bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Greek Athletics in the Roman World
Authors: Newby Zahra
Published: November 2023

The enduring importance of Greek athletic training and competition during the period of the Roman Empire has been a neglected subject in past scholarship on the ancient world. This book examines the impact that Greek athletics had on the Roman world, approaching it through the plentiful surviving visual evidence, viewed against textual and epigraphic sources. It shows that the traditional picture of Roman hostility has been much exaggerated. Instead Greek athletics came to exercise a profound influence upon Roman spectacle and bathing culture. In the Greek east of the empire too, athletics continued to thrive, providing Greek cities with a crucial means of asserting their cultural identity while also accommodating Roman imperial power.
G. E. Moore on Sense-data and Perception
Authors: Snowdon Paul
Published: November 2023

In 1958, the year of Moore’s death, Professor A. R. White published his book G. E. Moore: A Critical Exposition. White’s study, though now, presumably, rarely read, is extremely acute and based on a close reading of Moore’s work as he knew it. In it White says: ‘There are three main topics dealt with in Moore’s writings, namely, philosophical method, ethics, and perception.’ As a general description, the only reservation that can be felt about this remark is that it would be more accurate to add epistemology as a fourth main topic. Moore obviously grappled in a variety of ways with the problems raised by scepticism. Now, it might be that White included epistemology under the title of ‘perception’, and it is, indeed, not uncommon to think of the name ‘philosophy of perception’ as covering epistemology. But another, and I think more likely, possibility is that White underestimated Moore’s epistemological concerns, perhaps because when White was writing a number of Moore’s essays on the subject were not widely known (or, at least, not known to White).
Ending
Authors: Mullan John
Published: November 2023

When William Godwin, now best known for being the father of Mary Shelley, set out to compose his novel Caleb Williams, he wrote the ending first. Recalling the process of composition in 1832, he described how he ‘inventedfirst the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the . He believed that ‘carrying back my invention from the ultimate conclusion to the firstcommencement’ would ensure ‘an entire unity of plot’. The ending would not only provide a fitting climax, it would prove the novelist’s point.
The Odyssey of Christ: A Novel Context for Philippians 2:6-11
Authors: Fisk Bruce N
Published: November 2023

The Hellenistic context of early Christianity is back. After several post-Holocaust waves of preoccupation with the Jewish roots of early Christianity, the current vogue among NT scholars is to attend to matters Hellenistic,1 including Roman imperial politics, Graeco Roman religion, sophistic rhetoric and, to lesser degrees, the social world of the early Greek novels.
Is Kenosis Orthodox?
Authors: Davis Stephen T
Published: November 2023

1

This chapter addresses the question whether kenotic Christological theories are orthodox1. Naturally, this will require discussion of what makes a Christological theory count as kenotic. It will also require discussion of what makes a Christological theory orthodox as opposed to, say, unorthodox or even heretical. Roughly, I will use the wordorthodox in such as way as to imply that ‘t is orthodox’ (where ‘t’ is some theological theory or claim) means roughly ‘t is acceptable for belief by the people of God.
The Colossus of Rhodes: Ancient Texts and Modern Representations
Authors: Callataÿ Godefroid de
Published: November 2023

My interest in the Colossus of Rhodes began, rather accidentally, a few years ago, when I was investigating what is usually referred to as astrological geography in Antiquity, that is, the division of the oikoumene into a certain number of regions and the relationships imagined by the ancients between these regions and heavenly realities such as zodiacal signs or planets.1 The lists we have diverge widely among themselves, so that one is tempted at first to disregard the whole topic as pure fantasy.
A German Spinozistic Reader of Cudworth, Bull, and Spencer: Johann Georg Wachter and his Theologia Martyrum (1712)
Authors: Mulsow Martin
Published: November 2023

In his Persecution and the Art of Writing published in 1952, Leo Strauss propounded the view that, until the seventeenth century, high philosophy had a double nature: an exoteric side, devotional and educational, for the ordinary reader; and an esoteric one, concealing the truth between the lines, as it can be beneficial only to the select few. He based his theory mainly on the medieval Jewish tradition of Maimonides and Halevi, as well as on Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus.1 He could have found further support for this view in a period some time after Spinoza, the early eighteenth century. For in that period a new way of thinking unfolded which combined such different elements as Cosmotheism, Egyptianism, Cabbalism, and a theory of the Trinity with the idea of the necessarily esoteric character of philosophy.
Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes
Authors: Leighton Angela
Published: November 2023

George Moore once suggested that if Walter Pater ‘had lived to hear L’après-midi d’un Faune, he could not have done else but think that he was listening to his own prose changed into music’.1 Debussy’s piece was inspired by a steamy poem by Mallarmé about a lustful faun observing some playful nymphs. Cross-breeding between the arts was a fashionable ideal in the late nineteenth century, and one which could seem to protect artistic integrity by emphasizing the self-enclosed inviolability of art on art.
Aesthetic Conditions: Pater’s Re-forming Style
Authors: Leighton Angela
Published: November 2023

