bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion Minimizing and Mitigating Ethical Costs
Authors: Morton Jennifer M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that in an unequal, socioeconomically segregated society, strivers, as they travel the path of upward mobility, incur significant ethical costs for themselves, their families, and their communities. Those who grow up in communities in which disadvantages are concentrated must often seek opportunities for advancement elsewhere. If they succeed, their success in all likelihood will take them far from their families and communities. This distance will not just be literal. Strivers, in order to succeed, will have to prioritize their own path over important relationships, over obligations to their family, and over maintaining their ties to their community. In so doing, they risk sacrificing important and meaningful aspects of their lives and identities.
Development as an Ideology for Empire
Authors: Lorenzini Sara
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how colonial administrators started to use the active verb “develop” and to speak of developing peoples in the 1920s. In the view of the internationalists and philanthropists of the early twentieth century, development was a civilizing mission. Conceiving imperialism as having a pedagogical side meant that advanced societies were required to take colonized peoples by the hand and teach them the rules of a modernity they had been excluded from. This was a change: at the end of the nineteenth century, there were peoples who were thought to be unready for civilization, principally in Africa. However, colonial expansion meant taking responsibility. Indeed, colonization was described as a political duty: the superior races had duties toward inferior ones, particularly in the promotion of science and progress. Humanitarianism was a special element that started with abolishing slavery in all forms and limiting the excesses of colonialism. The struggle against slavery and slave practices was often used as a justification for intervention, as was the goal of undermining the influence of rival powers. In the United States, civilization was perceived as an element that bound Europe and the United States together in a global project. History was considered a movement from fragmentation to unity, and progress meant evolving toward a system of powerful nations that used a few rich and precise languages that everyone could understand.
Conclusions
Authors: Lorenzini Sara
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter argues that, during the Cold War, countries in the Global South had played the superpowers off each other, achieving almost unchecked aid during decolonization—but this approach no longer worked. Economists and social scientists attacked the Cold War, claiming that the aid distributed then, while abundant, had been distorted by politics, with negative consequences for national economies. Cold War aid, they said, fostered inefficient distribution, thwarted institutional development in newly independent countries, propped up failed states, and nourished civil wars with weapons and ideology. The book reveals development's many expectations other than humanitarian motives: political loyalty, broader markets, and personal or group legitimacy. It also recounts a plural history, seeing the global history of development as made up of projects with worldwide aspirations but clearly framed for national purposes and within regional dimensions. The image of development as a single design, the concretization of a hegemonic view, a global faith, a center around which global polity is organized, is a simplified representation.
Dissident Rabbi
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. This book tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who alone challenged Sabbetai Zevi's improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers. The book brings to life the tumultuous century in which Sasportas lived, an age torn apart by war, migration, and famine. It describes the messianic frenzy that gripped the Jewish Diaspora, and Sasportas's attempts to make sense of a world that Sabbetai Zevi claimed was ending. As Jews danced in the streets, Sasportas compiled The Fading Flower of the Zevi, a meticulous and eloquent record of Sabbatianism as it happened. In 1666, barely a year after Sabbetai Zevi heralded the redemption, the Messiah converted to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman sultan, and Sasportas's book slipped into obscurity. This book is a revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty, and a revealing examination of how his life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.
Introduction
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jacob Sasportas. Around 1610, Sasportas was born in Oran, a garrison town at the edge of the Iberian Empire on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in present day Algeria. The scion of a rabbinic family, Sasportas served the Jews of Oran and nearby Tlemcen as a rabbinic judge for several decades. In his early forties, he was exiled from North Africa for reasons that remain unknown, and fled to Amsterdam. For almost half a century, Sasportas lived among the Portuguese Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora. In 1665, he emerged as one of the few opponents to the provocative persona of Sabbetai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah who became the center of a mass movement. From his temporary home in Hamburg, he conducted a vigorous campaign first to challenge and later to undermine the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, keeping a meticulous record of Sabbatianism as it was occurring. This book asks why Sasportas would oppose a messianic movement and what the substance of this opposition is. In other words, it explores the truth-value of doubt within the rabbinic tradition as it was expressed by one man living in the midst of a maelstrom.
