bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Theory of Economic Rents
Authors: Remington Thomas F.
Published: May 2023

Economic rents are a major source of income inequality in the United States as well as in countries such as Russia and China. Rent incomes are concentrated among owners, shareholders, and top-level executives of the industries with the highest market power. Competition dissipates rents. Rent-seeking harms social well-being and benefits not only the rent-seeker but also the policymakers who are on the receiving end. Rents deepen inequality because they convert the power advantages of those able to claim rents into material advantages—they generate the returns to power. Estimates of the scale of rents in the American economy vary widely. However, the evidence shows that rents in the American economy are high and rising. Policies enabling big business to protect itself from competitive pressures explain much of the increase in economic inequality.
Rents and Market Reform
Authors: Remington Thomas F.
Published: May 2023

Economic crisis and the belief that the United States needed to become more globally competitive spurred the liberalizing reforms that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But after an initial burst of competition, deregulated industries grew more concentrated again. Firms with market power could extract rents by raising prices above the competitive level and shifting risk to taxpayers. In many cases firm profits grew while productivity fell. Tax cuts did not spur a burst of new business activity, but drove up top-end incomes. Liberalization weakened labor’s bargaining power and transferred social protection from the public to the private sector. Private healthcare providers have gained substantial market power and created lucrative investment opportunities. Healthcare is profitable, expensive, inefficient, ineffective, and deeply unequal. The fact that American mortality rates from Covid-19 are among the highest in the developed world illustrates the consequences of these policies.
Necessary Opportunities
Authors: Remington Thomas F.
Published: May 2023

In highly unequal societies, the wealthy seek to ally with those in power to stifle democratic impulses. Treating others in the political community as equally deserving of political rights has been a struggle throughout US history. Many ideologies, from racist theories to doctrines of laissez-faire and the sanctity of property rights, have been invoked against democratization. The United States’ current high inequality deepens social and political polarization, fueling extremism. Wealthy and powerful interests mobilize popular hostility to government and inflame racial resentments, rural-urban tension, and anti-immigrant sentiments. Geographic sorting reinforces enclaves marked by differing political cultures while lowering social mobility. As spatial inequalities converge with social and economic inequalities, political polarization deepens. An alternative public philosophy would build on the pluralist and liberal principles of the American Framers, recognizing that the dispersion of power and the competition of interests is the surest way to protect political equality and economic liberty.
Thinking like a plant disease ecologist
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Plant disease is the outcome of antagonistic symbiotic interactions between pathogenic microorganisms and susceptible hosts, contingent on environmental conditions that are favorable for infection and symptom development. Plant–microbe symbioses can range from mutualistic to pathogenic. The ecological outcomes of plant–microbe interactions are the products of life history and physiological traits that have been shaped by evolution, and, in turn, ecological interactions set the stage for rapid evolution in both plants and their pathogens. Thus, evolution and ecology are interwoven and jointly form the basis of the evolutionary ecology of plant disease. A tradition of applied research on the development, spread, and control of plant diseases in agriculture and other managed systems complements a rich body of theory from evolutionary biology and ecology, focusing on the role of pathogens in wild plant systems.
How to be a fungus
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Fungi are the most abundant and diverse of plant pathogens. Filamentous fungi grow as long tubes called hyphae that form mycelial networks. They obtain nutrition as osmotrophic heterotrophs, secreting enzymes into the substrate that surrounds them, then absorbing simpler compounds rich in carbon and nutrients. Fungi reproduce asexually and sexually to produce a diversity of spore types that serve both to disperse as propagules and to survive unfavorable conditions. Fungal nuclei are haploid for most of the life cycle, with a reduced diploid state during the process of sexual reproduction. Many fungi have extended dikaryotic phases, where hyphae contain multiple haploid nuclei of different genotypes. Fungi can grow as saprotrophs, as necrotrophs that kill host tissue to consume it, or as biotrophs that require hosts to remain alive. Five Divisions of fungi are important in plant–fungal interactions: Basidiomycota, Ascomycota, Olpidiomycota, Mucoromycota, and Glomeromycota. Fungal growth is affected by temperature, moisture, pH, and access to oxygen.
How to be an oomycete
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Oomycetes are in the Stramenopiles group of protists and many are aggressive plant pathogens. Oomycetes grow as coenocytic hyphae creating mycelial networks. They can reproduce through long-lasting sexual oospores or asexual chlamydospores. Sometimes called water molds, when provided with abundant moisture they can produce sporangia that release motile zoospores, able to swim through water filled pores in soil or across water films on plants. Some oomycetes are aggressive necrotrophs that cause the rapid death of germinating seeds and seedlings, a disease called damping-off, or cause destructive root rots on mature plants. Some are downy mildews that infect above-ground plant parts as obligate biotrophs. Oomycetes are among the most destructive of all plant pathogens.
How to be a virus
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Viruses are noncellular pathogens. Plant viruses are obligate parasites of plant host cells that rely on their host for transcription and replication. Viruses disrupt the growth of plants by dominating host resources for transcription and translation, and sometimes by manipulating host cellular processes. There are six groups of plant viruses, classified according to their nucleic acid makeup and how they generate mRNA, but most plant viruses are positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses. Viruses may be transmitted mechanically, or by insects, fungi, oomycetes, or parasitic plants as vectors. Piercing-and-sucking insects like aphids are common vectors for viruses, and transmission may be either noncirculative, in which the virus is carried for a short time on the aphid stylet or in the foregut, or circulative, in which the virus lives inside the aphid body cavity for an extended period.
Spatial ecology
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Spatial ecology is the study of spatial structure in populations and communities and the processes that create that structure. Disease spreads through plant populations when propagules of pathogens disperse from one plant to another. Propagules often disperse passively, moving via currents of air or water. However, some motile pathogens disperse actively, and others can be transported by animal vectors. The spatial spread of pathogens is dispersal limited, often described mathematically by dispersal kernels that either follow an exponential decay model or a power-law model. Dispersal limitation results in density-responsive disease prevalence in the host population, which can lead to density-dependent mortality or growth effects in the host. Thus reducing host density can reduce disease impacts in crops. On the plant side, dispersal limitation in wild plant populations means that most plant species have clumped distributions in space. Density-dependent disease development can reduce host clumping over time. Another key area in spatial ecology is the study of metapopulations, networks of populations across a landscape. Metapopulation dynamics respond to rates of extinction of individual patches and colonization of empty patches, rates that are determined by patch size and isolation. Linked populations of plants and pathogens can show interesting dynamics when situated in a broader metapopulation.
Global change
Authors: Gilbert Gregory S. , Parker Ingrid M.
Published: May 2023