The notion of the aesthetic has, by and large, been defined as the product of a historical moment: the mid-eighteenth century. It is, writes Eagleton, ‘a bourgeois concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the Enlightenment’.1 Specifically, the concept was first ‘hatched’, at least in its modern sense, by Baumgarten in 1750. Although Kant rejected Baumgarten’s definition, of the aesthetic as ‘the science of sensitive knowing’2 or the critique of artistic taste, this sense of the term survived and was introduced into England in the early 1830s.
Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee’s Ghostly Aesthetics
Authors: Leighton Angela
Published: November 2023

‘By the way, talking of literary fame, the only two creatures who seemed to have heard of me as a writer were Wm. Rossetti & Oscar Wilde!’1 So wrote the twenty-five-year-old Vernon Lee, author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) and a collection of essays on ‘Aesthetical Questions’, Belcaro (1887). Some fifty years, and more than forty volumes later, soon after the publication of Music and Its Lovers in 1932, she answered an admiring letter from Roger Fry with similar despondency: ‘But what your letter does make up for is the incurable disappointment (even at seventy-six) of finding all my work on aesthetics utterly wasted.’2 The reputation of Vernon Lee has always been a puzzle.
Wallace Stevens’ Eccentric Souvenirs
Authors: Leighton Angela
Published: November 2023

Art for art’s sake is both indiscreet and worthless. It opposes the common run of things by simply existing alone and for its own sake … Beauty is strength. But art—art all alone, detached, sensuous for the sake of sensuousness, not to perpetuate inspiration or thought, art that is mere art—seems to me to be the most arrant as it is the most inexcuseable rubbish.1
Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson
Authors: Leighton Angela
Published: November 2023

Emily Dickinson’s ‘formal feeling’ is a curious construction. These lines ought to mean that, ‘After great pain’, there is an end, a numbness, a death. And indeed, there is a kind of death in the poem. At the same time, ‘a formal feeling’ goes on to become the monumental feeling form of the second line: ‘Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs’. Like much Victorian women’s poetry, Dickinson’s posthumous moment, ‘After great pain’, lets feeling get free of the personal pronoun ‘I’ or ‘she’, as well as of its object ‘pain’, and freewheel into wit.
Introduction
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

Tombs in all their above-ground forms, from simple stone slab to multi-storeyed mausoleum, were among the most visible and public monuments of Roman settlements across the empire. Because ancient Roman law pre-scribed that the dead should be buried outside the settlements, approaching a Roman town by any of the main overland routes converging on it necessitated passing through a community of the dead, their memory being called forth by the tombs inscribed with all manner of personal information (Fig. 1). The roadside and suburban location of burial grounds on community land ensured good visibility of the funerary monuments, and it contributed to the constant link between the past and the present. This is an important point because these memorials would have been seen and visited by many, and it was the visitors to the tombs—either family and friends or complete strangers—who kept the memory of the dead alive. The roads lined with tombs ‘inscribed for all to see’ are the busy spots that the poet Propertius in the late Wrst century bc referred to as places ‘where the crowds travel along an unsleeping thoroughfare’.1 Tombs and cemeteries also were often located in close proximity to suburban houses and shops, and they sometimes encroached on each other.
Memory and Commemoration
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

The funerary monument, according to Roman legal sources, was designed to preserve memory (monumentum est, quod memoriae servandae gratia existat).1 It also acted as a visual indicator of the status of a person and of the splendour and antiquity of that person’s family. The form and size of the monument itself, and the written text on it, made it possible to display and negotiate status, belonging, and social relations in the community. But was a permanent stone monument the only way to preserve the memory of an individual? Cicero, in his speech honouring Servius Sulpicius Rufus, claimed that, although memorials and commemorative statues preserved memory, one’s accomplishments could also ‘be a memorial to a life of enduring renown’.3 Great deeds, rank, and accomplishments were something to be ‘handed on as a memorial to succeeding generations’.4
Conveying a Message
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

From the reign of Augustus occasionally, and from middle of the first century ad much more commonly, the epitaph is prefaced by an invocation ‘to the spirits of the dead’ (the Manes), written as Dis Manibus, and later abbreviated to D M.1 In Gaul and Germany, the introductory D M was expanded from the mid-second century to read ‘D M et Memoriae’ (to the spirits of the dead and the memory of ... ), and from the beginning of the third century the ‘eternal memory’ (memoriae aeternae) or the ‘eternal rest’ (quieti aeternae) of the deceased become common invocations (see Appendix, Nos. 2–5, 7, 9–14, 18, 20–2, 24).
Causes of Death
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

