bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Commission as the Watchdog of EU Law
Authors: Patrin Maria
Published: January 2024

This chapter brings together two case studies in the field of competition policy and infringement proceedings. Decisions on infringements and competition are rooted in the impartial status of the Commission as the Guardian of the Treaties and assign a crucial role to the expertise of the Directorate-Generals and to the Legal Service. The case study on the 2018 Commission’s decision on Google’s Android mobile devices shows that competition forms an area of separate responsibility, for which the competition commissioner and Directorate-General for Competition are in charge, which partially derogate to full collegiality. In infringements, the Legal Service plays a dominant role. Yet, following an increased use of infringements for political purposes, control by the college of commissioners has grown recently. There, collegiality plays an important role, shielding the Commission’s exercise of political discretion, as illustrated by the 2015 infringement proceedings against Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic on relocation of asylum-seekers.
Conclusions
Authors: Patrin Maria
Published: January 2024

The concluding chapter summarizes the key findings of the book and offers some general reflections on the broader implications of collegiality for the Commission’s role in the EU institutional setting. The chapter argues that collegiality holds a special status in the Commission because the EU displays specific features as a legalized system of formal rules and institutional practices. It also highlights how the principle of collegiality interacts with other key principles, such as efficiency, transparency, and legitimacy. Ultimately, the conclusions address the normative question of whether collegiality can still be of use in the current EU institutional setting against the background of the increasing functional diversification that has occurred in the Commission.
The Realm
Authors: Sax William S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on the realm of Raja Karna, a divine king in the Western Himalaya. This realm can be regarded as janapada or “land and people”, the second of Kautilya’s “seven limbs of the kingdom.” The chapter shows how, just as in the classic formulations of Indian political theory, the moral condition of the population effects “natural” processes, and vice versa. It thus contributes to the ongoing efforts of anthropologists and others to rethink the classical Western opposition of “nature” and “culture.” The argument is illustrated by means of several detailed ethnographic examples, including collective temple repair, a description and analysis of the palanquin journeys that are so prominent in the Western Himalaya, and the legendary account of a conflict between Raja Karan and Mahasu, the Western Himalaya’s most powerful “divine king.”
The Minister and the Army
Authors: Sax William S.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 6 deals with two more “limbs” of the classical Indian state: the minister and the army. It describes what happened when there was a serious dispute between, on the one hand, the human vazir who manages the affairs of the divine king, and on the other hand the warriors of Dargan Village upon whom the vazir relies. This dispute shook Karna’s world to its very foundations, and the author was present when the vazir attempted to “repair” the damage over the course of a year. The ethnographic description of this process is very detailed, and this chapter is the centerpiece of the book.
Religious Fictionalism
Authors: Oppy Graham
Published: January 2024

This chapter begins with simple accounts of religious error theory and fictionalism. It then provides more complex accounts of religious fictionalism and religion, in particular drawing a distinction between original and parasitic religious fictionalism. According to the former, fictionalism is proposed to capture the attitude of everyone who participates in a religion; according to the latter, it is proposed to capture the attitude of only some participants, who gain benefits of participation only if there are others who are sincere believers. The author argues that original religious fictionalism is untenable: the goods that are plausibly delivered by religion depend on its being believed. Parasitic religious fictionalism is also found to be untenable. Different accounts of the fictionalist proposal are canvassed and criticized. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some objections that might be raised against the case that the author has presented.
The Pretensions of Religious Fictionalism
Authors: Armour-Garb Bradley , Kroon Frederick
Published: January 2024

There is a tendency to let fictionalism become a procrustean bed for any view that allows the combination of a more or less uncritical participation in a discourse and its practices with resistance to a fully literal construal of its claims. The authors of this chapter consider the tendency problematic, and argue that its faults are found in some influential recent accounts of religious fictionalism. They consider one strand of religious fictionalism that centers on the attitudes of users of religious discourse rather than the discourse itself, and argue that such an approach makes it too easy to be a religious fictionalist. On the other hand, they claim that a religious fictionalism that focuses on the secular (e.g., moral) benefits of engagement in the discourse of religion is susceptible to collapse, and thus makes it too hard to be a religious fictionalist.
Revolutionary Moral Fictionalism and the Problem of Imaginative Failure
Authors: Brock Stuart
Published: January 2024

