bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Historical Roots of Existentialism
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

This chapter shows the inheritance by existentialism of ideas from the philosophical tradition. Socrates serves for Kierkegaard and Marcel as a model for the authentic practice of philosophy and for initiating interior reflection of the self. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus debated Stoicism’s understanding of freedom from external circumstances. Husserl and Heidegger interpreted Augustine’s conception of time, while Heidegger along with Beauvoir adapted, in a secular context, features of his conception of religious conversion. Augustine, Shakespeare, and Montaigne explored inner reflection and the nature of the self which came to be critically echoed in existentialist conceptions. The Enlightenment generated a philosophy of human freedom, defending the rational autonomy of the individual. Critical engagement of these ideas is shown to have shaped existentialist conceptions of authenticity, subjectivity, inwardness, freedom, and responsibility.
On Seeking and Taking (and Giving) Advice
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

In light of existentialism as a concrete philosophy for living, this chapter examines Sartre’s argument that in contemplating and making ethical decisions one must invent new values. It suggests that seeking advice in such a situation is already part of the process of valuation. Alongside the examples Sartre gives in his “Existentialism” lecture, Rilke’s advice to a young poet is considered.
Being in the Crowd
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

This chapter shows how many existentialists conceived the individual in the modern world and the challenges of modern life to individual authenticity. It takes up Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke, and the existential social theorist Georg Simmel, identifying their shared skepticism of modern mass culture and fear that it endangered human individuality. These existential thinkers could not have anticipated globalization, the breadth of mass production and consumption in the current century, or its data-driven anonymization of human culture. Yet this chapter argues that their insights are especially relevant for life in the contemporary world. It considers how the human individual may be existentially sustained despite these challenges.
On Being and Waiting (Tables), or, The Roles We Play
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

This chapter critically engages Sartre’s view that adopting roles in the performance of life’s tasks is inherently inauthentic. It examines Sartre’s critique in Being and Nothingness of the waiter and other professions that engage in “public ceremony.” It poses the question whether Sartre inadvertently endorses an overly purified vision of authenticity, overlooking the necessity of taking up multiple particular roles in our social interactions with others. This chapter asks whether there are circumstances in which role-playing is not only necessary but authentic, expressing different ways of being-in-the-world in different contexts.
Existential Suffering, Happiness, and Hope
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

This chapter shows that while existentialist thinkers recognize the human condition as wrought with difficulty, their vision of suffering is complex and should be considered alongside existentialist interest in happiness and the possibility of hope. All existentialist thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, extend philosophical dignity to suffering by considering our experiences of anxiety, dread, the tragic, anguish, forlornness, and despair. While this focus on suffering has led to the vision of existentialism as a nihilistic philosophy, this chapter shows that a number of existential thinkers also propose joyful responses to the difficulties of the human condition. Nietzsche, Camus, and Marcel in particular suggest that pain and joy can be interrelated, that the experience of anxiety is linked to that of happiness, the prospect of despair to the possibility of hope.
Life as a Work of Art
Authors: Gosetti-Ferencei Jennifer Anna
Published: October 2020

This chapter demonstrates why creativity is a persistent theme in existentialist thought. It shows why creativity may be required, as Nietzsche says, to become who we are, and who we may want to be. It considers why Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made philosophy into an inherently creative enterprise and why Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus wrote fiction themselves and gave tribute to literature or art as crucial to existential understanding. The chapter addresses Heidegger’s view that art and especially poetry served to reveal the world and established a form of truth. In this context it is considered why human beings may strive to make art under conditions of oppression. This chapter shows that while existentialists express diverging views about many topics, they all invite individuals to live life with creativity, that existentialist thinking encourages living life as a work of art.
Epilogue
Authors: Reilly Thomas H.
Published: October 2020

Protestant elites suffered along with the rest of China’s elite during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. After Mao’s death, many of these elite were rehabilitated and some were returned to positions of leadership. Meanwhile, under China’s economic reforms, the nation has become wealthier and stronger; China has become modern. While mostly controlled by the government, Chinese Protestant churches have grown larger, and their social influence has expanded, helping Chinese Protestants more faithfully fulfill their calling to serve their people, their nation, and their God.
Accordion Conjuntos and the Commercialization of Panamanian Música Típica
Authors: Bellaviti Sean
Published: October 2020

