bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Renewable Originality
Authors: George Doran
Published: November 2020

This chapter traces the history of the development of Somatics training from its early twentieth-century pioneers through to its contemporary use globally as a system for training dancers. Throughout it pays special attention to the ways that Somatics pedagogy made the case for its efficacy through appeal to the natural body. Pioneering teachers developed Somatics by studying the musculoskeletal functioning of the body, and they argued that this structure was universal, lying beneath any cultural and social influences. At the same time, they incorporated references to mystical Eastern practices and primitive peoples, and in so doing established the Somatics body as white and heterosexual. The chapter considers how Somatics opened dance training to many new bodies and how it excluded other bodies. It also exposes the way that Somatics continually reinvented itself through appeal to a universal naturalness.
Contradictory Dissidence
Authors: George Doran
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines the dissemination of Somatics pedagogy globally, focusing on five key sites where it developed: New York City, New England, England, the Netherlands, and Australia. Each site developed Somatics in different ways, adapting it to fit the aesthetics and politics of the locale. At the same time, teachers and performers frequently traveled from one site to another, thereby maintaining a network of distinctive yet mutually reinforcing hubs of practice. The chapter shows how Somatics met different kinds of needs for dancers in the distinct locales as they worked to establish experimental approaches to technique and performance and to connect with their sociopolitical surround. Even as Somatics was adapted differently in each location, it also carried with it an ideology of American expansionism that validated freedom and individuality.
Somatics Bodies on the Concert Stage
Authors: George Doran
Published: November 2020

This chapter looks at the relationship between Somatics training and the concert stage where its influence on dancers was increasingly evident. Focusing on New York City specifically, the chapter identifies three phases where Somatics impacted performance differently: first, as signaling the dancer’s real-time efforts to construct the dance in performance; second, as providing novel sources of movement; and third, as displaying a new standard of virtuosity. The chapter shows how in each of these phases the relationship of the choreographer to the performer shifted. In the first phase the choreographer and dancer were one and the same, processing the dance in real time, and this was seen as a radical alternative to midcentury modernist approaches in which the dancers showcased the choreographer’s vision. In the second phase, dancers deployed Somatics to demonstrate new vocabularies of movement and new ways of moving, not so much as a way to focus on dance making as to establish their unique artistic voices. In the third phase, the role of the choreographer was restored as the author of the dance, separate from the dancers, who then displayed the choreographer’s vision.
Introduction
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

In a 1981 Executive Order, President Ronald Reagan placed cost-benefit analysis at the heart of the US regulatory system. In the following decades, many progressives opposed cost-benefit analysis, arguing that it was a tool to undermine protections for consumers, public health, and the environment. Notwithstanding this resistance within their own party, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama embraced cost-benefit analysis and showed how the technique could be used while implementing a protection-oriented regulatory agenda. As Democratic constituencies became more comfortable with cost-benefit analysis, conservatives and industry trade associations became more skeptical. This trend ultimately culminated in the Trump administration’s rejection of expertise, analysis, and evidence and its open manipulation of cost-benefit analysis to obscure the true effects of an overzealous deregulatory agenda that is often at odds with the public interest.
The Illusion of Costs without Benefits
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

The core of the Trump administration’s regulatory agenda is to focus on the costs of regulations while ignoring, trivializing, and mischaracterizing their benefits. The administration has made significant regulatory efforts to delay or repeal important initiatives of the Obama administration designed to protect public health and the environment. In some of these proceedings, the Trump administration has altogether ignored the benefits of the rules it seeks to eliminate or suspend, instead focusing solely on cost savings to regulated industry. For example, Trump’s Executive Order 13,771 directs agencies to control costs and eliminate two regulations for every new one. This one-sided approach makes a mockery of cost-benefit analysis. Saving regulatory costs is attractive only if the benefits forgone as a result of these savings are lower than those costs. A rule that reduces compliance costs by giving up an even larger set of social benefits is hardly an attractive proposition.
Resurrecting Discredited Models
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

The Trump administration is pushing an argument that is at odds with the scientific consensus, claiming that prevalent air pollutants have thresholds below which they produce no adverse health effects. In doing so, the administration can hide an important portion of the health benefits of regulation. A major focus of this effort is particulate matter, which poses extraordinarily serious threats to public health. The administration is engaged in this effort with the support of industry advocates, who have discredited themselves repeatedly over more than half a century by attacking the scientific consensus behind government regulation of tobacco, acid rain, and other threats to health and the environment. In contrast, the administration’s efforts are opposed by the leadership of the scientific community and by the EPA’s own science advisors.
Trivializing Climate Change
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

