bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Roman Fasces
Authors: Brennan T. Corey
Published: November 2022

The fasces plainly had their limits in Rome, for the Republican system featured basic structural curbs regarding how officials who displayed them might exercise their official authority. Chief among them was the institution of the plebeian tribunes, said to be created in 493 bce to defend and support the Roman Plebs, deemed inviolable as to their persons and thus immune from physical contact by lictors—a situation that caught the imagination of Rome’s annalists, always interested in conflict. It was essential to an official’s dignity that he leave the lictors who carried his fasces to do their always unpopular and sometimes bone-chilling physical work, and not personally engage himself. Conversely, when lictors saw their fasces smashed or stolen, the disgrace rebounded onto their superior—and especially so if they could not protect his physical person. In all periods of Roman history into later antiquity, one can detect anxiety about improper use of the fasces and the power they represented. Non-Romans for their part hated the symbol of the fasces. Already in the mid-second century bce, Polybius counts it as the height of Greece’s misfortune that its free cities were compelled to admit Roman rods and axes within their gates. Even the peoples of Italy had much to fear from the fasces while they were still largely excluded from Roman political life before 88 bce. And so, when they could, Rome’s enemies made the most of ironic appropriation of captured insignia.
The Tang Dynasty
Authors: Fettweis Christopher J.
Published: November 2022

The next case shifts the focus to the other side of the world, where a great dynasty rose as Europe slipped into a centuries-long economic depression. China’s relative power has waxed and waned over time, but it was indisputably dominant under the Tang Dynasty, which ruled between roughly 618 and 907. These emperors led their country to heights unmatched before or since, a golden age when the arts and economy flourished throughout East Asia. Tang China was different from all the other cases in this book because it could not depend on the greatest military of its time. The empire’s strengths instead rested largely on economics and “soft power,” or cultural leadership. Relying on such tools entails rather substantial risk, which the Tang emperors generally handled with admirable skill. Eventually a bloody rebellion crippled their ability to wield both hard and soft power, but until then they enjoyed an extraordinary level of regional dominance. As it turns out, a martial culture is not a prerequisite for national security and prosperity.
“The Situation at the Time”
Authors: Kokin Serhii , Hale-Dorrell Aaron
Published: November 2022

In Chapter 6, Kokin documents the Great Terror in Zhitomir Oblast, following the cases of a series of mid-level NKVD operatives purged before and after the November 1938 directive curtailing mass operations. In this oblast as elsewhere, the mass operations developed at a pace and scope that almost predetermined the use of torture to obtain what were fake confessions within a compressed period. Here, NKVD operatives were charged with looting at the place of execution and the removal of gold teeth from victims. Kokin surveys the results of the arrests of NKVD leaders Grigorii Viatkin and Grigorii Grishin and speculates as to the different sentences for various leaders, suggesting that the harshest sentences were dealt to mid-level NKVD operatives. Kokin also reminds readers that despite the arrest of these NKVD operatives in the Beria purge, no one ever questioned the Great Terror.
In Praise of Ambivalence
Authors: Coates D. Justin
Published: November 2022

Ambivalence is a form of inner volitional conflict that we experience as being irresolvable without significant cost. Because of this, very few of us relish feelings of ambivalence. Yet for many in the Western philosophical tradition, ambivalence is not simply an unappealing experience that’s hard to manage. According to the unificationists, ambivalence is a failure of well-functioning agency. The reasons for this, we’re told, are threefold. First, ambivalence precludes agents from resolving their wills in a way that is necessary for autonomy. Second, ambivalence precludes agents from fully affirming their lives, and in particular from fully affirming the choices they make. As a result, it robs them of an important source of meaning. Finally, ambivalence causes agents to act in self-defeating ways. In so doing, they act without integrity. Ambivalence is thus seen as a threat to a trio of important agential goods, and as a result, it imperils the best forms of human agency. In Praise of Ambivalence argues that ambivalence does not preclude volitional resolution or normatively significant forms of affirmation. Nor does it guarantee self-defeat. Consequently, ambivalence as such is no threat to autonomy, meaning, or integrity. In the course of assessing these arguments, ambivalence is also revealed to have an important role in securing the very goods that unificationists contend it undermines. The best forms of human agency are therefore shown not only to be compatible with ambivalence but to frequently require it. Ambivalence is thus not a volitional defect, but a crucial constituent of well-functioning agency.
Introduction
Authors: Coates D. Justin
Published: November 2022

