bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Imitation of Rigor
Authors: Wilson Mark
Published: December 2021

J. L. Austin has written of “the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act.” By revisiting a classic “small metaphysics” puzzle drawn from physics that launched a thousand ships of grander philosophizing, Imitation of Rigor employs recent insights into the architectures of effective reasoning as a means of explicating how Austin’s covert “mechanisms” operate in concrete terms. By these means, the book attempts to reconnect analytic philosophy with the evolving practicalities within science from which many of its grander concerns originally sprang. In doing so, it provides an “alternative history” of how the subject might have developed had the diagnostic insights of its philosopher/scientist forebears (e.g. Heinrich Hertz and Ernst Mach) not been cast aside in the vain pursuit of inappropriate standards of “ersatz rigor.”
Prospectus
Authors: Wilson Mark
Published: December 2021

The most direct way to see what has gone wrong is to examine one of the “small metaphysics” difficulties that originally spawned theory T thinking. A paradigm exemplar can be found within the doctrinal tensions that Heinrich Hertz located within the elementary tenets of classical physics (a circumstance that is labeled as “the Mystery of Physics 101” here). Although seemingly innocuous in character, Hertz realized that these ambiguities impede a clear articulation of the conservation of energy and allied doctrines. He further recognized that these problems do not reside within simple misunderstandings of component words (such as “force”) but instead are holistically suffused through a much broader canvas of interlocked doctrine. The corrective cure he advocated attempts to whittle down such an overextended system to a self-consistent and axiomatized core. This two-pronged program—the rejection of individual word analysis and its pragmatic replacement by a single-leveled axiomatic corrective—forms the original inspiration for Carnap’s anti-metaphysical attitudes and the theory T conceptions of “rigor” that continue to dominate analytic philosophical presumption to the present day.
Inductive Warrant
Authors: Wilson Mark
Published: December 2021

But Hertz’s suggestions did not address his original “small metaphysics” conflicts in a credible manner. The alternative resolution that material scientists currently favor supplies an alternative paradigm upon which this book will later elaborate. To this end, the present chapter reviews the intellectual circumstances that Hertz confronted and why they were important to him. He displayed a keen eye for delicate detail in his diagnostic work, in a manner that should serve as a sterling model of conceptual detective work whenever it is wanted. But the depth of his insights has been frequently misunderstood by later generations, largely due to a greatly diminished form of “classical mechanics” that became popular in the twentieth century because of the parochial requirements of quantum theory. Within this reduced setting, Hertz’s motivating problems disappear, not because they have been solved, but because they have been ignored. As an aftereffect, many philosophers writing today confidently believe that they understand what “the worlds of classical mechanics are like,” although these rash presumptions embody a significant degree of simplistic misrepresentation. The present chapter outlines the forgotten background required to appreciate Hertz’s conceptual puzzles as he confronted them. These details are not required for the central argument of the book, but they nicely illustrate the natural contexts from which “small metaphysics” puzzles characteristically emerge within a gradually evolving discourse.
Enforcement Jurisdiction over Foreign Fishing in the EEZ
Authors: Goodman Camille
Published: December 2021

This Chapter examines the coastal State’s enforcement jurisdiction over fishing activities in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC), including the boarding, inspection, arrest, and seizure of vessels, the prompt release procedure, and the imposition of penalties. The Chapter argues that this jurisdiction should be interpreted by reference to the overall scheme of the LOSC, taking into account not only the rights but also the responsibilities of the coastal State, as well as those of flag States, in order to meaningfully preserve the balance of interests that is at the heart of the sui generis regime for the EEZ. However, while the balance of interests is commonly invoked in the jurisprudence on enforcement, international courts and tribunals have generally taken a narrow approach to its application, seeking to balance specific, corresponding rights of flag and coastal States in a binary equation, rather than the broader set of rights and responsibilities that underpin the EEZ regime. Faced with these limitations, as well as the practical and financial challenges of carrying out the primarily physical enforcement measures envisaged in the LOSC, coastal States have developed a range of alternative approaches to achieve the same result. As this Chapter demonstrates, these include: the conduct of cooperative and collaborative enforcement activities; a variety of prescriptive techniques to prevent and deter illegal fishing activity; and the use of modern technology to deliver cost-effective and remote, ‘no-force’ enforcement jurisdiction.
In Praise of Snapshots
Authors: Kanbur Ravi
Published: December 2021