The so-called “problem of imaginative resistance” is that it is very often extremely difficult, or even impossible, to enter imaginatively into scenarios where the moral status of things is markedly different from what we believe them to be. We have no trouble pretending that vampires exist, for example, but struggle to pretend that torturing innocent people for sadistic pleasure is a morally upstanding pastime. This poses a problem for the revolutionary moral fictionalist, who recommends that we pretend that things have a moral status that we believe they do not have. Different explanations of moral imaginative resistance/failure are canvassed, each of which leaves the moral fictionalist facing obstacles. Religious fictionalism, by contrast, faces no comparable challenge.
Yes to Moral Fictionalism; No to Religious Fictionalism
Authors: Joyce Richard
Published: January 2024

A version of moral fictionalism is presented and defended, modeled on Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” and Mill’s solution to the paradox of happiness. The key observation is that sometimes, in order to achieve our goals, we must come at them obliquely—practicing “self-distraction.” This, it is argued, is the case with our Humean values: “in order to get them, one must forget them” (as Sidgwick put it). More specifically, in order to satisfy these non-moral goals we must dress them in a Kantian moral veneer, which renders our judgments false but also more practically efficacious. After this version of moral fictionalism is defended, the question is posed whether similar arguments might support religious fictionalism. Kant’s “moral hazard argument” for religious fictionalism is discussed. Ultimately, it is argued that ambitious religious fictionalism faces challenges that don’t arise for a comparably ambitious moral fictionalism.
Brexit and the Northern Ireland Constitution
Authors: Whitten Lisa Claire
Published: January 2024

This book considers the intersection of two processes: the complex and constitutional process of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union—Brexit—and the steady yet fragile development of the Northern Ireland constitution deriving, primarily, from the Belfast ‘Good Friday’ Agreement of 1998. Interdisciplinary in approach, the analysis draws on legal and political theory to develop a novel framework for assessing the progressive impact of Brexit on the Northern Ireland constitution based on systematic definitions of both. This approach elucidates dynamics and implications not yet considered in the otherwise extensive debates on Brexit and Northern Ireland. Based on detailed analysis of the Brexit process, it is argued that its impact on the constitution of Northern Ireland has been profound. Fundamentally, Brexit changed the political and legal environment in which the Northern Ireland constitution had existed for over twenty years. Embracing ‘constructive ambiguity’, the 1998 Agreement recognises and accommodates the concerns of both Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland; it did not therefore solve the constitutional conflict but rather allowed it to be managed differently through an innovative system of multi-levelled governance: within Northern Ireland (power-sharing devolution), on the island of Ireland (North–South cooperation), and between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland (East–West cooperation), all underpinned by a multifaceted principle of constitutional, popular, and cross-community consent. By forcing a paradigmatic shift in the way that the architecture established by the 1998 Agreement operates, Brexit disrupted the ‘constructively ambiguous’ compromise it represents. Completed two years after the legal implementation of UK withdrawal from the EU, the book concludes by considering the potential longer-term constitutional repercussions of Brexit both within and beyond Northern Ireland’s recently (in)famous borders.
Gravity at the International Criminal Court
Authors: Urs Priya
Published: January 2024

The gravity of a crime or case features in various international and national legal frameworks for the investigation and prosecution of international crimes. At the International Criminal Court, ‘sufficient gravity’ is a requirement for the admissibility of a case specified in Article 17(1)(d) of the Rome Statute. The open-textured nature of the provision leaves open to question the manner of its application and, ultimately, the purpose of the gravity criterion in the context of the Prosecutor’s decisions whether to investigate and whether to prosecute. Set against the backdrop of ongoing debates as to how to justify selective investigations and prosecutions at the Court, this book addresses the question of how the gravity criterion is to be applied in the context of the Prosecutor’s respective decisions whether to investigate and to prosecute. By proposing a more coherent and persuasive application of the criterion than that reflected in the Court’s twenty years of practice, it argues that the purpose of the gravity criterion in this context is the allocation of limited investigative and prosecutorial resources. First, identifying appropriate indicators of gravity, the book contends that the application of Article 17(1)(d) requires a subjective assessment that involves the exercise of discretion. Second, by clarifying the respective roles of the Prosecutor and the Pre-Trial Chambers of the Court in the assessment of gravity in different contexts, it argues in favour of wide prosecutorial discretion in the making of this assessment compared with the limited powers of judicial oversight conferred on the Pre-Trial Chamber.
The dilemmas of the regional parties in Jharkhand
Authors: Basu Ipshita
Published: January 2024

Chapter 4 zooms in on the regional parties of Jharkhand and their dilemmas in balancing the representation of marginalized ethnic groups with the need to expand their ethnic social base across the region. While a politics of compromise has dictated their choices, it is also true that—in response to the instrumental and strategic application of Adivasi identity by the Hindu right—regional parties have revived expressive partisanship so that it achieves both political and social capital for those social groups who strongly identify as Adivasi. While the chapter outlines the emergence of the three main regional parties in Jharkhand, it focuses specifically on the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) to explain that the rise, fall, and resurgence of the party must be seen in the context of how those Indigenous subaltern movements that propelled groups-based rights claims to change extant structures of subordination have been dealt with through different phases of Indian democracy.
Financing Economic and Social Infrastructure
Authors: Pratap Kumar V , Gupta Manshi
Published: January 2024

