bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris
Authors: Dybicz Phillip
Published: January 2023

A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris takes inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s inquiry into the question, “Is the human race constantly progressing?” This book asks the question, “Are we, as social welfare agents, morally progressing in our efforts at administering social welfare to those in need?” To answer this question, this work offers a substantive analysis of the dominant Discourses on social welfare in the United States, from colonial times to the present. It is a genealogical analysis based on the approach developed by Michel Foucault. Such an analysis examines the formulation of what is considered an effective intervention within different historical eras and how this meaning arises from the particular conditions of that era. Once fully described and understood, this analysis offers the opportunity to explore areas of knowledge that are subjugated within the dominant Discourse and, hence, can lead to moral blind spots. For example, one of the moral blind spots of the present era of professional social work is the propensity at times for social workers to inadvertently embrace the role of social control agent rather than that of an agent for social change. It is hoped that the insights generated from this historical investigation can serve to help social workers maintain an awareness of present moral blind spots in the practice of social work and thus avoid them.
The Premodern Discourse (c. 1820–1920)
Authors: Dybicz Phillip
Published: January 2023

Chapter 4 of A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris describes the Premodern Discourse (1820–1920) on social welfare and begins by offering three anecdotes of social welfare practices that appear strange when viewed from our present understanding: a city pageant to promote social welfare, penitentiaries as a model for our society, and the orphan trains. The various elements of the Discourse are thoroughly explained while periodically referring back to the anecdotes in order to understand how these practices made sense to social welfare agents of that era. This era was marked by the rapid integration of society, yet concern arose that the moral integration of society was being quickly outpaced. Hence, the urgent need of this era is identified as that of attending to the moral integration of society. Enlightenment thought also exerted a strong influence in this era, leading to the rise of individualism in American culture.
Solutions, Narrative, and Strengths
Authors: Dybicz Phillip
Published: January 2023

In Chapter 9 of A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris, the three major approaches comprising postmodern practice (the strengths perspective, solution-focused therapy, and narrative therapy) are given thorough treatment, and common themes are identified: the fostering of hope, belief in client strengths, and faith in clients’ ability to direct the helping process. Extended case examples are provided for each approach and their meanings elucidated through reference to the Postmodern discourse. These meanings and their insights—such as client strengths—are contrasted with how they are misconstrued when being applied within the Modern Discourse of understanding. Unlike previous chapters, the emerging nature of the Postmodern discourse limits examination of moral blind spots as they are only emerging as well. Lastly, reflections are offered on how one can fully employ these insights to improve one’s practice.
Thomas Mann’s Joseph Tetralogy
Authors: Shapiro Michael J.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 1 focuses on Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy, basing its egalitarian emphasis on Mann’s use of Wagnerian motifs to structure the Hebrew Bible’s Joseph story. It emphasizes the tetralogy’s egalitarian effect through the way Mann’s narrative has Joseph—edified by conversations that resists privileging his story—stepping out of the center of Genesis as he recognizes that his story is one among others and that none of them are privileged. The chapter closes with an intervention that resets the scene in which Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, responding to their queries about his ambiguous identity (as an Israelite and Egyptian) by revising the encounter in a subjunctive mood. The rewriting displaces Genesis’s patriarchal framing with an imagined fraternal one, based on how a Schoenbergian atonal dissonance (substituting for Wagnerian motifs) could have given each voice/tone the same value so that Joseph’s would not be the central tonic.
Sculpting in Time
Authors: Shapiro Michael J.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 3, a critical analysis of Michael Haneke’s film Caché, is an inquiry into the way visual arts intervene and disrupt the inequalities within the metropolitan venues in which immigrant populations from former colonies dwell. Haneke’s interpersonal drama, which involves the abjection of an Algerian immigrant, refers allegorically to French society’s treatment of their immigrant population as a whole. The film drama is composed in the form of a whodunit (in which the viewer is positioned as a coinvestigator in a drama in which there is no singular “who”), but is meant to refer allegorically to a hidden part of French postcolonial history. The chapter concludes with a focus on the way the film ends, with an implicit suggestion that a younger generation is positioned to resist to France’s suppressions of memory and history.
Founders
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: January 2023

