bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Long History of the Regulation of Private Business Corporations in International Law
Authors: Lustig Doreen
Published: July 2020

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.
Morality and Mathematics
Authors: Clarke-Doane Justin
Published: July 2020

This book explores arguments for and against moral realism and mathematical realism, how they interact, and what they can tell us about areas of philosophical interest more generally.Â It argues that our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident or provable than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have better claim to being empirically justified. It is also incorrect that reflection on the “genealogy” of our moral beliefs establishes a lack of parity between the cases. In general, if one is a moral anti-realist on the basis of epistemological considerations, then one ought to be a mathematical anti-realist too. And yet, the book argues that moral realism and mathematical realism do not stand or fall together – and for a surprising reason. Moral questions, insofar as they are practical, are objective in a sense in which mathematical questions are not, and the sense in which they are objective can only be explained by assuming practical anti-realism. It follows that the concepts of realism and objectivity, which have been widely identified, are actually in tension. The author concludes that the objective questions in the neighborhood of questions of logic, modality, grounding, nature, and more are practical questions as well. Practical philosophy should, therefore, take center stage.
Trait-based ecological and eco-evolutionary theory
Authors: Klausmeier Christopher A. , Kremer Colin T. , Koffel Thomas
Published: July 2020

Trait-based approaches focus on the functional traits that define how organisms interact with the environment and each other. They represent an efficient way to capture different aspects of diversity in ecological models, which is essential for understanding community structure and ecosystem functioning, both now and in the future. There is an extensive history of trait-based approaches in theoretical ecology, enriched by an expanding array of complementary frameworks. In this chapter, we give a pedagogical introduction to one such framework—adaptive dynamics—explaining how to both set up and analyse models and surveying a range of applications. Then we show how adaptive dynamics relates to other frameworks, including species sorting, ecological quantitative genetics, and moment methods, highlighting the differences and connections between them. We then consider how these basic theories can be extended to incorporate temporal and spatial heterogeneity and multiple traits. Finally, we outline some frontiers of trait-based theory, including connections with empirical systems, linking trait- and species-based approaches, and embedding trait-based approaches in Earth system models.
Theories of diversity in disease ecology
Authors: Perkins T. Alex , Rohr Jason R.
Published: July 2020

Early theoretical developments in disease ecology overwhelmingly focused on interactions between a single pathogen and a single host. Today, it is well understood that numerous pathogens circulate among multiple host species, that some pathogens are comprised of many distinct strains, and that community ecology offers important perspectives for gaining insight into the inner workings of these complex ecological systems. Here, we focus on two topics that have received intense focus in theoretical investigations of multi-host and multi-pathogen systems, respectively. First, we review developments in a rather contentious debate around relationships between host diversity and disease. The current state of theory suggests that divergent views can be reconciled by considering where along a continuum of host diversity a given system lies, which is thought to affect how community assembly processes shape host species composition and overall abundance. Second, we review developments surrounding coexistence and other outcomes in communities of interacting pathogens. Ultimately, coexistence in pathogen communities can be explained by the same mechanisms that explain coexistence in any community, yet certain ways in which pathogens interact make the tailoring of theory specific to this context well justified. Despite a rich literature on host and pathogen diversity, there has been remarkably little theoretical work at their interface. To stimulate fresh developments to theories of diversity in disease ecology, we highlight aspects of ecological theory that may have been underutilized in theoretical work on host and pathogen diversity to date.
Alternative stable states, tipping points, and early warning signals of ecological transitions
Authors: Drake John M. , O’Regan Suzanne M. , Dakos Vasilis , Kéfi Sonia , Rohani Pejman
Published: July 2020

Ecological systems are prone to dramatic shifts between alternative stable states. In reality, these shifts are often caused by slow forces external to the system that eventually push it over a tipping point. Theory predicts that when ecological systems are brought close to a tipping point, the dynamical feedback intrinsic to the system interact with intrinsic noise and extrinsic perturbations in characteristic ways. The resulting phenomena thus serve as “early warning signals” for shifts such as population collapse. In this chapter, we review the basic (qualitative) theory of such systems. We then illustrate the main ideas with a series of models that both represent fundamental ecological ideas (e.g. density-dependence) and are amenable to mathematical analysis. These analyses provide theoretical predictions about the nature of measurable fluctuations in the vicinity of a tipping point. We conclude with a review of empirical evidence from laboratory microcosms, field manipulations, and observational studies.
Uneven, Contradictory, and Brutal Economic Development in Africa
Authors: Cramer Christopher , Sender John , Oqubay Arkebe
Published: July 2020