Ambivalence is a familiar but typically unwelcome phenomenon. We instead prefer to be unified or wholehearted in what we do. Unificationists like Plato, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Harry Frankfurt, and Christine M. Korsgaard (among many others) defend the claim that agential unity is preferable to ambivalence because it alone secures autonomy, meaningfulness, and integrity. Being unified or wholehearted is, on the unificationist view, the hallmark of ideal or well-functioning agency. This chapter introduces three unificationist arguments: the Resolution Argument, the Affirmation Argument, and the Argument from Self-Defeat. It then briefly identifies an alternative account of well-functioning agency, one that identifies disunity of a certain form as being crucial for evaluative competence.
Ambivalence and Integrity
Authors: Coates D. Justin
Published: November 2022

Chapter 5 considered two versions of the Argument from Self-Defeat. This chapter offers a direct argument that integrity sometimes requires agents to be ambivalent. This argument rests on an analysis of Agamemnon’s infamous sacrifice of his daughter. In that case, we see and agent who makes himself wholehearted, and as a result, betrays himself and guarantees self-defeat. This chapter also begins to explore how ambivalence would better serve agents like Agamemnon. This chapter concludes that ambivalence cannot be intrinsically self-defeating (as unificationists claim) in a way that precludes agential integrity. This result serves as the beginning of a more systematic explanation of what goes wrong with the unificationist account of agency.
Morality and Meaningfulness
Authors: Coates D. Justin
Published: November 2022

This chapter argues that for the normatively competent agent, ambivalence in the face of practical conflict is regularly called for. To do this, it considers how ambivalence-meriting conflicts arise given the axiological and normative commitments of several leading moral theories: pluralism, Kantianism, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. It then extends this general argument to the conditions that make our lives meaningful. Building on ideas due to Susan Wolf and Thaddeus Metz, the chapter argues that a meaningful life will regularly involve a plurality of commitments and projects that come into conflict in ambivalence-meriting ways. Well-functioning agents therefore have reason to be open to ambivalence.
And Yet
Authors: Bendroth Margaret
Published: November 2022

Chapter 1 describes the spiritual aftermath of the suffrage movement, with attempts to redefine the nature of feminine spirituality in a modern context. In the 1920s, Protestant churchwomen saw an opportunity to move beyond old Victorian gender roles, which had set separate spheres for men and women in church and society, and also assumed that women were naturally the more religious sex. This arrangement had afforded women some independence and the opportunity to build a network of separate organizations, but prevented them from obtaining full equality. The question stood: how could they continue to support the churches, retaining their supposedly innate religiosity, but also pursue the opportunity to achieve and explore, regardless of the conventions of gender?
Race and Class, but Not Gender
Authors: Bendroth Margaret
Published: November 2022

Chapter 4 details the work of churchwomen’s organizations toward racial reconciliation, important and ground-breaking work undertaken under the conviction that “ecumenical meant interracial.” The YWCA played an early role in pioneering these efforts, which focused primarily on the building of interracial friendships. Other women’s organizations, including United Church Women, made racial reconciliation a fundamental organizing principle. This chapter also explores the limitations white churchwomen faced, especially as seen through the eyes of black churchwomen. This includes an analysis of the social class conventions and the style of Protestant piety that dampened radicalism. In many ways, it was almost easier to forge cross-racial friendships than to declare “sisterhood,” because identifying as gender-based organizations invited worries about feminization.
Assuming Equality
Authors: Bendroth Margaret
Published: November 2022

This portrait is a reflection on the career of Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness, who taught at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in the 1950s and was at the time, one of only two women who were professors of theology. Despite this milestone, Harkness was a typical woman of achievement in her time, overworked and ailing, and also marginalized by the male academic elite. Expressing outright anger was not an option, however. As this portrait demonstrates, Harkness suffered both physical and psychological pain during her career. Her talk to pastors on “The Spirit of Heaviness” details some of her own struggles with what would now very likely be diagnosed as depression, which accompanying physical symptoms.
Introduction
Authors: Balbo Mattia , Santangelo Federico
Published: November 2022

The title of this volume states some working assumptions, and seeks to engage with a debate that has a long and complex history. It explicitly alludes to a book that just over a decade ago put forward a radical reassessment of the history of the Roman Republic, its structure, and its periodization. In Roman Republics (2010), Harriet Flower argued that the five centuries or so between the end of the regal period and the emergence of the Augustan regime are not best understood as a coherent or unified Republican age, but should instead be viewed as a sequence of fundamentally different, if interrelated, Republican setups. A central chapter in Flower’s volume is devoted to the second century bce as a whole, and places it under the rubric “A Community in Transition”: an age in which new rules, new protagonists, and new problems came to the fore. This volume seeks to flesh out that agenda by pursuing a number of thematic approaches in a set of interconnected chapters. This introduction summarizes their key research questions and findings.
Climate Change and Rome’s Changing Republic
Authors: Tan James
Published: November 2022