The Trump administration has, at every turn, taken actions to reverse the climate progress achieved during the Obama administration, moving to repeal or significantly roll back three significant rules to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from existing power plants, passenger cars and light trucks, and oil and gas installations. To mask the true effects of its policies, the Trump administration has targeted the social cost of carbon, which quantifies the harm caused by a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. It has used two principal techniques, unsupported by economic theory, to reduce the estimate of the damages of greenhouse emissions by a factor of about 10.
The Invention of Martial Arts
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call ‘martial arts’ and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV, and other media. It argues that ‘martial arts’ exploded into popular consciousness entirely thanks to the work of media. Of course, the book does not deny the existence of real, material histories and non-media dimensions in martial arts practices. But it thoroughly recasts the status of such histories, combining recent myth-busting findings in historical martial arts research with important insights into the discontinuous character of history, the widespread ‘invention of tradition’, the orientalism and imagined geographies that animate many ideas about history, and the frequent manipulation of history for reasons of status, cultural capital, private or public power, politics, and/or financial gain. In doing so, the book argues for the primacy of media representation as key player in the emergence and spread of martial arts, and overturns the dominant belief that ‘real practices’ are primary while representations are secondary. The book makes its case via historical analysis of the British media history of such Eastern and Western martial arts as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, taiji, and mixed martial arts (MMA) across a range of media, from newspapers, comics, and books to cartoons, films, and TV series, as well as television adverts and music videos, focusing on often overlooked texts such as adverts for ‘Hai Karate’, the 1970s hit ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, and other mainstream and marginal media texts.
Conceptual Foundations
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

Chapter 1 starts by interrogating the Oxford English Dictionary’s treatment of the term ‘martial arts’ as a way to broach the book’s concerns. Today, the idea that the term ‘martial arts’ is associated with practices that are ‘mainly of East Asian origin’ is contentious. But this chapter sets out how and why these connotations emerged. It goes on to deepen the case for the relationship between history and analysis within this work, to set out the core argument about the cultural power of media representation, and to lay out the ways in which its ensuing chapters will support the argument that ‘martial arts’ is a recently invented, variegated, and variable ‘discursive entity’.
Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

Chapter 2, ‘Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts: From Beginning at the Origin to the Origin of the Beginning’ poses the question of when and where the analysis of the discursive entity ‘martial arts’ should begin. In exploring this, the chapter notes the prominence of origin stories in traditionalist martial arts, and interrogates their roles and functions. This leads to a discussion of what Rey Chow called ‘primitive passions’ in a deracinated, postmodern, and postcolonial world. All of this prompts a critique of a current popular and academic orientation that the chapter diagnoses as a widespread fixation, which it calls the ‘origin destination’. It concludes by setting out and reflecting on key issues in the immediate pre-history of martial arts, via a discussion of moral panics stimulating self-defence discourses through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Martial Ads
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

Chapter 8 explores other important fragments of culture—TV adverts. Called ‘martial ads’, it argues that in a comparative analysis of British adverts, a clear distinction can be seen between those that feature Japanese and those that feature Chinese martial arts. Whereas the former are depicted as ‘normal’, the latter often continue to be exoticized. Some adverts also demonstrate cultural confusion or indifference about the specificities of Chinese and Japanese culture and martial arts. However, at the same time, still other adverts combine a nostalgia for 1970s Hong Kong aesthetics in adverts that thoroughly eroticize the Asian male lead—something that film critics have often criticized Hollywood for failing to do. The chapter also examines other adverts in which martial-artsy combat is eroticized, orientalized, and/or depicted as ludicrous.
Inventing Martial Subjects
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines contemporary academic and popular media conceptualizations of masculinity in relation to ‘hardness’. It stages this through a close reading of a recent documentary called ‘Hard Men’, which focuses on working-class masculinity. It then examines recent claims of connections between MMA practice and fascist ideologies. The chapter ultimately argues that an analysis of the formation or invention of political identities is a crucial task for media, cultural, and martial arts studies—a task that requires attention not just to local, physical, embodied, or ‘concrete’ contexts and practices ‘proper’, but that also involves analyses that take seriously the places and functions of transnational media culture, and the ways that subjects and objects of discourse and of study across all manner of media, medium, and cultural text and context are portrayed.
Conclusion
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