Sectoral analysis of private participation in infrastructure shows that most private investment has gone into economic infrastructure (like telecom, power, transport) as compared to social infrastructure (like water supply, health, education). Social infrastructure in India is currently suffering from resource crunch as well as abysmal levels of efficiency. Therefore, the need for private investment may perhaps be greater in these sectors, both in terms of resource augmentation and efficiency improvement. However, the projects in social sectors tend to be small (e.g. the cost of a primary school is much less compared to a power plant), and there may be issues in imposing full-cost-recovery user fees given that many such services (like water supply and primary education) are merit goods. Therefore, they are much less attractive to the private sector. The chapter will focus on challenges in financing social infrastructure and the strategies to overcome them. The Manila Water Company example for water supply, and the numerous education and health PPP projects in Australia and the United Kingdom show that private participation in social infrastructure is possible for mutual benefit to the private and public sectors. Impact investment, importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) norms, social stock exchange, and so on will also play a part in popularizing private investment in social infrastructure.
Generic Issues for Sustainable Infrastructure Financing—Sanctity of Contracts and Autonomous Regulation of Infrastructure
Authors: Pratap Kumar V , Gupta Manshi
Published: January 2024

Infrastructure projects require huge investments, which are in the nature of sunk costs, with returns that are spread over decades. As such, the sanctity of contracts needs to be upheld as the private sector typically uses these contracts to model their returns and submit bids accordingly. This chapter looks at one case study (the Hyderabad Metro Rail Project) to illustrate the point about upholding sanctity of contracts for sustainable financing of infrastructure projects. Because of the characteristics of infrastructure, autonomous tariff regulation is also very important for sustainable financing of infrastructure projects. If there is regulatory capture, either by the public or the private sector, the returns to infrastructure projects are affected, including the regulatory risk and its impact on the cost of capital. In this context, the chapter examines infrastructure regulation in India to evaluate whether some of the decisions taken by infrastructure regulators are increasing regulatory risk. This discussion leads to a case for other regulatory options like ‘regulation by contract’ and multi-sectoral regulators, rather than creating an independent sectoral regulator for each sector opened up for private participation.
Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on Infrastructure and Its Financing
Authors: Pratap Kumar V , Gupta Manshi
Published: January 2024

The Covid-19 pandemic is a black swan event and has had a major impact on infrastructure and its financing. The impact on infrastructure has been both from the demand and the supply side. In terms of its treatment, the Covid-19 pandemic is a non-political force majeure event in the Indian road sector’s Model Concession Agreement and the relief provided is an extension of the concession period by the force majeure period. To address the issue of the concessionaire’s liquidity during this period, the country’s central bank (Reserve Bank of India) has put in place a moratorium period for loan repayment up to August 2020. However, bank financing was already grappling with non-performing assets of 8.5 per cent of their portfolio, which was expected to go up because of the Covid-19 pandemic (however, the actual numbers are much lower), with consequent impact on bank financing of infrastructure. Implementation of India’s first National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP, April 2020) has been impacted adversely at least in the first two years (financial years 2020 and 2021) as public-sector resources were constrained because of the high-priority expenditures associated with the pandemic and private-sector investments suffered from increased risk. However, since the NIP is a six-year infrastructure development plan, the slack in the first two years may be covered in the later years given the infrastructure green shoots that have appeared even in the midst of the pandemic.
How Can You Have Law Without Lawyers?
Authors: Wendel W. Bradley
Published: January 2024

Lon Fuller’s parable of King Rex, which begins The Morality of Law, is intended to show how governing through law differs in morally significant ways from governing by top-down commands. But there is a key omission from Fuller’s story: There are no lawyers in Rex’s kingdom. Rex aimed to make law, which affects the practical reasoning of citizens. In order to do this, it is necessary for citizens to grasp the way in which the law has an impact on what they have reason to do. In a legalized society, the co-deliberation about what we owe to each other will frequently make reference to what the law permits or requires. Participating in a social practice of co-deliberation requires the assistance of experts in the law. Thus, lawyers do not perform merely an epistemic function but in fact constitute the relevant social practice along with rulers and citizens.
Private Law Theory from an Empirical Perspective
Authors: Tobia Kevin
Published: January 2024