Even where capitalist expansion brings about dramatic and progressive changes, it is always and everywhere contradictory, uneven, and brutal. All good things do not go together. African economic experiences have—similarly—been contradictory. That is one reason why efforts to fit African economic experiences into linear narratives of ‘tragic growth’ or ‘Africa Rising’ are doomed. African economic development is also extremely diverse. This variation is not just between countries. There is also huge variation, perhaps more significantly, within countries. That is why we argue against relying heavily on averages or on continent-wide pronouncements based on just a handful of countries. This variation, as we argue in this chapter and in others, is also often a useful analytical starting point to consider the possible and to identify potential for economic policy to bring about change.
Investment, Wage Goods, and Industrial Policy
Authors: Cramer Christopher , Sender John , Oqubay Arkebe
Published: July 2020

Raising and sustaining long-run growth rates is made more difficult by the complexity of economic growth and by the complexity of growth theory debates. Nonetheless, the investment rate is central to long-run growth and development. Growth sustained by high investment rates will also involve structural change: a shift of resources into high-productivity economic activities. This chapter combines discussion of investment—why it matters, what economic policies help to raise investment rates and keep them high—with discussion of ‘industrial policy’. But the terrain of industrial policy has expanded to take account of new high-productivity activities, of servicification, and of agribusiness; policy officials thus need to refine the criteria used to make resource allocation and incentive decisions accordingly. A particularly important political economy constraint on investment rates is the non-inflationary supply of wage goods.
Unbalanced Development
Authors: Cramer Christopher , Sender John , Oqubay Arkebe
Published: July 2020

Balance is a powerful idea in economics—in equilibrium economics, in strategies of balanced growth, and many other strategies. This chapter argues for a different understanding of the history of capitalism and, therefore, of policy and strategy. The idea of imbalance is a springboard to explore the ideas of Albert Hirschman. These include the concept of linkages and the dynamics of unbalanced growth (pressures, tensions, and disequilibrium as the motor of change), the principle of the hiding hand, and a focus on unintended consequences and poorly measured side effects of development projects and policies. In line with Hirschman’s ‘possibilism’, we argue that the critiques of large ‘mega-projects’ are misleading. Hirschman also highlighted the difference between economists who think a country’s prospects are determined by its ‘endowments’ (what it is and has) and those more interested in what a country does and becomes through what it does.
Working Out the Solution to Rural Poverty
Authors: Cramer Christopher , Sender John , Oqubay Arkebe
Published: July 2020

Ideas about poverty and poverty reduction policy are clouded by misleading measures and unreliable evidence. National statistical organizations (NSOs) are under-resourced and the collection and dissemination of data are compromised by political pressures. Allegedly pro-poor policies have had an inegalitarian impact in rural Africa. Conventional views expecting that support spread across smallholder farmers will reduce poverty are based on skewed evidence and ideology. Large farms have a bigger effect on poverty reduction through labour markets. ‘Gold standard’ poverty measures based on consumption surveys are unreliable and misleading. Composite indices are even less useful. There are better ways to assess deprivation. The poorest typically live in small households with few men in them. Women and children in these households suffer the risks of teenage pregnancy; they risk undernutrition because of a monotonous and undiversified diet; they can acquire hardly any basic consumer wage goods; they depend on access to wage employment opportunities.
Introduction
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This chapter briefly illustrates the contemporary context in which the foundations of computing need to be understood and explored.
What is Computable?
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This chapter defines formally the notion of computable function through its inductive and recursive definitions. It covers the construction schemas to define total and partial computable functions. It concludes by explaining how recursive definitions are general and equivalent to other formulations, a result known as Church’s Thesis.
Computing as a Mathematical Discipline
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This chapter explores more closely the debates concerning correctness and illustrates the principles of formal verification for programsand the philosophical critiques to it. It finally closes the first part of this volume by formulating principles of formal computational validity.
The First Generation of Computers
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This chapter starts with the analysis of the engineering foundation of computing which, proceeding in parallelwith themathematical foundation, led to the design and creation of physical computingmachines. It illustrates the historical evolution of the first generation of computing and their technical foundation, known as the von Neumann architecture. Fromthe conceptual point of view, the chapter clarifies the relation between the universal model of computation and the construction of an all-purpose machine.
Computing as an Engineering Discipline
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This Chapter reconsiders the engineering foundation of computing, overviews the related debate, and formulates a notion of physical computational validity.
Conclusion
Authors: Primiero Giuseppe
Published: July 2020