The conventional justification for moving from income distribution to intergenerational mobility analysis is that the movie encompasses the snapshot and is normatively superior as the basis for assessing policy. Such a perspective underpins many an argument for shifting the focus from income redistribution, which is said to equalize outcomes, to equalizing opportunity by increasing mobility through education policy such as equal provision of public education. This chapter argues that this perspective can be misleading. It shows that normative evaluation of income mobility in any event often falls back on a snapshot perspective. Further, the snapshot itself often contains the seeds of the movie, as posited in the Great Gatsby Curve. Income redistribution can itself improve mobility even if that is the only objective. The chapter thus speaks in praise of snapshots.
Introduction: Why Science Wars?
Authors: Goldman Steven L.
Published: December 2021

While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.
Science Influences Philosophy
Authors: Goldman Steven L.
Published: December 2021

The claims of the new natural philosophers that their methodical reasoning and newly invented instruments produced knowledge of reality had a profound effect on contemporary mainstream philosophers. Hobbes allied himself with the rationalist pursuers of certainty but rejected the ability of experimental philosophy to reveal certain truths about nature. Gassendi defended a probabilistic theory of knowledge, while Locke’s theory of knowledge accepted “moral,” or near, certainty as a limit to knowledge of reality. Berkeley reinterpreted the materialistic ontology underlying the new science, arguing the metaphysical character played in it by the concept matter. Hume formulated an openly skeptical theory of knowledge of the world, arguing the metaphysical character of the roles played by causality and induction in the new natural philosophy. Kant responded by creating a philosophy that restored certainty to knowledge, but its object was now experience, not a reality independent of the mind.
In Quest of the Thinker of Science
Authors: Goldman Steven L.
Published: December 2021

The relationships among mind, self, conscious thought, discursive reasoning, and social context became central issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, sociology, and epistemology, with direct implications for the nature of scientific knowledge. Minds and selves can be conceptualized as expressions of interactions between an individual’s nervous system and their physical and social environment. Is conscious thought, and in particular discursive reasoning, under the control of the individual thinker, or does it reflect societal influences? Nineteenth-century experimental neurophysiology and psychology began to reveal the role that systemic features of the nervous system and the brain play in producing consciousness. Concurrently, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists were proposing roles for the unconscious, language, society, and innate gestalten in shaping and limiting conscious thought. These ideas converged in the theories of individual scientists.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire
Authors: Waters Matthew W.
Published: December 2021

The Achaemenid Persian Empire was history’s first hyperpower, ruling much of the known earth from the reign of Cyrus the Great in the mid-sixth century to the defeat of Darius III by Alexander of Macedon in 331 BCE. The Achaemenid Empire’s evident debt to its predecessors in Elam, Assyria, and Babylonia may be contrasted with a deconstruction of the so-called Median Empire’s influence, to the point that several scholars question whether the Medes ever ruled a centralized empire in the traditional sense of the term. The Achaemenid Empire’s scale and durative power went beyond conquest. The royal court, satraps, elites, and administrative apparatus combined to substantiate a compelling ideology based upon the centrality of the king. The conquest of the empire by Alexander conjoins the Macedonian’s military success with a necessary reliance on Achaemenid imperial architecture and traditions.
The Parthian and Sasanian Empires
Authors: Canepa Matthew P.
Published: December 2021

This chapter examines the development of the Arsacid (ca. 238 BCE–ca. 224 CE) and Sasanian (224–642 CE) empires of Iran. It investigates the establishment of a new Iranian empire under the Arsacid dynasty and the transformation of that loosely structured empire into a more centralized and bureaucratically intensive system through the Sasanian period. The chapter tracks the changes the Arsacids instituted as the dynasty asserted control over a multifarious collection of Seleucid city-states dominated by culturally Greek aristocracies and a range of kingdoms, e.g. Hatra or Armenia, with diverse cultural and political traditions. It then investigates the changes that occurred over the course of the Sasanian period as the dynasty asserted greater and greater control over their empire’s economy, infrastructure, and military, urban, and agricultural resources, as well as religious traditions, especially as they progressively created a new “orthodox” formulation of Zoroastrianism overshadowing alternative traditions of Iranian religion.
The Kushan Empire
Authors: Benjamin Craig
Published: December 2021