One of private law theory’s longstanding projects is the analysis of (private law’s) concepts. The New Private Law has renewed interest in that project, which includes the careful comparison of legal concepts to similar ordinary ones. Insofar as legal theorists may not know—from the armchair—every feature of the relevant ordinary concepts, empirical research about those concepts can offer new insights for private law theory. This chapter considers, as an example, recent research in experimental jurisprudence, including work on comparative private law theory. Recent multi-country and multi-linguistic empirical research has examined concepts of legal interest, including intent and reasonableness. These studies reveal similarities and differences among citizens of varied legal systems, languages, and cultures, raising new possibilities and questions for private law theory.
Muslim Historical Genre and Muslims in Historical Genre
Authors: Khatun Nadira
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, the recent genre of Historical films represents Muslim rulers through the prism of aggressive Hindu nationalist discourse. The chapter discusses and critically look at the sharp distinction between representing Muslims in the Historical genre and in the Muslim Historical genre. Most of the Muslim Historical films in the post-Independence period (the 1950s and 1960s)—the so-called Nehruvian era—were based on the secular Mughal rulers and focused on the exoticism of those rulers. The films in this genre and the participants of my empirical study hint that Muslims were positively stereotyped at this time. Contemporary historical films are inspired by iconic Muslim historical figures, myths, and events to create ‘enemy images’ of ‘outsiders’ who have been marked with specific ‘political signs’. This chapter argues that by adopting an anti-Islamic stance, contemporary historical films in Bollywood have become a valuable tool for propagating the idea of nationalism. It shows how the most recent Bollywood films such as Panipat (2019), Kesari (2019), and Tanhaji (2020) are suitably aligned with the saffronized version of historical narratives. This chapter critically investigate the representation of Muslims in historical cinematic text in two categories: (1) Muslim Historical films from the 1950s to 2000s and (2) Muslims in Historical films from 2011 to 2019.
Origen of Alexandria and the Theology of the Holy Spirit
Authors: Miller Micah M.
Published: January 2024

Origen of Alexandria and the Theology of the Holy Spirit offers a comprehensive study of Origen’s pneumatology. In its examination of the Spirit’s identity and activity, the study reads Origen in his context and surveys his entire corpus. It shows that Origen grounds his pneumatology in Scripture and uses Jewish, philosophical, and earlier Christian teachings in exegeting the passages he believes pertain to the Holy Spirit. The study finds that Origen considers the Holy Spirit to be dependent on the Father and Son but above all other beings, a relationship which serves as the basis for Origen’s belief that the Spirit’s activities are a common operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit, then, plays an integral role in the salvation of the human person. In addition to providing an understanding of Origen’s pneumatology, the study also provides a fresh perspective of his trinitarian thought.
The Holy Spirit and the Salvation of the Human Person
Authors: Miller Micah M.
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 considers the Holy Spirit’s role in the salvation of the human person. The chapter discusses the Spirit’s cooperation in Christ’s ministry, a relationship that serves as a model for and the means of the Spirit’s relationship with believers. The chapter also considers the Spirit’s role in the life of believers, both how the Spirit comes to believers and what the Spirit’s role in the believer is. Through an analysis of Origen’s language, the chapter argues that the Spirit is present in each believer, a presence that entails the participation in not only the Holy Spirit, but also the Father and the Son. Alongside the Father and Son, then, the Holy Spirit plays an integral part in the salvation of the human person.
Buck-Passing and the Value of a Person
Authors: Ebels-Duggan Kyla
Published: January 2024

Some philosophers hold that value can be reduced to reasons: to say that something is valuable is just to say that there are reasons to respond to it in certain ways. T.M. Scanlon’s buck-passing account of value is a leading example of this sort of view. In the important case of the value of a person, Scanlon suggests that the relevant reasons are moral reasons. This paper argues that the value of a person cannot be understood in this reductive way. Scanlon’s approach cannot account for the value that we see in those we love, but neither can it account for the value to which we respond with moral respect. Widening the range of reasons to include reasons for attitudes does not solve the problem. The paper concludes that the value of a person is more fundamental than the reasons that we have to treat and regard her in various ways.
Pro Tanto Rights and the Duty to Save the Greater Number
Authors: Kiesewetter Benjamin
Published: January 2024

