bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hostility in Vienna
Authors: Finger Stanley
Published: May 2019

Gall remained in Vienna until 1805. He would have liked to continue working there but was prohibited from giving lectures (even in his home) by Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, who was guided by court physician Andreas Joseph von Stifft. The charges levied against Gall in 1801 were that he did not have a proper license to lecture, which was absurd, and that he was preaching unacceptable materialism. Gall’s listeners made notes of his lectures, and some were published. As for the charges, there are records showing how he responded to them in thoughtful detail, and that he also had some supporters. But things did not go his way and after a while he felt it best to leave Vienna voluntarily, at least for a while, given the power plays, conservative politics, and the ban now limiting his activities. He had several research assistants during his time in Vienna, the most important being Johann Spurzheim, who was a skilled dissector and strong in theology and philosophy. Gall met him in 1800 and hired him in 1804, after the emperor’s decrees restricted his lecturing to the Viennese.
A Detour to Holland, Switzerland, and Back to Germany
Authors: Finger Stanley
Published: May 2019

Gall’s scientific travels took him from the German states to the Netherlands in 1806, where his ideas were already known to many people, having been covered in periodicals and books, as well as through word of mouth. But although the Dutch had been intrigued by physiognomy, they were less than enthusiastic about Gall, who did not help his cause by how he reacted to small audiences and some fellow scientists. This part of his journey included stops in Utrecht, Amsterdam, the Hague, and Leiden. Tepid receptions made him anxious to return to the German states, starting with Cologne, where he also experienced a lack of interest. Things improved when he made his way to Frankfurt and then to some smaller German cities, and he was able to see his parents in Tiefenbronn. Gall had previously made a short stop in Heidelberg, returning there early in 1807 and entering into a vitriolic debate with Jakob Fidelis Ackermann, who criticized virtually everything Gall did in a book. He then went to Munich, where he met with anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, who was polite but felt Gall was a poor listener and not always right. Zurich, Bern, and some other Swiss cities followed, and once again Weimar. By the fall of 1807, he dropped his plans to go to Russia and instead turned to Paris, not expecting to spend the rest of his life there.
The Long-Awaited Volumes
Authors: Finger Stanley
Published: May 2019

Gall was already starting to write a book about organology while in Vienna. It had been approved by the censor and he had a subscription to back it. But he did not complete it there or during his lecture-demonstration tour prior to entering France. He did, however, continue to collect more case studies and feedback along the way and in Paris, where he was helped with his French. Gall knew this book was important for his legitimacy as a serious scientist and for his legacy, and he spent a small fortune on the four volumes and magnificent accompanying atlas. Titled Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier, it came out between 1810 and 1819, with Spurzheim (who left him in the interim) as his co-author on the first two volumes and the atlas. To his dismay, Gall discovered that the set was too expensive for most of his readers to afford. This revelation led him to publish a less expensive “small edition” without the detailed neuroanatomy and the costly atlas, his Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, which left his organologie virtually unchanged and was completed in 1825. The latter was translated into English a decade later, seven years after his death, and it allowed a broader audience to follow his logic and see his evidence for multiple, independent organs of mind associated with discrete cortical territories.
PresentingOrganologie
Authors: Finger Stanley
Published: May 2019

In his Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau, Gall dispensed with his extensive neuroanatomy and focused exclusively on his organologie. He began with a discussion about the brain becoming more complex as one ascended the ladder to humans, showing where we fit into the animal kingdom. He then turned to the faculties being innate, while recognizing that learning might teach us how to control some inborn propensities. He also explained why he dismissed metaphysics from his formulation, yet why his doctrine should not be regarded as materialist, fatalistic, or destructive of free will. In his second volume, he made the case for multiple organs of mind and dispensed with earlier notions. His next volume presented his various methods, showed his awareness of the power of converging operations, and laid out his reasons for making cranioscopy his primary method for determining the faculties of mind and the parts of the brain associated with them. The importance of dealing with exceptional people and animals is also made clear here. At the end of his third volume, he presented his evidence for the most primitive of his 27 faculties, continuing on to his eight distinctly human faculties in his fifth volume. New works on the brain by other authors are covered in his sixth volume, with commentary about each.
Spurzheim’s “Phrenology” and Gall in Britain
Authors: Finger Stanley
Published: May 2019