The Kushan Empire remains one of the least known of all ancient empires. Yet between ca. 50 and ca. 250 CE the Kushans dominated the political, cultural, and economic landscape of a vast region of Inner Eurasia, including extensive parts of Central, East, and South Asia. Along with their direct political and military control of this enormous realm, the veritable “crossroads of Eurasia,” the Kushans also exerted significant influence upon much of ancient Eurasia by playing a crucial role in facilitating the extraordinary levels of cross-cultural exchange that characterize the first Silk Roads Era. For two centuries the Kushans were one of the key powers of their era during a period in which much of Afro-Eurasia was controlled by just four imperial states. So crucial were they to this dynamic and interconnected period in world history that the First Silk Roads Era could justifiably be renamed the “Kushan Era.”
The Caliphate
Authors: Marsham Andrew
Published: December 2021

The first Muslim empire—the Caliphate—began with the conquests of the mid-seventh century CE and fragmented in the mid-tenth century. This chapter outlines the Caliphate’s political and economic history, its organizational structures, and forms of coercive and ideological power. During a long eighth century, the Mediterranean and the Middle East were transformed by the formation of new elites, by a new transregional coinage economy, by the rapid expansion of new cities and settlements, and by an agrarian revolution. The religion that became Islam was crucial in uniting the conquerors of the empire, and then as the idiom for the expression of the conquered peoples’ political ambitions. Eventual widespread conversion among the conquered populations meant that as the Caliphate collapsed, it left behind Muslim successor states, as well as new linguistic and ethnic identities—notably the Arabic and New Persian linguae francae, and a transregional “Arab” ethnicity.
The Khmer Empire
Authors: Coe Michael D.
Published: December 2021

Founded in 802 CE, until its demise in the fourteenth century CE, the Khmer Empire held sway over much of Southeast Asia. At the heart of the empire was the highly urbanized capital city Yashodarapura (Angkor), containing the royal palace, the state temple, and enormous artificial reservoirs or barays. The empire’s numerous provinces were connected to the central bureaucracy by a system of major and secondary roads. In a moneyless economy, taxes were levied in kind, principally rice, and market transactions were by barter. Over these roads traveled the imperial armies at times of foreign wars or invasion, or local revolt; army units consisted of foot soldiers, horse cavalry, and war elephants. Several factors led to the empire’s collapse, including agricultural failure and the silting of the barays; and outside attack, especially from the newly powerful Thai.
Charlemagne, the Carolingian Empire, and Its Successors
Authors: McKitterick Rosamond
Published: December 2021

Both the Christian empire of Charlemagne and the subsequently hugely influential imperial ideology of the early Middle Ages were rooted in the Roman past. This chapter addresses the reality of the early medieval empire and the ways in which it was represented by contemporaries for posterity. It examines the career of Pippin III, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, and the expansion of the Carolingian Empire under his illustrious son Charlemagne, by both design and chance, to embrace most of western Europe. This vast realm was governed by an elaborate and efficient political and administrative system in which both lay and ecclesiastical magnates played a crucial role. This system of governance was maintained even within the smaller political units of the later ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The Latin Christian culture initially promoted by Charlemagne, moreover, is the most enduring legacy of the medieval empire to the Western world.
Late Spanish Empire
Authors: Fradera Josep M.
Published: December 2021

After the Seven Years’ War, the Spanish Empire entered into a quickening spiral of internal and external changes. International rivalries accelerated internal adjustments in the relationship between society and an increasingly bureaucratic, intrusive, and demanding state. Internal and international conflicts resulting from the late-eighteenth-century wars and the Napoleonic invasion culminated with the crisis of the American empire and the emergence of independent republics all over the Spanish America. It was in those decades that the system of three colonies that would survive until the end of the Nineteenth century—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—was established. In the following decades, the three remaining overseas possessions would be sites of enormous changes. The Spanish monarchy put renewed emphasis on military might, giving its authorities a praetorian standing and skirting the edges of the liberal constitutionalism that ruled the Peninsula since 1836–1837. Cuba became critically important as the world’s greatest sugar-producing region, whose wealth was the result of vast plantations worked by slaves and indentured laborers imported (despite abolition) by British, French US and Spanish vessels. Meanwhile, In parallel, the Philippines became a major tobacco grower, the center of commerce with Asia, China in particular . The crisis of slavery in the Antilles after three wars of independence (1868-1898) and the subsequent political paralysis owing to the lack of reforms weakened Spain’s position as a colonial power in the last third of the nineteenth century. The US intervention of 1898, which coincided with anti-imperialist revolutions in Cuba and the Philippines, forced Spain to definitively withdraw, putting an end to its transatlantic nexus and to the Spanish nation’s identity as an American and Asian country.
Conclusion
Authors: Horwitz Ilana M.
Published: December 2021