By the Augustan period, it is clear that Rome had entered a stable and warm period conventionally known as the “Roman Climatic Optimum.” The question as to just how early that climate can be identified is not settled science, but various proxies—most notably 14C and 10Be indications of solar radiation—suggest that it was in more or less full effect by 200 bce. On that provisional understanding, it is worth examining how the climate of the second century could have affected Rome as a “Community in Transition.” This chapter focuses on three particular macrotrends of the period: military expansion, the movement of the population, and the shift from a settled and apparently uncontroversial distribution of Italian land, to a highly contentious situation in which the status quo became challenged. To the extent that this chapter relies on any given reconstruction of the climate, it will of course be provisional and contingent on new climate studies research. Working within our best current reconstructions, however, the goal is to demonstrate to students and scholars how consideration of climate can affect—and eventually become integrated into—our understanding of more conventional historical topics for the period.
Goodbye to All That
Authors: Taylor Michael J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the Roman militia system from the end of the Third Macedonian War to the outbreak of the Social War (167–91 bce). This period saw dramatically lower military deployments and significantly less intensive fighting than had characterized the years from 218 to 167 bce, defined by persistent and intensive hegemonic warfare. The reduction in both the deployment tempo and the intensity of fighting had a number of important implications for Rome’s citizen militia, namely: (1) diminution in the collective military experience within the citizen body; (2) increased military failures by less-experienced soldiers, officers, and commanders; and (3) increased reluctance of citizens to serve in campaigns, especially in Spain from 153 to 133 bce, in Numidia against Jugurtha, and against the Cimbri and Teutones from 112 to 101 bce, operations characterized by repeated debacles and significant casualties.
Interactions between Tribunes and Senate
Authors: Gallo Annarosa
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the interactions between plebeian tribunes and the Senate in law-making. During the Republican period the interactions between tribunes and the Senate underwent substantial modifications. From the third century bce, after the lex Hortensia, the tribunician college became a governing body, now formally accepted and recognized: the tribunes were indeed invited to join the Senate and to become part of it. The tribunes became then privileged interlocutors of the Senate and sometimes “instruments of the senatorial will” (as Francesco De Martino effectively put it). However, this vision of the two-way relationship between the tribunician college and the Senate, based on concordia, was not always shared by all the tribunes. In the dialectic between the Senate and the tribunes, commonality or divergence of intents were determined by political considerations.
The Gentes Maiores and Aristocratic Competition in Rome (200–134 bce)
Authors: Landrea Cyrielle
Published: November 2022

This chapter analyzes the Roman nobility between 200 and 134 bce. Its focus is on the patricians and the gentes maiores, the six “greater clans”: Aemilii, Claudii, Cornelii, Fabii, Manlii, and Valerii. The distinction based on gentes minores and gentes maiores is hard to define, but the powerful gentes maiores constantly maintained their prestige and retained a dominant position in the political life of the second century. For example, the princeps senatus was always a patrician, who had to belong to the gentes maiores. In addition, between 200 and 134 bce, forty-one consuls are from the “greater clans.” The chapter focuses on the power of the patricians and on the relationships between patricians and aristocratic competition.
The Arrival of Eloquence?
Authors: Steel Catherine
Published: November 2022

Did the practice and function of oratory change at Rome during the second century bce, and if so, what was the relationship between that change and the range of demonstrable change visible in other elements of Roman politics, society, and culture? At least two distinct stories can be told in response to this question. One sees the second century as a time of significant change in public speech, as the strains of imperial power create new arenas for debate and a consequent enthusiasm among the elite for new technique of speaking imported from the Greek-speaking world. The embassy of Athenian philosophers in 155 would be the emblematic moment for this story. But one can also develop a story of continuities, in which both circumstances and methods remain broadly similar, and the most significant innovation is the increasing use of written texts to preserve a record of oratory. The Elder Cato is the mascot for this story. Confusingly, Cicero proposes both narratives in different works. The underlying difficulty is the inaccessibility of public speech to those who were not present; texts are only a partial remedy. Cicero filled the gaps in the evidence available to him in different ways driven by differing priorities during his career. Oratory’s contribution to analyzing the second-century transformation is thus fundamentally historiographical, revealing points of stress and uncertainty that subsequent generations of Romans had in grasping the nature of the changes that took place between the defeat of Hannibal and the death of Tiberius Gracchus.
Beyond Conservatism
Authors: Santangelo Federico
Published: November 2022