Although the British were kept aware of Gall’s doctrine from 1800 on, their reactions to it were muted until Spurzheim left him, made his way to London in 1814, and immediately began to promote what would soon become known as “phrenology” (a term he did not coin but began to use in 1818) in books and lecture-demonstrations throughout the British Isles. Anxious to stand out on his own after first associating himself with his more famous mentor, Spurzheim took it upon himself to modify Gall’s system, renaming some of the 27 faculties, adding a few new ones, and reclassifying them in what he considered a superior way. His first books appeared in English in 1815, and he was prolific. Gall was so bothered by the inroads Spurzheim was making that he visited London in 1823 to set the record straight. To his dismay, his lectures were not well attended and he cut his tour short. Spurzheim engaged in some well-covered debates with John Gordon, who considered the doctrine “a collection of mere absurdities,” and later with William Hamilton in Edinburgh. He also found a disciple in Edinburgh, George Combe, whose efforts would lead to the first phrenological society and journal, and in 1828 (the year of Gall’s death) a best-selling book, his Constitution of Man.
The virtue of narrowing: the fiscal federalism setting
Authors: Salmon Pierre
Published: May 2019

This chapter mainly discusses the empirical work in the domain of local (subcentral) finance involving yardstick competition. It begins with a short section on the systemic novelty introduced by yardstick competition into the theory of fiscal federalism. The central part of the chapter focuses on the empirical arguments developed to probe the presence of yardstick competition and yardstick voting in various data sets. Then, some queries are formulated about the exact nature of what has been established empirically so far. It seems clearly confirmed that some form of yardstick competition or yardstick voting is at work in different settings. That result is important but the findings should not be supposed to validate the game-theoretical analysis or the pure mimicking behavior assumption typically associated with the empirical studies. Alternative approaches are considered toward the end of the chapter.
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”
Authors: Ebright Ryan
Published: May 2019

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s 1993 video opera, The Cave, addresses a potent political subject: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet shortly after its premiere, they publicly disavowed art’s capacity to effect political or social change. This disavowal belies the explicitly political genesis of The Cave, the development of which throughout the 1980s coincided with rising Arab-Israeli tensions and the First Intifada. Early sketches, outlines, and descriptions of The Cave reveal that the pair initially viewed their quasi-opera as a step toward “reconciling the family of man.” By 1993, however, they instead adopted a seemingly apolitical stance, shying away from answering the fundamental question they had set out to answer: How can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? This chapter argues that traces of this bid for peace remain in the opera’s music, text, and narrative structure, and that despite its purported neutrality, The Cave espouses an Americanized vision of Arab-Israeli reconciliation.
That’s All It Does
Authors: Tenzer Michael
Published: May 2019

Though integral to his formation as a composer, Steve Reich’s studies of Balinese gamelan have been overlooked. In part this is because of a certain redundancy: features of Balinese overlap significantly with the West African music whose impact on Reich’s formative works of the 1970s has been amply demonstrated. These include predominance of percussion, repetitive cyclic structures, interlocking rhythms, systems of oral transmission, and the nonprofessional ethos of the performing ensemble’s interactive behaviors. But what of the features of the Balinese music Reich studied and did not assimilate? Among these are malleable tempo, extended and minimally repetitive cycles, and tonally hierarchic melodies rooted in Southeast Asian traditions of sung poetry. Their eschewal opens pathways for insight into Reich’s music, as well as his cultural subjectivity, in the process illuminating unsuspected aesthetic affinity between his detractors among “uptown” composition apologists of the time and traditional Balinese musicians.
Enter Vladimir Teliakovsky
Authors: Meisner Nadine
Published: May 2019

Chapter 10 records the arrival of Teliakovsky as the new director. Championing the new artistic ideas that were flourishing in Moscow, he wanted to bring these to sclerotic St Petersburg where the flop of Petipa’s last big ballet, The Magic Mirror, epitomized just how out of touch Petipa was. Teliakovsky saw Petipa as finished, ‘a squeezed lemon’, and set about pushing him out. The reforms in theatre design, as represented by Konstantin Korovin and Alexander Golovin, meant there was revolution inside the theatres, just as there was revolution outside on the streets, with the march on the Winter Palace in 1905. The political fervour spread to elements in the ballet company, who wanted more control and the return of Petipa. But he was too old; the chapter concludes with his death in 1910 and the many tributes to him.
Introduction
Authors: Colombo Matteo , Irvine Liz , Stapleton Mog
Published: May 2019

Andy Clark is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist. His work has been wide-ranging and inspiring. The extended mind hypothesis, the power of parallel distributed processing, the role of language in opening up novel paths for thinking, the flexible interface between biological minds and artificial technologies, the significance of representation in explanations of intelligent behaviour, the promise of the predictive processing framework to unify the cognitive sciences: these are just some of the ideas illuminated by Clark’s work that have sparked intense debate across the sciences of mind and brain. This introduction puts into focus some of the major motifs running through Clark’s work and outlines the content and structure of the volume.
The Elusive Extended Mind
Authors: Adams Fred
Published: May 2019