Zion
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, in his own way, turned to Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi as part of a larger response to that crisis. If Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby had engaged in something akin to lower criticism in their editing and analysis of Sasportas, Teitelbaum employed analysis similar to higher criticism in his use of Sasportas. If Scholem saw Sabbatianism as generative of a crisis and fundamental rupture in Jewish history and turned to Sasportas as a witness to this crisis, Teitelbaum experienced the middle decades of the twentieth century as a crisis in and of itself. To him, Sasportas was not an intellectual instrument with which to reconstruct the past; rather, he functioned as a moral resource that served as a guide for the proper rabbinic response to religious messianism in the present. Ultimately, Scholem's and Teitelbaum's readings of The Fading Flower of the Zevi placed Sasportas squarely at the heart of a central debate in modern Jewish life: Zionism.
Religious Minorities and the Anxieties of an Islamic Identity in Pakistan
Authors: Zaman Muhammad Qasim
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on contemporary Pakistan, now entangled in sectarian strife, though this was not always so. There were religious minorities: the Ahmadis and Shiʻites. The former were heterodox many times over: they did not believe in jihad, and they did believe in a post-Muhammad prophet, Ghulam Ahmad. They were also a successful minority, self-styled modernizers who had carved out for themselves an outsized place in public life in the early postcolonial years. The Shiʻites too had enjoyed success as great landlords in the Punjab and as senior officers in the military. They were, moreover, a minority that did not hesitate to stand up for themselves, protesting when the state treated members as second-class citizens and proudly proclaiming their difference at Muharram festival processions. Ahmadis and Shiʻites may have been resented in certain quarters, but overall, they remained a significant and self-assured public presence in the postcolonial order. It was the Iranian revolution and General Zia's Islamization campaign of 1979 that turned this situation around. Once tolerated minorities were now stigmatized and targeted by blasphemy laws, comparative tolerance giving way to the politics of sectarianism. So, there it is again, the state—this time not colonial but postcolonial—converting difference into discrimination, if not outright persecution.
Against Equal Power
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses what is probably the most common and most influential view of political equality: the view that political equality requires institutions that guarantee citizens equality of power over common decisions. This view implies that rule according to majority vote of all citizens is necessary and sufficient to satisfy the demands of political equality. The chapter argues that this position focuses too narrowly on one moment of the decision-making process: the moment of translating citizens' judgments into legislative outcomes. As a result, it neglects the need for fair processes both preceding legislative votes—processes of agenda setting, deliberation, and representation, for instance—and succeeding those votes; for instance, in administrative procedure. It also fails to respond to the need to secure political equality over multiple iterations of collective decision making. Instead of the equal-power view, then, there is a need for a conception of political equality that reflects the democratic demand for equal political status over time.
Economics as a Public Mission
Authors: Offner Amy C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on John M. Hunter, the thirty-nine-year-old Illinois native who spoke as director of Colombia's first economic research center and addressed readers of one of Colombia's premier journals of economic research, the Revista del Banco de la República. It also talks about economics in Latin America. During the years after 1945, Colombian universities established freestanding economics programs where none had existed before. There had been men called economists in Colombia for decades; they were brilliant lawyers, engineers, businessmen, and politicians who made national economic policy and taught occasional courses in political economy on the side. But the crisis of the 1930s had inspired a new regard for economic expertise as a specialized form of knowledge, and Colombians set out to create a new kind of economist to steer the state. The invention of economics as an independent discipline, a nineteenth-century process in the United States and much of Europe, was thus a twentieth-century phenomenon in Latin America, born of new visions of national development and spearheaded by renowned men in business and government.
Fashioning the Imperial Self
Authors: Nurhussein Nadia
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces three incidents of Ethiopianist aristocratic impersonation or imposture. First is of Isaac Brown, a Jamaican man who successfully passed himself off as Menelik's nephew at the turn of the century. Second is that of Joseph Emanuel Blayechettai, who in the 1920s claimed to be the kidnapped son of a king of Tigre, an Abyssinian province. Then third is that of Virginia Woolf, whose participation in the Dreadnought hoax in 1910, during which she dressed as an Abyssinian prince, was notorious. The impersonations are dramatic illustrations of spectacular Ethiopianism, a variant especially prevalent in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The performances of spectacular Ethiopianism were preceded in the nineteenth century by the reciprocal costuming of Prince Alemayehu, the son of Emperor Tewodros orphaned by the Anglo-Abyssinian War, and his guardian, the eccentric English explorer Captain Tristram Speedy.