This conclusion reflects on the previous chapters and on the status of martial arts as both an organizing term and a discursive entity. Martial arts is a considerably less stable entity than many practitioners are either led or want to believe. The conclusion discusses what dynamics, forces, agents, and agencies work for and against change; what factors work to produce stabilities, and what generate change. If martial arts was invented in modern media culture, and if change is inevitable, what does this suggest about the longevity of the term, concept, set of associations, connotations, and indeed lived, embodied, and institutionalized practices? The conclusion speculates on the possible future modifications and transformations of the field, away from its current forms, contents, and orientations.
Reading Expression
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

As early as the 1830s, Darwin nominated the study of non-verbal expression as the most convincing way to demonstrate that human agency had animal origins. His book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), offers us the best point of access to his human psychology. Central to its approach is interdependency. While the language which frames Expression has proved ambiguous, its overarching argument, and the five methods of research it exploits, forge a strong link between facial displays and the ways they are read or recognized by other people. His book argues that expressions themselves have no evolutionary purpose—they are not designed to communicate, or to reveal inner emotional states. It proposes three principles which have governed such evolution—none of which depend on natural selection. Being non-communicative, any significance expressions have comes from the parts they have played in the dramas of social life. Expression would today be said to proffer an ‘externalist’ or ‘situational’ account of the relations between expressions and emotions. The book also bears on contemporary debates about the universality of expressions and emotions.
Sex, Difference, and Desire
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

The parts of The Descent of Man dealing with sexual desire and difference have sparked more controversy and misrepresentation than any of Darwin’s other publications. Crucial to Descent’s arguments is the derivation of sexual selection from the dramas of display and desire observed among animals. The book describes four plotlines structuring the theatre of sexual agency in animals, each having different implications for the roles played by males and females. When Descent extends these plotlines to humans, they alter and modulate into an even more varied array of scenarios, again, each with its own distinctive roles for women and men. A mirror-dynamic figures centrally in both animal and human sex—the need to recognize or predict others’ desires so as to act in a way to arouse them. However, several nodes of concern disturb Darwin’s presentation of human sex: tensions between his three epochs of human history; Victorian racial politics; Victorian ideas about male and female superiority; and the imperatives of propriety. The chapter illustrates some of the muddles that result from these concerns, including: confirmation bias; aporia in argument; grammatical kinks; and overlap between sexual and natural selection. Finally, the chapter instances some of the main resonances in more recent scholarship of Darwin’s discussion of sex, instancing debates in feminism, about anthropomorphism, in evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology.
Life in Groups
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

From its earliest days, Darwin’s theory marked off social from non-social animals. As his ideas developed, he suggested that several processes, would produce natural selection in social animals, which did not occur in their non-social cousins. These included processes based on: blood-relationships (kin selection); dependable reciprocity; and group selection. Complementing his view of evolution as promoting increasing inter-communication between parts of the hominid brain, group dynamics provide the key to understanding the evolution of humanity’s most distinctive and complex forms of agency, according to Descent. While the book deals with a range of the ‘highest’ forms of human agency, including the origins of language, it focuses most on conscience and moral action. It develops a complex theory of conscience in which several different characters play parts: the self-gratifier; the praise-seeker; an arbitrary monitor; a supremely rational judge; and an impulsive hero. Darwin’s group-based approach to understanding humanity was an inspiration to Freud and has widespread resonances in later scholarship—some discordant, many harmonious.
Culture
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

The concepts of civilization and culture play a structuring role in Descent’s discussion of human agency. The evolutionary history Darwin described found continuity between animals and proto-humans. Thereafter, human history took on the idealized form of a single stairway rising in stages. Despite his enlightened opposition to slavery, Darwin placed on the stairs’ bottom step ‘the lowest savage,’ pictured in a disturbingly derogatory way. On the top step were certain nineteenth-century Europeans. Descent does not hold the progress of civilization to be inevitable, however. Indeed, Darwin holds natural selection to play a subordinate role in shaping contemporary human agency. While the foundations of human action are laid by our descent from animals, agency is specified—for good or ill—by the social customs and institutions which structure the development and group-life of a given individual: evolution proposes, culture disposes. This formula is fleshed out through Descent’s discussions of language use, moral agency, religious belief, virtue, and aesthetics. Resonances are explored with perspectives on social organization in Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, and theories of cultural evolution.
Conclusion
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