For nearly twenty years Andy Clark has been the chief architect and proponent of the thesis of extended mind. But it is only the cognitive processes in the mind that extend, according to Clark (not consciousness itself). However, when it comes to saying what a cognitive process is such that one can determine whether it does or does not extend, Clark is less forthcoming. He has offered a Dennettian “cognition is as cognition does.” He has offered that cognition is “what supports intelligent behavior.” In some cases he comes very close to asserting that we don’t really need to say what cognition is. This chapter explains why this all matters and why the failure to be more forthcoming makes the extended mind an elusive entity.
Breaking the Waves
Authors: Wheeler Michael
Published: May 2019

Andy Clark is the foremost architect of the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC), according to which the machinery of mind extends beyond the skull and skin. Advocates of ExC divide into several camps, the most prominent being the first-wave (parity-based) theorists and the second-wave (complementarity-based) theorists. These two groups are routinely at loggerheads. Given this, it is an intriguing fact that Clark’s work has been appealed to by both sides. By exploring Clark’s own treatment of the relationship between parity and complementarity, this chapter argues that neither of these phenomena can ground a compelling case for extended cognition, and neither can their simple conjunction. Against Clark, it argues that a better argument for extended cognition relies on the concept of a mark of the cognitive. This argument does not fit comfortably into either first-wave or second-wave ExC, although it is perhaps most naturally seen as a development of the former.
When Is a Mind Extended?
Authors: Kirsh David
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores four conditions for operationalizing the concept of cognitive extension. (1) Temporal tightness of the coupling—interaction between inner and outer processes must be fast, tight, and fluid, interacting at the speed of thought. (2) External mind parts must be transparent extensions of ourselves like glasses or prosthetic limbs that are psychologically absorbed into the subject’s body sense. We act through these parts or processes rather than on them. (3) Cognitive extensions are “owned”; they are not independent functioning units that could be a source of cognition themselves; inner processes confer cognitive status on the outer. (4) Extended parts or processes interact bidirectionally; causation is reciprocal, though controlled from the biological side. The chapter concludes that extension does exist. Through interaction we create an extended cognitive envelope. The parts of this envelope are episodic processes enacting external thinking rather than being an enduring assemblage of parts. To make the final leap to durable mind parts—external assemblages that are parts of a person even when not in use—requires reasoning of the sort lawyers and judges do best, not scientists.
The Archaeology of the Extended Mind
Authors: Sterelny Kim
Published: May 2019

Our great ape cousins, and very likely the last common ancestor of the human and pan lineage, depend very largely on their own intrinsic capacities not just for material resources but also for their informational resources. Chimps and bonobos are capable of social learning, and very likely, in their foraging and their communicative practices, they do learn from their parents and peers. But everything they learn socially they could probably learn by themselves, by individual exploration learning. Their lives do not depend on social learning. And while they may learn about their physical and social environment from others, they do not learn how to learn. Humans are very different: for us, social learning is essential rather than optional. As a consequence, our cognitive capacities are amplified by our social environment, by our material technology, and by our capacities to learn cognitive skills, not just physical skills, from our social peers. This chapter charts the deep history of these changes and their archaeological signature.
Beyond the Desert Landscape
Authors: Friston Karl J.
Published: May 2019

To what extent is predictive processing enactivist? This overview of predictive processing and active inference offers an account of embodied exchange with the world that associates neuronal processing with inferring the causes of our sensations. Crucially, one of the most important causes of the sensorium is our own behaviour, which—perhaps counterintuitively—has to be inferred. The agenda—in active inference—is to link formal (mathematical) descriptions of dynamical systems to a description of active perception in terms of beliefs and goals. In short, it tries to understand why and how we gather evidence for our own existence. There are several approaches to this sort of formulation. This chapter compares and contrasts a Helmholtzian or Kantian (bottom-up) approach—via perception—with the sort of (top-down) approaches offered by the statistical physics of self-organisation in sentient systems.
How Radical Is Predictive Processing?
Authors: Orlandi Nico , Lee Geoff
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses Andy Clark’s recent explorations of Bayesian perceptual models and predictive processing. In the first part, the chapter discusses the predictive processing (PP) framework, explicating its relationship with hierarchical Bayesian models in theories of perception. In the second part, it examines the relationship between perception and action in the PP model. The overarching goal is twofold: first, to get clearer on the picture of mental activity that Clark is presenting, including what exactly is represented at the levels of the perception/action hierarchy, and the nature of the information processing it postulates; second, although the framework presented by Clark certainly has interesting novel features, some of his glosses on it are misleading. In particular, Clark’s interpretation of predictive processing as essentially a top-down, expectation-driven process, on which perception is aptly thought of as “controlled hallucination,” exaggerates the contrast with the traditional picture of perception as bottom-up and stimulus-driven. Additionally, despite the rhetoric, Clark’s PP model substantially preserves the traditional distinction between perception and action.
Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq
Authors: Sylvester Christine
Published: May 2019