This chapter raises critical questions about the seemingly positive relationships between an upbringing of religious restraint and academic success. Despite the legal separation of church and state, teenagers who live their life for God do not shed their religious commitments once they pass through the schoolhouse doors. They believe that God is always with them, and they must always be on their best behavior. But there is a downside. Although abiders’ conscientious and cooperative nature may help them get better grades, this advantage may come at the expense of developing and encouraging critical thinking, creativity, and deeper engagement in the classroom. While abiders may have an academic advantage, it may be a result of an educational system that rewards dispositions for the sake of expediency rather than for the sake of learning. This chapter also raises questions about the upsides and downsides of religious restraint as teens enter adulthood.
For the Common Good
Authors: London Alex John
Published: December 2021

The foundations of research ethics are riven with fault lines emanating from a fear that if research is too closely connected to weighty social purposes an imperative to advance the common good through research will justify abrogating the rights and welfare of study participants. The result is an impoverished conception of the nature of research, an incomplete focus on actors who bear important moral responsibilities, and a system of ethics and oversight highly attuned to the dangers of research but largely silent about threats of ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable medical practices and health systems. In For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, Alex John London defends a conception of the common good that grounds a moral imperative with two requirements. The first is to promote research that generates the information necessary to enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals. The second is to ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claims to be treated as free and equal. Connecting research to the goals of a just social order grounds a framework for assessing and managing research risk that reconciles these requirements and justifies key oversight practices in non-paternalistic terms. Reconceiving research ethics as resolving coordination problems and providing credible assurance that these requirements are being met expands the issues and actors that fall within the purview of the field and provides the foundation for a more unified and coherent approach to domestic and international research.
Justice and the Human Development Approach to International Research
Authors: London Alex John
Published: December 2021

This chapter articulates and defends the human development approach to international research. This approach extends into the international context the egalitarian research imperative outlined in chapter 4, the integrative approach to research risk in chapter 6, and the non-paternalistic approach to research oversight in chapter 7. In this approach, requirements related to responsiveness to host community health needs, the standard of care, and post-trial access to study interventions are grounded in requirements of justice and the egalitarian research imperative. The result is a unified foundation for both domestic and international research ethics that treats research as a social undertaking, recognizes justice as the first virtue of social institutions, and gives moral force to the imperative to generate the information needed to improve the ability of social institutions to advance the common good.
Agent-Affordance Framework of Networked Collective Actions
Authors: Seo Hyunjin
Published: December 2021

This chapter details an agent-affordance framework designed to offer an understanding of social change dynamics in rapidly changing information ecosystems. In doing so, it explicates a taxonomy of agents and affordances critical to the Park Geun-hye impeachment. This framework includes four types of agent and three categories of affordance to account for social change dynamics that have become both more decentralized and increasingly intertwined between human and nonhuman computational agents. As communication infrastructure and social and political processes co-adapt, it is imperative to consider how structural and behavioral affordances affect social change. The framework considers the complex web of motivations, processes, and outcomes that support networked collective actions and enable these actions to succeed or fail.
Park’s Supporters Fight Back
Authors: Seo Hyunjin
Published: December 2021

This chapter examines how supporters of President Park Geun-hye responded to the Park-Choi scandal and impeachment rallies. Park’s diehard supporters organized so-called Taegeukgi rallies suggesting the Park-Choi scandal was a plot by pro–North Korea forces and news media designed to destroy the conservative president. Trafficking in conspiracy theories produced by far-right media outlets, these staunch supporters used social media and physical gatherings to consolidate pro-Park groups. In contrast, some of Park’s early supporters ultimately turned against her, becoming outraged and embarrassed as details of her corruption became widely known. This chapter analyzes information consumption patterns of Park’s diehard supporters along with their demographic and social-psychological characteristics.
Introduction: How to Fix What Ails Democracy?
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

This chapter introduces the main topics of Debating Democracy. Brennan and Landemore agree that democracy should largely be judged by its results. However, they dispute whether the problems contemporary democracies face can be solved by increasing citizens’ involvement in politics or, instead, by limiting the scope of politics and experimenting with less democratic forms of governments. Brennan argues that voters in democracies are often ignorant, misinformed, or vote for their parties for tribalistic reasons rather than to advance their interests. He believes experts should make certain decisions and suggests experimenting with less democratic government. Landemore, on the other hand, believes the best decisions are made when everyone is involved. She promotes “open democracy” where all citizens have equal and far more substantive deliberative input than they do in contemporary democracies, in which citizens’ involvement is heavily constrained.
Is the Solution More Democracy?
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