Accelerating patterns of land-use change, air pollution, global trade, and climate change all contribute to changes in plant-pathogen interactions and the emergence of novel infectious plant diseases. Land conversion to agriculture has led to new encounters between crops and local pathogens, leading to the emergence of novel diseases through spillover. Habitat fragmentation may change patterns of pathogen spread through plant populations. Air pollution and resulting acid precipitation and nitrogen deposition are associated with changes in the types, prevalence, and severity of plant diseases. Globalization, trade, and travel drive the accelerating introduction of new plant and pathogen species into all regions of the globe, creating scenarios for the emergence of novel plant–pathogen interactions. Some destructive epidemics of novel pathogens have had transformative effects on wild plant communities and critical agricultural crops. Chestnut blight, Sudden oak death, and Phytophthora (Jarrah) dieback are iconic examples of these transformative epidemics. Plant pathogens can also play roles in the emergence of invasive plant species, if introduced plants leave important pathogens behind in their native range (enemy release), or if local pathogens attack naïve introduce plants and prevent them from invading (biotic resistance). In biological control, plant pathogens are used intentionally to limit the spread of invasive plant species. Climate change is affecting temperature and precipitation, along with elevated CO2 levels. In turn, these changes affect plant and microbe physiology, phenology, and geographic ranges. Species distribution models and process-based models can help inform predictions about how plant–pathogen interactions will respond to climate change.
Literary Traditions
Authors: Simpson James
Published: May 2023

In 1412 Thomas Hoccleve described Chaucer as the first and only ‘finder’ of English poetry. This chapter takes issue with Hoccleve’s claim by looking to the ways in which, in addition to Chaucer, three great late-fourteenth century poets, writing in English, produced bodies of poetic ‘finding’, or inventio, that were powerfully influential in the fifteenth century. The development, diminution, or decease of each of these traditions is mutually related: as one develops, another diminishes or dies. The four, key fourteenth-century traditions are, as represented by their most accomplished poets, as follows: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and John Clerk, author of the Destruction of Troy. The influence of these four figures cements English as the principal language of ambitious poetic activity in fifteenth century England. That direct influence extends, with some exceptions, to the middle of the fifteenth century.
Translation into English
Authors: Nievergelt Marco
Published: May 2023