What caused many rich and famous Romans to die can be learnt by randomly trawling through Roman literary sources. Here is just one example. Verginius Rufus was considered by Pliny the Younger to be ‘one of our greatest and most distinguished citizens’.1 He was rehearsing an address to the emperor Nerva when his manuscript fell out of his hands. As he bent to pick it up, he slipped on the polished floor, fell and broke his hip, and from this accident he never recovered. Searching the historical sources to gain insight into the causes and circumstances of death of those who were not wealthy and distinguished, however, would be largely fruitless. Funerary inscriptions, because they were commissioned by all classes of society, apart from the very poor, are therefore of immeasurable value in revealing what many people died of and what sentiments were expressed at their demise, even if the inscriptions tend to highlight unusual deaths or circumstances that surviving relatives felt particularly worth telling.
Family and Household
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

Familial relationships recorded in funerary epitaphs appear sometimes very simple, sometimes rather complicated, but the inscribed text always gives us only part of the picture. The epitaphs record some, but not all, family ties, and the actual extent and complexity of familial relationships the deceased once enjoyed whilst alive cannot be reconstructed with any real confidence. Although most soldiers in the first and second centuries were commemorated by their comrades, for example, it cannot be assumed that they had no blood relatives anywhere, just that they may not have lived near the base where the soldier was stationed. It was not the ‘job’ of an epitaph to provide a complete family tree or to record all the relatives of the deceased.
Social Mobility and Social Change
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

The Roman conquest of western and northern Europe had far-reaching consequences for the societies and individuals in those regions. In Chapter 8 we have looked at physical mobility, as witnessed in the epitaphs, and how, for various reasons, people migrated outside the confines of their towns, villages, and territories, some of them moving great distances from one place to another. The funerary inscriptions, although they are just one source of information, also give insight into social mobility and the restructuring of individual lives within Roman society. In this regard, the epitaphs alluding to one’s standing in society or suggesting improvement of a personal situation through promotion, inheritance, marriage, or manumission are especially valuable. Equally insightful are those inscriptions naming professions, careers, and public honours. Of particular interest here are the slaves (servi) and freed slaves (liberti) who, in many cases, managed to achieve upward mobility, even if they had to operate within the confines of relatively constricting social and legal structures.
Death on Earth, Life in Heaven
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

The forms of commemoration of the dead in the Christian communities of the Roman empire diVer from pagan traditions in sufficiently crucial and interesting ways to warrant a separate study of them as a conclusion to this book. Like the pagan funerary inscriptions, the epitaphs of Christians offer insights into the belief system, social structures, and forms of expressing the identity of the deceased. Under Theodosius in ad 392, Christianity became the official state religion, and all pagan cults were outlawed. From this time on, and especially after the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis in 496, Christianity rapidly spread in the Gallic and German provinces, and in Germany beyond the empire’s former frontier.
Conclusion
Authors: Carroll Maureen
Published: November 2023

In the Roman world various devices were employed to perpetuate the memory of the dead. The eulogy recited in the presence of mourners at the funeral served as one of the mnemonic aids used to recall actions and achievements of individuals and families, and memory was stimulated visually by the fashioning of portraits and statues of the deceased in various materials. Public philanthropy and munficence towards various communities, in addition, could ensure the remembrance and posthumous prestige of the dead in that the names of such benefactors were eternalized in inscriptions on buildings and honorific statues. But the vast number of sepulchral monuments bearing inscriptions relating to the life and death of individuals testifies best to the importance Romans throughout the empire attached to being remembered and revered. Choosing a prominent position and a public space for a funerary monument was an effective way of ensuring visibility and continued attention after death. Those with foresight, and with the financial means at their disposal, selected a monument and an epitaph before they died, or left testamentary specifications for their commemoration. For those of humble means, and perhaps no close family to bury them, burial clubs were established as benevolent societies from the legacies of wealthy patrons or from the contributions of the members of such societies.
T. S. Eliot and the idea of tradition
Authors: Reeves Gareth
Published: November 2023

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’—then and now Until the middle of the last century, Eliot’s idea of tradition was extraordinarily influential. His essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) was a major contributor to Modernism’s rise and hegemony. The essay’s decline accompanied that of Modernism, and in the academy it suffered the fate of the abandoned lover: spurn and neglect. Like its author, it came to be regarded as conservative, élitist, obsessed with order, and backward-looking. This was hardly surprising at a time when Modernism turned postmodernism, when plurality supplanted hierarchy, when the notion of a literary canon was under fire, when, indeed, what constitutes literary studies was under intense scrutiny.
Adorno and the Frankfurt School
Authors: Bowie Andrew
Published: November 2023