The birth of satyagraha as developed by Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian passive resistance campaign of 1906-7 opens this chapter. Also considered is the 1907 conflict between white miners and mine-owners, as the former sought to protect their racial privileges against the latter's cost-cutting measures. The white workers won a major victory when Louis Botha, the prime minister of the Transvaal, decreed the repatriation of the Chinese miners. Botha's premiership owed to a British decision to grant self-government to the former Boer republics. The chapter discusses the next stages of this reconciliation process, as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State joined the colonies of the Cape and Natal in advancing towards "Closer Union". The process culminated with the creation of the Union of South Africa in May 1910. White unity encouraged parallel efforts among the black population, leading to the January 1912 formation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress.
Red Peril
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses South Africa's political realignment after the Rand Revolt, as the Nationalist and Labour parties concluded an electoral pact, and the South African and Unionist Parties merged. The realignment saw J.B.M. Hertzog become Prime Minister in 1924, while black South African politics moved left. Clements Kadalie initiated efforts to transform the ICU into a nationwide labor federation, while the CPSA--prodded by the Moscow-based Comintern--sought to build a popular base within existing black organizations. The communists gained important support from Josiah T. Gumede, the president from 1927 of the African National Congress (as the SANNC was re-named in 1923). The leftward shift in black politics was, however, fiercely resisted by the State, and by black conservative leaders within the said organizations, as the chapter narrates.
Dominion
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the Great Depression's impact on South Africa. A sharp downturn in 1931–2 resulted in the country abandoning the gold standard. The step heralded a major economic boom that ended the depression in South Africa. The debris from the gold standard controversy occasioned another political realignment, as the parties of J.B.M. Hertzog and Jan Smuts fused to establish the United Party. The opposition was provided by the Purified National Party, led by D.F. Malan. The politics of the global depression also impacted South Africa, as the Greyshirts and Blackshirts were established on the model of Nazi and fascist counterparts in Europe. The chapter also considers Hertzog's assault on the Cape native franchise, as part of a revamped segregation policy. The chapter concludes by considering the outbreak of the Second World War, which split the United Party, as Hertzog broke away to form an alliance with Malan's nationalists.
Rubicon
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the efforts initiated by various actors to force P.W. Botha across the Rubicon. The American anti-apartheid movement championed boycotts, sanctions, and disinvestment, while a major outflow of capital followed Chase Manhattan's refusal to roll over its short-term loans to South Africa. It was also in this period that efforts were launched by white South African citizens to talk to the ANC. The Commonwealth established an Eminent Persons Group to kickstart negotiations, and the initiative brought the state and the ANC into proximity (if not direct contact) for the first time. The state's destruction of the Commonwealth initiative in May 1986 saw international attention shift to imposing sanctions. One consequence was the US Congress's passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.
Captive State
Authors: Simpson Thula
Published: January 2023

Late 2015 saw further revelations of the Gupta family's influence on the state. Key in this process was the appointment of the Gupta-linked Des van Rooyen as Finance Minister in December, which sparked a major financial crisis. The term 'State Capture' was coined early in 2016. The chapter also considers the increasingly violent student protests at universities that year. Amid mounting scandal, the 2016 local government elections suggested the ANC's electoral power had peaked, as it lost control of Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth), Tshwane (Pretoria), and Johannesburg. Thuli Madonsela's State Capture report called for a Commission of Inquiry into the influence of the Gupta family over the state. Increasingly besieged, Zuma and the Guptas fought back, enlisting the aid of companies such as Bell Pottinger and KPMG. The chapter concludes with the succession battle that led to Cyril Ramaphosa taking over from Jacob Zuma as ANC President in 2017.
‘This War is Out of Our Hands’
Authors: Wehrey Frederic
Published: January 2023

This chapter recounts how Libya became the site of an internationalized conflict. Tracing the internationalization of the conflict from the 2011 NATO intervention to the more recent civil war, the chapter touches upon the key role of new technologies, social media, and air strikes, as well as the political role of powers, including Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, the United States, European countries, Egypt, Russia, and others. At the same time, the chapter keeps a focus on the central role of Libyans themselves in shaping the conflict and its internationalization.
The Proxy Air Wars Over Libya
Authors: Salyk-Virk Melissa
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides a deeper focus upon the air wars that became intertwined with Libya's internationalized civil war. Using open-source tracking of air strikes and civilian casualties in Libya by Airwars and New America, the chapter provides a sense of the complexity of a war that saw multiple foreign powers as well as local forces conducting air strikes.
The View from the City of Taiz
Authors: Baron Adam , Al-Hamdani Raiman
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides a detailed look at the local dynamics of one Yemeni city, Taiz, with central importance to Yemen's civil war. The chapter finds that when viewed from the ground, narratives about proxy wars between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Iran fail to reflect the conflicts occurring at the local level. At the same time, the chapter argues that appeals to framings of Yemen's civil war as a proxy conflict can provide benefits for the belligerents while making efforts to achieve peace more difficult.
Decoding the Wagner Group
Authors: Rondeaux Candace
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines Russia's use of private military security companies as agents of a proxy warfare strategy. It traces the history of Russia's private military sector, and how private military companies like the Wagner Group are closely tied to the Russian state. In examining the rise of such groups, the chapter challenges state-centric narratives that treat sponsors as unitary actors and governance collapse as merely an issue in battlegrounds where proxies fight.
Promises, Promises
Authors: Rotberg Robert I.
Published: January 2023