Who is an authority on the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq? The Pentagon? Leading politicians? Allies? Academic specialists? The media? American soldiers? Vietnamese and Iraqis? Protesters? Families of war dead? Curators of war exhibitions? War novelists? This book considers locations of war knowledge that are often overlooked by scholars in the social sciences and also by civilians who have an interest in understanding these wars. It takes readers to a permanent exhibition of war at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its traveling facsimile, to Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery where military killed in Iraq are buried, and to well-regarded novels and memoirs about these wars. Across vastly different sites of war knowledge, the book considers whose war appears where, how it is curated, and whether some sites re-curate commonplace understandings of these wars by highlighting experiences war experts can neglect.
The Smithsonian Curates America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq
Authors: Sylvester Christine
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the evolution of the Smithsonian museums, including failed attempts to establish a national war museum, before focusing on one exhibition at its National Museum of American History. The Price of Freedom: Americans at War is a permanent display of objects related to every war Americans fought from colonial times to the 2003 war in Iraq. At issue is how that exhibition depicts the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Ten years before Price of Freedom opened, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition on the American bombing of Hiroshima that collapsed from controversy over whose war and which victims should be shown. The Price of Freedom cautiously focuses only on the American side of each war. The Vietnam rooms offer impressive American technologies while rooms dedicated to the American war in Iraq are remarkably absent of objects and seem barely curated.
The Enterprisers
Authors: Fedyukin Igor
Published: May 2019

The Enterprisers traces the emergence of “modern” school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. The efforts to “educate” Russia represent a trademark of Peter I’s reign and reformist program, and innovations in schooling in Russia in the eighteenth century have traditionally been presented as a top-down, state-driven process. As with many other facets of the emerging early modern state, the Petrine-era school usually appears as the product of the practical needs of the tsar’s new “regular” army, which demanded skilled technical personnel. It is also commonly taken to be the personal creation of Peter I, who singlehandedly designed it and forced it on an unwilling population. Contrary to this received wisdom, The Enterprisers argues that schools were instead invented and built by “administrative entrepreneurs”—or projecteurs, as they were also called in that era—who sought to achieve diverse career goals, promoted their own pet ideas, advanced their claims for expertise, and competed for status and resources. As the in-depth study of some of the most notable episodes in the history of educational innovation and school-related “projecting” in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates, the creation of “modern” schools took place insofar as it enabled such enterprisers to pursue their agendas. The individual projects these enterprisers proposed and implemented served as building blocks for the edifice of the “well-regulated” state on the threshold of the modern era.
Animals as Persons
Authors: Rowlands Mark
Published: May 2019

Far from being contrary to common sense, the idea that some nonhuman animals can be persons conforms to a certain prominent strand in common sense. Three conceptions of personhood are distinguished: legal, moral, and metaphysical. The subject of this book is the metaphysical sense of person. Four essential conditions of metaphysical personhood are identified: consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, and other-awareness. These conditions are advanced as individually necessary and collectively sufficient for an individual to qualify as a person. A person is an individual that is conscious, in the sense that there is something it is like to be that individual; it is a cognitive agent capable of engaging in reasoning; it is aware of itself; and it is aware of others precisely as other persons.
The Ghost of Clever Hans
Authors: Rowlands Mark
Published: May 2019

According to the problem of other animal minds, claims to know anything about the minds of animals suffer from serious problems of justification. These problems parallel the problem of other human minds. Inferentialist approaches argue that the justification lies in the appropriate form of inference. These approaches are inadequate for a variety of reasons. Direct perception approaches claim our access to the minds of animals is, in some cases, perceptual. A novel form of the direct perception account is defended. This is based on three ideas: (a) a distinction between seeing and seeing that, (b) a distinction between formal and functional descriptions of behavior, and (c) the idea that functional descriptions of behavior are (often) disguised psychological descriptions. If we wish to have any useful descriptions of animal behavior, we must accept that we can often see their mental states.
Beyond the Looking Glass
Authors: Rowlands Mark
Published: May 2019