The ‘Frankfurt School’ is the name used to refer to the philosophers, social theorists, literary scholars, economists, and psychoanalysts who developed the ideas of the ‘Institute for Social Research’, which was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. The members of the group sought to establish what they termed ‘Critical Theory’. Their theories were therefore not intended just as objective descriptions of social phenomena, but were also meant to contribute to changing those phenomena. This is the central idea which informs Critical Theory’s approaches to modern culture. Critical Theory analyses why that culture develops in the ways it does, tries to show how it can negatively affect people’s ability to think critically about their actions and evaluations, and suggests ways of thinking about positive alternatives to the existing state of society. In the 1930s the Institute was forced by the Nazis into exile in Switzerland, and then in the USA; it returned to Frankfurt in 1949.
The Russian debate on narrative
Authors: Morson Gary Saul
Published: November 2023

Russian scholars made decisive contributions to twentieth-century Western literary theory. New Criticism, structuralism, reader-response theory, various types of post-structuralism, and, above all, theories of the novel and narratology would all be unthinkable without the influence, direct or indirect, of the Russian formalists and Bakhtin. Their work has also contributed greatly to the development of Western folkoristics and anthropology. Indeed, it has sometimes been said that the most important contributions of Western theory have been a working-out, an extension, and a critique of the implications, sometimes barely noticed at the time, of Russian formalist premisses.
Form, rhetoric, and intellectual history
Authors: Shereen Faiza W
Published: November 2023

In the 1930s, the University of Chicago was in the midst of curricular reform and innovation, when a group of scholars from the humanities came together to form a new and theoretically distinctive school of literary criticism. The Chicago critics were determined as a school, not only by their affiliation with the University of Chicago, but more intrinsically by their embracing of a pluralistic vision in critical theory and philosophical inquiry and by their particular brand of Aristotelianism. The theories of the founding group were developed in the work of a second and a third generation of Chicago critics.
Feminisms
Authors: Tolan Fiona
Published: November 2023

When the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her 1949 book The Second Sex the famous sentence, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,’ she encapsulated an argument that would propel feminist thinking for the next fifty years or more. In one brief sentence, she touched upon questions and issues that lie at the very heart of feminist inquiry—questions as simple and complex as ‘What is a woman?’ In the attempt to address this question, feminism has become fractured, divided, and contradictory.
Race, nation, and ethnicity
Authors: Kerr Kathleen
Published: November 2023

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the gradual formation of discourses on identity which linked together the concepts of race, nation, and ethnic group or community. Each of these categories was initially conceived as discrete and homogeneous. Theories of race posited biology, geography, and climatic conditions as the bases for differences in skin colour and, by extension, in the ability to contribute to the progress of civilization through the arts and sciences. Models of nationhood primarily took two forms, one civic and one cultural or ethnic, both of which remain influential today. Civic nationalism, founded on the values of liberty and justice, is underpinned by social contract theory, as depicted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by John Locke and David Hume, and, in particular, in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract of 1762. According to Rousseau, the state is established and acquires legitimacy in terms of the ‘general will of the people’, rather than through force.
Postmodernism
Authors: Snipp-Walmsley Chris
Published: November 2023

American architect Charles Jencks famously declared that postmodernism began on 15 July 1972, when the Pruitt–Igoe housing scheme in St Louis, Missouri, was destroyed by a controlled and planned explosion. The housing scheme, designed by Minoru Yamasaki (who also designed the Twin Towers), was, for many, the flagship of Modernist architecture. Its destruction, Jencks argued, signalled a clear rift between the modern and postmodern periods.
Science and criticism: beyond the culture wars
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: November 2023

During the first half of the twentieth century there was a prevalent way of thinking about the academic disciplines—the natural, social, and human sciences—which assigned them each to their appointed place on a ‘hard-to-soft’ scale of methodological rigour. This idea had its source in Logical Positivism and in the ‘Unity of Science’ movement which was basically a programme for ranking those disciplines in a descending order of priority. Thus physics was taken as the paradigm case of a ‘hard’ discipline with clearly specified criteria for what should count as a valid empirical observation and an adequate (logically rigorous) mode of reasoning on the scientific evidence. Of course, there were some large differences of view about the kind of logical reasoning involved—as between inductivists and those who espoused a covering-law or a hypothetico-deductive approach—and also about the content and status of empirical truth claims.
Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma theory
Authors: Luckhurst Roger
Published: November 2023

The body of texts discussed in this chapter might reasonably be called ‘trauma theory’ only after the mid-1990s, when various lines of inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category. Trauma study now includes many fields, focusing on psychological, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic questions about the nature and representation of traumatic events. These concerns range from the public and historical to the private and memorial. Trauma theory thus synthesizes resources from a number of critical schools already treated in this book. Freudian psychoanalysis provided a model of traumatic subjectivity (although importantly not the only one) and various accounts about the effect of trauma on memory.
Modern Virtue Ethics
Authors: Coope Christopher Miles
Published: November 2023