This chapter pursues two aims. It provides a survey of the range of fifteenth-century poetic translations into English, including the courtly lyric, narrative allegory, romance, history, and humanist writings and religious verse. It also sheds light on the idea of translation for the development of fifteenth-century English poetry. Some important fifteenth-century English poets, like Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, were also engaged in major translation projects. Verse translation was an active means to forge their own, distinctive poetic styles in English. It was a habit of mind that infused poetic activity during the fifteenth century, and enabled an engagement with various kinds of cultural difference.
Authorship
Authors: Meyer-Lee Robert J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers a particular conception of authorship emergent in the fifteenth century in relation to its significance for English literary history. By way of recalling the late twentieth-century critique of person-centered literary histories that led to an alternative emphasis on institutions, and the alignment of that emphasis with broad medieval conceptions of authorship, the chapter casts into relief what was unprecedented in many instances of fifteenth-century authorial representations: an idea of the author as the specific living human agent from whom a work proceeds. With this idea, fifteenth-century poets bring to English literature the very person-centered notion of literary history that would predominate until recent times. As an initial example, the chapter considers the passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes accompanying the famous Chaucer portrait and, for purposes of contrast, some of the poems in BodL MS Digby 102. It surveys possible sources for this innovation and then describes some of the more typical or striking forms that this idea of authorship takes, pointing out their distinguishing features, reviewing their institutional circumstances, and noting their means of transmission. In particular, it provides examples of laureate author (e.g., John Lydgate, George Ashby), sacerdotal author (e.g., John Audelay, Henry Bradshaw), and author as narrative protagonist (e.g., Hoccleve, King James I, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton). These illustrations confirm that an author’s textualization as flesh-and-blood person is not inevitable but rather a strategic discursive construct that organizes the meaning of a text toward some end, however lofty or pragmatic.
Verse Outside Books
Authors: Boffey Julia
Published: May 2023

A considerable amount of fifteenth-century verse had a presence outside the context of manuscripts or printed books. In some cases this was a spoken presence, involving the oral performance of poetry, the communal reading of verse, and the role of poems in social occasions such as feasts, where they sometimes featured in both written and spoken form as subtleties. In other cases it involved reading words inscribed or somehow registered on something that did not take book-shaped form, as for example posted bills. Discussion covers the kinds of verse that survive on material objects, from swords to drinking vessels, and those poems such as charms and prayers that were recorded in forms to be worn about the body.
Biblical Paraphrase and Poems of Religious Instruction
Authors: Matsuda Takami
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines categories of religious verse. Verse biblical paraphrases played a major role in promulgating both biblical and catechetical knowledge among the laity. These range from the lengthy Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, to the narrative of Asneth, an apocryphal spin-off of the story of Joseph. The Pety Job and two verse paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms by Carmelite Richard Maidstone and Franciscan Thomas Brampton respectively offer models for private devotional practice. Verse lives of Christ include the Stanzaic and Metrical Lives of Christ, and Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Christ. John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests is a pedagogic work on the duties of parish priests. Two translations of Robert Grosseteste’s Chateau d’amour combine a biblical narrative and the exposition of catechesis. The Desert of Religion, a devotional poem of Carthusian origin, juxtaposes illustration and text in its exposition of catechism.
Saints’ Lives and Miracles of The Virgin
Authors: Turner Camp Cynthia
Published: May 2023

The fifteenth century saw a marked increase in the number of saints’ lives, both of those written in older literary forms as well as of those written in newer styles. Many fifteenth-century legends, by anonymous writers, continued the narrative forms of an earlier period. At the same time, monastic poets like John Capgrave, Henry Bradshaw, and Laurence Wade composed lengthy works modelled on earlier Latin hagiographic traditions. Other writers, such as John Lydgate and Osbern Bokenham, chose to write in a post-Chaucerian ‘high style’, and engaged in ambitious new metrical, rhetorical, and stylistic projects. Other poets composed hagiographic works from a different literary tradition, employing rhymed alliterative verse to achieve their effects.
Religious Lyrics and Carols
Authors: Whitehead Christiania
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the range of fifteenth-century religious lyrics and carols in relation to some of their most noteworthy authors and manuscript settings. It opens by reviewing the collection of poems in Oxford, BodL MS Digby 102. It then turns to the Benedictine lyrics of John Lydgate, and their appropriation of Chaucerian forms to more devotional ends, their interaction with material images, and their commitment to providing metrical translations of the psalms and other liturgical hymns and prayers. Like Lydgate, John Audelay’s corpus of religious poetry, contained in Oxford, BodL MS Douce 302, is also heavily inflected towards translation. There follows a general discussion of the carol, surveying its major manuscripts, its use of macaronics, and its poetic form, in particular the relation between the burden and stanza. The final sections focus on the interaction between religious lyrics and images in London, British Library, Additional MS 37049.
The Poetry of Religious and Moral Drama
Authors: Atkin Tamara
Published: May 2023

