bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nigeria
Authors: Dafe Florence
Published: May 2020

In Nigeria regulators have gradually adopted Basel I, II, and III, although implementation and enforcement have been slow. The impetus for Basel adoption has come primarily from regulators, who are embedded in international policy networks. They consider Basel II and III the most appropriate set of regulatory standards to stabilize and manage risk in Nigeria’s large, internationalized banking sector. While Basel adoption was not a salient issue among Nigeria’s politicians, Nigeria’s large internationally active banks welcomed the implementation of Basel II as an important means to enhance their competitiveness and signal soundness to markets. These banks play an important role in providing employment and access to finance for the private sector, and their resolution would meet with resistance from politicians and lead to a loss of confidence in Nigeria’s banking sector.
Angola
Authors: Engebretsen Rebecca , de Oliveira Ricardo Soares
Published: May 2020

As in other resource-rich countries, the financial sector in Angola plays a key role in facilitating outgoing financial flows. The political allocation of credit and issuing of bank licenses to insiders have been an important avenue for securing support for the regime. The result has been strong opposition to the ratcheting-up of bank regulation and supervision. Yet a balance-of-payments crisis in 2009, falling in oil prices from 2014, and changes in the global regulatory environment together meant that divergence from international standards was no longer an option. For Angolan banks to maintain their links to the global financial market, the country needed to signal its readiness to regulate the sector in line with international standards. Nonetheless, because the politicized nature of the banking sector has not changed, standards are either not implemented or are implemented but not enforced, leading to a situation of ‘mock compliance’.
International Law as a Political Language, 1600–1859
Authors: Rech Walter
Published: May 2020

By illustrating the history of Italian international law from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter explores the question of whether and to what extent this period may have been characterized by a genuinely Italian ‘tradition’ or approach to international legal issues. The chapter questions the notion of a monolithic Italian tradition in international law and shows that the commonality of topics and interests among Italian lawyers can best be read as part of broader trends in the European ‘law of nations’. Although they were concerned with nationally important matters such as maritime trade, the sovereignty of smaller polities and the relationship between State and church, Italian lawyers constantly defended their claims by resorting to the common European vocabulary of the ius naturae and ius gentium.
The Risorgimento and the “Birth” of International Law in Italy
Authors: Greppi Edoardo
Published: May 2020

The Italian doctrine of international law developed in the mid-nineteenth century, mainly under the influence of the historical events that characterized the so-called Risorgimento, the political process leading to the political unification and formation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Several scholars largely based their writings on the theory developed by Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, according to which the principle of nationality was the basis for legitimacy and international subjectivity, a theory clearly linked with the political afflatus of the period. This chapter addresses the Italian scholarship of international law during the Risorgimento period, through a series of authors originally so strictly-linked with Mancini’s theories to be qualified, even at the time, as the ‘Italian school of international law’. Such theories were therefore firmly anchored in the Risorgimento, its political ideals and its historical evolution exercising a very significant impact on the international law studies in Italy during those decades.
The Construction of the International Law Discipline in Italy between the Mancinian and Positive Schools
Authors: Mura Eloisa
Published: May 2020

This chapter reconstructs the evolution of international law studies between the aftermath of the political unification of Italy, when international law became a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the Departments of Law, and the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the positive law approach started to emerge. It provides an overview of the slow and tiring affirmation of the discipline’s specialism through dedicated chairs, the publication of early manuals, and scholars devoted to this subject, a process developed in the shadow of its influential tutelary deity: Pasquale Stanislao Mancini. This chapter thus offers another puzzle to current analysis aimed to reconstruct the phenomenon of the professionalization of international law in the nineteenth century, mainly explored in relation to other States.
The (Immediate) Post-World War II Period
Authors: Tancredi Antonello
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses the development, after World War II, of two different currents of thought inherited by the Italian international law doctrine from the interwar period: dogmatism and structuralism. The analysis of some fundamental writings concerning topics such as the foundation and the social structure of the international legal order tries to offer a reading lens on some of the most important scientific trends (especially ‘realism’ and ‘neo-normativism’) of the post-World War II period and on the scholars that animated such approaches. Thanks to the identification of some structuring ideas, it will then be possible to briefly examine other issues concerning, for instance, the relationship between international and domestic law after the 1948 Republican Constitution, sovereignty, etc. The evolution of the methodology of international law will have a relevant part in the analysis of theoretical approaches developed by Italian scholars in this period.
The Formation of International Law Journals in ItalyTheir Role in the Discipline
Authors: Ingravallo Ivan
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes the role played by legal journals as ‘tools’ for international law studies in Italy. The author considers their role in the development of this subject in the domestic arena, where there were no specialized legal journals expressly devoted to these topics until 1898. The early journals represented ephemeral experiments, prior to the foundation of the Rivista di diritto internazionale in 1906 under the leadership of Dionisio Anzilotti. The Rivista represented a turning point in this branch of law and was followed by other periodicals established in the 1930s and 40s, which were partly inspired by the political milieu characterizing Fascist Italy, and by those that developed in the aftermath of World War II, which were influenced in turn by the theoretical and methodological premises of the time and by accentuated contrasts between different academic ‘schools’ of thought. Lastly, the author evaluates how the Italian journals of international law dealt with foreign scholars and foreign languages.
Catholicism and the Evolution of International Law Studies in Italy
Authors: Sossai Mirko
Published: May 2020

Although there has been no Christian doctrine of international law in Italy, Catholicism still represented a source of inspiration for various scholars during the twentieth century when addressing the question of the foundations of international law. In a period of predominant positivism, alternative approaches, rooted in the universalistic view of the Catholic Church, sought to offer a narrative of the origins of international law, based on the idea of continuity with the ancient civitas christiana. This chapter seeks to assess how the scholarly debate took into account developments in the Catholic understanding of the role of law in the international community. Three key episodes are considered: the note of Pope Benedict XV qualifying the great war as ‘useless slaughter’; the ambivalent reaction of the Holy See to the birth of universal organizations; and the position of the Papacy vis-à-vis the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Integrated Approach to Private and Public International Law—A Distinctive Feature of Italian Legal Thinking
Authors: Franzina Pietro
Published: May 2020

International law scholarship has traditionally been understood in Italy as encompassing the study of both public and private international law. The two subjects are still considered jointly for recruitment purposes and are mostly taught by the same professors. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, who regarded nationality as a foundation of both disciplines, had a major influence on the popularization of this approach in the mid-nineteenth century. The advent of positivism, a few decades later, entailed a general rejection of Mancini’s views but did not challenge the integrated approach to the different branches of international law. Rather, the positivist turns triggered a renewed reflection on the ties between the two subjects. The study of international law, some argued, should cover, alongside international rules, such municipal rules as deal with international matters. The chapter outlines the origin and evolution of the Italian integrated approach to international law and its perception by today’s scholars, in Italy and abroad.
The Italian Doctrine over Final Decades
Authors: Palchetti Paolo
Published: May 2020

This chapter aims to examine the evolution of Italian international legal scholarship from 1990 onward. After providing some contextual elements that appear of relevance in assessing the persistence of a national identity in international legal scholarship, the chapter focuses on two issues: the methods of Italian scholarship and its fields of interest. It shows that the permanence of a strong rule-based conception of international law, as well as a generalist approach to the study and teaching of international law, continue to be the most striking features characterizing Italian scholarship. On a broader perspective, the methods employed by Italian scholarship appear to be informed by a legal tradition that continues to thrive and largely prevail in many European States, if not beyond.
Introduction to Programmable Integrated Photonics
Authors: Capmany José , Pérez Daniel
Published: May 2020

Programmable integrated photonics (PIP) aims at designing common integrated optical hardware configurations, which—by suitable programming—can implement a variety of functionalities that can be elaborated for basic or more complex operations in many application fields. It follows a different approach to that of application specific photonic integrated circuits (ASPICs), which have dominated during the last few decades. The interest in PIP is driven by the surge of a considerable number of emerging applications in the fields of telecommunications, quantum information processing, sensing and neurophotonics that will require flexible, reconfigurable, low-cost, compact and low-power-consuming devices, much as field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices operate in electronics. This chapter serves as a general introduction to the book and reviews the main basic principles and recent advances in PIP, including fabrication platforms, design principles, architecture choices, challenges and limitations. and provides a brief introduction to the applications of this new field.
Basic Building Blocks and Techniques
Authors: Capmany José , Pérez Daniel
Published: May 2020

Programmable integrated photonics (PIP) relies on designing suitable basic building blocks (BBBs) able to carry elementary signal processing operations and interconnection hardware architectures that offer very high spatial regularity. The most popular BBBs proposed so far are based on elementary 2×2 tunable photonics coupling components capable of providing independent setting of the power coupling ratio. Additionally, they are based on the phase shift experienced by the incoming signals from two input waveguides in their transition to the two output waveguide ports of the device. This chapter deals primarily with these components. First, it considers the basic matrix methods required to describe their operation, either standalone or in combination with others to form more complex structures. Next, it describes the main technology approaches for the implementation of BBBs, including 3dB Mach–Zehnder tunable couplers, directional couplers, and beamsplitters, followed by how these BBBs are employed to build up a tunable basic unit (TBU), which is the elementary constituent of waveguide mesh circuits. It concludes by describing the devices and techniques relevant in multiport devices, and discusses the equivalence between mode conversion and linear optics matrix transformations and the universal linear combiner.
Programmable Integrated Photonics for Classical Applications
Authors: Capmany José , Pérez Daniel
Published: May 2020

Programmable photonics can also be applied to classical systems. While these systems rely mainly on pure fixed application-specific photonic circuits, the advantages of programmability are decisive when systems grow in complexity. This chapter reviews application areas where programmable photonics can enable technology: optical switching interconnection and routing to provide myriad powerful solutions that encompass broadcasting and wavelength selective operation; artificial intelligence (AI) and neurocomputing to enables the implementation of reconfigurable analogue cores required for the operation of neural networks and neurophotonic systems. Microwave and analogue photonics are particularly appealing areas which require substantial cost reductions and broadband operation flexibility simultaneous with most of the required functionalities in a single chip, which span 5G communications, satellite payloads, electromagnetic and photonic radar, Internet of Things and autonomous driving. Finally, it covers optical signal processing, including examples in signal filtering and sensing, controllable Talbot effect and more speculative futuristic applications, e.g. synthetic domains.
The Implications of the Revised EU Economic Governance Framework for National Economic Policy
Authors: Markakis Menelaos
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the effects of the crisis-induced legal and economic developments on the Member States, most notably in relation to their fiscal, economic, and social policy. It consists of three main parts. The first section of this chapter will analyse the substance and scope of the new EU economic rules. The second section of this chapter will look at the important changes that the EU legislation adopted during the crisis has brought about in EU economic surveillance. It will be argued that the new EU economic rules have redistributive effects in European societies and encroach on very sensitive areas of national policy, which underscores the need for a democratically legitimate EMU architecture. The third section of this chapter will look at the implementation of EU economic rules and assess the rigorousness of EU and independent national fiscal oversight. The principal default line is between lender states and borrower states. First, we will examine the bearing of the crisis-induced economic developments on Germany, as well as the EU economic guidance addressed to it in the context of the European Semester. Second, we will examine the bailout terms agreed with Greece in the context of the three rescue packages. It will be shown that these terms mandate far-reaching economic and social policy reforms, from which grave social repercussions have flown. In addition, it will be argued that there was very rigorous EU and independent national assessment of the progress Greece was making in relation to its economic adjustment programme.
Division of Power, Democratic Input, and Accountability Structures in the EU’s Banking Union
Authors: Markakis Menelaos
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the division of power and accountability structures in the European Banking Union, the principal emphasis being on political accountability. Other types of accountability are also examined where appropriate (e.g. budgetary, administrative, or legal accountability). The discussion begins with the division of competence between the national and EU authorities in the Banking Union. This is followed by examination of the role of the European and national parliaments, as well as the Council and Eurogroup, in holding the European Central Bank, the Single Resolution Board, and the national supervisory and resolution authorities to account for their actions in this area. The focus then shifts to the intra-institutional balance of power and the emerging patterns of geographical fragmentation. The penultimate section of the chapter focuses on access to information, which is crucial for all forms of accountability. The final section of this chapter offers a snapshot of some of the features of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) which may hamper the effectiveness of the Banking Union and place its output legitimacy in jeopardy. The chapter concludes with proposals on how to strengthen accountability and transparency in the Banking Union.
Judicial Review of Economic Policy: The EU Courts
Authors: Markakis Menelaos
Published: May 2020

This chapter seeks to unpack access to EU courts in the area of EMU, the emphasis being on the challenges facing austerity-hit litigants wishing to put their substantive case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The discussion will proceed as follows. First, it will be shown that aggrieved individuals might not always be able to locate a formally binding EU law measure which could form the basis of a direct or indirect challenge before the EU courts. Second, it will be seen that the judicial doors to an Article 263 TFEU challenge (action for annulment) are, nevertheless, firmly shut as most private persons will not be able to overcome the admissibility hurdles of direct and individual concern. Third, almost all Article 267 TFEU challenges (preliminary reference) have so far been declared inadmissible, which begs the question as to the legal quality of the bailout terms and its ripple effect on the scope of application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Fourth, though aggrieved individuals could in principle bring an Article 340 TFEU action for damages before the EU courts, litigants are likely to face an uphill struggle in trying to convince the CJEU that the relevant requirements for liability of the EU institutions for damages for breach of EU law were met. The final section of this chapter will focus on the scope of application of the EU Charter, which has formed the basis of many (unsuccessful, thus far) challenges to austerity measures.
The Case Against Theory of Mind
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

Considerations in the previous chapters led to an acknowledgment of the important role played by social context and intersubjective relations for understanding action. In this and subsequent chapters I explore in more detail, not only how action is related to social interaction, but also the nature of social interaction itself. In this chapter I start with the critical task of showing how contemporary standard approaches to questions about social cognition and theory of mind go wrong and fail to explain how we understand others, and more generally how they cover up the importance of embodied interaction in social contexts. Here I discuss the standard approaches of theory theory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid versions of these theories. I outline eight objections to these theories.
Communicative Actions and Narrative Practices
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

This chapter continues to build the more positive account of our everyday intersubjective abilities by considering the role of communicative and narrative practices. Research in applied linguistics shows that our communicative engagements are complex and detailed practices that draw on a multitude of semiotic resources in the environment and in the other person’s embodied comportment. From childhood we learn to make sense of persons in action-oriented and narrative ways, listening to stories, or (re-)producing them in play-acting. We become familiarized with a range of ordinary or extraordinary situations, and the sorts of actions appropriate to them, all of which help to shape our expectations about people and their behaviors. In order to understand others in circumstances instituted by complex social practices and normative formations, to empathize with them, and to engage in such practices with them, much depends on our capacity to frame the actions of others in narrative.
Telling Actions: Institutions, Collective Agency, and Critical Narratives
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: May 2020

Concepts of socially extended cognition and cognitive institution have relevance for understanding how social and cultural practices shape not only our cognitive processes, but also our actions and interactions. Cognitive institutions are not only institutions that support cognitive processes, but are also such that without them these specific cognitive processes would not exist. Examples include things like legal systems, schools, universities, and cultural institutions. Narrative practices can establish and support such institutions, but critical narratives can operate as the basis for a critique of such institutions. Narratives not only serve to mediate intersubjective relations, they can map out the immediate and deeper contexts of action and understanding, provide detailed descriptions of events, objects and persons, help to coordinate complex tasks, define the identities and roles of individuals and groups, and express agreement among individuals. Critical narrative practice can also generate a reflective attitude about new or different possibilities.
Extinction, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Sociality
Authors: Oro Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses how social feedbacks, and particularly runaway dispersal resulting from social copying, influence population extinction. Several forms of the logistic model are built to assess the role of density-dependent and cooperation mechanisms in the generation of nonlinearities in the path to extinction. Interestingly, transience to an extinction stable state may be delayed and may result in quasi-extinction population queues. Some empirical examples of quasi-extinction stable states are shown, including human populations. It is also explained how social sunk-cost effects—when individuals are trapped in a patch due to its momentum of suitability, social copying, or emotional drivers—can influence these quasi-extinction dynamics. The chapter also reviews several statistical tools for anticipating critical transitions and other nonlinear behaviours in populations. These tools include the early warning signals, which quantify when a critical threshold is approaching.
Epilogue
Authors: Oro Daniel
Published: May 2020

Complex social animal groups behave as self-organized, single structures: they feed together, they defend against predators together, they escape from perturbations and disperse and migrate together and they share information. It is modestly evident that many individuals sharing information about their environment may be more successful in coping with perturbations than solitary individuals gathering information on their own. The group exists for and by means of all the individuals, and these exist for and by means of the group. Social groups have emergent properties that cannot be easily explained by either selection or self-organization. Yet, sociality has been shaped by the two forces. How sociality has evolved by selection is puzzling also because it confronts the benefits of the group versus the benefits of the individual, which is a historically debated theme. There are many other open questions about sociality that I have explored in this book. But in the end, the process that has fascinated me the most is social copying. Despite the sophisticated mechanisms evolved in increasing information in social groups—which has culminated in humans with language and technological interconnections—it is impressive how a simple behaviour such as social copying has maintained its strength when individuals make any kind of decisions, from insignificant to transcendent....
Utstein
Authors: Michalopoulos Constantine
Published: May 2020

Following several months of extensive informal collaboration over the winter of 1998–9 culminating in the spring 1999 Development Committee meetings and the May OECD/DAC High Level Meeting, the four ministers decided to intensify their collaboration by organizing a formal ministerial meeting. Johnson offered to host the meeting at the Utstein Abbey on 25–6 July 1999. Subsequent ministerial meetings were organized by the other members of the group on an annual basis. This chapter discusses in detail the main topics addressed in their first ministerial meeting and the key principles guiding the Utstein group, including their emphasis on a partnership approach, with the partner government showing programme ownership; programmes of budget support utilizing partner country systems; and increasing the volume and improving the quality of aid. The chapter then describes U4 efforts to spread their message to other likeminded countries through existing and new institutional networks.
Improving the International Development Architecture
Authors: Michalopoulos Constantine
Published: May 2020

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next millennium was characterized by an extraordinary burst of international cooperation on development. At the core of this cooperation was the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 and the related agreement to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The U4 played a role both in the run-up to the MDG agreement and in linking the achievement of the MDG objective of ending poverty to collaborative efforts between donor and recipient, with partners in the driver’s seat setting their own priorities. This chapter starts with a discussion of the agreement to establish the MDGs at the UN and its implications for development. Then it turns to the perennial question of how much aid developed countries should commit to provide to developing countries, and what donors and recipients must do to make aid more effective, two central issues of the Monterrey Conference on Finance for Development in 2002. The last part discusses the special U4 and international community efforts to achieve universal primary education and to battle HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
After Electromagnetism
Authors: Trotter David
Published: May 2020

The topic of this chapter is a quickening in the pace of change, in both technology and literature, brought about from the 1880s onwards by the harnessing of electricity’s alliance with magnetism to transform methods of telecommunication. The consequent opening up of the ‘Olympian frequency domain’ (Friedrich Kittler) fundamentally undermined the sovereignty of human consciousness. The chapter explores two uses of the metaphor of lightning in literature, philosophy, anthropology, and folklore: first, to mark the limit of unaided human perception; secondly, to indicate, by an emphasis on the return stroke, that two-way communication between earth and heaven is at least conceivable. The focus is on D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, essays, and poetry (especially the extraordinary ‘Bare Almond Trees’); and on Hope Mirrlees’s encoding of her relationship with the eminent classicist Jane Harrison into Paris (1920), a modernist long poem worthy of comparison with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
Fuller and the Folk
Authors: Donelson Raff , Hannikainen Ivar R.
Published: May 2020

Legal philosophers have long debated whether purported laws must meet specific criteria in order to count as genuine law. Lon Fuller offered a major contribution to this debate when he proposed that legal systems necessarily observe eight procedural principles, which he called “the inner morality of law.” This chapter people’s intuitions regarding Fuller’s procedural principles, revealing limited and fickle support: Laypeople and experienced lawyers alike believed that hypothetical laws would have to abide by procedural principles (e.g. “there could be no retrospective laws”) that actual laws often violate (e.g. “there are laws that are retrospective”). The studies not only demonstrate the ease with which people oscillate between contrasting views about the nature of law, they also illustrate how experimental methods can shed light on long-standing questions at the heart of jurisprudence.
Does Skepticism Lead to Tranquility? Exploring a Pyrrhonian Theme
Authors: Attie-Picker Mario
Published: May 2020

Pyrrhonian Skepticism, as described by Sextus Empiricus, has proven to be an influential philosophical tradition. However, little attention has been paid to the empirical claims that animate the Pyrrhonian project. This chapter aims to reverse that trend. First, it argues that Sextus’s assertion that belief causes anxiety plays an essential role in Sextus’s philosophy. It then reviews modern research on dogmatism and anxiety, and building on this research, presents three different studies conducted with the purpose of elucidating the relationship between them. The results suggest, contrary to Sextus’s claim, that dogmatism predicts low levels of anxiety, though no evidence about their causal relation was found.
How Gardens Feel
Authors: Schoenfeldt Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the ways that Edmund Spenser and John Milton focus their considerable epics on the scrupulous calibration of physical sensation with a range of environmental textures. Spenser, it is argued, offers a lush topography of corporeal temptation; he is primarily concerned with how environments can pollute individuals. Milton, by contrast, is concerned both with the ways that environments can pollute individuals, and the ways that individuals pollute environments. The landscapes of Spenser and Milton challenge individuals to manage their responses to sensuous environmental stimuli. While Spenser creates a lush paradisal garden that must be boisterously razed by a knight representing the virtue of Temperance, Milton proposes that if humans behave temperately, they might erect within themselves the infrastructure of a lost paradise.
Anatomy, Cartography, and the New World Body
Authors: Traub Valerie
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores a particular epistemological orientation towards the human body shared by early modern literature, anatomy, and cartography. Beginning with the confluence of anatomical and cartographical metaphors in a range of literary and visual texts, it scrutinizes pervasive and mutually sustaining analogies among the body, the land, and maps. It then tracks how the discursive intimacy between anatomy and cartography morphed from an analogical relationship into an interactive one. Through a detailed reading of anatomical illustrations, voyage illustrations, and ethnographic country, continent, and world maps, the essay demonstrates that anatomy and cartography produced a graphic idiom of the body dedicated to abstraction and a ‘logic of the grid’. In so doing, they contributed to cognitive conditions that provided the epistemological wherewithal to begin to conceptualize humans by means of classification and comparison, and to apply this systematizing (yet non-binary) habit of thought to diverse populations across the globe.
Introduction
Authors: George Coulter H.
Published: May 2020

All languages can, in a general sense, express the same ideas. But different languages have their own characteristic features that give them each their own particular personality, in part because of cultural and historical circumstances, in part because of the structural peculiarities of the language in question. This introductory chapter sets the stage for what follows by discussing the extent to which languages are marked by such differences, in connection with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (the idea that the language one speaks shapes how one views the world), which continues to loom large in popular writing on linguistics. It then provides a brief synopsis of the chapters that follow, noting some of the major points that will be made on the basis of the six main languages considered in the book.
Greek
Authors: George Coulter H.
Published: May 2020

To lay the foundations for the linguistic discussion found in the remainder of the book, this chapter begins with a systematic introduction to some of the main features of Ancient Greek, explaining the necessary technical terms along the way. First comes a discussion of the sounds of Greek, focusing on those that are particularly characteristic of Greek, as well as the development of Greek from the Proto-Indo-European parent language. The chapter then introduces some of the ways Greek words, especially nouns and verbs, change their forms to suit the grammatical context, since such morphological richness will come up repeatedly in the book. Excerpts from three texts are then discussed: first, the Iliad, to show how formulaic language marks its origins as an oral composition; second, Thucydides, to highlight the abstract language that characterizes his history; third, the New Testament, to show how much translators sometimes need to rearrange the structure of a sentence in order for the syntax to make sense in English.
Latin
Authors: George Coulter H.
Published: May 2020

The chapter begins with a discussion of some of the characteristic features of Latin, such as its case system and ablative absolute construction, with examples taken largely from Latin phrases (like vice versa) that have passed directly into English. Three case studies follow: the first looks at the word-play in Lucretius’ De rerum natura made possible through linguistic features particular to Latin, the second at the difficulties involved in translating Horace’s Odes 4.7 through a comparison of the Latin with A. E. Housman’s translation, noting especially the interlaced word order of the original poem, the third at the extreme compression of Latin seen in Tacitus’ Annals.
Kant and the Divine
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

The book offers a definitive study of the development of Kant’s conception of the highest good, from his earliest work, to his dying days. It is argued that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western philosophy. Kant is not a Christian, because he cannot accept Christianity’s traditional claims about the relationship between divine action, grace, human freedom, and happiness. Christian theologians who continue to affirm these traditional claims (and many do), therefore have grounds to be suspicious of Kant as an interpreter of Christian doctrine. As well as setting out a theological critique of Kant, the book offers a new defence of the power, beauty, and internal coherence of Kant’s non-Christian philosophical religiosity, ‘within the limits of reason alone’, which reason itself has some divine features. This neglected strand of philosophical religiosity deserves to be engaged with by both philosophers, and theologians. The Kant revealed in this book reminds us of a perennial task of philosophy, going back to Plato, where philosophy is construed as a way of life, oriented towards happiness, and achieved through a properly expansive conception of reason and happiness. When we understand this philosophical religiosity, many standard ‘problems’ in the interpretation of Kant can be seen in a new light, and resolved. Kant witnesses to a strand of philosophy that leans into the category of the divine, at the edges of what we can say about reason, freedom, autonomy, and happiness.
Contradicting Morality
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

The chapter argues that Kant’s conception of the noumenal/intelligible ‘proper self’, as set out in the Groundwork, is coherent in its own terms, and plausible, given wider premises. It is shown that a metaphysically robust interpretation of Kant’s ‘proper self’ unlocks and illuminates some standard and well-rehearsed problems in Kant interpretation. The chapter shows this with reference to the ‘four examples’, which exemplify the categorical imperative, in Book Two of the Groundwork. It is argued that Kant is offering, at this point, a reflection on the way in which breaking the moral law is a type of contradiction of our own proper nature, manifested in our proper selves. The chapter draws upon the conception of real possibilities and essences, found in Kant’s pre-critical philosophy, but which is also evident in his later work.
Does Kant Permit Grace?
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter asks whether Kant, in some sense, at least permits us to believe in the possibility of some sort of divine grace, in terms of a supplement to our moral action, or divine assistance. It is established that Kant does permit belief in what could be called a ‘reactive’ divine action, where the human being makes the first moral move in freedom, with God offering some sort of assistance. Kant, though, does not permit belief in proactive divine action, where God would be conceived of as first acting upon us, in a way that helps us to move towards the moral law. This would violate Kant’s demands in relation to freedom. Some commentators have suggested that Kant makes ‘room’ for some sort of concept of divine–human concurrence. This claim is dealt with by showing that, at most, Kant can be said to offer a translation of this concept, into the terms of ‘reactive divine action’, which, from the point of view of the Christian tradition, is tantamount to a denial of concurrence. Kant regards the more traditional conception of concurrence to be an ‘impenetrable mystery’. Kant does allow some space for specific types of mystery, but concurrence, for Kant, is the wrong type of mystery, being useless (and even dangerous) for both theoretical and practical reason.
The Two Highest Goods
Authors: Insole Christopher J.
Published: May 2020

The chapter argues that we can construe the relationship between Kant’s account of the moral law and God as a type of concurring moral dependence, on the basis of formal causation, such that the very activity of willing the moral law is a type of participation in the uncreated divine mind. In the end, morality does require divinity, and, even, a (carefully specified) type of divine activity, albeit that we do not arrive at this commitment through a traditional acceptance of the categories of revelation and faith. It is argued that there is a defensible sense of the notion of ‘divinity’ that Kant can be said to have warrant to believe in, given his assumptions about freedom, although it is a rather different sort of divinity from the ‘divine being’ of philosophical (let alone Christian) theism. I suggest that in his final fragmentary writings, Kant might be said to show some awareness of this. This interpretation throws a new light on Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends, whereby the happiness that constitutes the highest good can be construed as an enactment of divinity, through willing the moral law, rather than the contemplation of a divine being.
Introduction
Authors: Beavers John , Koontz-Garboden Andrew
Published: May 2020

Chapter 1 outlines the goals of a theory of verb meaning. It presents a justification for a constrained theory of verb meaning, and outlines the basic parameters of event structural approaches and surveys several types of such approaches to isolate their key ingredients. It also considers the predictions such theories make about possible and impossible verbs, and justifies the need for a further study of constraints of root meanings in particular to realize the predictive potential of event structural approaches. The chapter outlines the two hypotheses considered in depth in this study — The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots and Manner/Result Complementarity — and the methodology used to show they do not hold and the consequences for a theory of verb meaning if they do not. It concludes by outlining some preliminary assumptions on the semantics of causation and change.
Conclusion
Authors: Beavers John , Koontz-Garboden Andrew
Published: May 2020

Chapter 5 summarizes and synthesizes the results of the overall study. The deeper motivation for why roots would not be subject to constraints such as those required by Bifurcation and Manner/Result Complementarity is explored, whereby the semantic specificity of idiosyncratic root meanings may in some cases require also entailing more basic templatic notions and other types of idiosyncratic meanings. This chapter also considers alternative conditions on roots and why these may not hold. It concludes with an outline of the larger typology of roots this study predicts, and in conjunction with a theory of templates how this typology still makes predictions about possible and impossible verbs despite the fact that root meanings can be as complex and unconstrained as the case studies explored here suggest.
Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel
Authors: Jordan Julia
Published: May 2020

In the decades following the immediately post-war period in Britain, a loose grouping of avant-garde writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but also for the broader movement of the novel through the century. Oblique Strategies takes some of the things we tend to say about experimental fiction—how it is unreadable, non-linear, elliptical, errant, plotless—and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period’s investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique; it attempts to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts—error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident—all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Reading experimental literature in this light, Oblique Strategies finds it eloquent about the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more broadly.
Mountaineering and British Romanticism
Authors: Bainbridge Simon
Published: May 2020

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognized, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity’s evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture, and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with twenty-five images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering’s power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms ‘visual sovereignty’), the relationships between different types of ‘mountaineers’, and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.
Cultural Labour
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.
Performativity
Authors: Prakash Brahma
Published: May 2020

Reshma-Chuharmal is a story of Reshma, the daughter of an upper-caste feudal landlord and Chuharmal, an untouchable warrior. For several decades, this particular story has been a bone of contention between the upper castes and lower castes in the south Bihar region. Performances based on the lower-caste versions have led to several caste atrocities and caste wars in Bihar. The chapter discusses how an oppressed caste uses all possible performance strategies and symbols, from subversive to regressive, in order to overcome its social and cultural marginality. The chapter not only shows the paradoxical nature of identity discourse but also reveals the paradoxical nature of these performances whose meaning and affect change with time, space, and genre.
Land, Poverty, and Displacement
Authors: Sarkar Abhirup
Published: May 2020

The present chapter shows why the problem of displacement deserves special focus in discourses on poverty and underdevelopment. The context is India. We argue that poverty in India is caused both by an aggregate scarcity of food in the country as well as a skewed distribution of income. There are two ways of getting out of the problem: (i) increase in food grains production by increasing productivity and (ii) increasing the pace of industrialization. To increase productivity it is necessary to build large irrigation facilities, which are likely to displace people and increase poverty. Similarly, transformation of land from agriculture to industry and infrastructure displaces people from their traditional livelihood and may temporarily increase poverty.