Moving through the 1940s to the late 1960s, chapter 3 examines música típica’s sudden and wholehearted embrace by Panama’s popular classes. This boom was produced in significant part by massive internal migration of rural people both to the capital and other parts of the interior, the transformative effect of the arrival of cash-based economies in rural areas, the advent of commercial radio, and the creative interventions of pioneering musicians. All these changes, the author shows, stimulated the rapid commercialization of the genre, which further galvanized calls for cultural preservation even as performance opportunities for commercial música típica conjuntos grew dramatically. The chapter closes with an examination of how música típica’s broad acceptance by Panama’s popular classes and its continued connection with the country’s interior led to its development as a form of popular musical nationalism that, by the end of the 1960s, found favor among the leaders of Panama’s left-wing revolutionary government.
A Professional’s Guide to Performing Música Típica
Authors: Bellaviti Sean
Published: October 2020

Chapter 5 brings us to the ethnographic present wherein the author surveys the many activities música típica musicians pursue in the course of providing popular entertainment. For the bandleader, these activities include the investment in reliable transportation, musical instruments, and powerful sound systems, and negotiations with local baile organizers. For the entire band, the demands of performance necessitate constant travel over considerable distances and playing through the night for the better part of a week, all while balancing personal life and maintaining cordial relationships with bandmates, the bandleader, and fans. Moving from a detailed description of a weekly tour to the intricate inner workings of a Panamanian baile, it is here that the author shows how the work involved in performing música típica also projects the band’s image as a group of either committed traditionalists or daring innovators at the same time that it reinforces the music’s enduring association with the country’s interior heartland.
Standing Out While Fitting In
Authors: Bellaviti Sean
Published: October 2020

Chapter 6 extends the discussion of the previous two chapters by examining the musical choices música típica musicians make to forge an identifiable individual style that is the key to establishing a career, distinguishing the sound of individual conjunto musicians, and achieving a coveted region-based following. This focus on specific musical strategies through which musicians draw creative inspiration—whether from renown música típica performers and/or genres that have achieved broad international success—allows the author to explore música típica’s development as a form of cutting edge popular music that is, at the same time, firmly tethered to sentiments of tradition, regionalism, and populist nationalism. The technical approaches for developing the all-important original sound described by the musicians who are featured in this chapter opens the way for the author to theorize the relationship between style and genre as well as to discuss issues involving the common usages of these terms and concepts in ethnomusicological discourse.
Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body
Authors: Iyer Usha
Published: October 2020

Chapter 1 presents a dance-centered taxonomy of musical numbers, which clarifies how dance promotes agency and authorship. Reconsidering the term “song picturization,” which suggests the primacy of the song as setting the agenda for the visuals, this chapter proposes that in the case of certain dance numbers or famed dancer-actors, a reverse process of “dance musicalization” is at work, in which a desired dance vocabulary precedes and influences the conceptualization of the song. This disruption of given logics of production and authorship spurs the conceptualization of a multi-bodied “choreomusicking body,” which directs our attention to the many on- and off-screen bodies laboring to produce the song-and-dance number, and fundamentally shifts ideological readings of narrative and spectacle in popular Hindi cinema. Employing choreomusicological theory, historical accounts of dancer-actors’ influence on musical composition, and spectatorial responses to the music-dance composite, this chapter proposes new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence.
Choreographing Architectures of Public Intimacy
Authors: Iyer Usha
Published: October 2020

Chapter 2 develops a body-space-movement framework that studies the spaces of dance, the movement vocabularies used, and the resulting construction of star bodies. This framework uncovers the production processes behind the fetishized space of the Hindi film cabaret, an “architecture of public intimacy,” whose spatial and choreographic operations arouse intense sensorial stimulation. Through a focus on cabaret numbers featuring the dancing star Helen, this chapter discusses the cine-choreographic practices that produce a collision of infrastructures, bodies, and spaces. The body-space-movement framework is also employed to analyze film dance in relation to Indian “classical” and “folk” dance forms. Borrowing from Indian performance treatises like the Natya Shastra and Abhinaya Darpana, this chapter deconstructs the dancing female body into three broad zones—the face, the torso, and the limbs—each of which is capable of a variety of addresses depending on the social connotations of those gestural articulations at certain historical moments.
Corporealizing Colonial Modernities
Authors: Iyer Usha
Published: October 2020