This chapter reconnects the results presented to the problems illustrated in the Introduction.
The Metaphysics of Quantities
Authors: Wolff J. E.
Published: July 2020

This book articulates and defends a new and original answer to two questions: What are physical quantities and what makes them quantitative? This novel position—substantival structuralism—says that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of particular attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces. Physical quantities like mass, momentum, or temperature play an important role in formulating laws of nature and in testing scientific theories. It is therefore important to have a clear philosophical understanding of what makes these attributes special. Traditional views of quantities have either suggested that quantities are determinables, that is, attributes that require determination by magnitudes, or that quantities are in some sense numerical, but neither view is satisfactory. The book shows how to use the representational theory of measurement to provide a better, more abstract criterion for quantitativeness: only attributes whose numerical representation has a high degree of uniqueness are quantitative. The best ontology for quantities is offered by a form of sophisticated substantivalism applied to quantities as structured spaces. Substantivalism, because an infinite domain is required to satisfy the formal requirements of quantitativeness; structured spaces, because they contain fundamental relations; sophisticated substantivalism because the identity of positions in such spaces is irrelevant. The resulting view is a form structuralism about quantities. The topic of the book falls squarely in the metaphysics of science, with contributions to general metaphysics and philosophy of science.
Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life
Authors: Brill Sara
Published: July 2020

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life studies Aristotle’s understanding of the political character of human intimacy via an examination of the zoological frame informing his political theory. It argues that the concept of shared life, i.e. the forms of intimacy that arise from the possession of logos and the capacity for choice, is central to human political partnership, and serves to locate that life within the broader context of living beings as such, where it emerges as an intensification of animal sociality. As such it challenges a long-standing approach to the role of the animal in Aristotle’s thought, and to the recent reception of Aristotle’s thinking about the political valence of life and living beings.
Shared Life and Politics
Authors: Brill Sara
Published: July 2020

This chapter tracks the role of shared life in Aristotle’s account of the political bond, including its formation, maintenance, and the factors that bring about its dissolution. Here suzēn forms a spectrum, from the familial bond of those who cannot live without one another to the reciprocal affection of chosen friends, and includes both the impulse to live together that exists by merit of the kind of animal the human is (a political animal) and the exercise of the capacity for choice when it is directed to other human beings. Its inclusion of both human impulse and choice indicates that a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of shared life requires one to locate human political life within the context of Aristotle’s broader study of political animality.
Land-Dwellers and Water-Dwellers
Authors: Brill Sara
Published: July 2020

This chapter charts in detail Aristotle’s discussion of animal way of life and character in the History of Animals. In particular it explores that character of animal politicality as it emerges out of Aristotle’s description of more general forms of animal intimacy and the lack thereof in the History of Animals Books 7 and 8, with particular focus on the model of power that emerges from Aristotle’s account of the bios and genesis of bees. It argues that Aristotle’s investigation of human political life must include a study of those features of human life that tie it to the larger class of living beings. Those features comprise an intensification of animal intimacy, which Aristotle conceives as forming a spectrum from the radical antagonism of solitary carnivores to the sharing of a common task indicative of political animals.
The Neutral Hour
Authors: Pong Beryl
Published: July 2020

Taking as its context and metaphor the dislocated time zones of the Second World War—where neutral Ireland progressed on a different time zone from Britain—Chapter 4 addresses why neutrality was such a fraught political decision. Independence, for Ireland, was often couched in the rhetoric of youthful potential, but this theme came to suggest political irresponsibility in being ‘off war time’ instead. Examining Henry Green’s ‘fairy tale’ about neutral Ireland, Loving (1945), and Elizabeth Bowen’s non-fiction writings and short fiction, as well as her novel The Heat of the Day (1949), the chapter delves into the contradictory circumstances of neutral Ireland during the Emergency. Two competing understandings of the politics of time—as the temporality of colonial independence, on the one hand, and as the temporality of global war, on the other—created a situation that these writers found difficult to reconcile.
Social Insurance and the Origins of the German Political Economy
Authors: Manow Philip
Published: July 2020