This chapter provides a close reconsideration of the main historical themes of religious history of the period between the Hannibalic War and the Gracchi: prodigy reporting and expiation, temple dedications, changes in the calendar, tensions within the priestly colleges, debates on priestly recruitment, and controversies over the management of religious knowledge. In doing so, it also aims to serve the wider agenda of the volume by pursuing the potential of a thematic approach on several levels and furthering the debate on problems of periodization and definition that have been central to much of the debate on the second century bce over the last decade.
Pathology Report
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2022

This chapter is a pathology report. It diagnoses maladies that occur when six healthy philosophical impulses go into overdrive. Commitment to clarity begets the fetish of complete clarity; recognition of the disambiguating abilities of formalization gives rise to obsessive uses of formalisms; the power of a (poorly understood) faculty of “intuition” is grossly overestimated; the label “a priori” is sprinkled over claims as if it were fairy dust; other fields are raided for ideas that are paraded in cartoon versions; questions that have lost their pertinence are treated as if they were “timeless.” All are illustrated with examples.
Grounding Social Rules
Authors: Marmor Andrei
Published: November 2022

The main purpose of this chapter is to show what is it for a social rule to exist. The argument is that the existence of social rules can be fully explained by a two-step grounding account: social rules are fully grounded in patterns of conduct that take certain collective attitudes, appropriately shared by the relevant population, to be the content of the rule in question. It is shown that the building blocks of both grounding steps are in line with methodological individualism; rules exist in virtue of individuals’ attitudes, dispositions and regularities of behavior, motivated or guided by the appropriately shared attitudes. The fact that the content of social rules is constituted by collectively shared attitudes also shows why certain types of group-wide errors about the content of social rules is metaphysically not possible.
Intolerant Justice
Authors: Efrat Asif
Published: November 2022

Intolerant Justice examines how national legal systems handle dilemmas of international cooperation: Should our citizens stand trial in foreign courts that do not meet our standards? Should we extradite offenders to countries with a poor human rights record? Should we enforce rulings issued by foreign judges whose values are different from our own? This book argues that ethnocentrism—the human tendency to divide the world into superior in-groups and inferior out-groups—fuels fear and mistrust of foreign justice and sparks domestic political controversies: while skeptics portray foreign legal systems as a danger and threat, others dismiss these concerns. The book traces this dynamic in a range of cases, including the American hesitation to allow criminal trials of troops in the courts of NATO countries; the debate over the proper venue for trying Europeans who joined ISIS as foreign fighters; the dilemma of extradition to China; the British debate over extradition to the U.S. and the EU; the European wariness toward U.S. civil judgments; the American-British divide over free speech and libel suits; the establishment of mutual legal assistance treaties; and cooperation against child abduction. Despite the growing role of law and courts in international politics, Intolerant Justice suggests that cooperation among legal systems often meets resistance—and it shows how this resistance can be overcome.
Should American Troops Face Foreign Courts?
Authors: Efrat Asif
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the Congressional controversy over the 1951 NATO Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which allows the European members of the alliance to hold criminal trials of U.S. troops. Opponents of the agreement in the Senate argued that the legal systems of Europe failed to meet American standards of due process. Supporting the agreement, the U.S. military, Department of Defense, Department of State, and Department of Justice saw little reason to fear the legal differences between the United States and its allies. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that, to this day, the United States shows reluctance to submit troops to foreign jurisdiction.
The Dilemma of Extradition to China
Authors: Efrat Asif
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines how two countries considered human rights leaders—Australia and Canada—grappled with the dilemma of signing an extradition treaty with China: a country with a poor record on human rights and the rule of law. In Australia, the strongest opposition to an extradition treaty with China came from the legal community, which raised a host of concerns regarding China’s respect for human rights, rule of law, and procedural fairness in criminal proceedings. Australia’s NGO community shared these doubts and questioned the effectiveness of the safeguards included in the proposed treaty. By contrast, the Attorney-General’s Department insisted that these safeguards do guarantee adequate human rights protection. Labor—the opposition party—joined the critics, demonstrating how political opponents may attack a government willing to cooperate on litigation. In Canada, the political debate unfolded along similar lines.
Balancing Free Speech and Reputation
Authors: Efrat Asif
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines American concerns about libel judgments issued by British courts against American authors and publishers. British courts became attractive sites for suing Americans whose publications had little connection with Britain—a phenomenon labeled “libel tourism”—because of the plaintiff-friendly attitude of British defamation law. In 2010, Congress enacted the SPEECH Act, which instructs a U.S. court to enforce a foreign libel judgment only if it determines that the foreign defamation law provided adequate protection for freedom of speech consistent with the First Amendment. This legislation followed from the advocacy campaign of an American author who was sued in a London court by a Saudi billionaire she had described in her book as a financier of terrorism. This case demonstrates how a personal story of hardship can elicit ethnocentric concerns about foreign law.
Introduction
Authors: Doellgast Virginia
Published: November 2022