This chapter has two aims. The first is to present and defend a new argument for rights contributionism—the view that the notion of a moral claim-right is a contributory (or pro tanto) rather than overall normative notion. The argument is an inference to the best explanation: it is argued that (i) there are contributory moral factors that contrast with standard moral reasons by way of having a number of formal properties that are characteristic of rights, even though they can be overridden, and (ii) that this is best explained by a view that takes these factors to correlate with rights. The second aim is to show that the truth of rights contributionism matters for normative ethics. More specifically, it is argued that rights contributionism clears the way for deontologists to justify the pre-theoretically plausible verdict that we have a duty to save the greater number in so-called Taurek scenarios—scenarios in which we have to choose between saving either a greater or a smaller number of different people. The chapter offers a novel and distinctively deontological explanation of this verdict that is based on the assumption that everyone has a pro tanto right to be saved in a Taurek scenario.
What Does Virtue Have to Do with Consequences?
Authors: Fileva Iskra
Published: January 2024

Consider the question of what makes a disposition a virtue. The intuitive answer would appeal to the inner motivational state associated with the disposition rather than its effects. You would be virtuous if you are trying to help even if, unbeknownst to you, the devil keeps thwarting your intentions, and you fail every time. Call this the motivationalist intuition. Now consider another question: What makes a disposition a good candidate for inculcation? Why do we encourage helpfulness and kindness rather than their opposites? Our intuition now involves real world consequences rather than motivation: Helpfulness is a trait worth encouraging and deserves the label “virtue,” because it tends to produce good, not because of the way it’s motivated. Call this latter the consequentialist intuition. This is precisely the intuition Hume appeals to in the famous passage about the self-flagellating monk: Hume does not criticize the monk’s motive but rather, argues that self-abnegation is not a virtue however it may be motivated. There is tension between the consequentialist and the motivationalist intuitions. The purpose of this chapter is to resolve the tension. The solution will invoke a key distinction between virtuous and merely permissible dispositions.
The Comparative Syntax of Korean and Japanese
Authors: Sato Yutaka , Cho Sungdai
Published: January 2024

This work provides a detailed survey of Korean/Japanese linguistics from a comparative perspective and attempts to take the reader through most of the major issues in Korean/Japanese linguistics in a generative grammar way. The two languages exhibit remarkably similar morpho-syntactic features, e.g., similar sets of particles for specific linguistic functions and similar patterns of relativization (pertaining to a syntactic issue of movement vs in-situ operation for realization). Particularly, this work also introduces often overlooked aspects of these languages, i.e., how they behave differently in constructions with a genitive marker, sentence negation, multiple occurrences of Negative Polarity Items, formation of causatives, ranges of passivization, and other morpho-syntactic constructions. This work also depicts such topics related to pragmatics and sociolinguistics as differences between Korean and Japanese in perception and realization of ‘givenness’ as a topic marker and the influence of relationships of power and distance on the use of honorifics. Before the discussion of these morpho-syntactic issues, it illustrates the phonological systems of the two languages and refers to phonological issues such as the status of the obstruent series in a manner useful and comprehensible to a student conversant with the basics of phonological description. In addition, this work refers to the typological perspectives of the two languages in relation to the surrounding languages (e.g. Ainu, Chinese, and Altaic languages) and socio-cultural and historical backgrounds regarding the adoption and adaptation of a script (e.g., Chinese characters for writing).
The Concertation Impulse in World Politics
Authors: Cooper Andrew F.
Published: January 2024

This book unravels the centrality of contestation over international institutions under the shadow of crisis. Breaking with the widely accepted image in the mainstream, US-centric literature of an advance of global governance supported by pillars of institutionalized formality, the book points to the retention of a habitual impulse towards concertation related to informal institutionalism. The focus on the durability of a concertation impulse challenges common assumptions about change and continuity with special reference to the debate over fundamental institutions in world politics. With the mainstream institutionalist international relations (IR) literature situated as the scholarly foil, the book relies for conceptual guidance on the recovery of a valuable component in the intellectual contribution of Hedley Bull. If the overarching theme of this book is to expose the core defect of institutionalist IR analysis by its constricted neglect of the concert model, however, the subsidiary aim is to examine forensically an extended array of basic gaps, and so refine and accent our understanding of the context and content of institutional design in world politics. Operationally, the work underscores the striking—and unanticipated—persistence of an organizational variant with origins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As highlighted by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, even when the supply falls short, some demand for stratified concertation persists. This imbalance becomes more pronounced when the concertation impulse separates from apex plurilateral summitry as illustrated by the Group of Twenty (G20) to challenger variants of informality: whether animated by Trump’s disruptive populism or by the tensions in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) between a solidarity concert model and a looser construct.
Keeping the Peace in the Village
Authors: Forster Marc R.
Published: January 2024