Empire on the World Stage
Authors: Nurhussein Nadia
Published: May 2020

This chapter begins with a scene from George White's 1936 “Scandals,” reprised in the 1937 film “You Can't Have Everything,” that featured the dance team known as Tip, Tap, and Toe as Haile Selassie and two of his army's soldiers. Many reviews considered this scene the best one of White's Broadway musical revue, and a photograph from this scene was even included in the cover story of the January 6, 1936 issue of Time magazine, a profile of Haile Selassie declaring him the magazine's “Man of the Year.” With hints of so-called “Ethiopian minstrelsy,” the image of Selassie in the public eye was an odd amalgam of ancient solemnity and slick modernity. Literary and journalistic accounts of Selassie depicted a leader who evinced an attraction to technology and modernization that was undermined by Ethiopian culture and landscape deemed somehow averse to modern life. The chapter also addresses the theatrical representations of Ethiopia with Arthur Arent's censored 1936 Federal Theater Project Ethiopia, which was generically categorized as a “living newspaper,” and an important turn-of-the-century libretto, starring blackface performers Bert Williams and George Walker.
Beating the Odds
Authors: Lin Justin Yifu , Monga Célestin
Published: May 2020

Countries that ignite a process of rapid economic growth almost always do so while lacking what experts say are the essential preconditions for development, such as good infrastructure and institutions. This book uses this paradox to explain what is wrong with mainstream development thinking—and to offer a practical blueprint for moving poor countries out of the low-income trap regardless of their circumstances. The book begins with an observation of the increasingly globalized world economy in which technological development allows the use of factors of production in locations that maximize returns and utility, and countries gain mutually by trading with each other if their strategies focus on comparative advantage. The prospects for sustained and inclusive growth are even greater for low-income economies that enjoy the benefits of backwardness. The book advocates implementing viable strategies to capture new opportunities for industrialization, which can enable low-income economies to set forth on a dynamic path of structural change and lead to poverty reduction and prosperity. It concludes with an evaluation of lessons from development thinking and experience and identifies the main reasons why past intellectual and policy frameworks failed to yield the expected results. It then offers a pragmatic blueprint for allowing low-income countries to ignite and sustain economic growth without preconditions.
Counting
Authors: Lee Maurice S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but adventure novels of the long nineteenth century show how “the accounting of literature” could also be aesthetically enchanting. British and American adventure novels from the period register a productive tension: guided by atavistic, preindustrial texts, characters flee from civilized realms marked by information overload only to impose informational modernity on the deserted islands and lost worlds they find. The chapter also explores the limits and wonders of quantification by using a sustained multiscalar approach—a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a literary-historical argument that draws on a dozen transatlantic adventure fictions, and a distant reading project based on keyword frequencies in a corpus of 105 adventure novels. The chapter does not only explain how nineteenth-century literature accommodated the rise of information but also the prospect that the digital humanities might begin to tell a deeper history of itself.
Introduction
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter explains that the book provides a background on Victorian novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—two writers who have set the fundamental terms for contemporary critical conceptualizations of late nineteenth-century realism, domestic fiction, and psychological novel. Both writers' works demonstrate an abiding interest in character and readerly interiority and in making overarching claims about social and psychic life. It talks about the practices of narration and characterization deployed by Eliot and Hardy, which are more fruitfully uneven and unintegrated than retrospective accounts that place these writers in a realist tradition. The chapter reveals some of the ways in which the profound relationality of novel reading has been foreclosed and opened back up again. In an effort to draw out the relationality of the Victorian novels, the chapter places them in conversation with a key theoretical discourse: British psychoanalysis, whose mid-twentieth- century theorists and practitioners developed “object relations” theory by building from the foundational writings of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.
Restlessness
Authors: Christoff Alicia Mireles
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on The Return of the Native and Michael and Enid Balint, which both investigate how spaces are never simply themselves but instead are repeatedly figured through metaphor and allusion and atmospherically charged with feeling, racial politics, and overlapping imperial geographies. The chapter also analyzes restlessness and setting that turns from the ways reading Thomas Hardy's fiction can afford in opportunities for rest and unintegration to the “unrest” that undergirds his picture of life. It shows the geographic restlessness of Hardy's figurative practice. The long lyrical passages in Hardy's prose punctuate the feeling of doom that suffuses his fiction and offer us a respite from his shocking plots. And yet, Hardy's descriptions of place move through allusions, historical references, and “similes and metaphors” at a breathless rate.