The Introduction presents the book’s argument, describes research methods, and summarizes key findings. The argument has two parts. First, restructuring decisions involve contested choices concerning the social versus the market value of work. A central mechanism in market-oriented restructuring is intensifying competition based on replacing worker voice with employer exit as a means of securing worker cooperation. Second, labor’s power to reassert social values in negotiations or conflicts over restructuring rests on three factors, summarized as constraints on employer exit, support for collective worker voice, and strategies of inclusive labor solidarity. Three case studies from France, Germany, and Sweden illustrate this argument and serve as a jumping-off point for explaining the book’s framework.
Downsizing
Authors: Doellgast Virginia
Published: November 2022

Chapter 3 compares the politics and outcomes of restructuring policies focused on managing collective redundancies. There were often strong social partnerships at the incumbent employers around the time of market liberalization and/or privatization, with generous voluntary redundancy and early retirement plans. However, after the mid-2000s, management came under increased pressure to reduce the cost of these plans. While broad industry trends were similar, the cases differed significantly in the scale and pace of cuts, the overall generosity of redundancy payments, as well as the form and outcome of associated labor conflict. Overall, where constraints on exit were stronger, employers adopted more social approaches to downsizing. However, each case shows change over time, as management sought to exploit loopholes and cut costs. Unions had success in countering these trends through collective voice where they were able to build solidarity across their membership, and to draw on broader forms of labor solidarity among unions and with other actors in civil society.
Externalization
Authors: Doellgast Virginia
Published: November 2022

Chapter 5 compares externalization strategies, as the ten case study companies moved work to subcontractors, temporary agencies, and service subsidiaries. Institutions structuring exit options and giving workers collective voice in negotiating alternatives to externalization played a central role in both strategies and outcomes. However, the dynamics of labor solidarity were particularly important in campaigns to extend or maintain protections across networked workplaces, taking different forms across cases characterized by structural inclusive solidarity (Austria and Sweden), representation domain divides (Denmark and Germany), ideological divides (France, Italy, and Poland), and structural exclusive solidarity (United Kingdom, United States, Czech Republic, and Poland). Unions had the most success in reducing or reversing precarity in the “structural inclusive solidarity” cases. However, they adopted new, creative approaches across the four groups to raise the costs of exit through legal or negotiated extension of minimum terms and conditions, and to extend the benefits of voice through organizing and representing externalized workers.
Avoiding Old-Fogeyism
Authors: Stuhr John J.
Published: November 2022

Beginning with the recognition that humans are creatures of habit, this chapter identifies resources in William James’s Principles of Psychology for the development of flexible, plastic habits, imaginative genius, and human flourishing. Section 1 sets forth James’s account of habit. Section 2 examines the dangers of habits in a dynamic world—particularly the ways habits fix and limit attention, perception, conception, and emotion, turning people into old fogeys. Section 3 develops the implications of this view for human well-being—for habits of flourishing—proceeding in part by means of the contrast between healthy-minded persons and sick souls, as James uses those idea in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Section 4 draws on James’s account of genius as the capacity to perceive in unhabitual ways so as to set forth an account of genius in action, one consistent with contemporary neuroscience and Buddhist practice. This account has social and not just individual consequences.
More Inclusive Ideals
Authors: Stuhr John J.
Published: November 2022

Drawing primarily on James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” this chapter sets forth a new account of ethical theory and practice. Section 1 explicates James’s moral theory and his rejection of “old-fashioned ethics” and treats his pragmatism as a subset or application of his moral theory. Section 2 explains how James’s view of ethics rejects and ignores commonplace assumptions in professional philosophy—assumptions that are roadblocks to grasping James’s insights. Sections 3 and 4 argue in turn that for James ethics is irreducibly personal and practical; these sections develop the implications of these two facts. Section 5 provides an account of moral life without appeal to old-fashioned, absolutist ethics. Section 6 explains the practical meaning and timeliness of Jamesian ethics in terms of the strenuous mood and active striving toward a conscious ideal—and without any appeal to a Jamesian God or unseen infinite.
The multicellular organisms and colonial superorganisms
Authors: Boomsma Jacobus J.
Published: November 2022