The religious and moral drama of the fifteenth century includes, but is not limited to, biblical drama, saint and miracle plays, moralities, and secular interludes. This chapter seeks to assess the poetic achievement of the drama of the period as poetry through a series of case studies that compares and contrasts the treatment of similar episodes and themes as they appear in different plays. It shows how a range of writers and communities used drama to respond to political, economic, and social change. These comparative readings show how fifteenth-century dramatists drew on a rich and often shared heritage to create new and at times surprising forms.
Love Visions and Love Poetry
Authors: Critten Rory G.
Published: May 2023

This chapter surveys developments in fifteenth-century love poetry. It shows how poetry in this form invites contemplation of women’s experiences of love, evinces frustration with traditional expressions of male desire, and seeks to develop new modes of writing that are capable of encompassing women’s wants, including the possibility of women’s same-sex desire. It assesses the influence of Gower’s Confessio amantis on the development of these attitudes, and examines Lydgate’s Complaint of a Black Knight and Temple of Glass; the Kingis Quair; Richard Roos’s translation of Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans merci; the Isle of Ladies; the Flower and the Leaf; and the Assembly of Ladies. The final part of the chapter considers the variety of shorter love lyrics and the invention of the amorous verse sequence in Charles d’Orléans’s English Book of Love and the Fairfax Sequence. Throughout the innovative aspects, fifteenth-century love poetry are stressed.
Fictions of Antiquity
Authors: Bridges Venetia
Published: May 2023

This chapter surveys the significant yet frequently overlooked body of poetic material from the fifteenth century that focuses on antique narratives. It considers them through their approach to their inherited narratives. This approach allows a unified and contextually sensitive comparison to be made across a diverse corpus, including alliterative poetry, Scots works, long retellings of classical narratives, and shorter comic episodes, and it also enables lengthy works to be succinctly analysed. Particular kinds of works discussed are the narratives of Alexander (The Wars of Alexander and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour), narratives of Troy (Gest hystoriale/Destruction of Troy, Laud Troy Book), accounts drawn from Ovid and Virgil (John Metham, Amoryus and Cleopes), Charlemagne histories (The Sowdon of Babylon), and tales influenced by Chaucer (the Tale of Beryn).
Popular Tales
Authors: Parsons Ben
Published: May 2023

Fifteenth-century English preserves a number of comic narratives in verse. These texts constitute a significant strand of demotic literature in the period. Many of these works remained staples of popular reading for several centuries. But in spite of their enduring appeal such texts have attracted only limited critical attention. This chapter examines these verse forms as a distinct corpus, one that articulates a common set of meanings and functions. It further explores what social and cultural needs particular texts might have fulfilled, before going on to consider their special appeal to a middle-class, urban readership, by looking to the manuscript records and other traces of ownership.
FROM COPY TO CANCELS
Authors: Grafton Anthony
Published: May 2023

Matthew Parker published the Bible as well as liturgical, polemical, and historical works and medieval texts. He tried hard to purge them of errors of every kind — conceptual, aesthetic, factual, technical — at every stage of the process, including initial research, copy preparation, and while reading both his own and others’ texts. Despite his best efforts, he usually failed, even when his printer worked in Lambeth Palace. But his richly documented efforts reveal the many faces of error — everything from deliberate alterations in the copy to clumsy formatting — and the many practices of correction in early modern printing.
Maria van Reigersberch
Authors: Nellen Henk
Published: May 2023

Maria van Reigersberch (1589–1653) owes her lasting fame to the services she rendered to her husband Hugo Grotius, a famous jurist and statesman. Although much of Grotius’ scholarly work remained a closed book to her, she played a crucial role in his personal life and contributed largely to his celebrity: she took care of the household’s financial affairs, solved all problems regarding the education of her five children, supported her husband in his political endeavours, and functioned as his intermediary to the extent that he was able to overcome the problems of a life in exile and the multiple setbacks in his career.
Marguerite Frick-Cramer
Authors: Dijk Boyd van
Published: May 2023

The history of the Geneva Conventions—the most important treaties concerning armed conflict ever formulated—is populated by ‘great men’. The archetypical drafter remains a white bourgeois man from Geneva, such as Jean Pictet. What this obscures, however, is the significant role played by women in the formulation of this body of international law. In seeking to remedy this oversight, my contribution recovers the legal life of Marguerite Frick-Cramer, the first female drafter of the Conventions and the first woman to accede to the highest governing body of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and her international thought, emphasizing how she shaped key legal principles and practice on the global stage.
‘If only they listened to Simone Weil’
Authors: Korhonen Outi
Published: May 2023