Modernists Explain Things to Me
Authors: Micir Melanie
Published: May 2020

This chapter emphasizes that some impassioned biographical acts and archives range beyond the merely textual. It focuses on three examples of canonizing life narratives: the midcentury memoirs of modernism-in-the-making written by Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, and Alice B. Toklas as anecdotal archives in which the stories of their relationships are strategically encrypted—and thus preserved—in larger stories of renowned bohemian communities. None of these memoirs sold well, and none were acclaimed by critics, then or now, as literary achievements in their own right. But the publication of each of these failed projects was silently accompanied by the accumulation and preservation of a collection of modernist artifacts. The chapter attends to both textual archives and material collections of art, photographs, and household goods. After taking stock of the relative failure of her memoirs, Anderson's decision to begin what she called her “collection” signaled her transition into this curatorial mode. It talks about Sylvia Beach's expansive collection of literary artifacts alongside Alice B. Toklas's dwindling collection of modernist art, and Jeremy Braddock's description of modernist collecting to posit collection and curation, rather than creation and innovation, as late modernist acts capable of turning years of personal witness into public testimony and commentary.
Decolonizing the Novel
Authors: Freedgood Elaine
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the critics cited by Franco Moretti in his landmark essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” and analyzes them against the grain of his argument. Moretti argues that critics from Meenakshi Mukherjee and Kōjīn Karatani to Roberto Schwarz and Doris Somer similarly contend that the novels of the nations they study were pale or defective imitations of “Western” originals. Henry Zhao, whom Moretti hales with particular enthusiasm, has unfortunately internalized an idea about omniscient narration that cannot be found in “Western” realism. The chapter provides a description of the narrators of William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot by the earlier critics, including Henry James. Criticism of the novel and the novel itself have given readers worlds enough; the nineteenth-century novel, like those that preceded and followed it, gave readers one hugely ruptured but continuous world in which they are, as imperial liberal subjects, always in more than one place at the same time, always inhabiting multiple domains in person or by proxy.
Petrarch, Scholarship, and Traditions of Love Poetry
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Petrarch's (1304–1374) own poetry in order to articulate what he achieved and how he used his sources. In returning to the source, the chapter reveals how good Petrarch's poems are and how much their excellence owes to his subtle and restrained exploitation of the tradition of his poetic predecessors. It begins by considering the advice which Petrarch gives scholars and writers about imitation and the ways of using one's reading in order to write. He was aware of the role which his own work might play as a model for other writers, and he advised them on how to use their reading. Drawing on previous scholarship, the chapter makes some connections between his Italian poems and what he says about his life in the collections of letters which he constructed and in his Secretum. Then it looks at some examples of Petrarch's poems, both to substantiate a claim about their excellence and to show how that excellence derives from his creative use of his reading. Finally, the chapter considers his attitude to Dante, his immediate and overwhelming forerunner, and discusses the ways in which later writers used Petrarch's work.
Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how Geoffrey Chaucer's relationship to literary tradition can be explored through his study, translation, and adaptation of one Italian poem—Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. Chaucer used Boccaccio's youthful experiment Il Filostrato (1335) to create Troilus and Criseyde (1385), an enduring masterpiece and unquestionably his greatest completed work. Here, the chapter examines twelve aspects of Il Filostrato which prompt Chaucer at times to straightforward imitation, at times to considerable amplification of an idea, and at times to a corrective reaction. It shows how many of these aspects—which represent Chaucer in different ways learning from and being stimulated by Boccaccio—also came to seem like key characteristics of Chaucer's mature work. After all, Chaucer became the poet he was partly through intense reflection on Boccaccio's ideas and techniques.
Writers’ and Readers’ Traditions
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter reflects on the various ways in which authors have used their reading of previous writers. The examples discussed in the previous chapters show both that great original work often involves heavy reliance on previous authors and traditions and that this reliance has different aspects and forms. From here, the chapter turns to two issues: canon and nationalism. It considers what this study of literary traditions has suggested about what students should be expected to read as part of their literary education. The chapter suggests the use of the distinction between readers' and writers' traditions, which has emerged from these studies to address the question of the literary canon. It also considers how we define the literary traditions which writers can benefit from studying, and what would be a good canon of reading for someone who wants to write.