The chapter reconstructs the parallel emergence of Germany’s corporatist industrial relations and of the Bismarckian welfare state. It traces the influence that the parity representation of organized labor and organized capital on the self-government boards of the various social insurance schemes had (1) on union organization and organizational development, and (2) on the system of corporatist regulation of work and welfare that started to emerge in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter argues that the principle of self-administration of the various social insurance schemes was decisive for the development of German unions into industrial unions, and that it provided both capital and labor with extremely important organizational resources which helped in the creation and then stabilization of corporatist coordination between both. It also provided the responsible ministry with a blueprint for regulating industrial conflict.
Positioning Development in Human Protection
Authors: Foot Rosemary
Published: July 2020

This chapter concentrates on the Beijing government’s attachment to a view that human protection requires a state to be economically developed, domestically stable, and strongly effective and capable. The chapter places the focus on Chinese official arguments in support of this articulated triadic position, but also examines a range of Chinese and non-Chinese scholarly perspectives on this topic area. It situates Chinese voices within a larger, mostly UN-centred, policy literature that explores the relationship between economic development and the management of international peace and security. The chapter explores whether there is a gap between UN and Chinese thinking on how best to prevent conflict and give better protection to individuals caught up in violence, entertaining also the possibility that there has been something of a convergence of UN and official Chinese perspectives.
Early Christian Literature
Authors: Walter Anke
Published: July 2020

The aetiological formulae observed throughout Greek and Roman antiquity remain well and alive even beyond the transition from Classical to Christian antiquity. In Prudentius’ Peristephanon 2, the aetion around which the poem is centred provides the site for the conversion of the poem itself and its turn towards heaven, but it no longer establishes an exclusive connection between past and present. It shares this function with typological parallels, which privilege similarity over chronological order. The aetion embodies the position of Prudentius and his fellow Christians in time: still bound to this world with its sense of chronology and beginnings, but already looking forward to the realm of God, when time in its usual sequentiality will no longer count and the true light of God will fully be seen. Orosius, by contrast, uses aetia as textual loci that encapsulate with particular clarity his vision of time and of God’s role in human history. They also become touchstones of faith, since they can only be fully understood by those who can see the truth and the working of God in this world. Aetia become powerful textual occasions on which Orosius memorably instructs his audience about the power of God, his wrath and constant punishment of sin. For him, aetia become part and parcel of his agenda as a Christian author.
Conclusion
Authors: Walter Anke
Published: July 2020

While generic differences between different types of aetia are not as clear-cut as one might think, a more promising explanation of the differences between individual aetia is the period of literary history to which they belong. Aetia, in the specific ways in which they are narrated, are very much products of their time. They are also often told at crucial points of a narrative, and they provide privileged places for authorial self-reflection, both in terms of the larger agenda of a work and in terms of its aesthetics. Aetia are able to negotiate between different temporal frameworks, and their capacity to bridge the gap between the text and the world gives them the power to implicate the present in a very complex set of assumptions, beliefs, and convictions or exhortations for the future.
The Constitutio Antoniniana and Private Legal Practice in the Eastern Empire
Authors: Alonso José Luis
Published: July 2020

One of the greatest surprises that the papyri from Egypt brought to the founding fathers of Roman legal scholarship was the extent to which new citizens after 212 CE remained faithful to their own, non-Roman, legal traditions. This loyalty provided the main theme for Mitteis’ Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, and the field for the notorious dispute between Ernst Schönbauer and Vincenzo Arangio-Ruiz regarding the rationale behind this apparent continuity. Since then greater emphasis has been placed on the many aspects in which the local practice did in fact change in the decades after 212 CE. The almost universal assumption has been that in the absence of an ad hoc legal disposition or construction, the new situation would de iure have required the population to submit to the rules of Roman law in every aspect of their legal practice. This assumption, and the theories that it has fostered, will be reassessed together with some of the most notorious instances of adaptation, or rather the lack of it, to the demands of Roman law.
Law and Romanization in Judaea
Authors: Czajkowski Kimberley
Published: July 2020

Judaea in many ways posed a problem to Roman administrators, and not just due to the history of rebellion in the region in the first and second centuries CE. How should a population with its own very distinctive legal tradition be administered in the context of the imperial enterprise? This chapter concentrates particularly on the question of the availability and interaction of different jurisdictions in the region from 6 CE, when the area first came under direct Roman rule, up to the foundation of Aelia Capitolina. It is argued that the odd administration of the region makes this a particularly problematic case, and the oscillation between indirect and direct rule was a key factor in assessing the level of Roman influence on legal forms and institutions.
Navigating Roman Law and Local Privileges in Pontus-Bithynia
Authors: Kantor Georgy
Published: July 2020