Simon/e Weil worked closely with the drafters of what was to become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as what could be called the resident critic. Even before the seminal declaration took shape, Weil showed the blindspots of the liberal tradition and proposed an in-depth concrete alternative for humanity. Unfortunately, as Weil lived their philosophy in practice, they perished before they were heard. However, Weil’s legend still intrigues at least as many disciplines as they engaged with and much beyond international law. Although seen as peripheral to international law at best by many, Weil is at the core of the critique of the liberal international, which is yet far from spent, and Weil’s legacy for international justice and human rights should not be underestimated.
The Political Will
Authors: Peter Fabienne
Published: May 2023

According to a longstanding tradition of political thought, political legitimacy ultimately derives from the political will. In this chapter, my first aim is to shed light on the richness of this important tradition of thinking about political legitimacy. I then discuss the normative significance of the political will. Why have so many thought that the political will is the ground of political legitimacy? I trace this back to the assumption that citizens are equally politically authoritative. In the final section of this chapter, I push back against the idea that citizens are always equally politically authoritative, which leads me to conclude that the political will can’t be the only ground of political legitimacy. The problem that all will-based conceptions face, and which current historical developments make vivid, is that they are at risk of supporting undue arbitrariness in political decisions.
A Hybrid Account of the Grounds of Legitimacy
Authors: Peter Fabienne
Published: May 2023

I introduce and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy. On a hybrid account, there is more than one attribute of political decision-making in virtue of which political decisions may be legitimate. I argue for a hybrid account that involves two grounds of political legitimacy: cognitive political authority and the political will. Such hybrid accounts are not uncommon. But one question that has been overlooked is: what should be the order of priority between the two grounds? I argue that cognitive political authority has lexical priority over the political will. This hybrid account supports a plausible conception of political legitimacy—I call this the epistemic accountability conception. An attractive feature of this conception is that it avoids both the arbitrariness and the epistemic underdetermination objections.
Responding to Political Disagreements
Authors: Peter Fabienne
Published: May 2023

In the normal epistemic circumstances of politics, there can only be a very limited requirement for political deference because well-founded political disagreements remain. This chapter examines the implications of political disagreements for legitimate political decision-making. I focus on political disagreements that persist even in well-ordered political deliberation. I argue that such political disagreements are normatively significant. They necessitate a shift away from justification on the basis of cognitive political authority and towards a more voluntarist mode of political justification. While other solutions are also possible, one option that I discuss in this chapter is democratic justification.
The Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gita
Authors: Figueira Dorothy M.
Published: May 2023

This volume stems from the understanding that historiographical analyses of the Gītā’s reception overlook the element of its translation. It posits translation as fundamental to any understanding of the Gītā’s reception. It examines in depth and comparatively how translations of the Gītā do not seek the same aims in all places and at all times and recognizes that translation theories and methodologies are not uniform across nations and eras. In translation practice, there is often consistency with fixed equivalents in the guest language that allows one to build on philological analysis and textual specificity. But there is also the translation’s intent (dynamic equivalence) to give the appearance of modern relevance. Our analysis grapples with issues of translational non-neutrality, distortion, and the afterlife of distortion in the text’s subsequent shadow book. In particular, this volume looks at insolites (unusual, strange) readings of the Gītā and how they seek to fill the hermeneutical gap between readings tied to its canonical and scriptural status and those readings distant from the text’s tradition. Translation and its reception or rejection here become metaphors for the general problems involved in cross-cultural understanding, a timely topic in literary studies today where both theory and pedagogy seek to engage the Other in responsive and responsible ways. This volume looks at translation within this larger context, not merely as linguistic errors in the act of translation, but as indicative of conceptual, cultural, and ethical dimensions.
Introduction
Authors: Figueira Dorothy M.
Published: May 2023

The Introduction points out that a number of scholars have specifically examined the reception of the Bhagavad Gītā with regard to how it ‘defined’ Hinduism, acknowledging how its translations and interpretations coloured the understanding of Indian religion in given periods and among different populations. This chapter gives a broad view of how translation, as a site of textual analysis, along with its theories and methodologies, has informed the initial renditions and subsequent interpretations of the Gītā, which is ambiguous enough to justify good, bad, and dangerous actions. Past and present readers and translators seek to reconcile these possible meanings, but this is unnecessary if we accept that the Gītā’s seemingly ambiguous or contradictory messages concurrently serve different purposes, such as to proselytize a reformed or Christianized Hinduism, as a propitious exotic model to Western questers, or an alibi (an ‘elsewhere’) to dismiss the Other, reify the Self, promote false constructs, and explore darker purlieus of being. It provided a good reading for the Americans Transcendentalists against the confines of evangelical Christianity. In India, it could also support racialist arguments as well as offer a mystical worldview. For some Westerners, particularly in the Second World War, the Gītā provided inspiration in its call to duty or justification for violence. In India, it serves as a text for non-violence and counter-revolution. In the late twentieth century, it was adopted by Western ecumenical thinkers and counter-cultural poets and artists. Finally, countercultural America, fascinated with India, reinterpreted the Gītā for self-consciously ‘enlightened’ audiences.
Ambedkar’s Counter-Revolutionary Gītā
Authors: Figueira Dorothy M.
Published: May 2023