Banda’s replacements, beginning in 1994, were ostensibly democratic and progressive. Some were even dynamic but, even with extensive outside assistance and economic advice, Malawi was rarely able to overcome the failure of rains to fall and the inability of subsistence crops to feed its people adequately. Devoid of abundant natural resources, Malawi has remained poor, and struggling. It endured frequent episodes of elite-perpetrated corruption, especially under presidencies of the brothers Bingu wa and Peter Mutharika. Only since the election of President Lazarus Chakwera in 2020 have Malawi’s prospects improved. This chapter discusses how Malawians have dealt with their many political vicissitudes and economic mistakes since the days of Banda.
Mandela’s Triumph
Authors: Rotberg Robert I.
Published: January 2023

This chapter analyzes the oppression of apartheid and how it strangled African creativity and freedom. It discusses how Africans fought back at Sharpeville and Soweto, and how Nelson Mandela secured a new beginning for his country and eventually emerged as a global icon. There is much about Mandela and his contributions to securing and fashioning a rainbow nation. Many of Mandela’s co-conspirators are epitomized and his Afrikaner opponents examined. This chapter also epitomizes the important role of African and white opponents of National Party domination, discusses outside influence on ending apartheid, and reveals the critical influence of persons such as Steve Biko.
The Promise of Democracy Lost
Authors: Rotberg Robert I.
Published: January 2023

Zimbabwe’s African battle to overturn determined white settler rule was fought both in the bush and at the conference table. In 1980, after a decade of war, Britain managed to bring peace to the country. President Robert Mugabe greatly expanded its educational capacity and initially supported the white farmers who employed vast numbers of Africans. But then he ousted them from the country and became more and more corrupt and authoritarian. In this century he and his military acolytes rigged election after election, managed to subvert a South African imposed coalition government together with opponents, and eventually was ousted in 2017 as a result of an inside coup. Emmerson Mnangagwa, his successor, was once his bagman for corrupt proceeds, and has since ruled Zimbabwe harshly together with the armed forces. Mugabe’s reign greatly impoverished the country, and made its people remarkably poorer. Millions have fled; others literally starve. This chapter examines who did what to whom and exactly why Zimbabwe is in such desperate straits now.
Namibia
Authors: Rotberg Robert I.
Published: January 2023

Namibia finally removed South African shackles in 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of apartheid, and energetic Western diplomacy together with a nationalist guerrilla movement, persuaded South Africa to go. This chapter discusses Namibia from its mandatory period to the present, and examines corruption and governance under a succession of indigenous leaders from President Sam Nujoma to President Hage Geingob. South Africa tried to fold what was a UN Trust Territory into the Republic of South Africa. Thwarted by the UN and the globe’s major powers, South Africa tried a number of other devious maneuvers before finally letting the UN bring Namibia to freedom. Ever since, however, Namibia has stumbled, with attacks on the press, outbreaks of corruption, and battles against the coronavirus pandemic. This chapter reviews how Namibia liberated itself and how it perseveres today.
Leaders of Integrity Conquer Africa’s Consummate Challenges
Authors: Rotberg Robert I.
Published: January 2023

The destinies of the peoples of southern Africa have largely been, and are still, determined by the predilections and political strategies of those men and women who emerged after 1964 as its leaders. Structure and contingency are always important, but in the southern African and African contexts, national outcomes, the delivery of governmental services (governance) to citizens, and even personal welfare satisfaction levels have each been (and continue to be) supremely influenced by the designs and self-interests of the black rulers who replaced the white oppressors, and by the numerous heirs of those early liberation-era pioneers. This concluding chapter shows how the successful anticolonial surge in southern Africa was succeeded by a new wave of authoritarianism. Once the colonial oppressors were ousted, keeping a new class of oppressors from retarding popular progress was essential. It is a struggle that continues, as Frantz Fanon foresaw that it would.
The Language of Canon Law
Authors: Hahn Judith
Published: January 2023

This book explores the language of canon law, the legal order of the Roman Catholic Church. It seeks to bring the language of canon law into the law and language debate and in doing so helps readers better understand how the Roman Catholic Church communicates as a legal institution. It examines the function of canon law language in ecclesiastical communications. It studies the character of canonical language, the grammar and terminology of canon law, and how canon law makes use of linguistic tricks and techniques to create its typical sound. The book discusses the comprehension difficulties that arise out of ambiguities in the law, out of transfer problems between legal and common language, and out of canon law’s confusing mix of legal, doctrinal, and moral norms. It reviews the potential consequences of a plain language agenda in the church. This includes an evaluation of whether dead Latin is the appropriate language for a global and cross-cultural legal order such as canon law, and a discussion of how to improve multi-language communication. It takes a closer look at ecclesiastical interpretation theory. The book examines forensic language, the language of ecclesiastical tribunals, in its problematic shifting between orality and textuality. It addresses readers with an interest in law and language, theology and religion, and the sociology of law and religion. To scholars of secular law, the book may serve as a point of departure for approaching religious law through its language.
Idiosyncrasies of Legal Language
Authors: Hahn Judith
Published: January 2023