The chapter starts from the questions raised by a well-known (but underexplored from this angle) source for Roman governmental practice in provinces, the correspondence of Pliny the Younger as governor of Pontus-Bithynia in c.109–11 CE with the emperor Trajan. It attempts to integrate this correspondence with evidence from the legal and documentary sources on peculiarities of Bithynian law in the High Imperial period. Behind the deceptively straightforward presentation of legal issues in Pliny’s letters to the emperor there can be discovered a much more complex interaction between the interests of individuals, communities, their legal representatives and the governor himself. Particular attention is paid to the continuing role of the lex Pompeia, an uncharacteristically extensive set of Roman regulations for the province, going back to its early years. May a case in fact be made for the decrease in Roman legal interference in the early imperial period?
The Integration and Perception of the Rule of Law in Roman Crete
Authors: Tzamtzis Ioannis E.
Published: July 2020

The contrast between Rome’s difficult and bloody conquest of Crete on the one hand and the absence of any conflicts after the island’s integration into the Roman imperium on the other has not escaped the notice of modern scholars. It has often led to the suspicion that the conquerors had, from the start, disempowered the institutional idiosyncrasies of the conquered. However, careful scrutiny of the literary and epigraphic sources allows for the development of a more complex picture. That picture depends partly on the density of political, military, and institutional events that befell Crete in the last third of the first century BCE, and partly on the interaction between Roman legal culture and a Dorian mentality profoundly rooted in the island’s population. From the artificial creation of a provincia Creta-Cyrenaica (following a twofold military campaign and a conflict between Q. Metellus and Cn. Pompeius) to the experience of the confederative Creta libera, led by a Kretarchas, under the triumvirate; from the conservation of the ‘Gortyn code’ at the turn of the first century CE to the syssitia of Lyttos at the end of the second; from the introduction of the Campanian factor on the territory of Cnossos by Octavian to the persistent memory of a semi-proprietary system for the agricultural exploitation of the Messara plain: the composition of the Cretan legal landscape in the time of the Late Republic and the Principate is reminiscent of a Mediterranean fresco. This composition will be outlined in this chapter in order to give a more nuanced picture of Crete’s legal culture.
Roman City-Laws of Spain and their Modelling of the Religious Landscape
Authors: Strothmann Meret
Published: July 2020

The Roman municipal laws from Spain tell us much more about the political constitution of Roman cities than any other document from the Western provinces. However, the fragments at our disposal do not provide information about the social and religious identity of the citizens and incolae. A short survey of Latin inscriptions in Spain shows that in Baetica, where the municipal laws were found, there is very little evidence for indigenous cults, in contrast to other Spanish provinces, numerous deities and cults are attested. It is suggested that municipal laws do not add much to our knowledge of religious life in the cities precisely because they were conceptualized as blueprints for different cities with different conditions. The lack of precise instructions regarding religious institutions is to be seen as part of a broader concept. Thus, in a paragraph of the late-republican constitution for the colony of Urso, the city council has the right to complete the calendar, i.e. to define the official cults. In the Flavian constitution of Irni, such a paragraph is missing, but instead another indication of local authority in respect to possible acculturation can be found: the founder is allowed to legislate, but only within the limits of Roman customary law. Roman cities in Spain were able to autonomously model the religious landscape in response to local needs, a capacity clearly expressed in legal terms.
Public Law in Roman North Africa
Authors: Ando Clifford
Published: July 2020

Roman Africa is distinguished by the quantity and diversity of surviving evidence for the operation of public law. Although there is a lack of evidence for rules of jurisdiction such as survive for Sicily, the Iberian provinces, or especially Cisalpine Gaul, epigraphic material from Africa does allow for reconstruction of public law institutions that bear on the themes of this volume in at least two fields. First, the lex agraria provides information about the nature and degree of interest on the part of Roman authorities in Rome to regulate control of agricultural land. Second, a recently recovered inscription from Carthage, which has been interpreted as the lex sacra, probably of the cult of the Cereres (but which is probably a feriale for the sacra publica of the colony), provides detailed evidence for both the importation from Italy of Roman institutions and the preservation within the colony of the worship of indigenous gods. Each text provides information about the time of its production; they do not allow a clear-cut view for an increase in the importance of Roman norms. However, the epigraphic evidence for the spread of Roman public institutions, especially magistracies and the language of res publicae, can be situated alongside these statutes to yield a complex picture of law in the province over several hundred years.
The Standard Formulation of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Barrett Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2020

The standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics is presented as a set of five basic rules. We discuss each rule is discussed in turn paying particular attention to the conceptual history of the theory. Of central importance is the standard interpretation of states (the eigenvalue-eigenstate link) and the dynamical laws of the theory (the random collapse dynamics and the deterministic linear dynamics) and how the interpretation and dynamics work together to predict and explain the results of basic quantum experiments. While the focus is on the behavior of electrons, we also briefly consider how the theory uses the same mathematical formalism to treat other phenomena like the behavior of neutral K mesons and qbits in a quantum computer.
Quantum Interference
Authors: Barrett Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2020

Moving to more subtle experiments, we consider how the standard formulation of quantum mechanics predicts and explains interference phenomena. Tracking the conditions under which one observes interference phenomena leads to the notion of quantum decoherence. We see why one must sharply distinguish between collapse phenomena and decoherence phenomena on the standard formulation of quantum mechanics. While collapses explain determinate measurement records, environmental decoherence just produces more complex, entangled states where the physical systems involved lack ordinary physical properties. We characterize the quantum-mechanical wave function as both an element of a Hilbert space and a complex-valued function over a configuration space. We also discuss how the wave function is interpreted in the standard theory.
The Collapse of the Quantum State
Authors: Barrett Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2020

We consider Wigner’s proposal for solving the quantum measurement problem. His solution involves a strong mind-body dualism, but it is also possible to provide a purely physical collapse solution to the quantum measurement problem. To this end, we consider the GRW formulation of quantum mechanics and three ways one might interpret it: GRWr, GRWm, and GRWf. These ways of interpreting the theory differ in the metaphysical commitments one makes and, hence, in how one explains one’s measurement records and hence one’s experience. This provides an introduction to the notions of an empirical ontology and a primitive ontology. We consider some of the comparative virtues and vices of the GRW formulation of quantum mechanics.
Many Worlds and Such
Authors: Barrett Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2020

We consider a number of radically different ways that Everett’s pure wave mechanics has been understood. Each of these reconstructions aims to provide a stronger variety of empirical adequacy than Everett’s own formulation of the theory. Among the alternative formulations of quantum mechanics we consider are splitting worlds, decohering worlds, many minds, many threads, and many maps. Each of these differs in its metaphysical commitments and, hence, in how it explains determinate measurement records and probabilities. We focus, in particular, on the problem of accounting for the standard quantum probabilities. To this end, we consider the relationship between typicality and probability and contrast synchronic and forward-looking probabilities. We conclude with a brief discussion of epistemological, pragmatic, and information-theoretic formulations of quantum mechanics. A recurring issue in this chapter concerns what it should mean for a physical theory to be empirically adequate.
Empirical Ontology and Explanation
Authors: Barrett Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2020

Each formulation of quantum mechanics we consider in the book seeks to explain why we have determinate measurement records distributed according to the standard quantum statistics. The explanation we get relies on the metaphysical assumptions that underlie the particular theory. Metaphysics here does real explanatory work in accounting for our experience. While it is not at all clear what specific metaphysical commitments best explain our experience, one can distinguish between different types and degrees of empirical adequacy each formulation provides. Stronger notions of empirical adequacy might be characterized in terms of such things as the plausibility that one’s experience in fact supervenes on the sort of records a particular theory provides and the richness of the account of experience provided by the theory.
The Scalar Approach to Consequentialism
Authors: Norcross Alastair
Published: July 2020

According to maximizing consequentialism, rightness is an all-or-nothing property, rather than one that admits of degrees. This demands much of agents, and leaves no conceptual room for supererogation. While a retreat to satisficing consequentialism mitigates this problem, any choice of a threshold for rightness, even maximization, is arbitrary, and the difference between right and wrong has no more significance than other differences in net goodness. Consequentialist theories, such as utilitarianism, are thus best conceived, in scalar fashion, as, at the fundamental level, theories of the good, that judge actions to be better or worse than possible alternatives, and provide reasons for actions corresponding in strength to differences in net goodness. Such theories are no less capable of action-guidance than theories that incorporate rightness and wrongness at the fundamental level.
Contextualism
Authors: Norcross Alastair
Published: July 2020

Although consequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, obligation, goodness of actions, and harm, such notions may nonetheless be of practical significance. A contextualist approach to all these notions makes room for them in ordinary moral discourse, but also illustrates why there is no room for them at the level of fundamental moral theory. Roughly, to say that an act is right is to say that it is at least as good as the appropriate alternative, to say an act is good is to say that it is better than the appropriate alternative, to say an act harms someone is to say that it makes them worse off than they would have been on the appropriate alternative. In each case, “appropriate” is an indexical, whose referent is fixed by the context of utterance. This approach also makes room for an account of supererogation.
Is Nozick a Libertarian?
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