Standard ways of thinking about self-awareness in animals—the mirror test and the debate over metacognition—assume self-awareness must take an intentional form, where a bodily or psychological facet of an individual is taken as an intentional object of a mental act of that same individual. There are several reasons for supposing that this intentional model of self-awareness is inadequate. These include Wittgenstein’s analysis of the idea of knowing one is in pain, Shoemaker’s arguments that much self-awareness is immune to error through misidentification, and Perry’s argument for the non-eliminability of an indexical component of self-awareness. These cases show that, in self-awareness, what one is aware of is often not independent of the act of awareness, and this is something that cannot be accommodated by the intentional model.
In Different Times and Places
Authors: Rowlands Mark
Published: May 2019

The idea of pre-intentional self-awareness is extended to incorporate awareness of one’s mental states or acts and of the “lived” body. The temporal parameters of pre-intentional self-awareness are also extended by way of a detailed consideration of episodic memory in animals. Whether animals are capable of such memory is controversial, due to our inability to determine whether they represent past episodes in the right way. Even if animals cannot episodically remember, they still have pre-intentional awareness of themselves through time. This pre-intentional awareness of the self through time consists in a sense of familiarity, which is explained in parallel with perception: in terms of a generated series of anticipations in which the person who remembers is implicated.
In Three Minds
Authors: Stade Cory , Gamble Clive
Published: May 2019

Within cognitive archaeology, the Paleolithic mind is portrayed as rational, experiential, and anthropological. This chapter argues that the use of experiential and anthropological perspectives has the potential to enrich archaeological interpretations of early hominin cognition through the use of emotional and relational aspects. Wynn’s evolutionary cognitive archaeology is extended by using affective and material standpoints to explore the spaces between minds. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the work of Thomas Wynn to the development of the discipline and offers avenues to incorporate social, emotional, and relational aspects of mind in the study of early cognition—for example, the involvement of theory of mind when considering stone knapping, and the cultural transmission of early stone tool industries such as the Lomekwian. In a case study of the Middle Paleolithic site of Bruniquel Cave, the three approaches to the Paleolithic mind are explored, as well as their distinct interpretations.
Challenging Hegemony, Competing for the Truth
Authors: Togman Richard
Published: May 2019

Chapter 6 focuses on the rebirth of the Malthusian concept of overpopulation and the translation of fears over hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction to the problem of population. Moreover, delving into how alternative theories arose to challenge the dominant modernization discourse championed by national security and development agencies of Western states, this chapter explores the subjugated discourses espoused by actors including the nascent environmental movement, the Soviet Union, the Vatican, and the Black Panthers. This chapter shows how it is the subjective threat perception, married to the dominant discursive frame the actor adopts, that results in the creation of natalist attitudes and policy. Significantly, the wishes of individuals themselves are systematically ignored when actors come to narrate the meaning of fertility for the collective, which due to the very conceptualization of the problem at hand most often results in the failure of policy to have the desired effects.
Babies Will Save Us
Authors: Togman Richard
Published: May 2019

Chapter 9 examines the transnationalization of the neo-mercantilist discourse among developed world states. Tracing its origins to developments in France and the Soviet Union, this chapter explores how current government attitudes across the developed world came to be, as over two-thirds of all developed world states are now trying to grow their populations through manipulating fertility. This is the first major deconstruction of modern attitudes on population growth among developed world states that fully accounts for the rise and spread of such dramatically isomorphic policies across such dissimilar states while simultaneously accounting for the generalized failure of such policies to result in the desired objective. This chapter updates the natalist history of the developed world and explains how such a diverse array of governments, policymakers, academics, and the general public have come to seek the salvation of their nations in the wombs of their people.
Family Sacrifices
Authors: Jeung Russell M. , Fong Seanan S. , Kim Helen Jin
Published: May 2019

Family Sacrifices provides a comprehensive, sociological portrait of Chinese Americans’ most cherished values, practices, and ethics, ultimately illuminating why this ethnic group is the most nonreligious (52%) in the United States. Though unaffiliated, Chinese Americans adhere to the moral system of familism, a transpacific lived tradition rooted in Chinese Popular Religion and Confucianism, which prioritizes family above other commitments. Hybridizing their Chinese and American sensibilities, Chinese Americans employ familism as the primary narrative for constructing meaning, identity, and belonging. Research on the religiously unaffiliated in the U.S. focuses on nonbelief and nonbelonging. Yet the spiritual and ethical systems of China place more emphasis on ritual and virtue. To address this gap in understanding non-Western moral systems, Family Sacrifices employs the new theoretical concept of liyi, translated as “ritual propriety and righteous relations.” Reappropriated from its original Chinese usage, liyi is a needed breakthrough for understanding Chinese religiosity and the emergence of religious “nones” in the United States. Family Sacrifices is the first book based on national survey data on Asian American religious practices and a seminal text on the fastest-growing racial group in the United States. At the intersection of Asian American studies, sociology of religion, and religious studies, it is a much needed text for anyone working with Chinese Americans and the unaffiliated.
Transmission
Authors: Jeung Russell M. , Fong Seanan S. , Kim Helen Jin
Published: May 2019