This book examines the state formation in Germany from the perspective of social practice at the local level in the century after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, 1650–1750. Based on extensive archival research in local court records from four small territories in Southwest Germany, the study demonstrates the active role rural people took in shaping how they were governed. Rural society was of course riddled with conflicts of all kinds, yet people consistently sought to settle disputes and bring peace to their communities. In this effort, people turned increasingly to the law courts provided by their rulers, using them to strengthen existing methods of settling conflicts. The consequence of this process was popular support for the small states that provided those legal services. The local court records that underpin this study provide many examples of conflict and peacekeeping. The analysis of these sources shows real people, women and men, interacting in particular spaces. Conflicts of all kinds appear in the sources, especially honor conflicts sparked by verbal insults, but also drunken brawls, sexual assaults, family disputes, and routine fist fights. An analysis of the gender dynamics of conflicts, as well as an examination of the places and spaces where disputes occurred, deepens our understanding of the dynamics of rural society. The argument for state formation from below and the dense analysis of life in villages are the unique characteristics and mutually reinforcing hallmarks of this study.
The Honor of Peasants
Authors: Forster Marc R.
Published: January 2024

Almost every dispute involving insulting language and physical violence was construed as an attack on someone’s honor. At the same time, such honor conflicts often resulted from a pre-existing conflict or set of issues, a dispute over property or a debt, political divisions in the community, or contested social interactions and sexual relations. This chapter focuses on the central place of ideas of honor in rural society and how honor disputes were increasingly adjudicated in law courts. Most honor disputes began with insults (most often “scoundrel and thief” for men and “whore and witch” for women) and insults often led to violence or to slander suits in court. The chapter includes close readings of a number of cases, teasing out the meaning of language and actions in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the importance of honor. Importantly, honor was not just a possession of men with property. Poor people, including poor women, servants, apprentices, and farm laborers, also defended their honor, often in court and even against their employers and their more powerful neighbors.
Social Discipline and the State Formation from Below
Authors: Forster Marc R.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the interplay of “state formation from below” and the efforts of state authorities to discipline the population. Since the “states” in Southwest Germany were small and lightly governed, top-down “state-building” was a modest endeavor, aimed primarily at enforcing public obedience to the authorities and controlling the poor, migrants, and the youth. One aspect of this “social discipline” was the regulation of sexuality. In this area, servants, especially female servants, and poor people were harshly punished for sexual activity outside of marriage, while children of propertied farmers were allowed to practice various forms of “pre-marital intimacy.” The lower courts were centrally important to the process of state formation that did occur. First, the population came to use the courts more often in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Secondly, the courts did not function primarily as tools of the state, but rather as part of a more complex system of conflict resolution on the one hand, and as a vehicle for communication between the authorities and local communities on the other. Thirdly, these interactions between the population and the state were most often routine, pragmatic, and reasonably cooperative.
The Nature of Christian Doctrine
Authors: McGrath Alister E.
Published: January 2024

This work is a critical study of the historical development of Christian doctrine, focusing especially on the period of the early church, and an assessment of the functions of doctrine. It challenges and corrects some of the theories of doctrine set out in George Lindbeck’s still-influential Nature of Doctrine (1984), particularly its ‘cognitive-linguistic’ model of doctrine, and offers a richer and more reliable account of the nature and functions of doctrine based on a close reading of the Christian tradition. This study notes the important parallels between the development of Christian doctrine on the one hand, and scientific theories on the other, using this to correct the influential account of the relation of heresy and orthodoxy developed by Walter Bauer. In place of Bauer’s account of the suppression of early orthodoxies, this study argues that multiple doctrinal formulations were proposed for discussion, only becoming ‘orthodox’ as a result of a consensual assessment within the church. The work also explores the way in which Christian doctrines can be seen as both ontological disclosures and epistemic frameworks, affirming the coherence of Christian doctrine.
On the Origins of Christian Doctrine
Authors: McGrath Alister E.
Published: January 2024