Nozick’s libertarian theory of property rights, laid out in Part II of Anarchy, State and Utopia, has been subject to innumerable internalist and external critiques. But the book read as a whole poses a deeper puzzle. Parts I, II, and III present at least three mutually inconsistent theories of property rights: utilitarian; libertarian; and anything goes, provided that citizens have some unspecified level of choice among legal regimes. If any of the three predominates, it is not libertarianism but utilitarianism. Nozick is hardly alone in this regard. Nozick’s inconstancy to libertarian principles is typical of the problems deontologists of all stripes encounter in translating vague, abstract rights into concrete rules. His de facto solution is typical as well: when the going gets tough, rights theorists usually turn utilitarian.
The Unwritten Theory of Justice
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

Rawls’s Theory of Justice has had two parallel lives in political theory. The first—the version Rawls wrote—is a response to utilitarianism’s failure to take seriously the separateness of persons. The second—the unwritten version “received” by its general audience—is a response to libertarianism’s failure to take seriously our moral obligations to the well-being of our fellow citizens. This chapter explores how, had he written the second version, Rawls might have dealt with libertarians’ critique of “justice as fairness” as fundamentally illiberal, and how his two principles might have been transformed in the process.
Left-Libertarianism
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

Left-libertarianism marries a very thin reading of Lockean self-ownership with an extraordinarily expansive reading of Locke’s famous proviso that those who appropriate common resources must leave “enough, and as good” for all others. Left-libertarians have argued that those twin commitments justify a redistributive system that is egalitarian in effect, without direct appeal to egalitarianism. To reach that conclusion, however, left-libertarians have had to give both self-ownership and the Proviso highly strained interpretations. The motivation for doing so clearly seems to be to get to the desired conclusion (some form of egalitarianism). At the end of the day, then, left-libertarianism is probably best viewed as egalitarianism in drag.
The Case for a Progressive Benefits Tax
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

Opponents of redistributive taxation have long supported a “benefits” tax, which would tax individuals in accordance with the market value of the benefits they receive from the government. The question is, what market? A perfectly competitive market in which goods and services are priced at their marginal cost of production? A quasi-monopolistic market in which the supplier (here, the state) can price-discriminate among customers based on their willingness to pay? Some third alternative? Depending upon the answer, a benefits tax could yield radically different distributions of the tax burden, from a regressive to a steeply progressive rate structure. Benefits tax proponents have opted for a perfectly competitive market, but their own laissez-faire precommitments support a different answer, with radically different implications for the “right” rate structure.
Introduction
Authors: Bourne Claire M. L.
Published: July 2020

The introduction describes the original survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playbook typography on which the book’s arguments are based. It makes a case for typography as worthy of study by showing that printed plays were considered viable and profitable reading matter in their own time. It engages with recent field-shaping scholarship in book history and theatre studies to explain why playbook typography has not yet been taken up on its own terms. The introduction contends that early modern playbook typography yields a new way of understanding the surviving corpus of early modern playbooks: as reading texts that permitted readerly access to contemporary forms of theatricality rather than foreclosing the chance to experience their effects. In other words, the idiosyncrasies of early modern playbook mise-en-page offer a wealth of untapped evidence about the active—and necessary—creativity involved in the tricky business of making plays into books and books into plays.
Making a Scene
Authors: Bourne Claire M. L.
Published: July 2020

Chapter 3 shows how typography responded to the increasing formal complexity of vernacular plays. The central case study is the printer-publisher Richard Jones’s octavo of Tamburlaine the Great (1590). Jones used numbered scene headings to carve the plays into discrete units of action and tease out their episodic dramaturgy for readers. In particular, he removed divisions where characters are described as clearing the stage to “enter to the battle.” The absence of divisions at these moments in a playbook with an unusually full complement of divisions anticipated the treatment of numbered scene divisions in other plays that, like Tamburlaine, were styled as “histories.” The kinesis and noise of battle sequences invited the continuity of audience focus, not rupture. This typographic mediation of the iterative, “rotating door” strategy of staging battle scenes with limited resources exposes “the scene” as a shape-shifting entity of dramatic form.
Scene Changes
Authors: Bourne Claire M. L.
Published: July 2020