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is this: that virtue ethics, insofar as it remains a valuable new approach in moral philosophy, is misleadingly so described. The description fails to single out what is of interest. The second is that the difference between this new approach and other so-called moral theories is not at all to be called a mere difference in emphasis or focus. Again I must add: insofar as the approach remains of value. For it was intended to be something radical, and only as such was it worth anything at all. The third is that the cardinal virtue of justice, once thought ‘more glorious than the morning or the evening star’, has become damagingly marginalized. It no longer has a starring role. I shall point out some consequences.
The Virtues and Vices of Virtue Jurisprudence
Authors: Duff R A
Published: November 2023

The revival of interest in virtue theory (in particular Aristotelian virtue theory) among moral philosophers towards the end of the last century had an impact on legal theory, in a revival of ‘virtue jurisprudence’. Virtue jurisprudents argue that ideas of virtue and vice ought to play a central role in our understanding of the proper aims and principles of systems of law. At their most ambitious, they might claim that ‘the aim of the law is to make citizens virtuous’ (Solum 2003: 181), or ‘to promote the greater good of humanity .. . by promoting virtue’ (Huigens 1995: 1425). Such claims cause tremors in contemporary liberal hearts, redolent as they are of nineteenth-century ‘legal moralism’ and of the more ambitious (and more frightening) species of communitarianism; they also reflect what I see as one of the vices of some virtue jurisprudence— a familiar philosophical pleonexia that leads one to portray as the key to understanding a particular matter a concept or idea which, in fact, has only a more modest, but still useful, role to play.
Three Dogmas of Desire
Authors: Brewer Talbot
Published: November 2023

It is a truism that our desires figure essentially in the explanation of most or all of what we do: in general, we would not act as we do if we did not have the desires we have. If this truism is correct, as truisms tend to be, then having a virtue must involve having certain characteristic desires, since otherwise having a virtue would not suffice to impart a distinctive and laudable shape to characteristic actions. Desires, then, are essential components of virtues; hence, we shall be able to understand what a virtue is only if we understand what a desire is. So it would be a serious obstacle to the formulation of an adequate virtue theory if the reigning philosophical conception of desire were badly amiss. I think that it is, and that we must retrieve a more adequate conception of desire if we are to understand the virtues of character. Until we do this, we shall lack an adequate conception of how the virtuous person can be motivated to act by the intrinsic goodness of other human beings and of certain ways of interacting with them.
Losing Touch with the Everyday: Love and Language in The Wild Duck
Authors: Moi Toril
Published: November 2023

A Doll’s House shows how Nora finds a way out of her idealist and melodramatic scenarios towards the everyday, dramatized onstage by having her change into her everyday dress and launch into the deliberately nonspectacular conversation that ends the play. In A Doll’s House, then, the everyday stands for the realm in which words in a conversation begin to make sense, where we can manage to see that language—or, more precisely, our use of language—expresses us. In this chapter I shall show that The Wild Duck explores the connection between language and the everyday further than any other Ibsen play.
Losing Touch with the Everyday: Love and Language in The Wild Duck
Authors: Moi Toril
Published: November 2023

The play is also packed with references to voice and expression, suffiocation and silence, to hearing and not hearing, to understanding and not understanding others. This tells us that the major concerns of Rosmersholm are human expression and its failures, how we can come to doubt the power of words in general, and within a relationship between a man and a woman in particular. In short, Rosmersholm is about linguistic skepticism, and its consequences for love.
The Origins of the Festivals, especially Delphi and the Pythia
Authors: Davies John
Published: November 2023

Some years ago, in the paper which became Davies 1994, I reviewed the controversy which had been aroused by Robertson’s paper of 1978 on the First Sacred War. He had argued that the story about it, placed in the 590s and 580s by a literary tradition which made its appearance only in the fourth century, was a complete and baseless invention of the 340s. While the processes of engaging with his and others’ arguments, of attempting to disentangle the layers of the source material, and of assessing its veracity, took the discourse some way towards a defensible Third Way between old-style credulity and fashionable deconstruction, they left a loose end and an unfinished agenda.
The Entire House is Full of Crowns: Hellenistic Agōnes and the Commemoration of Victory
Authors: Bremen Riet Van
Published: November 2023

But these apparent continuities should be set against the wider changes that were taking place in the course of the third century BC. The equestrian victories of Attalos and Diotimos were gained in a world in which the new kingdoms carved out of Alexander’s vast but short-lived empire were rapidly becoming the main centres of power and wealth, and the courts of the Ptolemaic, Antigonid, Attalid, and Seleukid kings developed as cultural and political alternatives to the polis on a scale not seen before.11 The main innovation of the Hellenistic period in terms of elite- and patronage-culture was precisely the formation of networks based on these courts, in effect the creation of a Graeco-Macedonian elite of philoi who were first and foremost attached to the kings they served.
Conclusion: The Prestige of the Games
Authors: Douglas Mary
Published: November 2023