Chapter 3 investigates the educational and class-based differences in how Chinese American households transmit the liyi dimensions of Chinese Popular Religion and Confucianism. Working-class households tend to pass down the practices of Chinese Popular Religion based on fate, luck, and qi, whereas professional households tend to affirm Confucian thought to match their rational, scientific worldviews. Nearly all respondents’ parents practiced elements of Chinese Popular Religion, most notably venerating ancestors, adhering to fengshui principles of qi, and celebrating Lunar New Year. For working-class families, these practices included belief in supernatural realities and the efficacy of practices to bring about well-being and good fortune. Chinese American professional families saw these rituals as secular customs and maintained them for different reasons: to instill family responsibility through ancestor veneration, maintain good energy via fengshui, and celebrate their heritage through Lunar New Year.
Conclusion
Authors: Jeung Russell M. , Fong Seanan S. , Kim Helen Jin
Published: May 2019

The conclusion provides a summary of the book chapters, including the genealogy, transmission, translation, and yi and li of Chinese American familism. The conclusion discusses the theoretical implications of employing a liyi framework to understand Chinese Americans and Asian Americans in relation to religious, ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities, as well as mental health and political organizing. The authors explore the implications for employing the theory of liyi in current debates about the category of religion as well as the study of religious “nones,” especially among American millennials. Future directions are discussed.
Moral Development, Moral Identity, and Prosocial Behavior
Authors: Gibbs John C.
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on some of the variables accounting for individual differences in the likelihood of prosocial behavior. “Prosocial behavior” can range from a particular intervention to a lifetime dedicated to just and good causes. Highly prosocial individuals (moral exemplars) tend to be morally mature and highly empathic but field-independent (Moral Type B, internal locus of control, high self-efficacy) persons who perceive morality as central to their sense of self (high moral identity). Moral identity can join the main primary (affective and cognitive) sources of moral motivation. Finally, to take effective sustained action, even highly prosocial individuals need grit or ego strength, defined in terms of affect-regulating follow-through skills. Distinguishing features of genuine (versus spurious) moral exemplars are considered at the end of the chapter.
Beyond the Theories
Authors: Gibbs John C.
Published: May 2019

This chapter goes beyond Kohlberg’s, Hoffman’s, and Haidt’s theories to consider the question of a deeper reality. As noted, Kohlberg argued that existential thinkers in their soul-searching sometimes come to see their earthly moral life from an inspiring “cosmic perspective.” Perhaps such a reality can be glimpsed not only through existential crises, but also through physically life-threatening ones. Accordingly, this chapter studies cases of persons who have had a so-called near-death experience (“When some people come close to death, they go through a profound experience that may include a sense of leaving the body and entering some other realm or dimension” [Greyson]). A review of the literature—especially, recent medical research literature—suggests that the experience entails a transcendent significance congruent with Kohlberg’s cosmic perspective. In this light, “growing beyond the superficial” and “taking the perspectives of others” take on radical new meaning.
Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection
Authors: Rechtschaffen Alan N.
Published: May 2019

Under Dodd-Frank’s Title X, the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 (CFPA), Congress established an independent Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection in the Federal Reserve System (originally branded the “CFPB” or “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” and subsequently dubbed the “BCFP” or “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection” in accord with its legislated name. The BCFP is tasked with protecting consumer interests in financial markets. Specifically, the Bureau aims to ensure that all customers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services in a fair, transparent, and competitive way. The CFPA authorizes the Bureau to uniformly regulate, supervise, and enforce the provisions of consumer financial products or services under federal consumer financial law. This chapter discusses the structure of the CFPA, roles and function of the BCFP, significant changes in financial consumer protection by the BCFP, judicial review of BCFP’s power, and the BCFP under President Trump's administration.
Understanding Interest Rates and the Economy
Authors: Rechtschaffen Alan N.
Published: May 2019

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Banking System. The Federal Reserve System was created by Congress under the Federal Reserve Act “to provide for the establishment of federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States and for other purposes.” The Federal Reserve System comprises a central Board of Governors appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate, and 12 regional Reserve banks. Monetary policy is set by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The remainder of the chapter covers monetary policy, quantitative easing, balance sheet normalization and the FOMC minutes.
Derivatives
Authors: Rechtschaffen Alan N.
Published: May 2019