Ambedkar took on Gandhi, his discourse on caste and his notion of trusteeship that evolved from his reading of the Gītā. He saw the Gītā as a counter-revolutionary text created to protect Hinduism from the onslaught of Buddhism. He recognized that the nationalists had co-opted the text to produce a binding ethics and mobilize the population. Gandhi, with his idiosyncratic view of translation as his lived experience not tied to textuality, had transformed the Gītā into a political treatise on non-violence. Ambedkar saw in Gandhi’s unique translation process a ploy to retain caste restrictions. Ambedkar viewed Gandhi’s theory of translation and the ensuing message of non-violence as a ploy that enabled the Gītā’s to impose further textual violence on his community.
The Beats, the Monk, and Multicultural Artists
Authors: Figueira Dorothy M.
Published: May 2023

In the late twentieth century and up to the present, translation concerns are still at issue in the Western reception of the Gītā. Beginning with the Transcendental Meditation Movement and Aldous Huxley’s introduction to their translation of the Sanskrit poem, moving onto the Hare Krishna Movement and its translation of the Gītā with introductory commentary by Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Thomas Merton, this 1960s’ reception reaches a figurative extension in the exoticism of postmodern opera (Philip Glass, John Adams), proving in the last instance how translation can be inter-semiotic, and that it is ultimately a form of performance, sometimes more Orientalist, hysterical and histrionic than others.
Christianity without the Historical Jesus
Authors: Løgstrup K. E.
Published: May 2023

The first part of the book deals with the historical Jesus. While Kierkegaard focuses on the paradox that God became human and then died, Løgstrup objects that this renders the life, words and works of Jesus—as found in the Gospels—unimportant. Therefore, Løgstrup seeks to establish Christianity on what happened between the birth and death of Jesus rather than on his death and resurrection alone. What we learn from this life, Løgstrup argues, is that the goodness of life itself should be understood in ontological terms, as fundamental to existence. This goodness is not a result of our own achievements, but rather is given to us as part of the structure of life, which the Gospel of Jesus’s life, words and works enables us to recognize, perhaps for the first time. Other important issues in Løgstrup’s discussion are the occasion for faith (what makes faith possible) and the understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ.
Disability: A Justice-Based Account
Authors: Begon Jessica
Published: May 2023

I defend a new account of disability as restriction in the ability to perform tasks human beings are entitled to be able to perform as a matter of justice. Adopting this view implies that identifying disability requires an account of our entitlements. However, even before this is provided, its revisionary implications are clear: individuals with paradigmatic impairments may not be disabled; individuals with minor or invisible impairments may be disabled; and individuals’ status as disabled may change across time and context. What matters is not impairment per se but its impact on access to entitlements. Whilst potentially counterintuitive, these implications are a key advantage of my approach. By distinguishing disability as necessarily disadvantageous (lacking opportunities all are entitled to) from a normatively neutral account of impairment (capturing the heterogeneity of human capacities) we can shift the focus from eliminating impairment to removing the disadvantages that can be associated with them.
Capabilities for Control
Authors: Begon Jessica
Published: May 2023

What does it mean for an individual to have a capability, and why is this valuable? Capabilities are standardly understood as opportunities to perform (or not) particular ‘valuable’ functionings. This can exclude individuals with impairments, who often cannot perform or do not value functionings assumed to be essential to any human life. Capabilities should, therefore, be understood instead as the ability to control central domains of our life. Thus, rather than attempting to identify valuable functionings and ensure everyone has identical access to them, we should focus on ensuring individuals have an acceptable range of options and the ability to choose between them. Rather than endorsing a hierarchy of functioning, inevitably grounded in the functioning capacities of the able-bodied, we should accept that different modes of functioning can be interchangeable and equally valuable. This theory of justice can accommodate individuals with a variety of needs, preferences, and abilities.
Disambiguating Adaptive Preferences
Authors: Begon Jessica
Published: May 2023

Who should we trust to determine whether disability is disadvantageous? Pervasive mistrust of already underrepresented groups constitutes a serious epistemic injustice. Yet individuals routinely adapt to deprivation and claim to be satisfied. If we take such ‘adaptive preferences’ at face value, then injustice and oppression may not be recognised or rectified. Thus, we must achieve a balance between taking individuals’ preferences and self-assessment as definitive and ignoring them entirely. Current accounts of adaptive preferences also suffer from ambiguity: are they an unreliable guide to individuals’ interests or just policy? We should distinguish between those unreliable in the former sense (‘well-being adaptive preferences), and the latter (‘justice adaptive preferences’). Individuals’ preferences may be adaptive in one sense but not the other. Using my framework to determine when this is so avoids the blanket exclusion of individuals’ voices based on their unreliability in some narrower domain, allowing for greater inclusion and better-informed policy.
Aristotelian Syllogism and Mathematics in Antiquity and the Medieval Period
Authors: Mancosu Paolo , Mugnai Massimo
Published: May 2023