Chapter 3 focuses on Azurie and Sadhona Bose, once-famous, now-forgotten dancing stars of the 1930s–1940s, to excavate an intersecting, global history of early twentieth-century discourses on dance, featuring figures like Ruth St. Denis, Anna Pavlova, Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, among many others. Situating Bose, the Bengali bhadramahila, and Azurie, an Indo-German “dancing girl,” as co-choreographers of new mobilities throws light on cosmopolitan, transnational dance networks that intersected with nationalist projects of modernity. This chapter relates these dancer-actresses to the so-called revival of classical dance forms, which involved an appropriation of the cultural practices of traditional performers like devadasis and tawaifs by upper-caste, upper-class performers. By reading Bose and Azurie’s performing bodies and careers alongside each other, this chapter dislodges unitary accounts of the impulses and controversies around dance on film by a new class of urban performers.
Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?
Authors: Iyer Usha
Published: October 2020

With her vigorously libidinous dancing, her infamous “jhatkas and matkas,” Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated a whole new movement vocabulary for the Hindi film heroine. Dixit’s moves carried the unmistakable imprint of the choreographer who led her to stardom, Saroj Khan. With her six-decade-long career, Khan constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices in relation to dance performance and choreography. Chapter 5 delves into Khan and Dixit’s co-choreography of a new style of movement, reading choreography as an archival-corporeal system of transmission and transformation that articulates body cultures, industrial systems, and labor networks. A focus on training, rehearsal, and collaboration foregrounds the creative processes in their co-choreography that produced new techniques of the body, which both women continue to build on through richly intermedial careers in film, reality TV dance shows, and on web platforms.
The Cathedral of Santiago
Authors: Vera Alejandro
Published: October 2020

This chapter deals with musical life in Santiago cathedral during the 16th to 18th centuries. It considers, among other topics, its organization, structure, financing, and the agency of specific people, such as bishops, prebendaries, chapelmasters, and other musicians. It subsequently explains how this information casts light on more musical issues, such as performing practice, particularly during José de Campderrós’s time. The chapter also studies the repertoire, including plainsong and intonations, Latin polyphony, and Spanish pieces (especially villancicos), showing that the relative scarcity of music sources can be related not only to the restricted budget of the institution (especially until 1700) but also to specific features proper to is musical life. Then, it relates the different kinds of music mentioned before to the liturgical context, explaining both some of its similarities and differences with other cathedrals from the New World. As in the rest of the book, this chapter combines the study of historical documents and music sources.
Musicians in Colonial Santiago
Authors: Vera Alejandro
Published: October 2020

This chapter deals with musicians of Santiago in more depth, showing the importance of music in their professional and personal life. Among other aspects, it shows that these subjects frequently understood music as both a tool for social ascent and a vocation, and that music profession interacted with—but was not determined by—race, genre, familiar status, acquaintances, and other aspects of colonial life. Two of the chapter’s conclusions are that the social status of musicians was not necessarily proportional to the salary that they received, and that the music career of nuns and cathedral musicians was more similar than previously believed, since both passed many years working for free, with the goal of accumulating merits enough to enter the music chapel formally.
Bringing an American Report Card to Russia
Authors: Searcy Anne
Published: October 2020

Chapter 2 analyzes American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT’s) often-overlooked 1960 tour of the Soviet Union. The tour took place under highly fraught circumstances. Ballet was considered a uniquely Russian art form in both the United States and the Soviet Union. At many points in the spring and summer of 1960, both the Soviet and American governments threatened to withdraw support from the tour. In dealing with these concerns, ABT director Lucia Chase developed a strategy for presenting her company and the United States as the leader of an international, elite art form. Through repertoire and casting choices, she balanced the troupe’s profile, showing it as both an international company and an American organization. Moreover, the company’s American works bore striking similarities to Soviet drambalety and were therefore praised by Russian critics for displaying common aesthetic and political values. Much to the surprise of everyone involved, the strategy was successful.
Epilogue
Authors: Searcy Anne
Published: October 2020

The Epilogue addresses how issues in Cold War cultural diplomacy have played out in the last few years, focusing on the figures of David Hallberg and Alexei Ratmansky, two artists who have worked in both the American and Russian ballet worlds. Through a brief examination of their careers, the Epilogue shows how deeply the rhetorical strategies worked out during the Cold War continue to dominate discussions of ballet in the United States and Russia, despite the many obvious overlaps of personnel and repertoire in today’s globalized ballet culture.
Occitania, Court, and Cloister
Authors: Golden Rachel May
Published: October 2020