Comparative data indicate that clades of differentiated multicellular organisms and colonial superorganisms always originated by somatic adherence to a diploid (zygotic) cell and by comparable loyalty of a worker caste to monogamous parents. However, the functional analogy remains ambiguous because multicellular animals ultimately die from somatic failure while single-queen colonies die from germline failure. This difference relates to the forms of corruption that plague the two levels of organizational complexity, metazoan cancers due to somatic mosaicicm and inquiline social parasites due to germline chimerism. Parental monogamy also shaped condition-dependent reproductive altruism in societies of cooperative breeders, which never became monogamous enough to evolve permanently altruistic castes. In addition to evidence for ultimate conjectures, I explore three proximate parallels between multicellular animals and colonial superorganisms. First, the ways in which germlines and soma segregate and differentiate in bodies and colonies; second, the principles by which superorganismal (but not society) immune defenses reached impressive efficiencies, particularly in ants and termites that defend non-overlapping territories; third, the extent of developmental similarity between cell differentiation in metazoan bodies and caste differentiation in superorganismal colonies. Early organismal biologists often appreciated these natural history parallels more than modern scientists, and even pre-Darwinian naturalists were remarkably competent observers of life’s organization. The empirical data appear consistent with expressions of condition-dependent somatic altruism by cells or multicellular individuals not being ancestral to obligate and unconditional reproductive altruism in (super)organismal clades. This challenges the reproductive bauplan concept for the origin of castes and suggests that the clarification of unique gene regulatory networks for obligate somatic altruism need to replace the reductionist identification of toolkit genes.
The free-living prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells
Authors: Boomsma Jacobus J.
Published: November 2022

The last universal common ancestor of cellular life (LUCA) and the last eukaryote common ancestor (LECA) were unique events that committed previously independent replicators to joint vertical transmission by default although horizontal transmission remained possible. Here I develop an explicitly organismal narrative emphasizing that the organizational complexity of simple prokaryote cells and complex eukaryote cells was based on cell closure and division of labor among cellular elements. My arguments reconcile Huxley’s (1912) principle that nothing alive can be functionally homogeneous with Williams’ dictum that genetic homogeneity is a necessary condition for maintaining organizational complexity. Echoing arguments brought forward intermittently since the late 1800s, I question the validity of the cell as machine metaphor because that reductionist approach addresses only proximate aspects of functional causation and cannot explain the self-organized, and self-referential aspects of unicellular maintenance and reproduction as they are shaped by natural selection. I review the substantial insights obtained from studies of societies of bacterial and protist cells. They vindicated inclusive fitness theory and are now being extended to address viral social behavior, but they have no direct relevance for understanding LUCA and LECA as major evolutionary transitions in organizational complexity. Finally, I evaluate the scattered evidence for germline–soma differentiation within unicellular organisms, which increasingly confirm that these domains also have forms of reproductive division of labor and differential rates of aging.
Introduction
Authors: Braun Alexandra
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the reader to promises of a future inheritance and outlines the significance of the enquiry and, in particular, why it is important to adopt the promisee’s perspective. It outlines the focus, objectives, and claims of the book, as well as the value of taking a comparative approach. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the scope of the enquiry and explains the structure of the book.
Concluding reflections
Authors: Braun Alexandra
Published: November 2022

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of the book. It argues that although no universal approach fits all factual scenarios, let alone all legal traditions, there are important factors that ought to be paid attention to when considering how to tackle testamentary promises cases and how best to protect the promisee’s interests. The book explores these factors in the context of a) establishing a claim, b) granting relief, and, c) balancing the interests of the promisee with other interests.
How Can Systems-Thinking Address the Barriers to Implementing the Right to Health and Rehabilitation in South Africa
Authors: Hussey Meghan , MacLachlan Malcolm , Mji Gubela
Published: November 2022

How can systems thinking address the barriers to implementing the right to health and rehabilitation in South Africa? This chapter will use systems thinking to understand barriers to implementing the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in South Africa. It will first examine the rights of persons with disability as a global health issue and how disability is constructed within global health systems. It will then identify major barriers to implementing the health and rehabilitation articles of the CRPD in South Africa including negative attitudes, competing political priorities, lack of available finances, cumbersome organizational structures, inaccessible physical environments, and poor communication practices. It is necessary to look at structural inequality and how historical legacies perpetuate disparities in the health system that make it difficult to implement the CRPD. Furthermore, this chapter illustrates how underlying negative attitudes toward persons with disabilities influence barriers within the health system.
The Planetary Health Imperative to Eradicate Nuclear Weapons
Authors: Ruff Tilman
Published: November 2022

Nuclear weapons pose the most acute existential threat to planetary health. Health evidence, evidence-based advocacy, and wide intersectoral collaboration have played a seminal role in control efforts to date, most recently in the 2017 adoption of the historic UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Codifying their unacceptability in an international treaty has been an effective and essential step toward controlling and eliminating other types of inhumane and indiscriminate weapons. However, the danger of nuclear war is growing, and completing the eradication of nuclear weapons before they are again used is the most urgent planetary health imperative. A number of elements of a systems approach have thus far proven useful to the health contribution toward freeing our world from nuclear weapons. The treaty adds a powerful tool to the broad and multifaceted collaboration of health professionals, researchers, diverse civil society partners, and humanitarian organizations, working with governments, which is needed to complete this task.
Learning from Case Studies in Global Health
Authors: Rhatigan Joseph
Published: November 2022