Philosophers often try to “solve” democracy’s problems by arguing we need more and better democracy. They tend to think certain kinds of democratic systems could unleash the hidden “wisdom of the crowds.” Some defenders of democracy propose deliberative democracy and some extol the reliability of large groups. However, both ideas have limitations in the real world. This chapter objects to such arguments as they rely upon mistaken applications of certain mathematical theorems, or they end up retreating toward unrealistic ideals of how people ought to behave. In effect, they say that democracy would be wonderful if only people behaved the right way.
Alternatives to Democracy
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

This chapter argues that enlightened preference voting is likely to be superior to our current system. In enlightened preference voting, all citizens may vote. When they vote, they (1) register their preferences, (2) indicate their demographic categories, and (3) take a short test of basic, easily verifiable political knowledge. Afterward, all three sets of “data” are anonymized and made public. The government—and any decent political scientist or newspaper—can then calculate what a demographically identical public would have supported if only everyone got a perfect score on the test.
The Argument for Democracy
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

This chapter defends an epistemic argument for democracy, namely the argument that the rule of the many is better at aggregating knowledge and, in the version presented here, at producing better decisions than the rule of the few. This argument builds on the formal properties of two key democratic decision-making mechanisms of democracy, namely inclusive deliberation on equal grounds and majority rule with universal suffrage. Properly used in sequence and under the right conditions, these two mechanisms ensure that no information and viewpoint is ignored and maximize the cognitive diversity brought to bear on collective political problems and predictions. Building on existing formal results by Lu Hong and Scott Page, the chapter introduces the “Number Trumps Ability” theorem, which formalizes the intuition that many minds are smarter than just a few. Under the right conditions systems governed by democratic decision-procedures can be expected to deliver greater epistemic performance than less inclusive and egalitarian systems.
Against Epistocracies
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

This chapter argues against both oligarchic and majoritarian rule by knowers, or epistocracies. Such regimes are necessarily blind to certain interests and perspectives, rendering them epistemically inferior to fully inclusive democracies over the long term. The chapter first consider the classic defense of Chinese-style epistocracy by Daniel Bell and then turns to the more puzzling rule by the knowledgeable 95% defended by Jason Brennan. While Bell’s Chinese model is much more vulnerable to epistemic failure due to the blindspots it structurally builds in its decision-process, even Brennan’s majoritarian epistocracy takes the unjustifiable epistemic risk of silencing what could be the most relevant voices on crucial issues.
If Democracy Is Such a Smart Regime, Why Are Democracies Doing So Poorly at the Moment and How Can We Fix Them?
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: December 2021

This chapter returns to the ideal of people’s power and argues that democracies as we know them are dubiously democratic. Most ordinary citizens, in the United States certainly but in other advanced democracies as well, have little deliberative input into the laws and policies that rule their lives. The chapter traces the problem to fundamental design mistakes made in the eighteenth century when elections, an oligarchic selection mechanism, rather than the traditional lot of Classical Athens, were privileged as the method for choosing representatives. This original design mistake explains in part why contemporary democracies are, and indeed have always been, dysfunctional. This chapter also makes the case for open democracy, a new paradigm of democracy that takes more seriously the core ideal of people’s power and in which elections are no longer a central institutional principle.
Democracy in Darkness
Authors: Van Duyn Emily
Published: December 2021

Chapter 1 discusses the rise of political secrecy amid intensifying political, social, and geographic polarization. It introduces readers to CWG, the secret political organization at the heart of this book, and the contexts in which this group was formed. The existence of CWG and the prominence of political secrecy evident in national survey data suggest that political polarization and prejudice have driven even mainstream Democrats and Republicans to hide their political beliefs. In turn, this chapter argues that if and how people express their political beliefs depends very much on the context they are in, a phenomenon the author calls “networked silence.” Finally, the chapter details why studying political secrecy is important and how this book will approach this topic.
The Gods of Modern Spirituality
Authors: Woodhead Linda
Published: December 2021