While medieval Occitania lacked national or governmental cohesiveness, its language and culture constructed a distinctive collective identity. Meanwhile, the sociopolitical volatility of twelfth-century Occitania imbued local lands with seeds of disquiet, yielding ambiguities regarding the region’s boundaries, territory, and sovereignty. Song culture centrally established Occitanian-ness during the Crusade era, revealing how the song creators experienced devotional practices, power structures, and identifications with home. Versus and troubadour repertories crystallized Occitania’s positions on linguistic distinctiveness, spatial perceptions, and cultural identity. The versus genre became an expression of resistance and creativity, while troubadour poet-composers blended their religious-political positions into the context of courtly love composition. Later, during the thirteenth century, the Albigensian Crusade radically challenged Occitania’s political independence and cultural vitality, causing displacement and senses of nostalgia. Analysis of Bel m’es q’ieu chant by Raimon de Miraval reveals the troubadour’s concern with Occitanian territory and homeland during the time of the Albigensian Crusade.
Situating the Holy Land: Juxtapositions and Circular Paths
Authors: Golden Rachel May
Published: October 2020

In endowing the Holy Land with sanctity, the Crusades established it as an object of territorial desire and a site of spiritual transcendence. Cultivating this desire for the Holy Land involved several interrelated Crusade concepts: the power of pilgrimage traditions, perceptions of the Eastern enemy, fear and curiosity about the unknown, and delineations of the position of the Holy Land within a larger globe. These factors converged to redefine Jerusalem within a sacred landscape, where Crusaders sought to walk in the very steps that Christ had impressed in the sacred terrain. Such concepts were explored in Crusader maps, and articulated in Crusade lyric. The rhetoric of Crusade song variously relied upon circular and linear motions, dualistically juxtaposed nearness and distance, sameness and difference, and yearning and attainment. This chapter demonstrates ways in which Crusade songs, such as Ara pot hom conoisser by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, mapped space, articulated geographic beliefs, and explored physical and spiritual senses of movement.
Near and Distant Lands in First Crusade Songs
Authors: Golden Rachel May
Published: October 2020

Two First Crusade songs from the turn of the twelfth century—Ierusalem mirabilis and Nomen a solemnibus—demonstrate Occitanian attitudes toward violence, Jerusalem, and dynamic Crusade journeys. Both come from the Aquitanian versus repertory and reference current or recent events pertaining to the First Crusade, and the state of Jerusalem between 1096 and 1099. In this way, they enhance our understanding of the versus repertory, which typically focuses on broader themes of Marian and Christological theology. Both songs rely upon various elements of Pope Urban’s Crusade call and contemporaneous crusading ideologies. They employ musical-poetic rhetorical techniques such as circular motion and dialectic opposition in order to portray the early Crusades as active, vital campaigns. The also employ deictic language to mark positionality and us-versus-them belief systems. In so doing, they position Jerusalem and Occitania—conceptually and geographically—in relation to one another, particularly through spatial notions of nearness and distance.
Singing Crusade Journeys
Authors: Golden Rachel May
Published: October 2020

In mapping geopolitics and spirituality, Crusade songs enacted motion and travel. Directionality and circularities typify Crusade songs and Crusaders alike. Songs variously embody dialogues between singing and hearing, the actions of Crusaders traveling both outremer and homeward. As songs moved through geographical spaces, bodies, air, and time, they articulated new contexts. Multiply re-created, songs emerged from composite and collective processes that included monks, troubadours, performers, scribes, and listeners. Contrafacture, seen in the relationship between Walther von der Vogelweide’s Palästinalied and Jaufre Rudel’s Lanqan li jorn, demonstrates the dialogic nature of these layers of creation, and how differing Crusade perspectives re-inscribe a song’s expression of striving, movement, or conclusion. Overall, Occitanian songs rendered the Crusade front as areas inflected by regional perspectives, from unknown spaces to meaningful places. Using techniques like deictic language, oppositional rhetoric, and circular motion, Crusade songs reinforced contemporaneous ideologies in both their poetic texts and directed melodic shapes.
Introduction
Authors: Golden Rachel May
Published: October 2020

Assatz i a portz e camis. / E per aisso no·n sui devis . . . [Many are the ports and roads, / And so I cannot prophesy . . .] (ll. 19–20)

—Jaufre Rudel, Lanqan li jorn
1

In his song Lanqan li jorn, the early-twelfth-century troubadour Jaufre Rudel expresses a sense of wonder and uncertainty about the future, one that he maps onto his perception of geography as complex, interwoven, and often unknowable. The song proclaims Jaufre’s intention to travel eastward to the Crusade front as a Christian pilgrim, and to unite there with his beloved Lady (generally understood as the Countess of Tripoli), the object of his ...
Who Is a Refugee?
Authors: Parekh Serena
Published: October 2020