Case studies are useful tools for examining and teaching many issues in global health. As global health involves many actors across diverse contexts, case studies are well suited to examining specific phenomena that other forms of qualitative and quantitative research are not able to elucidate. They can analyze how complex, systems-level forces influence particular events, and they promote systems thinking by considering the interrelationships among multiple perspectives and sources of causality. This chapter illustrates this by discussing specific issues in global health that are best examined by case-studies that adopt a systems-thinking perspective. It also discusses how case studies can be used in to promote systems thinking in global health education, and it provides examples of teaching case studies that utilize this approach.
Statelessness, the Right to Health, Policy, and Case Law
Authors: Erasmus Patricia
Published: November 2022

Discriminatory governmental policies (both legislated and informal) often prevent migrants and stateless persons in Africa from accessing adequate healthcare services. Case studies demonstrate the vast inequalities migrants and stateless people face in accessing their healthcare rights, often exacerbated by xenophobic community tensions. The landscape of healthcare is thus already often hostile to the migrant or stateless person, even in the face of healthcare practitioners who may be willing to provide non-discriminatory services. It is against this background that the particular plight of people who are made stateless by inadequate access to (or awareness about) birth registration mechanisms must be considered since the additional layer of inequality does not exist free from more institutional causes of unequal access to healthcare. Statelessness in Africa, when it is caused by inadequate access to (or knowledge about) birth registration mechanisms, is an issue linked to the feminization of poverty, the cycle of poverty, and inequality. Crucial in overcoming this type of statelessness is education, both of a grassroots nature in Africa and also, it will be suggested, in the context of feminist development education in the Global North. Development education has a powerful role to play in furthering global equality and fostering a sense of global citizenship. It has vast potential to explore and amplify feminist and gender empowerment themes in meaningful ways to achieve global solidarity and awareness of gender-based inequalities which negatively impact on human rights.
Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

The ancient Greek philosophers had the ambition of showing how to put happiness/eudaimonia in our power. For that Socratic project to be feasible, it had to be removed from arbitrary divine control and external contingency, on the one hand, and, still more importantly, it had to be grounded in the internal rule of reason. Corresponding revisions to traditional ideas about the gods and the mind were brought together by the postulate that human reason is a divine faculty, and capable, when perfected, of producing a life that would be not only excellent in human terms but also an authentic likeness of divinity. The morality of ancient philosophy is a kind of mathematics, by which we make what is good for ourselves balance what is good for others.
Politics and Divinity in Plato’s Republic
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

Plato’s political dialogues incorporate divinity in the interests of establishing policies that are as good as humanly possible. In making access to the Form of the Good the pinnacle of the political philosopher’s education, Plato’s Socrates envisions it as the essence of divinity, not as a particular god but as divinity itself. The Good is accessible to minds that are predisposed to see it because of their own rationality and civic devotion. This interpretation reverts to views that were standard among ancient Platonists and modern scholars until recently. I conjecture that the charge of impiety may have been brought against Socrates owing to his notion that access to divinity is though our rational faculty and dialectic as distinct from ritual worship.
Cosmic Craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

Both Plato and Stoic philosophers envision the universe as the product of a divine and providential craftsman. Plato’s model for the operation of this creativity is mathematical. The Stoics, instead, opt for fiery energy as the active principle of the cosmos. In Stoicism the primary god, called Zeus, is immanent in all nature, whereas Plato’s demiurge transcends the world and looks to eternal Forms as paradigms for cosmology.. Divine craftsmanship is the goal for Platonists and Stoics alike to emulate, but Stoicism is distinctive in construing the world as a polity, making it quite literally the city of gods and human beings. The author introduces this essay with a survey of pre-Platonic cosmology and theology.
Second Selves and Stoic Friends
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

Notions of selfhood are strongly implicated in the ancient philosophers’ accounts of friendship. This chapter focuses on their idea that mutual benefit is essential to authentic friendship, and explores its ramifications in Stoicism. Like Aristotle, Stoic philosophers regard true friends as second selves. Unlike Aristotle, they restrict all friendships to persons of virtuous character. Stoic friends benefit one another not by material help but by sharing one another’s virtues and providing moral knowledge and motivation. They value one another not because of their distinctive personalities but because they are persons of a certain sort. The chapter includes discussions of friendship by Seneca and Epictetus.
The Self in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius addresses himself more directly than any other ancient author. In his Meditations (literally Books to Himself) he reviews his life from subjective and objective perspectives. He sees himself both as a part of nature’s causality, and as an autonomous agent whose essence is his internal divinity. His self-model is threefold, consisting of body, breath, and intellect. His practice of self-management focuses on treating his present consciousness and agency as the only reality that he must confront, in order to adapt himself to his external situation as a rational and social creature.
Plotinus on Self and Happiness
Authors: Long A. A.
Published: November 2022