The scientific study of religion tends to focus on the social aspects of religion at the expense of what, for many its followers, it is really about—God, the gods, and spiritual entities. This chapter puts the latter in the spotlight and traces the changing “theosphere” of alternative spirituality in Britain and America from the 1890s to 2020. It takes the reader on a tour of three sites and phases in the development of modern western spirituality: Chicago in 1893, Kendal in 2000–2002, and Glastonbury in the 2010s. The chapter traces a development from Christian theism through formless mysticism to revivalist polytheism. It attends to the way in which the Christian God gradually diminishes as a point of reference, the theosphere becomes increasingly repopulated, and a practical re-enchantment of life takes place.
Methodological Innovations for the Study of Spirituality
Authors: Wright Bradley R. E.
Published: December 2021

One of the most important decisions in any study of spirituality is the method used to collect information about spiritual life. This methodological choice frames later conceptual analysis—making possible some types of conclusions but preventing others. Accordingly, methodological innovation in the study of spiritualty holds the promise of conceptual innovation. This chapter puts forth three methodological innovations available to spirituality researchers. They are (1) using smartphones to collect experience-sampling method data about day-to-day spiritual experiences, (2) conducting field experiments in which spiritual experiences are randomly assigned, and (3) analyzing big data to observe societal-wide trends and patterns in spiritual expressions. Each of these methods promises to produce rich and novel data that hold the potential for conceptual breakthroughs in our understanding of spiritual processes.
Spirituality among African Americans
Authors: Shelton Jason E.
Published: December 2021

This chapter assesses the importance of spirituality among African Americans. More specifically, it examines the extent to which respondents in a large, multiyear national survey view themselves as a “spiritual person.” Four sets of comparative analysis are offered: (1) racial differences among black and white members of various evangelical Protestant traditions, (2) racial differences among black and white members of various mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions, (3) denominational differences specifically among African Americans, and (4) racial differences among blacks and whites who view themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” The findings reveal significant interracial and intraracial differences in how spirituality shapes one’s personal identity. Because organized religion has historically been so central to African American community life, the implications for the growth in noninstitutional spirituality are considered.
The Microinteractive Order of Spirituality
Authors: Pagis Michal
Published: December 2021

The discourse of spirituality emphasizes personal, embodied experience. This emphasis can lead to a relatively individualized understanding of spirituality that neglects the fact that spirituality is practiced in groups and is based on the production of intersubjective spaces in which people learn together to look inward and experience transcendence. This chapter tracks the unique social order of vipassana meditation retreats, illustrating that meditation training is not merely psychological—it includes training in a new kind of social interaction mode. The community of practitioners in the meditation center is one of “collective solitude,” as practitioners are in close proximity to one another but avoid direct social engagement, helping one another to transcend the tendency to focus on the self as seen by others. Social spheres such as meditation groups, yoga, pilgrimage, or even mass prayer all resemble the collective solitude described in the context of vipassana meditation.
Yoga Spirituality in the Context of US Institutions
Authors: Gunther Brown Candy
Published: December 2021

This chapter examines yoga as a spiritual and a social practice. It considers three institutional contexts for interpreting yoga spirituality: religion, law, and education. Social institutions such as public schools and courts of law must arbitrate interpretive contests by formulating and applying definitions for the purposes of educational policy and legal precedent. In making such determinations, it would be naive to accept all assertions of identity and meaning as full disclosures. Sometimes the same people describe the same practice as “spiritual” or “secular,” depending upon whether the legal context is First Amendment religious free exercise clause protection or establishment clause restriction. Decisions about how to categorize practices rest in large part on pragmatic concerns. This case study invites scholars of spirituality to pay closer attention to how legal and social contexts shape how people think and talk about practices in relation to the interpretive categories of “spirituality,” “religion,” and “secularity.”
Spirituality and Islam
Authors: Rinaldo Rachel
Published: December 2021

Many Muslim societies have long histories of mystical, devotional, and esoteric traditions such as Sufism, which are today commonly referred to as “spiritual” traditions. Yet spirituality within Islamic traditions has an uncertain and marginalized status in many contemporary Muslim societies as a result of local, national, and global political struggles over Islam. In Indonesia, where Sufism has had a major historical influence for much of the twentieth century, there has been a strong trend toward scripturalist Islamic modernism. Yet along with Indonesia’s Islamic revival since the 1990s has come a revival of Sufism, particularly among the urban upper middle class. This chapter explores the Sufist revival as a manifestation of spirituality in Indonesia, examining the recent history of Sufism and the evolving relationship between Sufism and other ways of being Muslim, as well as surveying recent scholarship on the social and political contours of the embrace of Sufism by educated urbanites.
Three Questions about Spirituality
Authors: Steensland Brian
Published: December 2021