Chapter 5 studies the impact of moveable scenes on playbook typography. Play quartos published after 1660 began to use pared-down “place-markers” that simply named the place for readers to “mark” (that is, acknowledge) where the action was situated. Focusing on a series of debates between Dryden and fellow playwrights, this chapter shows how Dryden’s preference for place-markers, which effectively untethered the act of reading from the material contingencies of theatrical performance, eventually won out over more elaborate accounts of scenery. The combination of a single generic place-marker at the beginning of the book and specific place-markers throughout became so prevalent in printed plays that Rowe used them in Shakespeare’s Works (1709) to harness the frequent geographical shifts in plays like Antony and Cleopatra. The strategy solved part of the problem of Shakespeare’s so-called flagrant disregard for dramatic decorum and helped to reframe his reputation as the English heir to a classical tradition.
Paul’s Cross
Authors: Hentschell Roze
Published: July 2020

This chapter examines Paul’s Cross, the pulpit located in the north-east quadrant of the churchyard, and its material properties and uses, focusing on sermons, the importance of preaching in early modern London, and the sensory spatial practices of sermon attendance at Paul’s. Sermons preached at Paul’s that critiqued and sought to reform the members of the auditory for their primary sin of pride in apparel are analysed. The spotlight on sartorial vanity derives from both a general preoccupation in early modern texts with that particular ‘vice’ and the sense that Paul’s precinct was a common place where it was put on stage. The chapter discusses the jeremiads preached at Paul’s as texts that were significantly influenced by secular literature, including Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses as well as verse satire and Thomas Nashe’s Christ’s Teares over Jerusalem, and emphasizes the importance of the site in relation to the message.
International Relations and the Problem of Time
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

What is time and how does it influence our knowledge of international politics? For decades International Relations (IR) paid little explicit attention to time. Recently this began to change as a range of scholars took an interest in the temporal dimensions of politics. Yet IR still has not fully addressed the issue of why time matters, nor has it reflected on its own use of time—how temporal assumptions and ideas affect the way we understand political phenomena. Moreover, IR remains beholden to two seemingly contradictory visions of time: the time of the clock and a long-standing tradition of treating time as a problem to be solved. International Relations and the Problem of Time develops a unique response to these interconnected puzzles. It reconstructs IR’s temporal imagination by developing an argument that all times—from the rhythms of the universe to individual temporal experience—spring from social and practical timing activities, or efforts to establish meaningful and useful relationships in complex and dynamic settings. In IR’s case, across a wide range of approaches scholars employ narrative timing techniques to make sense of political processes and events. This innovative account of time provides a more systematic and rigorous explanation for all manner of temporal phenomena in international politics. It also develops provocative insights about IR’s own history, its key methodological commitments, supposedly “timeless” statistical methods, historical institutions, and the critical vanguard of time studies. This book invites us to reimagine time in theory and practice, and in so doing to significantly rethink the way we approach the study of international politics.
City and Suburb in Roman Italy
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

“City and Suburb in Roman Italy” introduces the book’s approach to Roman suburbs. It discusses the laws and practices that surrounded various urban boundaries, and highlights the concept of “death pollution,” the idea that Romans feared a contagious of uncleanliness that radiated from the dead. A long tradition has attributed the Roman ban on interment within the city to concerns with death pollution, and today most work on Roman urbanism begins from the assumption that tombs stood outside the religious boundary of the pomerium in order to preserve a city’s ritual purity. Nevertheless, no source prior to Late Antiquity mentioned death pollution. This chapter argues that the concept has unnecessarily separated tombs from suburban neighborhoods, and that reintegrating the dead into their urban contexts is necessary for understanding how an ancient city worked, both inside and outside its official boundaries.
Modern Social Contract Theory
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

This book provides an exposition and evaluation of major work in social contract theory from 1950 to present. It locates the central themes of that theory in the intellectual legacy of utilitarianism, particularly the problems of defining principles of justice and of showing the grounds of moral obligation. Subsequently, it demonstrates how theorists responded in a novel way to the dilemmas articulated in utilitarianism, developing in their different approaches a constructivist method in ethics—a method that aimed to vindicate a liberal, democratic, and just political order. A distinctive feature of the book is its comparative approach. Each theory is placed in its particular intellectual context. Special attention is paid to the contrasting theories of rationality adopted by the different authors, whether that be utility theory or a deliberative conception of rationality, with the intention of assessing how far the principles advanced can be justified by reference to the hypothetical choices of rational contracting agents. The book also looks at some principal objections to the enterprise of contract theory, and offers its own programme for the future of that theory taking the form of the empirical method.