The theory of the syllogism was developed in Aristotle’s Organon. Mathematical proof reached a high standard of presentation in Euclid’s Elements. However, when one looks carefully at the relation between logical demonstration and mathematical proof in the Greeks and the medieval world, the results are dismal. This is surprising in light of Aristotle’s programmatic statements which indicate that mathematics was supposed to be a prime example of scientific knowledge, that is, a discipline that could be presented according to “demonstrative” syllogisms. That mathematical proofs could be recast according to syllogistic logical proof was basically accepted as dogma and only a few authors in antiquity, such as Galen, raised doubts as to whether this could be done. This chapter also discusses some medieval authors who present syllogistic reconstructions of Euclidean theorems (Avicenna, Algazel, Kilwardby, Albert the Great).
Bernard Bolzano on Non-Syllogistic Reasoning
Authors: Mancosu Paolo , Mugnai Massimo
Published: May 2023

Bernard Bolzano, in his Theory of Science, discusses the ground-consequence relation and within that context he analyzes forms of valid reasoning which he argues cannot be reduced to syllogisms. In section 262 of the Theory of Science, titled “The syllogism in the received logic,” Bolzano provides a rigorous argument aimed at showing that proofs (including mathematical proofs) cannot all be captured by chains of syllogistic inference rules. Bolzano expresses astonishment that Aristotle, having started with a broad definition of syllogism, restricted its range quite narrowly. A possible justification for the restriction consists in two claims, made by Aristotle at I.25 and I.23 of Prior Analytics, to the effect that every inference can be reduced to a sequence of syllogistic arguments, each of which consisting of two premises and one conclusion. Bolzano objects that it is questionable whether Aristotle ever gave such a proof. The chapter reconstructs Aristotle’s argument and Bolzano’s objections to it.
Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, and Augustus De Morgan
Authors: Mancosu Paolo , Mugnai Massimo
Published: May 2023

Thomas Reid’s importance lies primarily in the clear way he asserts that the syllogism is an inadequate tool for carrying out mathematical demonstrations. Reid argues that even a simple inference such as the one asserting the transitivity of equality cannot be recast in syllogistic form. William Hamilton, in his edition of Reid’s works, attempts to recast the statement concerning the transitivity of equality into a syllogistic inference. In the dispute for or against the syllogism, a very special place is held by Augustus De Morgan, who, while on the one hand considering the traditional syllogism insufficient as a tool for proving mathematical theorems, on the other hand proposes to interpret the copula as a generic relation, thus giving rise to valid relational inferences and paving the way for a logic of relations, which will be developed and refined later by Peirce and Schröder.
The Cooperative Neuron
Authors: Phillips William A.
Published: May 2023

The Cooperative Neuron roots our understanding of mental life, as consciously experienced and as studied by psychologists, in recent discoveries in cellular neurophysiology, which show that many neurons in the mammalian neocortex have capabilities that transcend those assumed by twentieth-century psychology and systems neuroscience. These neurons receive information from many other parts of the brain and amplify their information transmission when appropriate in that context. Amplification is defined and quantified using recent advances in information theory by which the contributions of different inputs to information transmission can be distinguished. This context-sensitive cooperative style of Big Data processing produces widespread coherence from operations that are localized within each of a multitude of local neuronal processors. This book shows how this provides cellular foundations for contextual disambiguation in perception, selective attention, working memory and imagery, emotional prioritization, cognitive control, and learning, which has profound implications for neurobiology, psychology, neurology, psychiatry, and philosophy. The book is written for a wide audience, and it explains the neuroscience to the psychologists, the psychology to the neuroscientists, and both fields to philosophers, to students of the behavioural and brain sciences, and to all intrigued by the enduring mystery of how brains can be minds. Finally, it identifies many issues inviting exploration.
Neocortical Pyramidal Cells that Cooperate by Sensitivity to Context
Authors: Phillips William A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers recent discoveries from multisite patch-clamping studies of neocortical pyramidal neurons. It discusses how the output of many pyramidal cells is amplified when it matches the current input to their apical dendrites in layer 1 of the neocortex, and that the apical input provides a context within which transmission of information abstracted from synapses closer to the cell body is amplified if it matches that context. It goes on to cover how they operate as context-sensitive neurons with two functionally distinct points of integration and how these distinct sources of input to the cell’s two sites of integration are shown to reflect their distinct functions. It explains that the interneurons that inhibit or disinhibit this apical amplification are shown to be distinct from those that regulate excitation closer to the cell body. Finally, it cites authoritative review articles to show that fundamental advances in the sciences of brain and mind are now arising from these discoveries.
Cooperative Neurons in Various States of Mind and Brain
Authors: Phillips William A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter investigates cooperative neurons in various states of mind and brain. It looks at how transitions between states of wakefulness, slow-wave sleep (SWS), and dreaming are shown to be regulated by the neuromodulators, such as the cholinergic, adrenergic, and serotonergic systems. These various systems are shown to operate predominantly via their effects on the function of apical dendrites. Apical dendrites have three modes of operation: amplification, drive, and isolation. Isolation of the apical dendrites from the cell body is shown to occur in SWS and general anaesthesia. This apical isolation has clear implications for conceptions of conscious experience.
What Cooperative Neurons Do for Mental Life
Authors: Phillips William A.
Published: May 2023