Using the concepts of developed in the volume, this chapter concludes the book by addressing three important questions about spirituality. Our approach foregrounds how spirituality is shaped by the interplay of context and practice and influenced by the distribution of material resources. On the question of the meaning of spirituality, we advance an explicitly relational approach that identifies the polysemous nature of “spirituality.” On the question of spirituality’s influence, we highlight the social mechanisms through which spirituality is likely to influence individual and public outcomes. Regarding the future of spirituality, we argue that spirituality, in both supernatural and secular forms, will endure for the foreseeable future because the conditions of late modernity will continue to create a demand for it.
The Arts and Social Change
Authors: Kertz-Welzel Alexandra
Published: December 2021

This chapter analyzes the relation of the arts, and particularly music education, to social change. The first section discusses what social change is, presenting important research and ideas. It situates the notion of social change within the framework of utopia and connects it with human flourishing as its ultimate goal. The second section is concerned with the social impact of the arts, discussing important notions such as their relation to cultivation and to moral intentions, and their political purpose. The third section is explicitly focused on music education’s relation to social change, presenting general considerations and examples such as El Sistema or developments in international music education policy.
Music Education and Utopia
Authors: Kertz-Welzel Alexandra
Published: December 2021

This chapter applies the ideas developed in the previous chapters to music education theory and practice. It presents utopia as method in music education, emphasizing its meaning as a hermeneutic, visionary, and exploratory tool. This leads to reconceptualizing music education as utopian theory and practice regarding two different approaches of music education: politically or socially responsive music education and esthetic music education. They represent two sides of music and music education, which need each other regarding political engagement and musical autonomy, being based on music as social fact or as existing for its own sake. This reconceptualization helps to overcome a long-standing dichotomy in international music education.
Sustaining Democracy
Authors: Forestal Jennifer
Published: December 2021

Democratic spaces must also be durable. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to our communities and to other members; they help us sustain communities. Chapter 3 draws from Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on democracy to explain how the durability of the built environment can be a powerful resource for generating the attachments that sustain democratic communities by (1) continually reminding citizens of their social obligations and (2) facilitating repeated interactions between citizens. The chapter then turns to the example of Twitter—particularly the mechanism of hashtags—to explore these dynamics in a digital environment. Hashtags provide temporary boundaries that are useful for mobilizing, but not sustaining, communities of interest; as a result, Twitter is not a platform well suited for cultivating the attachments required for longer-term cooperative activity. The chapter concludes with suggestions as to how we might design more durable spaces—and sustainable communities—in digital environments.
Conclusion
Authors: d'Ambruoso William L.
Published: December 2021

This chapter explores the scope and limits of the book’s central claims, extending the argument to other circumstances and norms and describing cases that do not fit the theory. The chapter examines the recent variation between the United States and Europe on the question of torture. The human rights picture in Europe has improved over the past few decades in part because European institutions have been clearer than the United States about prohibiting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, eliminating the antitorture norm’s specificity problem, and preventing a slippery slope that so often ends with torture. Finally, the chapter broadens the argument by demonstrating how the pervasive belief that autocrats have an edge over rule-bound democracies has tempted certain elected officials to chip away at their own liberal-democratic institutions.
Understandings of Democracy
Authors: Lu Jie , Chu Yun-han
Published: December 2021

While democracy is popular and still enjoys supremacy in contemporary political discourse with limited challenges from alternatives, it has also been acknowledged that democracy is in crisis. However, if most people love democracy and politicians have to live with democracy, how can democracy be in trouble? Understandings of Democracy examines this puzzling phenomenon, arguing that (1) people hold distinct understandings of democracy; (2) popular conceptions of democracy are significantly shaped by socioeconomic and political contexts; (3) such varying conceptions generate different baselines for people to assess democratic practices and to establish their views of democracy; and (4) such distinct conceptions also drive political participation in different ways. Overall, popular understandings of democracy have critically shaped how citizens respond to authoritarian or populist practices in contemporary politics. Using new survey instruments embedded in the Global Barometer Surveys (GBS), this book highlights the significance and essentialness of how people assess the tradeoffs between key democratic principles and instrumental gains when they conceptualize democracy for comparative research on popular understandings of democracy. Furthermore, weaving together GBS II survey data from seventy-two societies and survey experiments, this book scrutinizes some key micro-dynamics that drive people’s critical political attitudes and behaviors, which are centered on how people understand democracy in different ways. Overall, this book theorizes and demonstrates that, as a critical but underappreciated component of the demand-side dynamics, varying conceptions of democracy offer significant explanatory power for understanding why democracy is in trouble, even when most people profess to love democracy.
New Instruments for Popular Understandings of Democracy
Authors: Lu Jie
Published: December 2021