“Refugee” is a term that is used in many different and sometimes inconsistent ways. This chapter provides an overview of the complexities involved in defining who a refugee is. It argues that because there is no universally agreed-on definition of a refugee, one that is consistent with international law, our moral intuitions, and on-the-ground practice, we cannot be confident that we are categorizing the right people as refugees and others as not deserving of any help. The line between refugees and other kinds of forced migrants is blurry at best, and a rigid distinction is perhaps impossible. The seemingly arbitrary way that refugee status is given is a feature of the global refugee regime that contributes to the second crisis and the inability of refugees to find refuge.
Moral Obligations, or Why We Should Help People Even If We Don’t Like Them
Authors: Parekh Serena
Published: October 2020

This chapter argues that Western liberal democracies have a moral obligation to rethink the way that refugees are treated during their displacement and to ensure they have access to the minimum conditions of human dignity. Yet many people find the language of morality uncomfortable or inappropriate when it comes to refugees. Others deny that morality is real and makes legitimate demands on us. This chapter responds to these concerns and gives an overview of the concept of a moral obligation by looking at its roots in philosophy and religion. The chapter examines the consequentialist, Kantian, religious, and human rights grounds for morality in order to demonstrate why a moral perspective is fundamental to addressing the crisis that refugees experience. This chapter makes clear that morality is not merely personal but can and must be extended globally. Countries must take their moral obligations to refugees seriously.
Attributing Knowledge
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

The word “know” is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive, and criterion-transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application—not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable “know” to be applied correctly—as it routinely is—to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word “know” suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown that the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word “know” explain Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict each other. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given—as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK.
The Variability of Know(s)-that Judgments
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

The usage evidence—various scenarios that realistically depict where and when we attribute knowledge to ourselves and others—shows that all the alternatives (epistemic contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism, knowledge relativism) to intellectual invariantism fail. They fail for several reasons: When cases are compared, speaker-hearers tend to retract one or the other conflicting knowledge claim; the intuitions elicited by various cases don’t consistently satisfy any particular position; the situations under which speaker-hearers retract knowledge claims under pressure seem to support an invariantist position. Nevertheless, no standard invariantist position seems supported by the usage data because speaker-hearers do seem to shift because of differences either in the interests of the agents to whom knowledge is attributed, for example, oneself, or because of other apparently non-epistemic reasons. Attempts to use pragmatic tools, such as implicatures, to handle the apparent shifts in knowledge standards are shown to fail as well.
Usage Traps in the Language of Iterated Knowledge Attributions
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

How we easily slip between metacognitive thought and assertion and ground-floor thought and assertion is illustrated; how, as a result, we easily confuse the two is also illustrated. “Do you know the time?” is often speaker-meant merely as a request for information as opposed to what it literally conveys, a question about the auditor’s knowledge state. Distinctions between having concepts, grasping one’s own concepts, and metacognizing one’s propositional attitudes (in various ways) are distinguished. Why it is so easy to confuse being aware of being in pain and being in pain is explained; that it seems it isn’t possible to be in pain without being aware of it illustrates metacognitive confusions. Similarly, kinds of justifications are distinguished that are often confused, ones that involve metacognition and ones that don’t. How “level confusions” bedevil philosophical arguments is illustrated.
Iterated and Ground-Floor Cognition, KK and K¬K Arguments and Empirical Studies
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

A distinction between Cartesian knowers (who are capable of all forms of metacognition) and ground-floor cognizers are drawn. B.B., a virtual ground-floor cognizer, is extensively described: what it knows, what it doesn’t know, and what concepts can be attributed to it. The fragmented nature of iterated cognitions is described. That deduction need not require metacognitions of any sort is described: in successfully deducing q from p, an agent need not recognize or appreciate that she is using propositions, that she is using a rule (modus ponens), or that she is justified. A psychological study of deduction is described, and how it fails to illustrate metacognition is illustrated. The apparent ineffability of metacognition in nonhuman animals is discussed. A single anecdotal case of metacognition in chimpanzees is given, and an implicit knowledge generalization is attributed to the animals on the basis of this case. The use of Morgan’s canon is rejected.
Inferential Justification
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