First, the coordination of mental processes to form coherent percepts, thoughts, and actions is shown to depend on context-sensitivity. Neurophysiological and psychological investigations showing that contextual disambiguation guides perception via apical dendrites of pyramidal cells is then summarized, and related in detail to conscious experience, including direct phenomenological demonstrations to the reader. Many psychological and neurophysiological investigations are then described to show that context-sensitive cooperative neurons are closely implicated in the basic information processing capabilities, that, in various combinations, characterize the state of normal conscious wakefulness, that is, selective attention, working memory and imagery, prioritization of emotionally charged events, cognitive control, learning and long-term memory.
Evolution and Development of Cooperative Neurons
Authors: Phillips William A.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews similarities and differences in the structure and function of neocortical pyramidal cells across species as a source of evidence on the evolution of context-sensitive cooperative neurons. These comparisons are related to those revealed by cross-species comparisons of cognitive capabilities that depend on cooperative context-sensitivity. These cross-species neurophysiological and psychological comparisons are in broad agreement but are presented as early forays into largely unexplored territory. It shows how comparisons of the postnatal development of apical structure and function with the development of cognitive capabilities that depend on context-sensitive cooperation are also in good agreement, so invite much further investigation. Evidence for context-sensitive cooperative cells is shown to correspond with the neuroconstructivist perspective on cognitive development. It argues that, as linguistic capabilities are so highly context-sensitive, they may arise from distinctively human apical functions, and reviews evidence to support this claim.
Rating Politics
Authors: Barta Zsófia , Johnston Alison
Published: May 2023

How do countries’ political and policy choices affect the credit ratings they receive? Sovereign ratings influence countries’ cost of funding, and observers have long worried that rating agencies—these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable, for-profit organizations—can interfere with democratic sovereignty if they assign lower ratings to certain political and policy choices. Yet, it has remained unexplored whether, how, and why ratings react to policy and politics. Rating Politics opens the black box of sovereign ratings to uncover the logic that drives rating responses to political and policy factors. Relying on statistical analysis of rating scores, interviews with sovereign rating analysts, and a close reading of the official communications of rating agencies about their decisions, Rating Politics shows that ratings penalize center-left governments and many (though not all) policies associated with the center-left agenda. The motivation for such penalties is not rooted in assumptions about how those political and policy features affect growth and debt-servicing capacity. Instead, ratings are lower in the presence of those features because they are expected to make a country more vulnerable to market panics whenever the economy is hit by unforeseen shocks, as they signal insufficient willingness and/or ability to engage in determined austerity for the sake of reassuring markets. Since market panics and the resulting “sudden stops” of funding lead to humiliating collapses of ratings, rating agencies attempt to insure themselves against “rating failures” by preemptively assigning lower ratings to countries with the “wrong” political and policy mix.
Learning Urdu in Wartime India
Authors: Molteno Marion
Published: May 2023

Extracts from Russell’s autobiography, Part 1 (Findings Keepings) describes how he first learnt Urdu. Conscripted into the army and sent to India, he learnt basic Urdu in army training near Abbottabad, where—unusually for a British officer—he took it seriously and became a fluent speaker; through subsequent transfers to other parts of India, and eventually to the India/Burma border. He describes his appreciative contacts with any local people he was able to meet despite the constraints of army life: his Urdu teacher from a landowning family; camp servants; hawkers; a Pathan fellow officer; and two destitute children who attached themselves to his unit. Knowing Urdu enabled him to get to know them personally and learn about their different life conditions; and with the sepoys in his unit he was able to discuss current political issues in India, without senior army officers’ knowledge.