This chapter sums up the characteristics of legal language, specific grammatical and terminological features that give the language of the law in general and the language of canon law in particular its specific sound. These features often include the use of a challenging syntax, an excessive use of the passive voice, and an alien terminology, including technical terms, terms in foreign languages, and neologisms. With regard to the terminology of the law, the chapter addresses the use of common terms as legal terms and the development of a specialist legal language based on common language. A critical issue in legal terminology is the use of indeterminate terms, allowing for some flexibility in legal application but undermining legal certainty and the rule of law. Canon law makes wide use of indeterminate terms (“grave necessity”, “just cause”). This poses a particular problem for legal certainty in church.
Comprehension Difficulties
Authors: Hahn Judith
Published: January 2023

This chapter deals with selected problems of legal comprehension which are particularly relevant when it comes to comprehending canon law: ambiguities in legal language, transfer problems, and genre mixes. For several reasons, canon law not only contains many ambiguous terms (“christifidelis”), it also contains syntactic ambiguities which blur the meaning of canonical norms. Drawing terms from everyday language into legal language has resulted in transfer problems as church members without legal training attribute a meaning to these terms which differs from that of the law. A critical example is the “nullity” terminology with which the church approaches invalid marriages. In mixing legal norms with theological statements, canon law also blends diverse genres, often obscuring the intended meaning of the law.
Challenging Legal Incomprehension
Authors: Hahn Judith
Published: January 2023

The difficulty of understanding legal language is socially costly and defies the modern definition of democratic, liberal, and egalitarian society. Shielding the law from public understanding has an exclusivist and elitist flavor—and a clericalist one in the church—as Latin canon law is intended solely for the comprehension of a clerical elite. The plain language movement responds to these problems by proposing how to make the language of the law easier to comprehend. These proposals are also relevant for canon law. Here, however, one major point in the debate has to be the elemental question of whether to abide with Latin as canon law’s authentic language.
Interpreting the Law
Authors: Hahn Judith
Published: January 2023

In discovering the meaning of norms, canon law follows a plain meaning rule. Consequently, the doubts of scholars who question the existence of a plain and proper meaning of terms are also relevant for canon law. Rules on interpretation provide for cases in which meaning is more difficult to obtain. The church, interestingly, provides the appliers of its law not only with legal rules for interpreting the law but also with a mixed approach combining textualist, contextualist, and intentionalist approaches, thereby forming a pragmatic bundle of interpretation rules. However, with regard to interpretive authority, canon law also shows a strong tendency to rely on the legislator for matters of interpretation. This centralist temptation to maintain control over the law may be received critically as one sign of mistrust toward the local appliers of the law.
The False Promise of Superiority
Authors: Lebovic James H.
Published: January 2023

In focusing on US nuclear superiority, contemporary scholars highlight capability asymmetries, or improvements, that only promise to override undesirable deterrence constraints; and they accept too readily that coercive bargaining tactics can compensate, rather than worsen, conditions when capability alone appears insufficient. In this, they understate the influence of assumptions about adversary intent—conjectures influenced by political, social, psychological, and organizational factors—that determine how parties act in a conflict, and whether they seek to avoid one. To compensate, The False Promise of Superiority reflects on deficiencies in US thinking about the Cold War nuclear balance to expose biases in current thinking about US nuclear superiority. It examines the exaggerated utility of coercive tactics, which include making commitments, manipulating risk, showing resolve, and establishing reputations for acting. It develops its points with revealing case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iran nuclear deal. It closes by discussing the implications for policy and analysis of a long list of perils and pitfalls identified in the volume.
When Tactics Consume Strategy
Authors: Lebovic James H.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 7 offers a case study of the Cuban Missile Crisis to show how preexisting options inform policy discussion and debate. Whereas analysts often extoll the benefits of nuclear advantages, for coercive effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis offers powerful evidence that officials in the throes of confrontation might lack the foresight, deliberativeness, and control to produce desired results. They might defer, then, to salient (perhaps, prepackaged) options with little insight, or effort to gain insight, into the adversary’s goals or the conditions that could cause a conflict to spiral beyond control. During the crisis, officials latched onto conventional options—in particular, air strikes—with little thought to how they might spark a nuclear conflagration. For that matter, despite alleged US nuclear superiority in the period, US policymakers gave no attention to whether, or how, a nuclear advantage would permit a favorable resolution of the crisis.
When Red Lines Consume Debate
Authors: Lebovic James H.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 8 offers a case study of US efforts to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions which culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement in the Obama administration. It shows how the material aspects of a security issue can dominate policy and debate. Controversy centered largely on the material dimensions of the challenge—that is, establishing thresholds and allowances for Iran’s nuclear program. Yet underexamined assumptions about Iranian intentions—based on prior ideological commitments—determined whether members of the large US policy community accepted or rejected the deal. Thus, the material focus—far from highlighting enormous US ratios of advantage—had just the opposite effect. Ironically, US policy hawks who had long stressed the value of relative nuclear advantages most stressed the unsettling impact should Iran acquire any nuclear weapons. With the focus on what Iran could do, lost in discussion and debate was what Iran would do given the incentives and disincentives ostensibly created by US nuclear superiority.
Conscious Experience
Authors: Salje Léa , Geddes Alexander
Published: January 2023