This chapter opens by considering the distinction between ‘doctrine’, ‘dogma’, and ‘theology’. It then moves on to explore the historical origins of Christian doctrine in the early church, in response to a ‘paradigm shift’ caused by the radical novelty of Jesus Christ, who could not be convincingly accommodated within the inherited conceptual categories of Judaism. This led early Christian theologians to develop new ways of reading the Hebrew Bible (such as Melito of Sardis’s typological exegesis) which allowed the continuities and discontinuities between Christianity and Judaism to be appreciated. Particular attention is paid to the way in which doctrine was seen as enabling a new way of seeing things, often linked with the notion of metanoia, understood not primarily as ‘repentance’ but rather as a transformation of understanding and vision.
Theorizing the Identity of Christ
Authors: McGrath Alister E.
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the period of early Christian doctrine developed as analogous to a ‘theological laboratory’, in which various doctrinal formulations were proposed and assessed over time in terms of their capacity to offer a coherent account of the apostolic teaching and practices of the church. Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘Best Account’ is applied to illuminate some aspects of this process of development. The parallels with the modern scientific notion of ‘inference to the best explanation’ is explored, and used to challenge Walter Bauer’s influential account of the relation of heresy and orthodoxy in the early church. In place of Bauer’s account of the suppression of early orthodoxies, this study argues that multiple doctrinal formulations were proposed for discussion and possible reception, only becoming ‘orthodox’ as a result of a consensual assessment within the church. The chapter then considers Athanasius of Alexandria’s development of the concept of incarnation as the ‘best explanation’ of the witness of the New Testament to the identity and significance of Christ, and the criteria of assessment that he appears to have used in this process.
The Three Worlds of Christian Doctrine
Authors: McGrath Alister E.
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on the nature of doctrine, noting its theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects, while setting out a theoretical framework that enables these to be seen as different aspects of the same thing. Karl Popper’s famous concept of the ‘Three Worlds’ is used as a framework for affirming and exploring this complex unity of Christian doctrine. Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘Articulation’ is used to make the point that doctrine is a verbal expression of something that itself lies beyond words. Other topics considered in this chapter include the problem of abstraction in doctrine; the ways in which doctrine can be interpreted affectively (as in the case of the poetry of George Herbert), and the objective and subjective aspects of the doctrine of the incarnation.
Doctrine
Authors: McGrath Alister E.
Published: January 2024

This chapter deals with the ontic and epistemic aspects of doctrine, which has important parallels with the development of scientific theories. It explores how Christian doctrine can be seen both as an ontological disclosure, allowing theological reality to be seen in a new way, and as a coordinating framework which holds together multiple aspects of a greater whole. There are clear parallels here with ontic and epistemic approaches to scientific explanation, often expressed in terms of ‘realist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to reality. After considering how ontic and epistemic approaches are developed in the natural sciences, the chapter explores how two important Christian doctrines—the incarnation and Trinity—can be seen as both securing ontological disclosure and as offering a coordinating framework for a complex reality.
Pain
Authors: Carruthers Peter
Published: January 2024

The debates among the intrinsic-feeling, value-representing, and imperative accounts of valence considered in Chapters 5 and 6 also play out (albeit somewhat differently) in theories of the nature of sensory pain. Indeed, pain (and to a lesser extent other sensory pleasures and displeasures) has been thought to provide a decisive counter-example to representational theories of consciousness, thus purporting to under-cut one of the arguments favoring representational accounts of valence. Moreover, one major objection to value-representing theories of pain is that pain and painfulness seem to lack correctness conditions. To feel pain is to be in pain. There seems to be no possibility of error. Even phantom-limb pain is real pain. It has also been objected that awareness of pain is not transparent in the manner required by the value-representing account, and that the latter cannot explain the reason-giving nature of painful experiences. This chapter confronts these objections, while at the same time defending a value-representing account of painfulness.
Moral Motivation
Authors: Carruthers Peter
Published: January 2024

This final chapter develops the value-representing theory of valence (pleasure and displeasure) into an account of moral motivation, looking especially at the question of how much of moral motivation (if any) is “built in” (innate), as opposed to being culturally constructed via processes of conditioning and affective learning. With hedonism and egoism having been refuted over the course of the previous chapters, the task in this one is to consider whether or not there are human-specific innate foundations for prosociality and altruism, and for motivation by moral norms. The chapter also discusses evidence of an innate sense of fairness, as well as for innate expectations about social groups. Evidence for these claims is reviewed and discussed, focusing especially on evidence of the very early emergence of altruism and norm-based thinking and evaluation in early infancy. Finally, before summarizing the main argument of the book, the sense in which the account of motivation provided here is a kind of Humeanism is discussed.
The Foundations of Kant’s Mature Moral Philosophy in the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: January 2024

This chapter expounds the central doctrines and arguments of Kant’s two foundational works in moral philosophy from the 1780s. The analysis of Kant’s several formulations of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork shows that the Formula of Humanity, which is the ground of the Formula of Universal Law and leads to the Formula of the Empire of Ends, is Kant’s new way of expressing the value of the maximal yet equal freedom of all to set their own ends. Kant’s transcendental idealist defense of freedom of the will, which would lead to the objection that he cannot explain free but contra-rational and therefore immoral action, is examined next. Then Kant’s account of the feeling of respect and its role in the motivation of morally worthy action is examined. The chapter concludes with consideration of Kant’s conception of the highest good, which adds a concern for happiness back into his conception of morality, and his “postulates” of personal immortality and the existence of God as conditions of the possibility of the highest good.
Schelling
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s response to Kant in his earlier System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and later Essay on the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). The first work, still under the influence of Fichte, describes consciousness’s construction of its representation of nature and then of itself, thus of self-consciousness, and argues that consciousness of having a will is a necessary condition for distinguishing between oneself and objects. Schelling argues further that the experience of resistance is necessary to have consciousness of a will. In this way, he attempts to provide a deduction of the phenomenology of the categorical imperative, namely that we experience the moral law as a command and constraint, that he felt Kant took for granted. In the essay on Human Freedom, he argued that we have to posit the possibility of our own evil in order to distinguish ourselves from God, thus attempting to give an a priori argument for the necessity of radical evil in place of Kant’s merely empirical recognition of the ubiquity of evil.
Nietzsche’s Transvaluation of Kantian Values
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: January 2024