This book gives readers a point of access to Darwin’s writings about psychological matters. This concluding chapter reviews Darwin’s concept of agency: stressing the interrelations that result from agency; the laws that describe its long term effects (evolution by natural selection and sexual selection); and the ways it structures Darwin’s approach to the study of non-verbal expressions and other features of human sociality. I then examine the caution with which Darwin regarded what the Victorians called psychology, as represented by the works of Bain, Spencer, and Lewes—the point of difference upon which Darwin insisted being the priority he gave to observation, as opposed to definitional niceties and deduction. I show that Darwin’s prioritization of observation contrasts with the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ which has given rise to a flight from reality in psychology, both practically—from the observable world we all know, into the laboratory—and theoretically, toward a rendition of the visible world in terms of invisible inner processes. I suggest that several current moves to reframe psychological research, and evolutionary theory, are converging on the place where Darwin’s treatment of agency has been standing for a hundred and fifty years. If pursued further today, Darwin’s approach to the study of agency would restore significance to the natural world, and the lives of its inhabitants.
Spinoza on Superstition
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

One of the strengths of Spinoza’s philosophy is his recognition that what we can achieve politically depends in part on our affective capacities, an insight illustrated in his account of the distinction between ‘true religion’ and superstition. I argue that superstition, as Spinoza sees it, is an affective state. To be superstitious is to be subject to a pervasive and damaging kind of fear. False prophets, for example, harness the resources of imagination to encourage political division and superstitious anxiety. By contrast, defenders of true religion appeal to existing imaginative resources to foster devotion to God and promote cooperation. However, the boundary between these two strategies is far from distinct. Superstition may play a role in a harmonious way of life.
Narrative as the Means to Freedom
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

One of the differences between imaginative and rational practices, Spinoza claims, is that only the first depend on and make use of narratives. For example, whereas the imaginative revelations recorded in Scripture often take a narrative form, reasoning deals with the demonstrative relations between adequate ideas. Whereas imagining engages with particular things and events, reasoning operates at a general level. The chapter challenges this view by examining some of the ways in which reasoning, as Spinoza conceives it, not only develops out of imagining but continues to incorporate it. Philosophers rely on an imagined idea of a completely cooperative form of life to motivate their pursuit of cooperation and freedom.
Constructing Practical Reasons
Authors: Müller Andreas
Published: November 2020

Some things are reasons for us to perform certain actions. That it will spare you great pain in the future, for example, is a reason for you to go to the dentist now, and that you are already late for work is a reason for you not to read the next article in the morning paper. Why are such considerations reasons for or against certain actions? Constructivism offers an intriguing answer to this question. Its basic idea is often encapsulated in the slogan that reasons are not discovered but made by us. This book elaborates the constructivist idea into a fully fledged account of practical reasons, makes its theoretical commitments explicit, and defends it against some well-known objections. It begins with an examination of the distinctive role that reason judgements play in the process of practical reasoning. This provides the resources for an anti-representationalist conception of the nature of those judgements, according to which they are true, if they are true, not because they accurately represent certain normative facts, but because of their role in sound reasoning. On the resulting view, a consideration owes its status as a reason to the truth of the corresponding reason judgement and thus, ultimately, to the soundness of a certain episode of reasoning. Consequently, our practical reasons exhibit a kind of mind-dependence, but this does not force us to deny their objectivity.
The nature of reason judgements
Authors: Müller Andreas
Published: November 2020

This chapter argues that the Normative Guidance Account of practical reasoning defended in Chapter 2 provides constructivists with the resources to formulate an anti-representationalist account of reason judgements. According to this account, these judgements are mental states whose characteristic cognitive function is to guide our reasoning, rather than to represent certain facts. The chapter also introduces a distinction between this rationalist version of anti-representationalism, which characterizes reason judgements in terms of their role in reasoning, and conativist versions of anti-representationalism, which characterize these judgements as motivational states. This is where the constructivist’s account of reason judgements differs from the one endorsed by most expressivists.
Semiconductor Physics
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