A number of philosophers claim that reflection on the subjective or phenomenal character of conscious experience reveals the universal involvement of a certain feature—‘for-me-ness’, or ‘mine-ness’, or ‘a sense of mine-ness’—whose presence is often overlooked or denied. The first half of this chapter canvasses several possible interpretations of these phrases, identifies some ways in which their use tends to be problematically equivocal, and ends with a clear and minimal statement of what the feature is supposed to be. The second half questions some of the grounds on which the universality of this feature has been upheld in recent analytic work, addressing both a cluster of explanatory motivations (appealing to immunity to error though misidentification, epistemic asymmetry, and ease of judgment or reportability) and a more direct descriptive or conceptual case for this view.
The Three Circles of Consciousness
Authors: Kriegel Uriah
Published: January 2023

A widespread assumption in current philosophy of mind is that a conscious state’s phenomenal properties vary with its representational contents. In this chapter, I present an alternative picture that admits two kinds of phenomenal properties that do not vary with content. First, there are phenomenal properties that vary rather with attitude. Secondly, there is a kind of phenomenal property that varies neither with content nor with attitude but is altogether invariant across all conscious states: a substantive phenomenal commonality among all experiences. This substantive commonality, I suggest, is the for-me-ness component of what it is like for me to have any experience. The chapter closes with a discussion of the interrelations among these three concentric layers of phenomenality: content-based, attitude-based, and for-me-ness.
Experiencing Subjects and So-Called Mine-Ness
Authors: Nida-Rümelin Martine
Published: January 2023

Subjective character (mine-ness, for-me-ness) is supposed to be a property of experiences. To use the term is to adopt the experience property framework. I assume that all one can truthfully say within the experience property framework is translatable into the subject property framework, into talk about experiencing subjects and their properties. I suggest four translations of the claim that experiences have subjective character into the more fundamental subject property framework: (a) there is a subject for whom it is like something to undergo the experience; (b) the subject undergoing the experience is aware of having the experience; (c) the subject undergoing the experience is aware of itself as the one who undergoes the experience; (d) the subject is under the impression that the experience it undergoes belongs to it. The chapter explores these readings and their conceptual and ontological interrelations.
The Phenomenology of Bodily Ownership
Authors: Vignemont Frédérique de
Published: January 2023

When considering the sense of bodily ownership, one needs to answer at least three questions: (i) Is there a phenomenology of ownership? (ii) If there is a phenomenology of ownership, is it an inherent quality of the sensory phenomenology of bodily awareness, such as the location at which one feels tactile and painful sensations, or is it beyond the sensory qualities? (iii) If it is beyond, then what is it? An irreducible feeling of myness? A specific type of agentive feelings, which is grounded in the control that one exerts over one’s body? A cognitive feeling, or possibly even a metacognitive one? Or a specific type of affective feeling, which is grounded in the special significance of one’s body for self-preservation?
No Country for Strangers?
Authors: Butt Daniel , Stemplowska Zofia
Published: January 2023

This chapter argues that David Miller’s theoretical methodology can be used to ground a different account of the political theory of migration from that expounded in Miller’s Strangers in our Midst. The chapter first discusses the idea of taking a ‘fair share’ of refugees, and the exclusion of those seeking to migrate who are not fleeing unavoidable violations of their human rights. It proceeds to challenge the role of existing public opinion in Miller’s account, which is seen as dangerous in contexts where there is good reason to believe that popular sentiment is affected by racial prejudice. The chapter draws on the argumentation of Miller’s influential work on market socialism as a model for how political theory can be grounded in the real-world present and yet offer an imaginative utopian vision of the future. The upshot is a progressive account of migration policy that pays particular attention to past injustice.
Republican Citizenship, National Identity, and Trust in Diverse States
Authors: Lenard Patti Tamara
Published: January 2023