The ordinary distinction between being justified and being able to give a justification is described. Being able to give a justification requires metacognition; being justified doesn’t. Animals are sometimes justified in what they believe; sometimes they’re not. A definition for justification is given by analyzing a justification j of a proposition p in terms of j providing a truth-conducive reason for p. Two forms of justification are revealed along the lines of how propositions are justified, an inferential form and a representational form. Infinitism, the suggestion that infinite chains of justifiers—both deductive and truth-enhancing—are cogent, is then explored. It’s shown both that infinitary chains of justifications can’t function as additional forms of justification and that they can’t be used as provisional justifications either.
Confidence, Belief, and Knowledge; The Vagueness of “Know(s)”
Authors: Azzouni Jody
Published: October 2020

Knowledge does not require confidence. An agent may know without confidence because of misleading evidence or for other reasons. An agent may not believe what she knows. Misleading evidence never causes agents to lose knowledge. The vagueness of an expression may be visible to speakers or invisible. In the case of “bald,” it is visible; it is not visible for “know.” This is because knowledge standards are invisible. Vagueness is analyzed as being epistemic in the sense that our ignorance of whether a word applies in a case places no metaphysical constraints on the facts. Agential standards for evidence are also tri-scoped and application-indeterminate. There are cases where such standards determine no answer, knows or not; and there are cases where it is indeterminate whether, or not, standards determine an answer. Because Timothy Williamson’s argument against KK presupposes that knowledge requires confidence, his argument fails.
The Violence Pendulum
Authors: Matesan Ioana Emy
Published: October 2020

What drives Islamist groups to shift between nonviolent and violent tactics? When do groups move away from armed action, and why do some organizations renounce violence permanently, while others only place it on hold temporarily? The Violence Pendulum answers these questions and offers a theory of tactical change that explains both escalation and de-escalation. The analysis traces the historical evolution of four key Islamist groups: the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya in Egypt, and Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia. Drawing on a wide variety of archival materials, interviews, and reports, each chapter narrows in on critical turning points in each organization, and shows the factors that best explain whether the group legitimizes and resorts to violence and develops an armed wing. The book’s main contention is that Islamist groups alter their tactics in response to changes in the perceived need for activism, shifts in the cost of violent versus nonviolent resistance, and internal or external pressures on the organization. However, escalation and de-escalation are not simply mirror images of each other. Groups turn toward violence when their grievances escalate, when violent resistance is feasible and publicly tolerated, and when there are internal or external pressures to act. Organizations may renounce armed action when violence becomes too costly for the group, disillusionment eclipses the perceived need for continued activism, and leaders are willing to rethink the group’s the tactics and strategies.
Conclusion
Authors: Matesan Ioana Emy
Published: October 2020

This chapter summarizes the findings of the book and discusses their implications for our understanding of violence and nonviolence. Despite their differences, all four Islamist groups started legitimizing armed resistance when their grievances were high and violence was widespread. The groups turned to violent behavior once they began facing internal pressures from organizational fragmentation or external pressures from the state. Disengagement from violence does not occur when grievances cease to exist or groups no longer face pressures. Groups renounce violence when armed resistance becomes unsustainable, pressures turn to disillusionment, and leaders are willing to rethink tactics and strategies. The case studies examined in the book shed light on the contradictory findings on the effects of repression, by showing that that the impact of repression is filtered through organizational dynamics and social context. An effective long-term approach to terrorism should strive to design exit options from violence, resolve conflicts, and promote trust in the government.
Can One Turn to One’s Outward Baptism for Assurance of Salvation?
Authors: Tipson Baird
Published: October 2020

This chapter focuses on a single day during a late-sixteenth-century confrontation between Lutheran and Reformed theologians. As each side argued for its understanding of the meaning of infant baptism, each fastened on a different part of Martin Luther’s teaching. As the theologians argued, the distinction between the traditional understanding of sacramental baptism and something else, an “inward baptism,” became clear. Commitment to an inward baptism, which appeared to the Reformed to be a necessary consequence of Luther’s teaching, would eventually create space for evangelicalism.
Building the Future
Authors: Parkin Jack
Published: October 2020

The fourth chapter describes how technological decentralisation emerged with advancements in cryptography and acted as a political counterweight of resistance to the encroachment of centralised governments across (online) spaces. The decentralist worldview is shown to be rooted in the specific political geography of the West Coast of the United States that, during the latter half of the 20th century, became a crucible of counterculture and entrepreneurship. Fuelled by this vision, a monetarist desire to create fairer economies through algorithmic decentralisation gave rise to the advent of cryptocurrencies. The intersection and slippage of this technologically deterministic imaginary (preaching a freedom from hierarchy and control) with geographies of material practice is developed throughout following chapters.
Programming Politics
Authors: Parkin Jack
Published: October 2020