A graduate-level text, Semiconductor physics: Principles, theory and nanoscale covers the central topics of the field, together with advanced topics related to the nanoscale and to quantum confinement, and integrates the understanding of important attributes that go beyond the conventional solid-state and statistical expositions. Topics include the behavior of electrons, phonons and photons; the energy and entropic foundations; bandstructures and their calculation; the behavior at surfaces and interfaces, including those of heterostructures and their heterojunctions; deep and shallow point perturbations; scattering and transport, including mesoscale behavior, using the evolution and dynamics of classical and quantum ensembles from a probabilistic viewpoint; energy transformations; light-matter interactions; the role of causality; the connections between the quantum and the macroscale that lead to linear responses and Onsager relationships; fluctuations and their connections to dissipation, noise and other attributes; stress and strain effects in semiconductors; properties of high permittivity dielectrics; and remote interaction processes. The final chapter discusses the special consequences of the principles to the variety of properties (consequences of selection rules, for example) under quantum-confined conditions and in monolayer semiconductor systems. The text also bring together short appendices discussing transform theorems integral to this study, the nature of random processes, oscillator strength, A and B coefficients and other topics important for understanding semiconductor behavior. The text brings the study of semiconductor physics to the same level as that of the advanced texts of solid state by focusing exclusively on the equilibrium and off-equilibrium behaviors important in semiconductors.
Particle generation and recombination
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

This chapter introduces a semi-classical interpretation of particle generation and recombination using the bimolecular recombination coefficient and radiative lifetime. Particles—electrons and holes in the semiconductor—can be generated and recombine because of the multitude of energetic interactions. Radiative recombination and generation arise in the interaction with photons and can be spontaneous or stimulated. Important non-radiative processes such as the Hall-Shockley-Read process and the Auger process, which arise in multiparticle interactions, are discussed. Auger recombination is common at small bandgaps and high concentrations but also appears in large bandgap materials under high injection conditions. Impact ionization is an example of Auger generation arising from high fields. The Auger process is analyzed quantum-mechanically to show how energy and momentum conservation equations and quantum restrictions lead to the observed behavior. The chapter also discusses recombination at surfaces, which is inevitably present because of the defects and confined states arising from symmetry breaking.
Quantum to macroscale and linear response
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

This chapter focuses on the properties associated with linear response. Reversibility holds in linear transformations. Schrödinger and Maxwell equations are linear, yet the world is irreversible, with time marching forward and dissipation quite ubiquitous. The connections between the quantum and microscopic scale, which are reversible and non-deterministic, to the macroscale, where irreversibility and determinism abounds, arise through interactions where both linear and nonlinear responses can appear. Causality’s implication in linear response is illustrated through a toy example and a quantum-statistical view of response. Linear response theory—using Green’s functions—is applied to develop dispersion relationships and dielectric function. The tie-in between real and imaginary parts is illustrated as one example of the Kramers-Kronig relationship, and the linear response of a damped oscillator and the Lorentz model, together with the oscillating electron model, employed to illustrate the dielectric function implications.
Remote processes
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses remote processes that influence electron transport and manifest themselves in a variety of properties of interest. Coulomb and phonon-based interactions have appeared in many discussions in the text. Coulomb interactions can be short range or long range, but phonons have been treated as a local effect. At the nanoscale, the remote aspects of these interactions can become significant. An off-equilibrium distribution of phonons, in the limit of low scattering, will lead to the breakdown of the local description of phonon-electron coupling. Phonons can drag electrons, and electrons can drag phonons. Soft phonons—high permittivity—can cause stronger electron-electron interactions. So, plasmon scattering can become significant. Remote phonon scattering too becomes important. These and other such changes are discussed, together with phonon drag’s consequences for the Seebeck effect, as illustrated through the coupled Boltzmann transport equation. The importance of the zT coefficient for characterizing thermoelectric capabilities is stressed.
The Function of Revelation in Jewish Apocalypses and John
Authors: Reynolds Benjamin E.
Published: November 2020

Apocalypses function to “interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and the future” and to “influence” belief and behavior “by means of divine authority.” Numerous scholars consider apocalypses to have been written in situations of crisis, but recent studies on Jewish apocalypses indicate that the specific situations can be quite varied and are not always crises. Resistance to oppression from empire or internal religious conflict may be more relevant for some Jewish apocalypses. The Gospel of John shares this function with apocalypses in the cosmological perspective that it provides on the life of Jesus and its emphasis on belief. Even though John has traditionally been considered to lack an ethical perspective, the Gospel does reflect a concern for behavior. The concluding framework elements of apocalypses are also evident in John’s paraenesis, instructions to the recipient, and the narrative conclusion that centers on the writing down of revelation in books.
Compassion’s Nature
Authors: Hordern Joshua
Published: November 2020