David Miller’s account of republican citizenship requires a shared national identity in order to generate trust between citizens. This chapter argues that more attention needs to be given to conditions under which trust can be produced and reproduced in democratic states characterized by diversity, much of which is the result of socially beneficial immigration. For a multicultural society to be characterized by trust, it must be the case that the mechanisms of national identity reproduction are a source of trust, or at least not a source of distrust. This means paying attention to both the formal and the informal spheres of social and political interaction. Insofar as Miller’s own account of republican citizenship is concerned with the former but not the latter, concentrating on reason-giving in formal political space, it may lack the resources necessary to ensure that the reproduction of a state’s national identity can build trust in diverse societies.
Introduction
Authors: Koralus Philipp
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the dual problems of success and failure for a theory of the human capacity to reason. The chapter considers what it takes to give an explanatory theory of the capacity to reason. The chapter explores insights and limitations in the frameworks of mental logic, mental models, bounded optimality, and Bayesianism, among others. The erotetic theory is introduced.
Reasoning with Uncertainty
Authors: Koralus Philipp
Published: January 2023

This chapter further extends the erotetic theory to represented graded uncertainty through what is termed equilibrium answerhood potential. This will allow us to use the mechanisms developed in the previous chapters to make sense of various fallacies of judgment under uncertainty, including base-rate neglect and other evidence fallacies. A refined notion of erotetic equilibrium will be shown to allow the erotetic reasoner to be probabilistically coherent and perform correct Bayesian updates. We finally consider what might enable Tetlock’s “Superforecasting” and how we might understand expert judgment as being often outside erotetic equilibrium.
Astronomy: The Human Quest for Understanding
Authors: Ostlie Dale A.
Published: January 2023

This book is an introduction to how science operates in practice and what makes it so successful in uncovering nature's secrets. Given that the study of astronomy dates back thousands of years, it is the ideal subject for tracing the development of the physical sciences and how our evolving understanding of nature has influenced, and been influenced by, mathematics, philosophy, religion, geography, politics, and more. This historical approach also illustrates how wrong turns have been taken, and how the inherent self-correcting nature of science through constant verification and the falsifiability of truly scientific theories ultimately leads us back to a more productive path in our quest for understanding. This approach also points out why, as a broadly educated citizenry, students of all disciplines must understand how scientists arrive at conclusions, and how science and technology have become central features of modern society. In discussing this fascinating and beautiful universe of which we are a part, it is necessary to illustrate the fundamental role that mathematics plays in decoding nature's mysteries.
The Sun, Our Parent Star
Authors: Ostlie Dale A.
Published: January 2023

The Sun, Our Parent Star explores the complex nature of the star that provides the light and heat necessary for our existence. First, the characteristics of the Sun and its atmosphere are studied. The atmosphere is structured in layers with the photosphere at the base out to the corona from which the solar wind flows. Observations of sunspots reveal the 22-year solar cycle. Studying the rotation of the Sun and the spectral lines associated with magnetic fields shows that the periodicity of solar activity is connected to the behavior of the Sun’s magnetic field, its differential rotation, and convection. Powering the Sun are the nuclear reactions that occur at its core. The energy produced is transported to the surface first through the radiative zone that occupies the inner 70% of the star, then through the convection zone to the surface. The top of the convection zone is visible as granulation.
Measuring the Stars
Authors: Ostlie Dale A.
Published: January 2023

Measuring the Stars begins the reader’s journey toward understand that stars are far more interesting than simply being dots distributed throughout the night sky. Armed with our knowledge of gravitation, light, atoms, and the production of light spectra, patterns in stellar characteristics emerge. Because only select wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum can reach Earth’s surface, and because of the distances light must travel to reach us, tremendous effort has gone into constructing telescopes that can gather as much light as possible from wherever we must go to obtain it. With information about the spectra of stars, paired with their brightnesses and distances, relationships between temperature, luminosity, and radii reveal themselves. The analysis of binary star orbits provides additional information about stellar masses. With the development of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, the stage was set for profound advances in our understanding of how stars work.
The End of a Stellar Life
Authors: Ostlie Dale A.
Published: January 2023

The End of a Stellar Life considers the consequences of a star that expends all its available fuel. Stars less than about 9 solar masses will grow so large and become so luminous that their very extended atmospheres will gently blow off into space, temporarily forming beautiful planetary nebulas while leaving behind their burned-out nuclear cores. These Earth-sized cinders are known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf happens to be in a binary star system, material from its companion could fall onto it, pushing its mass above the 1.4 solar mass Chandrasekhar limit, thus triggering a supernova explosion that destroys the star. For more massive stars, the nuclear reactions ultimately lead to collapsing cores and a different sort of supernova. What is left behind is either a bizarre, city-sized neutron star or, if the star’s original mass was large enough, a black hole.
The Once and Future Universe
Authors: Ostlie Dale A.
Published: January 2023