Introduction
Authors: Manski Charles F.
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the themes of this book as well as the origins of its research. The focus here is on decision making under uncertainty regarding patient health status and response to treatment. The main concern is decision making when the available evidence and medical knowledge do not suffice to yield precise probabilistic predictions. From there, the chapter pays considerable attention to the large class of decisions that choose between surveillance and aggressive treatment of patients at risk of potential disease. Uncertainty often looms large when a clinician contemplates choice between surveillance and aggressive treatment. Finally, the chapter shows how research on treatment response and risk assessment shares a common objective: probabilistic prediction of patient outcomes given knowledge of observed patient attributes.
Managing Uncertainty in Drug Approval
Authors: Manski Charles F.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers management of uncertainty in drug approval. In the United States, the approval process of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determines whether a drug can legally be sold within the country. A similar process occurs in the European Union, with approval performed by the European Medicines Agency. To obtain approval for a new drug, a pharmaceutical firm must provide to the FDA information on treatment response through the performance of randomized trials that compare the new drug with an existing treatment or a placebo. The FDA makes a binary (yes/no) approval decision after reviewing the findings of these trials. Approval decisions are made with incomplete knowledge of the effectiveness and side effects of new drugs. The chapter describes how the FDA deals with uncertainty and suggests how the approval process might be improved.
Introduction
Authors: Macedo Stephen
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of professor Robert Boyd's approach to the study of human evolution that focuses on the population dynamics of culturally transmitted information. Putting aside the more familiar question of human uniqueness, Boyd asks why humans so exceed other species when it comes to broad indices of ecological success, such as humans' ability to adapt to and thrive in such a wide variety of habitats across the globe. Humans adapt to a vast variety of changing environments not mainly by applying individual intelligence to solve problems, but rather via “cumulative cultural adaptation” and, over the longer term, Darwinian selection among cultures with different social norms and moral values. Not only are humans part of the natural world, argues Boyd, but human culture is part of the natural world. Culture makes humans “a different kind of animal,” and “culture is as much a part of human biology as our peculiar pelvis or the thick enamel that covers our molars.” The chapter then outlines the lectures and discussions that follow, which originated as the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University in April of 2016, organized under the auspices of the University Center for Human Values.
Not by Brains Alone
Authors: Boyd Robert
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that humans make use of insights and adaptations that humans do not understand. Humans learn very often not by figuring out how things work but by imitating others who have locally useful “know-how.” The chapter then describes the conditions under which selection favors “a psychology that causes most people to adopt beliefs just because others hold those beliefs.” Indeed, it contends that “even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies depend on tools and knowledge far too complex for individuals to acquire on their own.” Ultimately, culture is the storehouse of gradually accumulated, local, and typically tacit knowledge. Thus, “cumulative cultural evolution” is the great and unique advantage of humans.
Beyond Kith and Kin Culture and the Scale of Human Cooperation
Authors: Boyd Robert
Published: May 2020

This chapter details Robert Boyd's account of social learning and cumulative cultural evolution to illuminate how societies adapt to changing environments and develop ever more sophisticated tools and technology. Humans' ability to learn by imitation and their evolved trusting psychology are used to explain the centrality of social norms, and to explain why and how humans have for so long been “supercooperators.” Even in foraging societies, the extent of human cooperation vastly exceeds that of any other species. Ultimately, millennia of cumulative cultural evolution have helped create a vast “worldwide web of specialization and exchange.” Humans are unique in that “people cooperate in large groups of almost unrelated individuals to provide public goods.” Cooperation in large groups “requires systems of norms enforced by sanctions.” In larger and more complex societies, cooperation and the provision of public goods depend crucially on coercive sanctioning by third parties: institutions such as police and courts.
Imitation, Hayek, and the Significance of Cultural Learning
Authors: Orr H. Allen
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses biologist H. Allen Orr's two large and interesting questions about Robert Boyd's model of cultural learning. He wonders, first, whether Boyd exaggerates the contrast between the “Big Brain” model, which emphasizes cognitive explanations for human success, and the imitative model that Boyd prefers. Orr argues that successful imitation often requires considerable “neuronal firepower.” In addition, Orr usefully describes the partial convergence of Boyd's view with that advanced by the well-known free-market economist and social theorist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek also emphasized that social success and progress depend on the use of tacit and dispersed local knowledge, culturally transmitted social norms and ethical mores, and institutions that are the product of social evolution. Orr wonders whether scientists and social scientists pay less attention to Hayek than they should because of Hayek's politics.