The editors of this book have made a grand interdisciplinary gesture. It was a happy thought to put poetry and sport (in its widest sense) into the same frame, and in itself a bold idea to bring together classical scholars from all branches of the discipline to talk about the Panhellenic crown games and Pindar’s Odes celebrating the games’ victors. Academically speaking, it was also a postmodern gesture. The earlier (modern) idea used to be that sport is sport, a branch of play, a genre of its own, one which has much to say for the education and mental and bodily well-being of the individual performers, and something to do with school and national morale, but nothing else.
Black Africa
Authors: Patke Rajeev S
Published: November 2023

Contemporary African poetry remains implicated in the life of politics and the fate of nations with a fixity of concern not found in Asia or the Caribbean. The end of colonialism was followed in most African countries by decades of native misrule. For three generations, African poets have given voice to a wide range of experiences, always conscious that their use of English links them across regional boundaries, while they present the language with the challenge of dealing with the local in all its uniqueness, in circumstances ravaged by civil war, natural disasters, human greed, and political misrule.
The institutional and regulatory settings for occupational health and safety: an international survey
Authors: Hotopp Ulrike , Mendeloff John , Sinclair Sandra , Tompa Emile , Eltard, Dorte , Koeper Birgit , Clayton Alan
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents a survey of the institutional and regulatory context of occupational health and safety (OHS) systems in several jurisdictions. The intent of the survey is to provide readers with a sense of how the OHS context can vary from one jurisdiction to another and, hence, offer an appreciation of how different systems can affect workplace parties and other stakeholders in different ways. Key factors to keep in mind are the behavioural incentives created by a system, as well as its impact on outcomes, and the distribution of costs and consequences. These factors must be borne in mind when designing a study (some effects may be of more consequence in some jurisdictions than others), when comparing the results of evaluations done in different jurisdictions, or when assessing the implications of a study done in one jurisdiction for another. There is a significant diversity of policy environments even amongst jurisdictions having close geographical and cultural proximity. Given the importance of system incentives, it is good practice in the reporting of study results to clearly outline the OHS context in which the intervention was undertaken, and to highlight those aspects most relevant to behaviour, outcomes, and the distribution of costs and consequences in the jurisdiction(s) in question.
Kind of analysis and decision rule
Authors: Hoch Jeffrey S , Dewa Carolyn S
Published: November 2023

To advance and help to standardize the methods of economic evaluation in the occupational health and safety (OHS) field we describe the key principles of economic evaluation. We focus on two key considerations related to the evaluation of OHS interventions: the kind of analysis that should be done and the ways in which the results should be used to make decisions.
Adjusting for time preference and addressing uncertainty
Authors: Gnam William , Grignon, Michel , Dolinschi Roman
Published: November 2023

This chapter covers two topics: adjustment for inflation and time preference, and uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. The two topics are sometimes perceived as related because the discount rate used to adjust for time preference is a parameter commonly subjected to uncertainty and, hence, subjected to sensitivity analysis. However, the issues of time preference and uncertainty are actually distinct. Hence, each is given separate treatment here. We begin the chapter with a discussion of adjustment for inflation and time preference, and follow with uncertainty and sensitivity analysis.
Equity
Authors: Culyer Anthony J , Tompa Emile
Published: November 2023

A basic tenet of economics is that resources are scarce, so it is in the interest of individuals and societies to put them to their best uses. This is the notion underlying allocative efficiency—to get the most for the least. Economic evaluation is a tool to assist with achieving it. Invariably, it requires placing values on both the resources consumed and the consequences their use has produced in order to compare inputs and outputs within and across alternatives. Also inherent in the process is the need to compare and, where appropriate, aggregate costs and consequences across individuals and groups.
Parasites and sexual selection
Authors: David Patrice , Heeb Philipp
Published: November 2023

In numerous species, such as the peacock and the red deer, males differ morphologically and behaviourally from females. They are often bigger, more brightly coloured, and have more complex songs. Charles Darwin was the first to address the paradox of sexual dimorphism: why do males acquire traits that render them more detectable and appear to reduce their survival? These observations seemed to contradict his theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin 1859). To address this contradiction he invented the concept of sexual selection, defined as ‘the advantage which certain individuals have over other individuals of the same sex and species, in exclusive relation to reproduction’ (Darwin 1871, ch. VIII). Briefly, the extravagant traits of males would increase their reproductive success, thus compensating for their reduced survival. Research in this field has increased considerably in recent decades.
Health ecology: a new tool, the macroscope
Authors: Magny Guillaume Constantin de , Renaud François , Durand Patrick , Guégan Jean-François
Published: November 2023