Derivatives provide a means for shifting risk from one party to a counterparty that is more willing or better able to assume that risk. The counterparty's motivation for assuming that risk might be to manage its own risk or to enhance yield (make money). Derivatives transactions may be based on the value of foreign currency, U.S. Treasury bonds, stock indexes, or interest rates. There are four types of derivatives contracts: forwards, futures, swaps, and options. This chapter discusses the following: counterparty credit risk, over-the-counter versus exchange-traded derivatives, shifting risk, types of derivatives, reduction of counterparty risk, suitability as hedging instruments, distinction between forwards and futures, foreign exchange forwards and futures, options, characteristics of swaps, and credit derivatives.
Transparency, Tax, and Human Rights
Authors: Stewart Miranda
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores tax transparency in the context of previous governmental, private, and civil society initiatives about transparency of the last thirty years. There has been a particular focus on transparency as a mechanism to enforce taxation of large multinational enterprises (MNEs) and to ensure tax compliance by high wealth individuals, with a specific goal of addressing tax avoidance and evasion especially through the hiding by such taxpayers of income and assets in tax havens. In addition to the promotion of transparency as a key strategy for global tax enforcement, transparency has also been aimed variously at ending corruption and abuse of power by private and public agents or entities; disciplining the fiscal actions and processes of governments by constraining spending or reducing taxes; strengthening financial and other markets; building participatory democracy; protecting human rights; supporting economic development and good governance in general; and ensuring compliance with environmental and other global policies.
Corporate Tax Privacy and Human Rights
Authors: Blank Joshua D.
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the relationship of corporate tax privacy and tax compliance from a new vantage point, which is called the “intercorporate perspective.” In the United States, all tax returns and return information of corporations are confidential. An unappreciated value of corporate tax privacy is that it can limit the pressure to pursue aggressive tax planning and reporting that corporate tax directors often face from significant shareholders, nontax managers, and even themselves. Corporate tax privacy provides the government with valuable strategic defenses by restraining the ability of a corporation’s stakeholders and agents to engage in “benchmarking” and “reverse engineering,” behaviors that would likely cause some tax directors to pursue more aggressive tax planning and reporting. Yet, at the same time, increased public access to certain corporate tax return information could enable the public to participate in informed debate and discussion of the corporate tax law and to question whether the governments is applying the tax law to corporate taxpayers effectively and fairly.
Interrogating the Relationship between “Legally Defensible” Tax Planning and Social Justice
Authors: Shaviro Daniel
Published: May 2019

This chapter assesses where the ethical lines should be drawn around what constitutes “legally defensible tax planning,” given social justice imperatives. Because tax minimization by wealthy individuals and profitable corporations does not involve blatant fraud, one cannot simply call for “good corporate tax behavior” and criticize the ethics of those tax professionals who aid and abet the fraud. The tax-reducing strategies of super-rich individuals and highly profitable corporations commonly qualify as what will be called “legally defensible.” This term, however, covers tax planning that may vary across a range in at least three important dimensions: likelihood of legal correctness; consistency with legislative or regulatory intent; and ordinary course of business versus carefully contrived.
ECHR Litigation as a Tool for Tax Justice in Europe
Authors: Braumann Céline
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the prospects for challenging a tax exemption granted to a private company by invoking the prohibition on discrimination in the European Charter on Human Rights (ECHR). Should the Court hold that certain selective tax rulings are a violation of the prohibition of discrimination under the ECHR, this finding would set a powerful precedent to rebut the claim that tax avoidance is “perfectly legal.” Accordingly, the hands-off treatment the international community has afforded tax-avoidance strategies might give rise to legal liability. Ultimately, to reform international tax policies, it is crucial to understand past practices and whether and why these practices should be considered broken and unjust. The chapter then looks at a specific case of tax exemption, allegedly granted to a subsidiary of McDonald’s by Luxembourg.
“Taxing for Growth” vs. “Taxing for Equality”—Using Human Rights to Combat Gender Inequalities, Poverty, and Income Inequalities in Fiscal Laws
Authors: Lahey Kathleen A.
Published: May 2019

This chapter highlights the inadequacy of current measures to mitigate the regressive impacts of value-added tax (VAT), particularly on women as individuals, female-headed households, and female-owned businesses. It argues that the text of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence, and the Beijing Platform all mandate the use of more progressive tax strategies, such as graduated personal income taxes and broader VAT exemptions to cover all basic needs, as well as gender-impact analysis of taxation and correction of discriminatory policies. In short, CEDAW and the Beijing Platform form a comprehensive global implementation framework designed to actively secure both formal and substantive equality in all laws, policies, and practices in all member countries, as well as in regional and global governance organizations.
Recent Cases of Regressive and Racially Disparate Taxation in the United States
Authors: Smith Andre L.
Published: May 2019