This chapter builds on Chapter 2’s therapy by specifying compassion’s nature. The distinction is drawn between compassion’s nature and its content. The former is common to the quality of all relationships characterised by compassion while the latter is constituted by the interaction and negotiation between what people bring to such relationships by way of specific beliefs, doctrines, or practices concerning suffering and the human condition. Compassion’s nature is defined as, paradigmatically, a quality of intersubjective relationships formed as wayfarers and pilgrims with diverse views about suffering encounter each other in the course of their lives. As such, compassion is described as cognitive, normally consensual, affective, typically bodily or intercorporeal, alleviative and, in principle, persuasive, and narratival. While compassion is primarily a quality of second-person relatedness, it is also a personal character excellence, which decentres the agent in ways which are conducive to such relatedness.
Essential Ornithology
Authors: Scott Graham
Published: November 2020

Essential Ornithology provides the reader with a concise but comprehensive introduction to the biology of birds, one of the most widely studied taxonomic groups. The book begins by considering the dinosaur origins of birds and their subsequent evolution. Development, anatomy, and physiology are then discussed followed by chapters devoted to avian reproduction, migration, ecology, and conservation. Sections dealing with aspects of bird/human relationships and bird conservation give the book an applied context. This new edition has been thoroughly updated, providing new information from rapidly developing fields including the avian fossil record, urban and agricultural ecology, responses to climate change, invasive species biology, technologies to track movement, avian disease, and the role of citizen scientists. There is also a greater focus on North American ornithology. Drawing extensively upon the wider scientific literature, this engaging text places the results of classical studies of avian biology alongside the most recent scientific breakthroughs. Useful case studies are presented in a concise and engaging style with the student reader foremost in mind. Key points are highlighted and suggestions for guided reading and key references are included throughout. Essential Ornithology provides a companion text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in avian science, as well as a useful reference for professional researchers and consultants. Amateur ornithologists will also find this book offers a scientifically rigorous and accessible overview for a more general readership.
Equality, Freedom, and Democracy
Authors: Morlino Leonardo
Published: November 2020

A democratic regime is assumed to implement freedom and equality as the two critical and most important values. The question we intend to address here is: how and why has the actual implementation of freedom and equality been changing in the 1990–2020 period? Researching this topic, we cannot ignore the impact of the Great Recession since 2008. Thus, in this comparative research, we analyse France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom to detect the changes. As expected, the six largest European democracies have been differently affected by the crisis, as they also had different background factors. We address an additional question: what is the impact of the European Union on the two democratic values? Accordingly, we analyse economic inequality, social inequality, and ethnic inequality with the related changing trends and explanations. We also detect and analyse the trend of freedoms, and especially personal dignity, civil rights, and political rights. Thus, the relative decline of equalities and freedoms in the six countries emerge in the different complex facets. We also explore the demand for equalities and freedoms by citizens and the political commitments of party leaders. The other issues we address include how and why, respectively, equalities and freedoms are affected by domestic aspects and the role of external factors, especially the European Union. By connecting equalities and freedoms and drawing the lines of entire research, we show how there are three different paths in the future of democracy: balanced democracy, protest democracy, and unaccountable democracy.
Is There a Comprehensive Explanation?
Authors: Morlino Leonardo
Published: November 2020

Thinking over the empirical results, discussed in the previous chapters, we have to acknowledge that there is no direct intertwining between the freedoms and equalities when checking the domestic and external explanations. At the same time, the immediate and strong tension that also emerges in our analysis of freedoms concerns the contradictory demands of citizens about achieving security to cope with terrorism, with security that comes first. When reflecting on the data presented in the previous chapters, we can single out three patterns. The first is balanced democracy, characterized by the attempt of implementing both freedoms and equalities. The second is protest democracy, where the more substantial attention to equality is complemented by different possible types of protest, of a revendicative kind, a weak rule of law and inter-institutional accountability. The third is unaccountable democracy, where there may be relatively higher equality, complemented by weaker freedoms and above all the absence or the weakening of inter-institutional guardians who were relevant in establishing democracy. Corruption may be present along the lower side of the triangle to reinforce both patterns. The last part of the chapter proposes an overview of the literature about the questions addressed in the book. However, as in the published literature, there is no empirical work that addresses our questions, but works that address similar questions concerning equality only, freedom only or also the entire democratic regime.
The Idea of Redressive Justice
Authors: Gold Andrew S.
Published: November 2020