Culture, Beliefs, and Decisions
Authors: Boyd Robert
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter highlights Robert Boyd's reply to the commentators, in which he expresses appreciation for their thoughtful disagreements, all of which “accept the value of trying to understand how culture evolved.” Boyd notes one broad point of contention, shared by Ruth Mace, Kim Sterelny, and Paul Seabright, which is that he does not “give people enough credit for making smart, well-informed decisions.” Boyd stands his ground, arguing that individual choice matters but people's basic beliefs come from their social context. With respect to the related comments by H. Allen Orr and others, Boyd expresses agreement that “cognitive abilities and cultural learning are mutually reinforcing.” Ultimately, Boyd ably defends his model against all four commentators and concludes by offering a pointed defense, against Seabright, of his own more optimistic view.
On Purpose
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Kant thought we were stuck with it, and even Darwin, who profoundly shook the idea, was unable to kill it. Indeed, purpose seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious advocates of intelligent design and some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. This book explores the history of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. The book traces how Platonic, Aristotelian, and Kantian ideas of purpose continue to shape Western thought. Along the way, it also takes up tough questions about the purpose of life—and whether it's possible to have meaning without purpose.
Athens
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about Aristotle who implied that knowledge is the object of inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the “why” of it. He was not the first to raise the question of causation, for it was nigh an obsession of his philosophical predecessors, back through his teacher Plato, to Socrates, and to the earlier “pre-Socratic” thinkers, including Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomist Democritus. They all grasped that in some sense causation is both a backward-looking and forward-looking matter. Backward-looking in the sense that this happens because a hammer was picked up and used to hit the head of the nail; forward-looking in the sense that this happens because the builder wants to tie the planks together to support a roof. The chapter also argues that the forward-looking side to causation lends itself to different approaches: “external” teleology, “internal teleology,” and “eliminative” or, more positively, “heuristic” teleology.
Jerusalem
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Augustine, whose influence on Western Christianity cannot be overemphasized, was born in a Roman province in North Africa of a Christian mother and a pagan father. Raised a Christian, he dropped out, acquired a mistress with whom he lived for thirteen years and by whom he had a son who died in adolescence, went to Italy as a professor of rhetoric, fell among the Manicheans, sloughed off his first mistress and had another for two years. Finally, Augustine went back to Africa, particularly at the urging of his very persistent mother, became again a Christian and was baptized by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in 386. About ten years after returning to Christianity, Augustine wrote his autobiography, the Confessions, perhaps the greatest spiritual story of personal growth of Western culture. His God is emphatically the God of Plato, the God of The Republic, where the form of the good is a necessarily existing eternal force or entity, outside time and space, truly good and beautiful, the font of all other beings, from which everything stems and to which everything relates as the cause of existence.
Machines
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the Scientific Revolution that is dated from the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the work that put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe to Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, the work that gave the causal underpinnings of the whole system as developed over the previous one hundred and fifty years. Historian Rupert Hall put his finger precisely on the real change that occurred in the revolution. It was not so much the physical theories, although these were massive and important. It was rather a change of metaphors or models—from that of an organism to that of a machine. By the sixteenth century, machines were becoming ever more common and ever more sophisticated. It was natural therefore for people to start thinking of the world—the universe—as a machine, especially since some of the most elaborate of the new machines were astronomical clocks that had the planets and the sun and moon moving through the heavens, not by human force but by predestined contraptions. In a word, by clockwork!
Charles Darwin
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on Charles Darwin who spent five years as the naturalist of the ship HMS Beagle, spending much time in South America and eventually going all the way around the globe. During this time Darwin's religious beliefs changed from fairly conservative Anglican to deist, a view he held for the next several decades, changing again at the end of his life to a form of agnosticism. Although by the nature of his work he had to spend much time thinking and writing about the science–religion relationship, he always claimed that by nature he was not a particularly a religious man. Darwin returned to England and in the next two years became first an evolutionist and then a Darwinian, meaning he discovered his mechanism of change, natural selection. What spurred the move to evolution was, above all, the distribution of the animals on the Galapagos Archipelago, a group of islands in the Pacific that the HMS Beagle visited in the final part of its journey.