Friedrich Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values” in his works from The Birth of Tragedy to The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil seems to reject the rationalism of Socrates as well as Kant and Kant’s conviction that there is a single, rational moral law, valid for all human beings, and indeed for all rational beings. Nietzsche’s early work was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, and he thought of rationality as a thin veneer over a fundamentally irrational reality, and it is not clear however well he ever knew Kant’s own work. But his conception of the “noble” way of life is not so different from Kant’s ideal of human beings getting to set their own ends freely, although he never shared Kant’s concern that everyone has an equal right to live a noble life.
Combining Kant and Consequentialism
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: January 2024

A series of philosophers including Richard Hare, Kurt Baier, Marcus Singer, David Cummiskey, and Derek Parfit, have attempted to find common ground between Kantianism and utilitarianism, or more broadly what is now called (after Elizabeth Anscombe) consequentialism. On the basis of his analysis of moral language, Hare advocated what he called “universal prescriptivism,” which sounds Kantian, but also argued that what anyone would prescribe for everyone is a form of utilitarianism. Baier’s “moral point of view” requires everyone to override self-interest in favor of universally acceptable reasons, but finds the content of the latter in what is required to preserve human society. Singer argued for a Kant-inspired “generalization” principle that “what is right (or wrong) for one person must be right (or wrong) for any similar person in similar circumstances,” but also argued that we could determine what would satisfy this constraint by considering the “desirability” of the consequences of proposed actions. Cummiskey stayed closer to Kant in presenting a consequentialist analysis of the implications of the Formula of Humanity. Finally, Parfit argued that utilitarianism best stated the content that would be yielded either by a Kantian universalization procedure or by T. M. Scanlon’s “contractualist” principle that what is right is what no one could reasonably reject.
Kantian Constructivism I
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: January 2024

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls derived two principles of justice, a principle of maximally equal liberties and a principle of equality of opportunity, from an “original position” for agreement upon principles governed by a “veil of ignorance” that operationalizes a “Kantian interpretation” of citizens as desiring to express their nature as “free and equal” to each other. He thus erected his own liberal political philosophy on what he recognized as the most fundamental concept of Kant’s moral philosophy. He regarded his approach as “constructivist,” for the principles of justice are not somehow given or intuited but are constructed by a procedure that begins with a Kantian conception of the true nature of persons. In later work he introduced the idea of “Kantian constructivism” as a more general approach to moral philosophy, but in his lectures on Kant’s moral philosophy he made it clear that the underlying conceptions of persons as equally ends in themselves and of the categorical imperative are not “constructed” but must simply be assumed at the outset of the construction of further, more specific moral principles. In this Rawls remained closer to Kant that did many of the successors who call themselves “constructivists.”
What God?
Authors: Pegg Mark Gregory
Published: January 2024

This chapter looks into the life of Vibia Perpetua, an ancient noble Roman woman, and an ancient Roman Christian. Perpetua's early martyrdom foreshadowed the definition of the medieval phenomenon of redemption through holy violence. The chapter details the features of Late Antiquity or the beginning of the Middle Ages. The shift of the era correlates to the way the old gods and the Christian God were understood to interact with one another. The chapter highlights the distinct change in the relationship of humanity to holiness that inaugurates a sensibility amongst some people that has more in common with anyone from seventh-century Jarrow or fifteenth-century Paris.
The Flutter of Blackbirds
Authors: Pegg Mark Gregory
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the transition of Rome from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages. It notes the swift, cataclysmic disintegration of Roman Britain in the fifth century is one of the most stunning societal breakdowns in world history. The “barbarian” successor kingdoms in North Africa, Spain, Italy, and Gaul were surprisingly effective in co-opting or coercing elite Romans into the new governing entourages gathering around these Vandal, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Frankish kings. The chapter explains how the kingdoms fell under Justinian's campaign of reconquest. It points out how the cultural and religious contours of the West were moving away from southern and eastern influences.