Chapter 5 outlines the community of developers who have contributed to Bitcoin’s source code. Drawing from ethnographic data and existing political economy theorisations of cryptocurrencies, the governance of the Bitcoin codebase is understood through obligatory passage points found among key individuals and groups involved in the creation of Bitcoin. The consensus model for making changes to the Bitcoin software shows how code is bound up with political tensions that arise through coordinating geographies of production. Pressures between different stakeholders are exposed to show how a stagnation of decision-making in code development and the increased likeliness of the project forking as it scales demands degrees of centralisation at the architectural level of cryptocurrency design so actions can be resolved and implemented. The overall political framework for altering Bitcoin’s code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralised model where bureaucratic parties compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol.
Embedded Centralism
Authors: Parkin Jack
Published: October 2020

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted within the Silicon Valley cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, Chapter 7 provides an account of the situated frictions among varying stakeholders in high-technology culture. The clashing of libertarian anarchy and entrepreneurial profit-seeking are forced into a vision reminiscent of the Californian Ideology, contributing to tensions of a splintering community. Blockchain technology is symptomatic of this polarising worldview. As “radical” and “disruptive” start-up companies are absorbed into the embedded spatial ties of the surrounding economy, they become increasingly “normalised” by their investors at the same time as scaling to enrol more users within their platforms. This has the effect of funnelling financial practices on blockchains through proprietary software controlled by a small number of technocrats, who can be more easily regulated by nation-state jurisdictions. The entrepreneurial geographies of high-technology agglomeration industries thereby act as another spatial limitation to algorithmic decentralisation.
Blueprinting BlockchainsIntroduction
Authors: Parkin Jack
Published: October 2020

The final chapter dives deeper into the territory of spin-off blockchains offered as technological modes of organisation for decentralising a host of socioeconomic practices. Recent discussions of platform capitalism are used to critique claims that blockchains are an incorruptible mode of democratic governance. Instead, blockchain capitalism is offered as a more accurate transaction model where profit necessitates certain points of centralisation through dominant distributed ledger technologies. A close examination of blockchain typologies reveals the co-option of these architectures by the very centralised banking firms and governments they were initially designed to bypass. As financial giants and central banks design their own distributed ledgers to increase the efficiency of business practices and monetary policy, innovation from the disruptive edges is once again absorbed into “the centre” by the corporate/state powers that be.
The Cross in Spirituality
Authors: Viladesau Richard
Published: October 2020

Spirituality may be based on an explicit conceptual theology; or it may be relatively unreflective on the conceptual level. It operates primarily not on the conceptual but on the aesthetic or imaginative level. It symbolically mediates and expresses a relation to God and to the world, and implies a certain intellectual (but not necessarily conceptual) formulation and certain modes of acting, both religious and secular. The traditional spirituality of the cross, involving appropriating Christ’s sacrifice and joining with his suffering, was strongly represented in a number of twentieth-century figures, including several stigmatics, people who showed the signs of Christ’s crucifixion on their bodies. At the same time, liberation theologies stress, solidarity with those who suffer “the cross” in our own times, and include a spirituality of social reform.
The Cross in Music
Authors: Viladesau Richard
Published: October 2020

Like art, music proliferated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although only a very small part of that output consisted of religious music, and even less of sacred music that involves the cross, the field is still too large to be covered with depth or completeness in this study. The goal of this chapter is simply to provide a necessarily incomplete survey, with special attention to views of salvation and the place of the cross in it. The purview will be restricted to liturgical and concert music, for the most part leaving aside popular music both inside and outside institutional religion. Attention will focus largely on the texts that composers have set and the ways in which their music augments the theological and religious meanings indicated or implied in them. The chapter deals with music of the Passion written after 1900.
Introduction
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: October 2020

The notion that Americans do not disagree about evolution can seem difficult to digest. This introduction previews the many ways that Americans fight about creationism yet share a fundamental desire to have children learn real evolutionary science. To recognize the real contours of American disagreements about creationism—not merely the inflated rhetoric we see in newspapers—all sides need to adopt a humbler attitude about their own preconceptions. Secular people need to take note of the broad divisions among American creationists and realize that few creationists actually dispute mainstream science. Creationists who are nervous about mainstream science need to modify their century-old anxieties.
After Their Kinds
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: October 2020