The Once and Future Universe begins with the discovery that the universe is expanding. Not only are galaxy clusters and superclusters moving away from one another, but they are being carried apart by the expansion of spacetime caused by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory, combined with cosmic inflation, describe the beginning of the universe, an idea confirmed by the discovery of the predicted 3 K microwave background. However, our models are handicapped by the lack of a complete theory of quantum gravity. Recent observations have demonstrated that not only is the universe expanding, but contrary to intuition it is accelerating, leading to the conclusion that spacetime includes some form of dark energy that science has yet to understand. Fittingly, the chapter and the textbook end with a look at how our universe might end.
Introduction
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

The introduction discusses ‘spontaneity’ as both a post-Romantic and a religious concept—historicizing an idea that connects to Protestantism, but has also a range of global coordinates—while also exploring Caroline Levine’s extension of ‘form’ into the social world. The author explains their focus on, beyond effects of metanoia, self-correction, and splintered or splurting syntax, assonances that make sentences justle, a word borrowed from A. E. Housman’s poetry. Tracking hidden sonic durations, where impulses resistant to articulation (that, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, ‘resist the intelligence | Almost successfully’) intuit their way, the author locates within prose rather than verse a dialectic of spontaneity and form. Sentences may bear the whole burden of a constructive wager that is at one and the same time the glimpse of a melody, the initiation of an idea, and an insistence to both the writer themselves and their reader of the value of what has arisen.
William Hazlitt’s Spontaneous Journalism
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

The Romantic essayist William Hazlitt turns demands placed on him as a journalist into an aesthetic, which then migrates across the Atlantic. The connection between Protestantism and money behaviours is one that Hazlitt, living by his writing, could enact—limning it marvellously in his prose, should we read between the lines. An improvident man, beset by financial and other insecurities, he wrote avidly, torrentially. While a newspaper or magazine columnist may be pressed by deadlines to write ‘spontaneously’ in the second sense, they can’t be considered (like a poet, philosopher, or painter) to compose spontaneously in the first, because their writing is always occasional: prompted by a pre-existing event or text. Hazlitt realized he could raise journalism to the status of Romantic poetry by asserting the new, literary sense of spontaneity, suggestive of improvisatory, and therefore inspired, composition.
The Crisis Prose of Emerson and Whitman
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

Emerson and Whitman, theorizing through Indian texts a suprapersonal oneness that would heal the United States, transplant a rhetoric from one war context (Krishna advising Arjuna at Kurukshetra, in the Bhagavad-Gita) to another. Analysing Emerson’s rhetoric of a pre-reflective spontaneity that doesn’t isolate the individual, but connects them with others—an idea he, Englishing the Sanskrit concept of paramatman, names the ‘over-soul’—the chapter then turns to Whitman’s late prose work Specimen Days. This assortment of diary-entries, jottings, and retrospective analyses loosely assembled, is really his wildest experiment with the poetics of improvisation, as a means of fusing diversities into unity. In it, the imagery of moonlight Michael Warner identifies in Whitman’s cluster of war verse, Drum-Taps, is extended to provide a cosmic perspective corresponding to that of Krishna in the Gita, and suggesting a purview in which the war itself appears an unavoidable and historically indispensable convulsion.
‘In some spontaneous way, so to speak’
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

The Victorian Jesuit-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins esteemed sound and prosody. Yet he was also fascinated by the rhythms of prose, writing to his brother Everard on 5 November 1885 that ‘prose … has, at least possible to it, effects more beautiful than any verse can attain’. The nature-descriptions in his journals experiment relentlessly with the poetics of prose his letters assert piecemeal. There is evidence Hopkins edited these notebooks, nuancing an aesthetic of notation that, arising from the diaries of Romantic poets like Coleridge, was made irreversibly self-conscious within the published prose of his Victorian precursor, John Ruskin. Against a scientific, or scientistic, view of nature as a desacralized space, disintegrating into lifelessly untethered facts, Hopkins’s prose reveals an apparently spontaneous, self-shaping spirit alive in plants, stones, clouds, and water. His self-consciousness about his sentences illuminates the complex relationship prose had to Victorian habits of intellectual enquiry.
Herman Melville’s Heart and Billy Budd’s Overflowing Soup
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