This chapter assesses whether there is a national trend in the United States toward disproportionate imposition of regressive taxes on low-income communities of color, reflective of a deliberate effort to shift the tax burden from the wealthy and white to the poor and black. This phenomenon is not new. There is a history of communities that are facing financial exigencies correcting their budget deficits by levying formal and informal taxes on black people. The collateral consequence of formal and informal taxes levied disproportionately on black people includes more potentially violent confrontations with police and responses like the Black Lives Matter Movement. The chapter then considers whether well-intentioned white folks have lent their support to racist taxation, perhaps unwittingly, because the stated purposes of increased taxes satisfy their social desires while it squares with their financial interests to ignore the disparate racial ramifications.
Democratic Practice
Authors: Fishman Robert M.
Published: May 2019

This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical basis in a multimethod study of Portugal and Spain, pioneers in the worldwide turn to democracy that began in the 1970s, the argument identifies how political inclusion and equality vary substantially as a result of processes that the book theorizes: Nationally predominant forms of democratic practice constitute cultural legacies of the countries’ pathways to democracy during the 1970s. Whereas Portugal moved from dictatorship to democracy through a social revolution that inverted hierarchies and reconfigured cultural patterns while also generating thorough political democratization, Spain experienced a regime-led process of political transition under pressure from the opposition. The book shows how this contrast in pathways put in place ways of understanding democracy that have had deep consequences for political inclusion and conduct. Points of contrast in contemporary democratic practice include patterns of interaction between social movement protest and elected power holders as well as conduct within representative entities and in crucial secondary institutions such as the news media and the educational system. Consequences are identified in distributional outcomes, housing and welfare state policies, employment policy, and in the handling of economic crises. The implications of Spain’s less inclusionary democratic practice for cultural “others” such as Catalans are taken up in the chapter on the Catalan crisis. Implications for democratic theory and for sociological and political science theory are also taken up.
Messages of Transition
Authors: Fishman Robert M.
Published: May 2019

This chapter specifies major differences between the Portuguese and Spanish transitions to democracy in the 1970s and their implications in the cultural sphere. Whereas Portugal experienced a historically unusual social revolutionary transition that began on April 25, 1974, Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy through a reform-oriented process in which the regime itself played a crucial role. The chapter emphasizes differences between the two cases not only in the mechanisms of political change but also in the understandings of democracy that were forged in the process of democratization. The discussion examines major differences between the cases in how political actors defined the relationship between formal political power and expressions of citizen sentiments in the streets and elsewhere. The analysis also introduces a new concept, that of the transitions’ “codas,” that is the readjustment of elements of the initial transition-era arrangements after the rest of transition had been completed.
Reducing Poverty, Improving Health
Authors: Basu Sanjay
Published: May 2019

Poverty reduction approaches may improve health by addressing the most persistent and central correlate to morbidity and mortality: low income. There is substantial evidence that higher income is correlated to better health outcomes and lower income to worse health outcomes, often because material resources essential for health—nutritious food, safe housing, and the education to make healthy decisions—require adequate income. Hence, numerous actors—governments, international organizations, and community groups—have sought to reduce poverty as a strategy to improve health. This chapter reviews key historical lessons from efforts to reduce poverty and improve health worldwide.
Aging Populations
Authors: Cagney Kathleen A.
Published: May 2019

Perhaps the two most important demographic shifts in the world today are urbanization and population aging. More than half the world’s population is now living in cities, and there are more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 5 worldwide. This is an enormous demographic shift and will lead to a world greatly changed from that of a mere 50 years ago. Aging populations in cities represent a tremendous opportunity to harness human capital on a previously unimaginable scale, but, conversely, may lead to challenges to ensure that services are available to meet the needs and wants of these populations. The health of aging populations is rapidly emerging as one of the central urban health issues of the coming decades. This chapter discusses changing age demographics in cities worldwide and accompanying challenges and opportunities for urban health.
Inequities in Cities and in Urban Health
Authors: Brisbois Ben , O’Campo Patricia , Kamalanathan Janisha
Published: May 2019

As cities grow and thrive, urban populations have access to more resources and better health than has ever been the case in human history. However, at the same time, the material gaps between the haves and have-nots are also starker in cities, where large populations live in close proximity, than they are anywhere else. These social divides map onto health divides, creating health haves and health have-nots, thus threatening to create two classes of population in close geographic proximity. This chapter discusses the challenge of resource inequities in cities and how these inequities become health inequities.