Darwinism
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes how Charles Darwin changed the world after publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871. Although there were those who continued generally to stand firm against evolution, even the religious accepted that organisms, including humans, are the end point of a long, slow process of natural development. As in the Hans Christian Andersen tale about the lad who said openly that the king has no clothes, so when Darwin said “evolution,” almost everyone said that they had known it all along! Natural selection had more mixed success. Everyone accepted it to some extent. Julian Huxley, for instance, always had some doubts about its universal power and applicability, but when it came to humans physically, he was fully convinced of its overwhelming importance. This said, the scientific community was slower in coming to full acceptance, and it was more in the popular domain that natural selection—and even more sexual selection—was a huge success. Poets, novelists, politicians, and many others also harped on and on about its importance.
Human Evolution
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes Darwinian evolution through selection. It explores what the Kantian/Darwinian perspective implies for humans. Charles Darwin was absolutely convinced of the fact of human evolution and as soon as he had discovered natural selection was applying it to species, to minds and powers of thought no less. However, in the Origin he was cautious, wanting first to get the main details of his theory laid out for all to see and only at the end pointing to the implications for humankind. This did not stop others from getting on the bandwagon, and although in the Descent Darwin had much to say that was both new and interesting—notably about sexual selection—by then he was entering an already well-plowed field. Naturally, the early parts of Darwin's book were concerned with making the straightforward case for human evolution, showing how it is reasonable to think—especially on the evidence of homologies—that people and the higher apes are close relatives and that humans came jointly from organisms more primitive.
Mind
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the writer Thomas Hardy who was raised a good Christian, a member of the established church. Then he read The Origin of Species and it all came crashing down. His poem “Hap,” written in 1866, tells it all, implying that God does not exist but that with his going, humans lose all meaning to life. The chapter also discusses crucial issues about how philosophers handled mind and meaning, about knowledge and morality. Not just the nonexistence of God— agnosticism or atheism pretty much became the norm in the profession—but the lack of meaning. The American pragmatists rode with things pretty well. Whether this was part of the general, late-nineteenth-century American vigor and rise to prominence and power, they found the challenge of Darwinism stimulating and thought provoking. For someone like William James, the struggle for existence and natural selection translated readily into a theory of knowledge—ideas fight it out just as organisms fight it out.
Religion
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes how Charles Darwin has had huge influences on religion, particularly the Christian religion, as well as the attitude of the Darwinian. One temptation, in the tradition of Lucretius, is to dismiss it all as a dreadful mistake and move on. The chapter also explains how religion plays out with respect to questions about purpose. God created humans to have what are essentially his children, to love and to cherish and in return to have them thank and adore and worship. The idea is that people should spend eternity in blissful joy with God. In many versions—the Augustinian version particularly—humans rather spoiled things through our disobedience, but God in his boundless love sacrificed his son on the cross, and once again salvation is made possible.
The End
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the possibility of a life without religion, without God. Many people think of Darwinism as an alternative religion. Julian Huxley actually wrote a book called Religion without Revelation. Edward O. Wilson is of the same mind-set. Anyone who knows their scriptures has to be forcibly reminded of the Old Testament prophets on reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. The chapter discusses the secular notion of purpose through history, the idea of social or cultural progress—something with a goal toward which history is directed. Steven Pinker argues that, despite suffering and other acts of violence, the world nevertheless is becoming a friendlier place. Science and technology seem as much the problem as the cure. This said, one can see progress in limited areas, and not just in science and technology.
Epilogue
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: May 2020

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Introduction
Authors: Scheidel Walter
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter shows how the contribution of science has broadened even further as entirely new types of evidence from genetics to climate proxies have been brought to bear on historical inquiries in recent years. Thanks to this accelerating expansion, the study of history in general is now approaching a new stage of interdisciplinarity that is firmly grounded in the recognition that human and natural history are intimately and inseparably intertwined. Indeed, the study of the ancient Roman world is no exception to this trend. The chapter embarks on the potential applications of biohistory for ancient Roman history. It also discusses the integration of conventional evidence with scientific findings.