Epidemiologists and parasitologists studying transmissible diseases tend to take an interest in direct causes, the visible modes of spread, and disease prevention. Usually, these disciplines show little interest in the physical, ecological, or evolutionary processes which occur on larger time and space scales. Epidemiologists and parasitologists have for a long time also considered the individual host as the only frame of reference for understanding the causes and consequences of infections. However, recent studies on the impact of global environmental changes and the dynamics of pathogens and their geographical distributions perfectly illustrate the relevance of large-scale studies for a better understanding of the persistence and dynamics of micro-organisms in host populations of humans, animals, or plants.
The Pursuit of Unhappiness
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

The pursuit of happiness is a defining theme of the modern era. But what if people aren't very good at it? This and related questions are explored in this book, the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of happiness in the contemporary psychological sense. In these pages, Dan Haybron argues that people are probably less effective at judging, and promoting, their own welfare than common belief has it. For the psychological dimensions of well-being, particularly our emotional lives, are far richer and more complex than we tend to realize. Knowing one's own interests is no trivial matter. As well, we tend to make a variety of systematic errors in the pursuit of happiness. We may need, then, to rethink traditional assumptions about human nature, the good life, and the good society. Thoroughly engaged with both philosophical and scientific work on happiness and well-being, this book will be a definitive resource for philosophers, social scientists, policy makers, and other students of human well-being.
What Do We Want from a Theory of Happiness?
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

Settling questions about the nature of happiness probably strikes more than a few philosophers as an exercise in futility. Indeed, there may be no question philosophers enjoy hearing less than “What do you mean by ‘happiness’?” Even once we get past the linguistic hurdles discussed in Chapter 2, we still lack any plausible way of telling a good theory of happiness from a bad one. As someone helpfully put it to me: how are we supposed to play this game?
Life Satisfaction
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

For as long as anyone can remember, the message from on high was generally some form of “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.” Or, like Job, you won’t. As far as the authorities were concerned, it didn’t much matter whether you liked it. The sages who advised us in the betterment of life accordingly tended to focus their efforts on how to bring ourselves to like, or at least stomach, the fetid stew that so often got heaped on our plates. Not so in the age of consumer sovereignty, where the grim creed of yore has slowly given way to a perkier theology of “How may I help you?” The authorities whom we once served now serve us—or so we are told—and our rapidly proliferating needs. Not even college professors can claim immunity to the imperatives of customer satisfaction, many of us having learned from forward-thinking administrators that our job is not to produce an enlightened citizenry but to satisfy our choosy young customers.
Happiness as Psychic Affirmation
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

The last chapter sketched a default version of the emotional state theory on which happiness consists in a person’s overall emotional condition. This in turn was understood as the sum of the individual’s moods and emotions. To be happy, on this view, is to have predominantly positive, versus negative, moods and emotions. We then filled out this view in certain ways, yielding a “three aspect” version of the emotional state theory on which happiness specifically involves states of attunement, engagement, and endorsement. This was seen as an articulation of a broader ideal of happiness as “psychic affirmation.” Here I want to fill out the view in further detail, clarifying both its “psychic” and “affirmation” aspects. We will accordingly focus on two issues: first, the fundamental distinctions in affect driving the inclusion of moods and emotions—and other states, we will see—versus other affects; and second, the “threshold problem”: how happy one has to be actually to count as happy, versus not. After addressing these and a few other matters, I will summarize the resulting account of happiness, contending that it is both intuitively plausible and answers well to our practical interests in happiness. Happiness is best understood along the lines of
Well-Being and Virtue
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

Part II centered on questions of psychology, specifically the character of happiness, in the long-term psychological sense distinguished in Chapter 2. The emotional state theory of happiness defended there raises doubts about liberal optimism’s Transparency assumption, since our emotional lives are surprisingly rich, and much harder to grasp than “smiley-face” stereotypes would suggest. But how important, really, is happiness? Answering this question requires that we turn to the theory of well-being.
Happiness, the Self, and Human Flourishing
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

Our excursion into Aristotelian approaches to well-being served several purposes, one being to counter a major source of doubts about the importance of happiness. At the same time, recognizing the considerable force of the Aristotelian position may soften support for the main alternative, the various forms of subjectivism. This is useful, since popular notions of the transparency of well-being, and hence personal authority in such matters, draw much strength from subjectivism. Finally, the approach to well-being that I want to develop here centers on an old idea most commonly associated with the Aristotelian paradigm, welfare eudaimonism: grounding well-being in some ideal of nature-fulfillment. Because contemporaries tend not to think of psychological states like happiness in such terms, our investigation of Aristotelian eudaimonism should help the reader to see the deep historical roots of the basic approach I will be defending. There is nothing exotic about it.
The Pursuit of Unhappiness
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