This chapter describes the many varieties of American creationism. A certain form of creationism tends to attract the most attention, a form this book describes as “radical” creationism. Some radical creationists believe in ideas that are truly outside the scientific mainstream, such as an actual global flood and the recent creation of humanity within the last 10,000 years or so. But those creationists are by far not the only representatives of American creationism. All religious traditions tend to have creation stories but very few religions demand that those stories are superior science. Many more people believe in types of creationism that have no argument with evolutionary science, as this chapter describes.
Ignorance and Evolution
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: October 2020

Secular Americans might assume that creationism is the result of a lack of knowledge about evolution. In fact, as this chapter argues, creationists are not distinguished by their lack of knowledge. The best available evidence suggests that all Americans—creationist or not—do not know very much about actual evolutionary theory. Key ideas such as natural selection are vaguely understood, at best. Those who say they believe evolutionary theory tend to be just as ignorant about it as those who say they do not believe it. Creationism tends to be less about what people know than about whom they trust.
I Saw the Light
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: October 2020

The history of culture-war battles over creationism and evolution have been dominated by the language of religious conversion. Instead of focusing on the science of evolutionary theory, activists have focused on its religious implications. This long tradition of conversion-talk has confused the real disagreements among creationists about evolutionary theory. It has not only been religious creationists that have tried to convert America to their particular creationist vision, but also secular people hoping to convert creationists to the side of mainstream science. In the end, talk of conversion only makes it more difficult to see the broad areas of agreement Americans share about evolutionary theory.
Conclusion
Authors: Laats Adam
Published: October 2020

Americans do not have a fundamental disagreement about evolutionary science. Not the science itself, that is, and not in ways that matter to public policy. The thing that distinguishes radical creationists from the rest of us is not their sincere belief in religious ideas that seem peculiar to outsiders. Rather, the thing that separates radical creationists is their profound distrust of mainstream institutions. Radical creationists do not distrust science, but they have been taught for generations to distrust scheming secularists who hope to undermine their children’s religious beliefs in the name of science. If we can separate out science itself from this accumulated distrust, we can agree on two fundamental principles about evolution education.
Introduction
Authors: Barmash Pamela
Published: October 2020

The fame of the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi is due to the collection of laws written under his patronage. The Laws of Hammurabi was recopied for more than a thousand years after it was promulgated, and when the text of the Laws of Hammurabi was lost to history, the style and content exemplified in it left traces on the laws of other cultures. In December 1901–January 1902, during an excavation of Susa in present-day Iran, French archaeologists discovered the Laws of Hammurabi, inspiring great publicity and interest. It is crucial evidence for the history of law and for understanding the human experience in general.
Royal Legitimization through the Establishment of Justice
Authors: Barmash Pamela
Published: October 2020

In this chapter, we explore how establishing justice was a crucial aspect of a king’s legitimacy and authority in Mesopotamian culture. The king was involved in adjudicating cases as well as promulgating decrees of social reform and laws. The gods were seen as attentively governing the cosmos and establishing justice, and guaranteeing justice was seen as a duty enjoined upon a king by the gods. This is reflected in three textual genres: acts of equity commemorated in royal inscriptions and hymns, edicts of social reform, and law collections. The relationship between these three genres is complex and nuanced. Justice was viewed in Mesopotamian thought as a means of restoring equity in society.
The Legal Authority of the Laws of Hammurabi
Authors: Barmash Pamela
Published: October 2020

The legal authority of the Laws of Hammurabi has been assessed by examining whether it was legislation, royal decrees, or judicial decisions. Searching for evidence that the Laws of Hammurabi was applied in actual cases or derives from verdicts has yielded mesmerizing hints but no definitive evidence. However, the crucial question is whether this approach accurately illuminates the nature of the authority of the Laws of Hammurabi. There is no reason for law to be limited to the application of a set of rules, and debating whether the Laws of Hammurabi was legislation, royal decrees, or judicial verdicts is misplaced, as this chapter discusses. The nature of the authority of the Laws of Hammurabi was based on scribal activities in the legal realm. The conflicting rulings they learned during training and their legal experience helped them to think through competing examples of justice and to weigh the variables in a particular dispute or offense.
Introduction
Authors: Zagzebski Linda Trinkaus
Published: October 2020

This introduction gives an overview of Zagzebski’s work in epistemology during the last twenty-five years, introducing the papers included in the collection. The subject areas of most of contemporary epistemology are included in these chapters: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem. Some chapters are among the earliest works published on a given topic—e.g., understanding, intellectual virtue, the value problem for knowledge, intellectual authority. Others take a novel approach to an old problem—Gettier, virtue in religious epistemology, a new transcendental argument against skepticism.