Melville’s creative inhabitancy of the space between two understandings of spontaneity combines a Protestant understanding of divine enthusiasm with the more secular inspiration of a Romantic poetics—in a strangely mistrustful, alienated way. This chapter tracks his metaphor of the economically appraisable heart through his letters and passages from Moby-Dick; moving to Billy Budd, which mentions spontaneity several times, I treat Billy’s spilling of soup across his enemy Claggart’s path as a literalization of Wordsworth’s poetics of spontaneous overflow, and indeed the relationship between these characters as a version of Melville’s mixed feelings towards the (that) Romantic poet. Billy Budd, more than any other text, dramatizes the conflict between spontaneity and form: naval rituals survive the protagonist’s spontaneity, but at the cost of his life. There are tensions that Melville’s plots, his characterization, and his sentences themselves either refuse to, or cannot, resolve—impulsivities shirking coordination either by the author or the critic.
The Aesthetics of Outburst
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

Saul Bellow admires D. H. Lawrence for prioritizing a primordial vitality at odds with conventions. Both, feeling themselves outsiders—Bellow was Jewish-American, Lawrence the working-class son of a Nottinghamshire miner—brandished spontaneity as a counter-authority to existing, genteel, codes. Making space in their prose for the spontaneous, they write aggressively towards other subject positions—they can be racist, sexist, multifariously spiteful—refusing to suppress or censor or curate such blurting velocities as, they insist, retain an unpredictable truth content. This chapter concentrates on Lawrence’s Women in Love and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, novels bringing displaced perspectives to events close at hand. Women in Love is recognized as a novel of the Great War, despite Lawrence’s temporally nebulous peacetime setting; Henderson, the author suggests, takes its hero to an insufficiently imagined (Bellow had never been there) Africa as part of Bellow’s vexed dealings with Black people in the United States and their quest for civil rights.
Virginia Woolf, Marion Milner
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

Spontaneity as a word and a concept is important to Virginia Woolf’s theorization both of the modernist novel and of modern female personhood. Her prose wishes often to float down the stream of consciousness as long as possible—treating the outside world as an aggressor. This is part of her discourse-initiating assertion that a woman gain her own time and space in which to think, an allowance requiring protection against the demands of others. The psychoanalyst and life-writer Marion Milner combines Woolf’s nuancing of female consciousness with British School object-relations psychoanalysis—to create a style of journal writing that rediscovers the Wordsworthian idea of a ‘wise passiveness’ by not deconstructing or subverting but by repurposing (transvaluing) gender stereotypes. For Milner, we mustn’t just re-learn—in war-darkened times—to trust our impulses, but more aconscientiously entrust our disquiets to ‘spontaneous ordering forces’ within that, if we let them, may shape experience into gladdened forms.
Reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, in the Meantime
Authors: Ravinthiran Vidyan
Published: January 2023

Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha is neglected twice over. First, it’s poet’s prose, whose theme, of Black womanhood in the mid-century United States, we assume Brooks treated best in verse. Second, the mode of resistance it suggests appears too internal, intellectual, passive—at a remove from structural change. Combining Fred Moten’s theories on Black improvisation with the racialized phonetics of Brent Hayes Edwards, I explore how in Brooks’s prose, networks of sound establish against myriad forms of circumscription and constriction a replenishing, yet never secure, surplus. This isn’t a simple opposition—of, say, Maud Martha’s spiritedness to the entrapping, grey, kitchenette building in which she lives—because she, and Brooks, also take from Whitman a metaphor of stonecutting and sculpture he uses to describe the poet creating new forms for his nation, and which Brooks racializes to depict the challenges faced by the Black artist who would create for her people new traditions permitting a liberated expressiveness.
The Insanity DefenceConflict and Reform in New Zealand
Authors: Brookbanks Warren
Published: January 2023

Relative to other jurisdictions, New Zealand’s experience with the insanity defence is brief. A statutory defence was first enacted in 1893, and its substance has changed little. In its development it has adhered closely to a narrow cognitive test of capacity, exclusive of emotional or volitional elements, and regardless of recent neuropsychological insights. Statutory changes, including the adoption of a standard of knowledge of moral, as opposed to legal wrong, mark a more inclusive insanity formulation, despite the small annual numbers of cases where insanity is pleaded. The introduction of a novel procedure for determining insanity by agreement in the absence of a trial, introduced in 2003, today accounts for the vast majority of successful insanity pleas in New Zealand, eliminating the distress and conflict of experts often associated with insanity trials. Unresolved judicial opinion, however, still remains around whether the insanity test requires proof of total incapacity as opposed to subjective lack of knowledge of wrong, potentially exposing defendants to the requirement of a higher threshold of capacity than the law seems to demand. Any significant change to the formulation of the insanity defence has been rejected by the New Zealand Law Commission. However, the advent of widespread methamphetamine abuse and associated legal issues have challenged the workability of the defence, questioning whether it remains fit for purpose. In addition, questions raised by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities further challenge the appropriateness and viability of the defence and its conformity to international human rights norms.