For most of the living world, the good life is mainly a matter of context. Given the right setting and a good dose of luck, most organisms tend to do well, or at least to succeed in their terms: that’s basically how they’re wired. Conversely, put a typical creature in the wrong setting and—good luck or no—it is lost, pretty much guaranteed a quick death. For perhaps the majority of life forms, almost every place on earth is “the wrong setting” (a fact that gives zookeepers no end of headaches). Not so, it seems, for Homo sapiens, a species so adaptable that its members can flourish just about anywhere, probably including space. This is not because they are hard to kill, like cockroaches and rats, but because they are smart. Though rather needy in purely physical terms, these tropical primates have a remarkable talent for engineering whatever environment they find themselves in to suit their purposes. They are “ecological engineers,” to use Kim Sterelny’s apt expression. Impressed by their seemingly boundless ingenuity, many of them, at least in the brief era leading up to the twenty-first century, have thought that their species largely transcends context. For its members really need
Happiness in Context
Authors: Haybron Daniel M
Published: November 2023

My father once watched a fisherman, a resident of a traditional island community often mocked by outsiders as backwards and primitive, construct a skiff approximately eighteen feet in length—cutting, shaping, and fitting the numerous pieces together to form a handsome, seaworthy craft. All by eye and memory, using hand tools only. This is an astonishing, but for such fishermen perfectly ordinary, feat requiring a degree of intelligence, discernment, and judgment far surpassing anything we see in other animals. There is nothing backwards about someone who can do that, and on that island there were not many stupid people (stupid people tended quickly to become dead people). Yet the fisherman’s knowledge was largely inexplicit and inarticulate; he could have said something of what he was doing, but much of what he knew about building that boat he “just knew.” So too was most of the other knowledge traditionally required to survive in the often harsh environment of that island: among many other things, how to build and maintain a home that won’t wash away in a hurricane or winter storm, how to repair your tools and machines, how to handle a boat in rough seas, how to read the sea and
Initial thoughts and potential advantages of regional anaesthesia under ultrasonographic guidance
Authors: Marhofer Peter
Published: November 2023

Since 1884, when Carl Koller described the first successful blockade of a peripheral nerve in Vienna, regional anaesthesia has become an important specialty for providing adequate perioperative pain control. Nevertheless, a close evaluation of significant advantages during the past decades is disappointing. The introduction of the most recent new local anaesthetic drug was roughly a decade ago, and the same situation could be presumed for additive substances.
Pearls and pitfalls
Authors: Marhofer Peter
Published: November 2023

The position of the anaesthesiologist relative to the patient should be ‘face-to-face’ with the ultrasound machine positioned lateral to the head of the patient (Figure 7.1). For approaches at the neck, the anaesthesiologist might wish to position themselves behind the head of the patient (Figure 7.2). The orientation of the probe should adhere to a ‘true image’ (i.e., left side of the probe = left side of the screen).
Neck blocks
Authors: Marhofer Peter
Published: November 2023

The cervical plexus is formed by the ventral rami of the spinal nerves C1–4. In this context, only the rami of nerves C2–4 are of interest for regional anaesthetic purposes. Each nerve (except the first) divides into an ascending and descending branch to form three communicating loops. The cervical plexus is located at the level of the first four cervical vertebrae, deep beneath the internal jugular vein and anterior to the levator scapulae and middle scalene muscles. The cervical plexus is covered by the sternocleidomastoideus muscle. The branches of the cervical plexus can be classified as either deep or superficial.
Upper extremity blocks
Authors: Marhofer Peter
Published: November 2023

The brachial plexus is formed by the ventral rami of the spinal nerves C5–Th1. In general, supraclavicular and infraclavicular parts are described. The ventral rami leave the intervertebral foramina posterior to the vertebral artery and, after a short distance in the scalenovertebral triangle (bordered by the longus colli muscle medially, the anterior scalenus muscle laterally, and the dome of the pleura inferiorly), are situated between the anterior and middle scalene muscles – the interscalene space. The first branches are the dorsal scapular and thoracic longus nerves, both of which pierce the middle scalenus muscle to take a dorsolateral course. Subsequently, the roots form a superior (C5/C6), intermediate (C7), and inferior (C8/T1) trunk.
Truncal blocks
Authors: Marhofer Peter
Published: November 2023

Truncal blocks are well established regional anaesthetic techniques in the abdominal region, providing pain relief by blocking the sensory end branches of the ventral rami Th7–12 and L1–2. Historically, blind techniques relying on tactile sensation (‘scratching sensations’ or ‘palpable gives’) to identify the correct needle position have been the standard method for these nerve blocks. These simple but often forgotten blocks can be divided into three techniques: