bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Grammatical Archive
Authors: Ward H. Clifton
Published: August 2022

Can the account provided of the exegetical aims of the literary analysis of grammarians and forensic orators in Chapter 1 account for both the literal and figurative exegesis of early Christians? Chapter 2 turns to ancient figurative readers—those concerned with the “poetics of the riddle.” Though scholars have at times contrasted these figurative readers with those ancient exegetes espousing an Aristotelian “poetics of clarity,” this chapter suggests that the gulf between these two modes of reading is much narrower than is often said. Instead, it argues that ancient figurative readers employed the same techniques of the grammarians to create their imaginative commentary, and it examines some of the reading practices that they draw from this “grammatical archive” (stylistic ambiguity, plausibility, propriety, textimmanence). Having shown that figurative reading is as much dependent on the grammatikē outlined in Chapter 1 as literal reading is, Chapter 2 completes the definition of “creative exegesis,” which will serve as the foundation for describing early Christian biblical interpretation throughout the book.
Clement’s Grammatical Archive
Authors: Ward H. Clifton
Published: August 2022

Chapter 4 examined the textual practices that Clement culled from his grammatical archive, as they pertained to the properties of the text itself, that is, his commentarial assumptions. Chapter 5 analyzes the reading practices that Clement applies to the text: his commentarial strategies. This is not an exhaustive description of Clement’s repertoire of reading practices, but rather an emphasis on those practices that one may observe from Clement’s own display of exegesis in book 5 of the Stromateis: Scripture’s textimmanent intention, a lexicon of clarity, textual coherence, and the definition of scriptural terms. These commentarial strategies are particularly concerned—as was noted earlier in the book—with the textual obscurity presented by Scripture and how Clement might clarify Scripture’s intentions through these strategies.
Reading as “Creative Exegesis”
Authors: Ward H. Clifton
Published: August 2022

This chapter develops further the implication of the previous chapter that the art of rhetorical memory is, in fact, an art of recollection—the skill of recalling items from one’s memorial archive. After examining the art of recollection in Aristotle’s De memoria and Cicero’s De oratore, the chapter utilizes a helpful illustration to argue that Clement presents the entire process of memory and recollection as an art of literary “invention.” Rhetorical invention in Christian exegesis is much like the constellations of astronomers. These astronomers never intended to recall groups of stars that “looked like” certain mythic creatures, but rather assumed, as we do, that the patterns of the stars were the significant pieces of information to be understood from the constellations. Similarly, and employing the Pauline building metaphor in 1 Cor. 3, Clement marks an early stage in a tradition of creative exegesis that will continue into the medieval monastic practices of memoria sacra. This chapter argues that Clement is rightly seen as an exegete whose enterprise of literary analysis is not only grounded in the grammatical tradition, but also an activity of rhetorical invention—the imaginative act of discovering what may be said about a text in any given instance.
“The Beginning of All Things”
Authors: Ward H. Clifton
Published: August 2022

Chapter 3 argued that Clement restricts the figurative referents of Scripture to a single twofold mystery: the economy of Christ and the higher knowledge of the divine life. A significant portion of Clement’s scriptural commentary emphasizes the proper understanding of this twofold mystery, which will be the focus of the Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 8, then, argues that Clement’s view of theology is, like Philo’s, a scripturally mediated Middle Platonism. That is, although Clement believes that the views of the divine prevalent in the second century ce are essentially correct, he feels constrained to present the Christian view of God by recourse to Scripture, not merely to Plato et al. For Clement, the One is a simple God, ineffable and inexpressible. Nevertheless, this must be mediated through a biblical lens in which names are predicated of God, and Clement turns to a Johannine and Pauline constellation of terms that permit him to articulate an ineffable “Father,” the very “depth” of God. Simultaneously, Clement’s Johannine texts force him to assert a second first principle, the “Beginning” who is also the “Son.” This chapter argues that, unlike the philosophical conceptions of theology current at the time, Clement’s scriptural foundations permit him to claim that “the Father is only known by the Son,” the absolute principle by the first principle, as mankind participates in the Monad (the Son) and from there cries out with Paul, “Abba, Father!”
The ‘Great Theban Revolt’, 206–186 bce
Authors: Veïsse Anne-Emmanuelle
Published: August 2022

Chapter 2 aims to achieve a better understanding of the ‘Great Theban Revolt’ that broke out in southern Egypt at the turn of the third and second centuries bce. After a synopsis of the facts, it focuses on the political-religious concerns displayed by the leaders of the revolt, who proclaimed themselves as pharaohs, and their engagement in a genuine state-building process. The question why the revolt broke out and why it reached such an extent in the Thebaid is also discussed. It is argued that the causes of the revolt lie in the articulation between a general context – explaining why troubles broke out at the same time in other parts of Egypt – and a local context, that is, the tightened grip of the Ptolemaic kings on the Thebaid in the last quarter of the third century bce.
Memory and Resistance in the Seleucid World
Authors: Haubold Johannes
Published: August 2022

Chapter 3 considers historical memory in Hellenistic Babylonia, focusing on the decades just before and after the collapse of Seleucid rule in the region. It advances three main claims. First, there is no evidence of major anti-Seleucid uprisings in Babylonia. Second, there is evidence that Greeks and Babylonians converged on a shared vision of imperial history that oscillated between the lows of Assyrian and Persian occupation and the highs of Neo-Babylonian and Seleucid rule. Third, the re-appearance of an aggressive Elam on the world stage rekindled memories of a long-standing Babylonian trauma and strengthened loyalty to the incumbent king at a crucial moment of transition.
Diverging Memories, Not Resistance Literature
Authors: Honigman Sylvie
Published: August 2022

Chapter 5 questions the definition of the historical apocalypses as resistance literature. It compares the passage 1 Enoch 90.6–19, referring to the Maccabean crisis in the Animal Apocalypse, with 1 and 2 Maccabees. In contrast to commentators who treat these texts as complementary, this work argues that the Animal Apocalypse and the Maccabean books offer two contrasting memories of the crisis. Two arguments are key to this reinterpretation. First, close reading shows that the ‘horned ram’ in 1 Enoch 90.9 cannot refer to Judas Maccabee. Second, the dating of the Qumran fragments of the text suggests that it was composed in the days of John Hyrcanus, whereas according to proponents of the resistance paradigm, the work was composed at the height of the crisis to comfort the victims of Antiochus IV’s alleged religious persecution. Consequently, this reading of 1 Enoch 90.6–19 concords with David Bryan’s reading of the Animal Apocalypse, whereby its underlying principle was the classification of animals as either clean or unclean according to the priestly laws of purity. Clean animals are used to allegorize the righteous, and unclean animals to allegorize the wicked. The dominant theme of the apocalypse is the historical alternance of order and chaos caused by Israel straying from YHWH’s path. Foreign oppression is the punishment, rather than the cause of suffering. Finally, this reinterpretation suggests that the Animal Apocalypse may have been a response to the pro-Hasmonean version promoted in 1 and 2 Maccabees.
‘Herakles is stronger, Seleucus’
Authors: Tober Daniel
Published: August 2022

Chapter 8 offers a close reading of fragments from the local histories of Pontic Herakleia written by Nymphis in the middle of the third century bce and by Memnon over two hundred years later. It argues that in the Hellenistic period local historiography, as a performative and parenetic medium, afforded citizens of Greek poleis a cautious means of articulating ideologies of independence in the face of foreign kings and empires. The chapter takes its title from a patriotic retort allegedly delivered by the Herakliote philosopher Chamaileon to Seleucus I in 280 bce, a slogan that served for Nymphis as a founding charter of Herakleian autonomy and local identity in the Black Sea region. Yet emic expressions of local historiography, like Nymphis’s history, were by and large the prerogative of autonomous Greek communities: histories of poleis that had been conquered by the Macedonian kings or by Rome tended to be written by non-locals, a phenomenon exemplified by the epitomes of the Aristotelian Politeiai published in the middle of the second century bce by the diplomat and scholar Herakleides Lembos. And when Memnon wrote his own history at the tail end of the Hellenistic period, after Herakleia’s hopes of independence had been decisively extinguished by Roman expansion, he did so with far different aims; the resulting narrative was less an exhortation to local resistance than an exercise in nostalgia.
Northern Ireland
Authors: Hayward Katy
Published: August 2022

Chapter 3 by Katy Hayward examines in depth the political and sociological situation of Northern Ireland. In her contribution, Hayward explores the identity cleavages in Northern Ireland, tracking electoral preferences from the Brexit referendum to the entry into force of the Protocol. As Hayward underlines, in Northern Ireland religion remains a proxy of political preferences. As she points out on the basis of opinion polls conducted over the period between 2016 and 2021, while Northern Ireland had by majority voted against leaving the EU, Unionist parties in Ulster had mostly supported Brexit. Similarly, all Unionist parties are now opposing the Protocol, which is instead largely favoured by Republican parties. In this context of political polarization, however, Hayward emphasizes the growing demographic importance of the non-aligned groups, meaning the political forces and voters who do not identify either as Catholic/Republican or Protestant/Unionist, and suggests that their current support for the Protocol will be likely to tip the balance in favour of retaining it at the next consent vote in 2024.
Non-discrimination
Authors: O’Donoghue Aoife
Published: August 2022

Chapter 5 by Aoife O’Donoghue focuses on Article 2 of the Protocol, entitled ‘Rights of Individuals’, and examines its significance, particularly with regard to non-discrimination. As O’Donoghue points out, Article 2 of the Protocol makes an explicit reference to the Rights, Safeguards, and Equality of Opportunity provisions of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, and as such reaffirms its legal validity and the commitment by the UK to ensure no diminution of rights. At the same time, Article 2 of the Protocol also refers to several human rights bodies established by the Belfast Good Friday Agreement—including the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, and the Joint Committee of representatives of the Human Rights Commissions of Northern Ireland and Ireland—and confirms their continuing importance in securing individual and social rights in Northern Ireland. Moreover, as O’Donoghue makes clear, Article 2 of the Protocol entrenches in Northern Ireland a number of EU non-discrimination laws, which are listed in an Annex 1 attached to the Protocol, thus extending the protections afforded by EU law to Northern Ireland after Brexit.
The Common Travel Area
Authors: Maher Imelda
Published: August 2022

Chapter 6 by Imelda Maher examines Article 3 of the Protocol, entitled ‘Common Travel Area’ (CTA). Maher explains how the CTA is a long-standing arrangement which has allowed Irish and UK citizens to move freely between the two islands, and she underlines how Article 3 of the Protocol essentially enables the two countries to continue this practice, provided it respects the rights of natural persons conferred by EU law. At the same time, Maher shows how the CTA is a largely uncodified arrangement, which relies on multiple sources of law, including international agreements, bits of immigration legislation in the UK, and several memoranda of understanding (MoUs) on travel, access to health, and education. In fact, Maher stresses how the first legally binding recognition of the CTA could arguably be found in Protocol 20 to the EU Treaties, which exempted Ireland and the UK from joining the Schengen free movement zone, because of their CTA. While this provision of primary EU law will have to be removed at the next round of treaty revisions, according to Maher the CTA has today found a legal protection in the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland. Yet, the CTA remains mostly a political commitment between the two governments, which suggests that its future remains somewhat uncertain.
Cross-border Cooperation
Authors: O’Connell Rory
Published: August 2022

Chapter 7 by Rory O’Connell looks at the provisions of the Protocol on North-South cooperation, zooming in on Article 11 of the Protocol, entitled ‘Other areas of North-South cooperation’. O’Connell maps the complex historical relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland since the time of partition, and explains the functioning of North-South institutions established by the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. He then underlines how the Protocol foresees the continuation of North-South cooperation in a vast array of areas, including on environment, health, agriculture, transport, education and tourism, energy, telecommunications, broadcasting, inland fisheries, justice and security, higher education, and sport. However, O’Connell also discusses the political controversies that the Protocol has created, including the decision of the DUP leadership to boycott the North-South Ministerial Council, and reviews the recent High Court of Northern Ireland decision to declare this boycott unlawful. In conclusion, O’Connell raises some cautionary remarks on cross-border cooperation after Brexit, identifying several political preconditions which will be necessary for this to continue.
Protection of the UK Internal Market
Authors: Barnard Catherine
Published: August 2022

Chapter 9 by Catherine Barnard focuses on Article 6 of the Protocol, entitled ‘Protection of the UK Internal Market’ and offers a critical perspective on this concept. In fact, as Barnard points out, the idea of a UK internal market is relatively new: while one may trace antecedents of it as long ago as in 1706, in the Act of Union between England and Scotland, the concept of a UK internal market is very much a Brexit-related creation, as the UK government first started speaking about this in the context of the withdrawal negotiations. Nevertheless, as Barnard explains, the UK internal market is not quite as strong and effective as the EU internal market—on the one hand because it is law-given, rather than based on a higher law, and on the other because Northern Ireland is not part of it. Indeed, owing to the operation of Article 5 of the Protocol, regulatory checks are required for goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and these are posing hurdles to unfettered market access.
Consent
Authors: O’Leary Brendan
Published: August 2022

Chapter 12, by Brendan O’Leary, focuses on one of the key legitimating provisions of the Protocol, namely the ‘Democratic Consent in Northern Ireland’ of Article 18. This clause, which was introduced in the Protocol as part of the October 2019 renegotiation, allows the Northern Ireland Assembly to vote, in 2024 at the latest, on whether to retain the Protocol’s economic provisions (Articles 5 to 10), or whether to discard them—and, as such, plays a key role in ensuring ex post democratic backing to the most contentious elements of the Protocol. In his critical contribution, O’Leary dismisses a number of false claims about the Protocol, namely that it was imposed on the UK, or that it undermines the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. Instead, O’Leary claims that the Protocol reflects the reality of the UK constitution, based on parliamentary sovereignty, and does not infringe on devolved competences of Northern Ireland. As such, he maintains that Unionist forces in Northern Ireland do not have a veto on the operation of the Protocol, as the mechanisms of cross-community consent foreseen in the Belfast Good Friday Agreement do not apply to this law. As the chapter underlines, the consent mechanism of Article 18 of the Protocol will probably lead to Northern Ireland endorsing its continuing application in 2024, but without cross-community consent.
Class
Authors: Kerr Douglas
Published: August 2022

This chapter is about ‘the road from Mandalay to Wigan’, and the way Orwell’s developing ideas about social injustice grew, for better or worse, out of his experience of Burma and his disgust with the ‘despotism’ he had served. The analogy between empire and the British class system was, however, an inexact one. He had been brought up—‘an odious little snob’ –to think of the working class as hostile; it was a painful education to think of them differently. He remained acutely conscious of class and its subdivisions, not least in his hostility to smaller septs like bourgeois socialists or the Anglo-Indians themselves (he belonged to both tribes).
Women
Authors: Kerr Douglas
Published: August 2022

Orwell was not at ease with women, and is not popular with most feminists. His views of women were formed against his very masculine and unexpressive Anglo-Indian, public-school, and colonial-police background. There are disturbing images and episodes of the subjection and exploitation of women in his fiction, especially Burmese Days, and the rape victim in Down and Out is orientalized. A Clergyman’s Daughter adopts the point of view of a woman trying and failing to escape the bondage of family, class, and church. Both Orwell’s wives, however, were sexually emancipated modern women. Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a free spirit, but a sexual and not intellectual force. This chapter shows, however, that a rich cluster of feelings, and all the important positive values of that novel, coalesce, as if in atonement, around the figure of the mother, perceived only in dream and distant memory.
Police
Authors: Kerr Douglas
Published: August 2022

In England, and in Orwell’s English novels, the policeman was a benign and trusted figure. Orwell thought this made the British dangerously complacent. For five years in the Imperial Police in Burma, he had been part of the ‘machinery of so-called justice’ in a period of widespread racial tension and anti-British agitation, imposing discipline and punishment often against his better instincts. Burmese Days is in part a police story. In Homage to Catalonia, however, the boot was on the other foot, and as a POUM soldier in Barcelona in 1937, Orwell found himself on the run in what was rapidly becoming a police state. These experiences make their way into Animal Farm, where Napoleon’s dogs are both police force and murder-squad, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Thought Police are everywhere and there is no law. In 1949, he was to write, ‘half the world is ruled by secret police forces’.
Grounding Friendships
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: August 2022

The aim of this chapter is to offer an account of the grounding of deep friendships within the context of virtue ethics that, while drawing on Aristotle’s justification of ‘character friendships’, goes some distance in reconciling Aristotle’s highly moralistic view with a prevalent counterview (represented e.g. historically by Montaigne and in recent times by Telfer and Nehamas) according to which we are drawn towards close friends for reasons that are essentially aesthetic, amoral and arational. It is argued that there are resources within Aristotelian virtue ethics (while not exploited by Aristotle himself) that enable us to overcome some of the difficulties of his exclusively moralistic view and bring it into better harmony with common-sense conceptions; yet preserving fundamental aspects of Aristotle’s view, such as that vicious people cannot form truly deep friendships. What the chapter aims at could be called an ‘individuality-adjusted moralised view’ of the grounding of deep friendships: a conciliatory view that still remains closer to an amendment of the moralised view than to a middle-ground synthesis.
Friendships for Utility
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: August 2022

Can (Aristotelian) friendships for utility have moral value? There is an assumption in much of the literature on Aristotelian friendships that his ‘lower forms’ of friendship, especially friendship for utility, do not merit the label ‘genuine friendship’ and thus do not ‘qualify as morally valuable’. Rather, friendships for utility are just considered to be about taking advantage of one another in amoral or immoral ways. This chapter offers counter-arguments, going beyond the letter if not necessarily the spirit of Aristotle’s own texts, based on delineating two different levels of utility friendships and showing that the higher one (with non-instrumental while extrinsic value) can have moral worth in combatting moral despondency, incontinence and even vice. A personal illustration is given from the moral utility value of friendships in Facebook support groups for patients with a rare disorder.
Online Character Friendships
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: August 2022

This chapter adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so, first, by examining carefully recent arguments for and against online friendships as virtue enhancing and finding the latter arguments wanting. It then does so, secondly, by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not available to Voltaire and Catherine, and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so.
Thinking About Tears
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France’s ‘long eighteenth century’ (approximately 1650–1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France’s long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of ‘passions’ and ‘feelings’, thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of ‘sentiments’. For this reason, this book examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts—including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays—Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of ‘the age of reason’.
From Heaven to Earth
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter begins by briefly describing the transcendent conception of weeping that dominated antiquity and the Middle Ages to then map the process through which weeping was ‘secularized’ in seventeenth-century France. Mythological and ancient tears belong to a thoroughly transcendent sphere. These are ‘vertical’ tears with the power to establish a relationship between the human being and a higher, unknowable dimension. This aspect is further accentuated in the Christian view of the phenomenon of crying: in the Bible, tears are primarily associated with a supra-human dimension (such as the tears of angels, Christ, or God himself) or, at any rate, humans who are extraordinary. This sacred vision of crying dominated Western culture until the mid-seventeenth century, at which point there was an unprecedented attempt to take the phenomenon of weeping from the heavens and bring it down to earth. Naturally complex and gradual, this process was particularly noticeable in French culture where the treatment of lachrymal secretions developed in two specific literary genres, consolations and traités des passions. The analysis of these texts shows the unfolding of a process that could be described as the ‘secularization’ of crying: from this moment, scholars began to analyse weeping not only as a biological phenomenon characterizing human beings as such but also as a possible tool for understanding how passionate dynamics and emotionality affect moral conduct.
Tears and Humours
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter highlights how the moral assessment of crying typical of the seventeenth century led to a profound reformulation of the physiological explanation for tears, carried out within the humoral paradigm as proposed by Hippocrates and revisited by Galen. Galen’s fundamental contribution consists in proposing an emotional therapy that is not only medical but also philosophical: man, naturally humoral and therefore unable to realize the ideal of apathy, can achieve a balance between passions and virtues only by acting on both the will and the body. As a paradigmatic example of the revival of the Galenic doctrine of temperament, the chapter then analyses the ‘masks’ of Democritus and Heraclitus, popular incarnations of two visions of reality that correspond to laughter and tears, respectively, showing how these two emotions—formerly seen as rivals—were considered sympathetic in the seventeenth century. The figures of Democritus and Heraclitus are also used in the investigation of the role of emotions in the diagnosis and treatment of melancholy, the humoral disease par excellence. The last section of the chapter explores the first text dedicated exclusively to systematically analysing the physiological-moral value of tears: De lacrymis libri tres, published in 1661 by Pierre Petit. A physician, Petit realized that physiology is not sufficient to explain emotional tears and, although without yet having adequate conceptual tools, sought to combine medical-scientific investigation with philosophical and classical literary culture.
The Tears of the Soul
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter considers the clash between René Descartes and Marin Cureau de la Chambre regarding the origin and specificity of human lacrimal secretions to show that this was an emblematic moment in the progressive shift from the physical-passive paradigm of passion to the moral-active one of emotion. First, it shows that Descartes’s explanation of crying—presented especially in Passions de l’âme—sets out to systematically dismantle the link between natural and moral philosophy that characterized earlier traités des passions texts by positioning the analysis of emotions in a mechanistic framework whose physical and mechanical kinematic classifications were capable of explaining all of reality. Second, it suggests that Cureau de la Chambre’s Charactères des Passions—above all the final volume eloquently titled Les charactères des larmes—can be considered the founding contribution to the ‘moral’ conception of crying that ended up enjoying such success in the following century. Finally, the chapter shows how the difficulty of articulating the physiological and moral aspects of crying can be seen in a text all but unknown to present-day readers, namely Christian Warlitz’s Scrutinium lacrymarum (1705).
Physical and Moral Tears
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter focuses on the link between the moral evaluation of crying and the question of sensibility, one of the main themes of investigation in eighteenth-century France. Starting from an analysis of the most important dictionaries of the time, the chapter shows that sensibility included both sensation (the receptive faculty) and sentiment (the emotional and affective faculty). As proof of the interdependence between the physiological and moral dimensions, tears were re-evaluated together with the affective and irrational dimension. This moral re-evaluation of the act of crying went hand in hand with a new physiological explanation, namely the epigastric theory according to which tear secretions are caused by the movements of the fibres of the diaphragm and not by the brain. This theory stemmed from a holistic and dynamic vision of human beings promoted by French medicine in the mid-eighteenth century that replaced the Cartesian model of man–machine with that of ‘homme sensible’, linked to the vitalistic paradigm. In light of this constitutive link between tears and sensitivity, the last part of the chapter is dedicated to analysing two main philosophical assumptions of the doctrine of sensibility: pathetic and sympathy. While the doctrine of pathetic guaranteed the legitimacy and effectiveness of tears in the fields of aesthetics and rhetoric, the idea of ‘sympathy’ provided a more purely moral and political foundation for the act of crying, a foundation that proved fundamental for transforming emotions into an object of ethical investigation.
The homme sensible
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

Chapter 6 focuses on the most evident and historically influential formulation of the moral conception of crying, that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the formulation destined to become the manifesto of the new sentimental philosophy based on the circulation of emotion. Rousseau identified even the fundamental principles of natural law in two emotions—self-love and pity—and asserted the pre-eminently social and moral character of tears. Lacrimal secretions coincide, according to Rousseau, with the essence of human morality. In fact, emotional tears—the fruit of piety, a conscious and altruistic impulse—constitute the first and most effective form of human communication, allowing the development of a sympathetic morality. Rousseau’s writings (especially Nouvelle Héloïse) marked the solidification and rising popularity of the anthropological model of homme sensible, but this model also appears in the work of Antoine François Prévost. Thanks to characters such as Cleveland and Chevalier Des Grieux, indeed, Prévost contributed to ‘inventing’ male crying as public crying, a behaviour not only accepted but actually put on display. Through the example of correspondence between Rousseau and Diderot during the bitter quarrel they waged in 1757, the last part of the chapter shows that male crying had come to be considered a precise moral and philosophical code used in real life in a way that was actually quite similar to the literary mode, and also more similar than one might expect.
The Pedagogy of Tears
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

Thanks to their ability to bring together physical and moral sensibility, tears came to constitute the centre of a comprehensive pedagogy based on the idea that crying is sympathetically contagious. This chapter shows this mechanism at work particularly clearly in the expressive forms most favoured by eighteenth-century sentimental philosophy, that is, novels and theatre. The chapter argues that these literary genres do not represent a sort of trivializing application of the philosophy of moral sense; rather, they convey significant changes in investigations of the emotions. In sentimental novels, the abstract analysis of the emotional sphere—a process in which the reader remained completely passive (suffice to cite the seventeenth-century traités des passions)—was definitively supplanted by the idea of an active analysis of emotionality in which both the literary character and reader take active part in the theoretical investigation. The ‘pedagogical’ ideal of shaping readers’ sensibility typical of sentimental novels had an important counterpart in contemporary theatre, as theatre of the time was increasingly characterized by a flurry of philosophical exploration of the possible forms emotions and pathos might take during a performance, both on stage and among audience members. This thesis is demonstrated, in the last part of the chapter, through a specific analysis of the role tears play in two of the most influential theatrical genres of the period, namely comédie larmoyante (tearful comedy) and bourgeois drama.
The Tears of the Revolution
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter explores the dual political function that tears and their representation performed in the years of the French Revolution. On one hand, tears were an instrument of brotherhood and pacification; on the other hand, they often accompanied the bloodshed carried out in the name of social revenge and freedom. Their disruptive force, celebrated in the fabled verse La force des larmes (1772) by Claude-Joseph Dorat, appears above all on the occasion of revolutionary festivals where the collective sensibility was forged and expressed. This sympathetic conception of crying changed with the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (1793–94), an era that constitutes a fundamental watershed in the history of emotion. The chapter identifies the sensational murder of Jean-Paul Marat—a supporter of sentimentality and the diaphragmatic conception of crying—as a true apotheosis of sentimentalist rhetoric; at the same time, it argues that this event contained the seeds of a process of ‘erosion’ of sentimentalism that went on to characterize the final revolutionary years. The case of tears shed during the royals’ trials or public executions in particular indicate the birth of a new emotional rhetoric, one focused on ‘false sensibility’ and the potential danger of insufficiently regulated emotion (both private and collective).
Sentimental Onanism and the De-moralization of Crying
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter explores the way in which the eighteenth-century conception of crying, linked mainly to the analysis of sensibility, gradually gave way to the nineteenth-century conception characterized by an increasingly suspicious view of tears. Indeed, lachrymal secretions were considered the expression of sensiblerie, a neologism coined by Mercier in 1801 to indicate the pathological degeneration of sensibility itself. First, the chapter analyses Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771) in which sentimentality is the subject of internal criticism. Second, it establishes a comparison between two writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and The Triumph of Sensibility (1777)—to highlight how this author contributed both to the rise of sensibility and to the condemnation of its excesses. Finally, it shows how the aesthetic and moral rejection of pathos in France in the tournant des Lumières period was most effectively expressed in the parody of sentimentality and tears to the point that the so-called ‘popular genre’, having established itself during the 1840s thanks to Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, remained the last bastion of nineteenth-century sentimentalism. In this tear-jerking machine, the doctrine of sensibility was now reduced to a consoling and self-defeating rhetoric devoid of any philosophical-moral basis.
Pathological Tears
Authors: Menin Marco
Published: August 2022

This chapter shows how tears were cast into doubt on the physiological level in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with lachrymal secretions increasingly considered to represent a pathological degeneration of sensibility that had to be ‘cured’ by both physicians and philosophers. The epistemological conviction underlying the idea of a link between tears and pathology was fairly simple: disease, by virtue of the fact that it modifies the element of physique, makes it possible to grasp with greater clarity the repercussions that emotions have on morals, thus allowing scientists to analyse both of sensibility’s twofold facets. This investigative method can be seen particularly vividly in descriptions of the pathology of ‘vapours’ (vapeurs), one of the most curious and fascinating expressions of the synergy between medicine, literature, and philosophy in French culture. While ‘vapours’ involved an excess of tears, early nineteenth-century physicians were more concerned with the absence of lachrymal secretions. Particularly, the emerging field of psychiatry—which found fertile ground for its development in the philosophical environment of the Idéologues—took as one of its great challenges the task of providing a medical and scientific explanation for the inability to cry. This issue was central to the ‘moral therapy’ theorized by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, one of the founding fathers of modern psychiatry.
Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality
Authors: Pettigrew Richard
Published: August 2022

How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James’ ideas in ‘The Will to Believe’, proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It’s called epistemic utility theory, and it says that what it is epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs. This book explores the latter. The result is permissivism about epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore different posteriors they permit.
The Role of Law in Fostering or Inhibiting Resilient Energy Systems
Authors: Bankes Nigel , Godden Lee , Guayo Íñigo del
Published: August 2022

This chapter analyses resilience theory and socio-ecological systems theory and their application in cases of disruption to energy systems. This analysis embraces crucial theoretical components such as ecosystems, stability domains, tipping points, system self-organization, and ‘coupling’ between sub-systems and the role of resilience within a system. The chapter moves then into considering how resilience concepts are applied in law, and how resilience and social-ecological systems theory are applied to energy and related systems. Particular attention is paid to the concept of a ‘stability domain’, in trying to identify what systemic factors may trigger a change from one stable domain to another, and the role of law as a catalyst. This conceptual background is used as a platform to consider the real world implications of resilience thinking in energy systems. For this purpose, several situations are examined from the European energy sector, such as the adoption of flexibility principles, unbundling, and resilience thinking in planning energy infrastructure. Finally, the chapter reflects on the contribution that resilience may make during a period of disruption and change in energy systems, and in light of their increasing complexity. This section offers some potential pathways in which resilience may be further integrated into energy systems and energy law.
Planning for Resilience
Authors: Banet Catherine
Published: August 2022

The need to integrate different requirements related to energy, environmental protection, and climate change has resulted in the creation of new monitoring tools. Among them, planning is experiencing a revival. At the international, state, and local levels, this is taking the form of so-called ‘energy and climate plans’. Because global concerns need local implementation measures, the energy and climate plans are intended to ensure, on the one hand, that climate and energy measures are realized (thereby serving as a monitoring and compliance tool) and, on the other hand, that the different considerations are integrated and the different planning regimes are better coordinated (serving as an integrating and coordinating tool). Those plans come in addition to other existing plans within spatial and natural resources management. The increasing occurrence and impacts of disruptive nature-based events add another dimension to planning processes, calling for the integration of social-ecological resilience thinking into planning law. This chapter analyses the extent to which resilience is defined as a criterion in the legislation applying to the four planning processes for energy, climate, spatial, and natural resources management, and whether strategic environmental assessment rules could better support its integration and consistent application. It questions the legal nature of the resulting plans and thereby their enforceability. It identifies good practices across diverse jurisdictions and provides for recommendations to improve the legal framework.
Resilient Energy Systems in the European Union
Authors: Roggenkamp Martha M.
Published: August 2022

Energy systems are becoming increasingly complex as well as their governance. Technically, an energy system is no longer merely a pipe or a cable but also includes more and more ICT technology. Also the management and organization of the infrastructure have become more complex. In the EU, network activities are increasingly unbundled from production and supply. This led to various communication challenges and complicates the operations of the system. Increasingly, energy production and supply is also taking place at the local level, which requires additional ICT technology and management structures. Hence, the level and types of disruptions have become more diverse and the potential for supply disruptions has increased. Disruptions may be the result of external causes (damages to pipelines and cables due to construction work), internal causes (lack of communication between parties) but increasingly also of cybercrime. This chapter examines these developments and the regulatory regime in the EU to protect energy systems and safeguard supply security.
Resilience and Energy Law in China in an Era of Energy Decarbonization
Authors: Zhang Hao
Published: August 2022

Through the lens of scholarly discussion on law, resilience, and adaptive capacity, this chapter critically discusses the extent to which energy law and governance in China has been steered towards better resilience. By looking at the laws and regulations in China’s electricity sector, this chapter argues that China’s efforts to create a more resilient and adaptive electric power system that can respond to disruptions is challenged by three key factors. The first of these is the historic focus in China on assuring adequate supplies of energy to support economic growth; an approach that relies more on engineering resilience rather than transformational resilience. The second factor is the multi-level, fragmented, and authoritarian governance structure in China’s energy sector that opens the door to local authorities and SOEs favouring especially coal generation and curtailing generation from renewable energy sources. Finally, the laws that support the transition to a cleaner, lower carbon, and more efficient energy system in China and that are essential to transformational resilience need to be strengthened since simply adopting policies have not achieved the desired result.
How Strong Can You Stand If You’re on Your Knees? Financing Crises in Africa
Authors: Mostert Hanri , Adomako-Kwakye Chris , Chisanga Kangwa-Musole , van den Berg Meyer
Published: August 2022

This chapter interrogates the recourse taken in South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, and Ghana to close the financial gaps where crises affect the natural resource and energy sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic is used to contextualize the economic challenges developing countries face, but other disasters contribute to the heavy toll: the experiences in Zambia and Namibia of the El Niño weather effect, specifically the drought of 2017–2018, feed into the discussion, showing how crisis-clustering affects countries whose financial positions limit or exclude resilient responses. Many African countries were already on their knees in economic terms before the COVID-19 health pandemic struck. For them, it is impossible to deal with the economic fall-out of this latest crisis in the cluster without external funding support. This may lead to debilitating national debt. Also, countries’ strategic choices in this regard will have a significant impact on the extent of their resource dependency in years to come. For instance, such countries might choose to compromise existing policy mechanisms designed to support their sovereignty. The chapter considers the options for financing developing countries’ responses to crises, highlighting some of the pitfalls and concludes on a cautionary note.
Natural Damage Insurance
Authors: Bull Hans Jacob
Published: August 2022

The chapter examines the Norwegian compensation system for natural damage, with a semi-compulsory insurance scheme as the central factor and with state-financed compensation schemes as a supplement. The insurance scheme is based on a solidarity principle. The premium rate is the same regardless of risk and the compensation paid is pooled and distributed among the insurance companies based on their gross fire insurance sums. The Norwegian system is contrasted with risk-based insurance schemes in other countries, and the expediency of the system as a viable measure of economic resilience in an energy and natural resources setting is discussed.