Archaeobotany
Authors: Veen Marijke van der
Published: May 2020

This chapter aims to highlight what can be achieved through archaeobotany by focusing on one aspect: food. It is divided into five main sections, each concentrating on one of the five phases of food: food production, the realm of the farm and the landscape; food distribution and trade, the realm of the granary, the market, and long-distance transport; food preparation, the realm of the kitchen; food consumption, the realm of the meal and, in many instances also, the realm of the table; and finally food disposal, the realm of the dustbin or refuse deposit and, par excellence, the realm of archaeology. Other human–plant interactions are mentioned in passing. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on how these interactions helped create many different modes of being. It considers how daily life in antiquity varied across time and space.
Bones, Teeth, and History
Authors: Sperduti Alessandra , Bondioli Luca , Craig Oliver E. , Prowse Tracy , Garnsey Peter
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses human bones and teeth, which are the primary databank for biological anthropologists. The topic has aroused little interest among historians of antiquity. The beginnings of an explanation of this disparity are to be sought in the fact that human skeletal remains have no obvious relevance as a source of information for politics, political institutions, political thought, government, law, religion, warfare: in brief, for the traditional concerns of ancient historians. A second consideration is that biological anthropology is rooted in prehistory; its practitioners are characteristically involved in the exploration of the origins of humanity. Fortunately, some anthropologists have allowed themselves to stray into historical periods, including the classical world of Greece and Rome. In the meantime, historians of antiquity are showing increased interest in social, economic, and cultural history, and are displaying a new willingness to expose themselves to other disciplines, including the natural and social sciences. Thus, the time seems ripe for fruitful communication between historians and anthropologists. Specifically, health and demography (mortality, fertility, and mobility) hold promise as fields for constructive dialogue and collaborative research.
Human Growth and Stature
Authors: Gowland Rebecca , Walther Lauren
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the study of stature in the archaeological record with a focus on the Roman period. A critical review of current methods of estimating stature, including an evaluation of the differing techniques and their application to the Roman period follows. This chapter does not advocate the comparison of long bone lengths alone for the study of stature in the Roman world. It argues that such an approach overlooks the biocultural significance of overall body proportions (including trunk height); instead more effort should be made to establish population-specific regression formulae. Finally, the chapter argues that because adult stature and final body proportions are strongly influenced by environmental conditions during childhood, a more nuanced consideration of growth and adversity during infancy and childhood is required.
Modern DNA and the Ancient Mediterranean
Authors: King Roy J. , Underhill Peter A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a look at genetics and its role in the study of ancient history. Genetics is the study of inheritance, and DNA variation is the essence of heredity. DNA sequence differences underpin genetics overall and population genetics is the study of such diversity in populations and how it changes through time. Reconstructing human history using modern DNA has been a longstanding endeavor rooted in sampling practicality. If a mutational change does not negatively affect the individual's ability to reproduce, it may be passed down to each succeeding generation, eventually becoming established in a population. Such mutations, whether beneficial, harmful, or neutral, can serve as genetic markers.
Introduction
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of “misdemeanorland” and how it is studied. “Misdemeanorland” is a colloquialism used by people who work in the courts that receive the large volume of cases generated by New York City's signature policing tactics. The term designates a jurisdictional and physical space where these cases are processed. Within the context of the city's Broken Window enforcement, the expression “misdemeanorland” also signifies the widely shared notion that there is something unique about the operations of justice in the subfelony world. Many social science and media accounts of the U.S. criminal justice system tend to address either the back or front end of the system. In the age of mass incarceration, much public and scholarly focus has been directed at the back end, at what many of us assume to be the end point of most arrests: prison or jail. But between police and jails stands an institution assigned the role of deciding which people identified by police will end up in jail, prison, or elsewhere: the criminal court.
The Rise of Mass Misdemeanors
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: May 2020

This chapter briefly recounts the origins of the policing experiment of the early 1990s that flew under the Broken Windows banner. It also explores how that experiment has become an institutionalized feature of New York City's law enforcement since then. The history is tailored to highlight those changes in enforcement that most affected the flow and composition of cases into the lower criminal courts. It also portrays how the justifications for this policing model demanded bureaucratic practices that in turn shaped how these low-level cases came to be processed by criminal justice actors. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the new record-keeping and record-sharing practices that the police and courts innovated in this period in an effort to mark suspected persons for later encounters and to check up on prior records to identify and target persistent or serious offenders.