This chapter reviews pertinent research on varying understandings of democracy to assess the empirical challenges in studying this elusive concept and to propose some new survey instruments (i.e., the PUD instruments) with theoretical justification. In particular, it emphasizes the embedded tensions and critical trade-offs as people view and assess democracy and brings such tensions and trade-offs to the center of instrument selection. The chapter further examines the validity and reliability of the PUD instruments using both survey experiments and different psychometric models to establish a solid methodological foundation for subsequent empirical analysis.
Varying Understandings of Democracy in the Contemporary World
Authors: Lu Jie
Published: December 2021

This chapter presents systematic descriptive evidence on the status of popular conceptions of democracy in today’s world, using GBS II data from seventy-one societies. To make the descriptive analysis more informative, we have included comparable information from the United States and relied on different psychometric models to uncover people’s latent characteristics that shape their responses to the PUD instruments. We have consistently found that the PUD instruments are sufficiently sensitive to the socioeconomic and political environment, thus revealing significant and substantial variation in popular conceptions of democracies across regions, between societies, and among individuals. To ensure that the variation documented in the PUD instruments is not something transient or idiosyncratic, we further explore the longitudinal dynamics of this critical attitude using the ABS two-wave rolling-cross-sectional surveys from thirteen East Asian societies.
Democratic Assessment Colored by Understandings of Democracy
Authors: Lu Jie
Published: December 2021

This chapter examines the attitudinal consequences of popular understandings of democracy. In particular, we focus on the influence of this critical mass opinion on how citizens assess democratic practices in both foreign countries and their own societies. Mixed-effect regressions confirm that, ceteris paribus, people who have embraced the procedural understanding of democracy by prioritizing its institutions and procedures in protecting basic rights and liberty are more critical of China’s democratic practice but more favorable to that in the United States. Similar mixed-effect regressions reveal that, again, people’s different understandings of democracy significantly shape how they assess their own societies’ democratic practices. On average, people who prioritize the intrinsic values of democracy are less satisfied with their regime’s democratic practices and more critical in assessing their regimes’ democratic nature. Furthermore, even a full democracy still needs to deliver to win over people’s hearts and minds, thereby fostering its popular support.
A Dynamic Theory of Populism in Power
Authors: Carrión Julio F.
Published: December 2021

The relationship between populism and democracy is a hotly debated topic. Some believe that populism is inherently bad for democracy because it is anti-pluralist and confrontational. Others argue that populism can reinvigorate worn-out democracies in need of an infusion of greater popular participation. This book advances this debate by examining the empirical relationship between populism in power and democracy. Does populism in power always lead to regime change, that is, the demise of democracy? The answer is no. The impact of populism on democracy depends on the variety of populism in power: the worst outcomes in democratic governance are found under unconstrained populism. This book discusses the conditions that explain how populism becomes unconstrained, and advances a dynamic theory of change that shows how the late victories of populists build on early ones, resulting in greater power asymmetries. The book analyzes five populist presidencies in the Andes. In four of them (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela), populism became unconstrained and regime change followed. In one case, Colombia, populism in power was contained and democracy survived. The concluding chapter places the Andean cases in comparative perspective and discusses how unconstrained populism in other cases (Nicaragua and Hungary) also lead to the end of electoral democracy. Where populism in power was constrained (Honduras and the United States), regime change did not materialize. This book advances a theory of populism that help us understand how democracies transition into non-democracies. To that extent, the book illuminates the processes of democratic erosion in our time.
A Dynamic Theory of Populism in Power
Authors: Carrión Julio F.
Published: December 2021

This chapter considers how populism in power leads to regime change in some cases, but not in others and shows how the difference is explained by the ability of populist leaders to navigate a key moment of confrontation with the opposition and the courts. This ability is determined by the strength of permissive conditions (public opinion support for institutional change). The necessary productive conditions are given by their decision to use the state’s repressive apparatus to prevail against the opposition. In some cases, another productive condition is present: the mobilization of civil society. Once the opposition is severely weakened, populist leaders find it much easier to accumulate greater power and to create an uneven playing field that reproduces their hold on power. By contrast, if the courts and other institutional actors defeat populist leaders in a key moment of confrontation, they will also constrain populist rule and avoid regime change.