Chapter 2 introduces the idea of redressive justice, while also distinguishing leading theories of corrective justice. As the chapter develops, there is a distinctive kind of justice involved when right holders undo wrongful transactions they have suffered—that is, when they engage in acts of redress—or when third parties undo such transactions on the right holder’s behalf. The authorship of a remedy matters, in part because a wrongdoer’s obligation to undo a wrong is not symmetrical with a right holder’s privilege (if it exists) to undo that same wrong. Authorship also matters because the moral ledger of the parties involved will vary depending on which party undoes a wrong. This chapter argues that much of private law is best explained in light of the justice in redress.
The Value of the Justice in Private Law
Authors: Gold Andrew S.
Published: November 2020

This chapter develops the value in possessing a right to redress. Such rights are valuable in part because they can lead to an important type of justice between the parties, but this is not their only benefit. They may deter future wrongdoing, or they may communicate something about the dignity of a wronged plaintiff. This chapter outlines a particular kind of value that a right to redress advances in addition to these others; it provides a right holder with distinctive forms of authorship (both of her life’s narrative writ large and also more narrowly at the level of her specific choices). Rights of redress may also provide a type of private authorship that is distinctively valuable.
Choice, Equity, and Redress
Authors: Gold Andrew S.
Published: November 2020

This chapter addresses several puzzles that stem from a right holder’s option whether or not to seek redress. First, there are cases where it would be desirable along various dimensions if a plaintiff were to bring suit. It is a striking feature of private law that a plaintiff nonetheless has the freedom to choose not to sue even if it would be better (for her or for society) if she did sue. Second, there are cases where a right holder can legitimately enforce her rights, yet it would be morally wrongful for her to enforce them. This chapter will discuss mechanisms by which private law addresses such concerns; most significantly, equitable doctrine often limits unduly harsh forms of redress. This feature of equity is important not only for its impact on redress, but also for its implications regarding the state’s role in assisting private parties. Chapter 8 concludes with analysis of the relation between the justice in redress and the justice in equity.
The Rational Expectations Hypothesis and the New Classicals
Authors: Tsoukis Christopher
Published: November 2020

This chapter analyses the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), a pillar of forward-looking macroeconomics that emphasizes expectations. It also develops its implications in terms of ‘market efficiency’ and related concepts. It then reviews New Classical Macroeconomics: its main tenets, the ‘Lucas supply function’ that is crucial for much subsequent theory, and the ‘Lucas island model’ that underpins it. The centrepiece ‘Policy Ineffectiveness Proposition’ (PIP) is developed both intuitively and more formally. Subsequently, the chapter reviews one major line of criticism of PIP, the fact that markets may not clear, based in particular on staggered wage setting. Broader criticisms of the REH, including ‘bounded rationality’, are also reviewed. The chapter concludes with yet another landmark contribution of Robert Lucas, namely the ‘Lucas critique’ of activist stabilization policy.
The Inner Resting Point and the Common Cause of Animal Motion
Authors: Rapp Christof
Published: November 2020

This contribution comments on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium 1 (MA 1). In this chapter Aristotle gives a general introduction to the treatise, posing the question of what the common cause or explanation of animal self-movement consists in. For the first time he formulates a general requirement for all kinds of movement, namely movement presupposes something that is unmoved. Afterwards, he points out that within animals the joints serve as inner resting points and that they are required in order to facilitate the animal’s self-movement. The author argues that the structure of joints or something he calls ‘the joint model’ is significant for the understanding of some of the treatise’s key tenets.
The Role of Thought in Animal Voluntary Self-Locomotion
Authors: Cooper John M.
Published: November 2020

This contribution comments on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium 7 (MA 7), in particular on the difficult passages that introduce the so-called ‘practical syllogism’; at this particular point of the treatise the practical syllogism is used as part of the answer to the question of why it is that an agent, by thinking, sometimes acts but sometimes does not act. The author argues that, according to the account given in MA 7, thought plays a twofold role in the initiation of action; it is an animal’s thought that connects its desire to an end, and that connects that end to a particular, here and now: i.e. to this action for it to do in furtherance of that end. Even if the immediate psychological cause of action is desire, that desire itself is by the thought that recognizes this as an instance of what its general desire is for.
Articulating the De Motu Animalium
Authors: Laks André
Published: November 2020

This contribution locates the treatise De Motu Animalium within the Aristotelian oeuvre as a whole. It pays special attention to a section in De Anima III 10, where Aristotle announces another treatment that will deal with functions that are common to body and soul. Accordingly, the contribution tries to specify the kind of hylomorphism that is implied by this announcement.
Policy Conversation on Big Tech
Authors: Petit Nicolas
Published: November 2020