Plotinus divides the self into into an embodied soul, subject to the vicissitudes of physical existence, and an everlasting incorporeal intellect that is completely unaffected by its bodily counterpart. In Ennead 1.4 he criticizes the accounts of happiness (eudaimonia) given by Epicureans, Stoics, and especially Aristotle. His chief objection is their psycho-physicalism. He agrees that a virtuous person will achieve happiness in the face of extreme misfortune, but he insists that only a fully incorporeal and immortal self can achieve the independence from body that such invulnerability requires. A virtuous self, even when embodied and in pain, engages unconsciously in continuous intellectual activity, unaffected by its body.
Value
Authors: McHugh Conor , Way Jonathan
Published: November 2022

This chapter defends a fitting-attitude account of value, according to which for something to be good is for it to be fitting to value that thing. It argues that norm-attitude accounts of value, of which the fitting-attitude account is an example, have important advantages over two main rivals: subjectivist accounts, on which to be good is to be valued under certain non-normative conditions, and primitivism, on which no constitutive account of value can be given. The chapter then argues that fitting-attitude accounts are to be preferred to the most prominent alternative form of norm-attitude account, the buck-passing account. Two problems for norm-attitude accounts are considered: the wrong kind of reason problem and the partiality problem. Both forms of norm-attitude account can offer attractive solutions to the partiality problem. The wrong kind of reason problem is a severe challenge to buck-passers, but not the fitting-attitude account.
The Implications of Thucydides’ Abstract Style
Authors: Joho Tobias
Published: November 2022

Dealing directly with the stylistic extravagances of the Pathology (3.82–3), this chapter examines in detail the implications of the abstract nominal phrasing in the excursus on stasis, in which actions are redescribed as occurrences happening to people, impersonal entities replace human agents, people are locked into external states, and events are represented as conforming to patterns. In short, Thucydides’ abstract style has a depersonalizing character. This unwieldy stylistic register prevails when Thucydides probes into the basic forces that drive events. By contrast, the plain style dominates when Thucydides’ primary focus is an exact reconstruction of the sequence of events.
A World Governed by Neuters
Authors: Joho Tobias
Published: November 2022

Human nature emerges as the force ultimately responsible for the impact of necessity on the formation of events. By using the abstract style, several speakers highlight transpersonal factors that govern the behaviour of human beings. In the Mytilenean Debate, Diodotus represents the fundamental driving forces (both passions and external circumstances) as larger-than-life agents. Several aspects of Diodotus’ account of natural necessity recall the intervention of daemonic powers in Euripides. The Melian Dialogue also suggests a parallelism between the natural and the daemonic: the speakers juxtapose ‘the divine’ and ‘the human’, both expressed by the same impersonal phrases. An analysis of specific passages shows that Herodotus and Euripides use, alongside references to personal gods, neuter abstracts to suggest the impact of forces that evoke the depersonalizing notion of a ‘divine fate.’ Thucydides adopts this language but gives it a twist: immanent necessity based on ‘the human’ takes the place of divinely sanctioned fatalism.
Pericles’ Containment of Necessity and the Scope for Choice
Authors: Joho Tobias
Published: November 2022

In Thucydides, Pericles is the paragon of an individual who successfully resists the thrust of natural necessity. Pericles’ political agency is reflected in his distinctive oratorical style: it vividly expresses Pericles’ integration of the intellect with resolute action, and the mind’s capacity to assert itself against the forces that regularly try to overwhelm it, namely irrational passion and hostile external circumstance. Pericles’ oratorical style gives tangible shape to these ideas. Through his oratory, Pericles temporarily impresses the same mentality on the Athenians. Reason-guided action combined with resoluteness emerges as an analogue to the modern notion of freedom. Yet other passages in the History suggest that the mind is more often defeated by the forces opposed to it. Moreover, Thucydides’ presentation suggests that γνώμη, the signal faculty by which Pericles opposes natural necessity, is marked by tragic ambiguity: it plays the role of both an opponent and a facilitator of irrational forces. In the final analysis, Pericles cannot win out against necessity, but he does provide evidence for the rare achievement of containing its destructive effects, at least for a while.