This chapter describes the polarization observed in the contemporary policy conversation about big tech. According to one view—which can be called neo-structuralism—each big tech firm is a structural monopoly harmful to the economy and the political system. Big tech firms must be regulated, if not broken up. Legislative reform is a prerequisite. According to another view—which can be called consumer welfarism—serious factual inquiry of tech companies' market power is necessary prior to any enforcement initiative. Existing antitrust laws provide the right framework, though disagreements arise about the interpretation of applicable principles and rules. The chapter shows that both views have limitations, and concludes that additional study is needed to evaluate the economic and social issues raised by tech giants.
Economics of Big Tech: Monopoly v Uncertainty
Authors: Petit Nicolas
Published: November 2020

This chapter focuses on the economics of big tech. It asks whether the standard monopoly model of received economic theory is the appropriate framework to analyze big tech firms. The question is important; the monopoly model underpins antitrust and regulatory policy. It provides the intellectual foundation for the assessment of anticompetitive conduct and transactions in digital markets. However, economic models on which laws are based may lose relevance as a result of technological change. Our analysis suggests that the average tendencies of big tech firms do not fit the textbook monopoly model. Instead, observed properties of big tech firms like increasing returns to adoption, network externalities, and tipping effects hint at the superiority of a distinct economic model of competition under uncertainty.
A Concrete Theory of Moligopoly
Authors: Petit Nicolas
Published: November 2020

This chapter presents an empirical theory of moligopoly competition, in which big tech firms compete by a process of indirect entry. It begins by introducing each tech giant, namely, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft. The chapter then identifies six properties common to many of them: diversification, discontinuity, long termism, growth, exploration and discovery, and flexibility. All six properties work together toward a competitive outcome. Moreover, moligopoly competition appears to lead to a substantial allocation of resources to invention.
Antitrust in Moligopoly Markets
Authors: Petit Nicolas
Published: November 2020

This chapter draws the implications of the theory of moligopoly competition for antitrust law and policy. In digital industries, economic forces discounted in received theory produce socially beneficial incentives on monopoly firms to compete by indirect entry in untipped markets, when they understand that their monopoly rents in tipped markets are under pressure. Antitrust should thus focus on maintaining competitive pressure in markets that have tipped, and apply more forgiving rules towards the leveraging of market power in untipped markets. Besides, antitrust should adopt tools that allow fact finders to draw a better line between tipped and untipped markets, complementing inferences of monopoly power drawn from structural methods of market definition and evaluation of market power.
Conclusion
Authors: Petit Nicolas
Published: November 2020

This concluding chapter explains that the picture of big tech firms as monopolists is intuitively attractive, but analytically wrong. The digital economy has a variety of properties that work together to impose on firms a pressure equivalent to oligopoly competition. In particular, network externalities, increasing returns to adoption, and tipping effects produce significant discontinuities. This influences the direction and intensity of competition. Tech firms compete with others by a process of indirect entry, and reconfigure existing channels of competition.
The Making of the Book
Authors: O'Daly Gerard
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses the occasion of the composition of City of God, Alaric’s Gothic sack of Rome in 410, and reactions to it. The theme of Rome’s fall, and its moral and religious implications, in Augustine’s sermons of 410–11, and in correspondence with prominent Roman political figures in the same period, is surveyed and linked to its treatment in City. The dates of composition of its various sections from 412 on (the work was completed by 426-7), and of their publication, are discussed, as well as the dedication of Books 1–2 to Flavius Marcellinus. Evidence is provided from Augustine’s correspondence on the format and dissemination of the work. The questions of its intended readership and of the possible revision of the work are discussed
Domain-Specific Working Memory
Authors: Martin Randi C. , Rapp Brenda , Purcell Jeremy
Published: November 2020

The domain-specific approach to working memory assumes specialized working memory systems dedicated to maintaining different types of information (e.g. orthographic, phonological, semantic, visuospatial) which serve to support processing in that domain. These storage systems are assumed to be separate from long-term memory representations in each domain and also from attentional and cognitive control processes. This chapter provides an overview of support for this approach drawn mainly from neuropsychological case study and case series approaches, though it also integrates findings from behavioural and imaging studies of healthy individuals that were motivated by the neuropsychological findings or provide confirmation of those findings. The neuropsychological findings not only demonstrate dissociations between working memory in different domains but also provide a rich source of evidence to address the nature of forgetting in working memory, the interactions between working memory and long-term memory, and the role of aspects of working memory in language comprehension and production.