bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: King Matt
Published: June 2023

This chapter introduces the main idea of the book: that there is a single responsibility relation that holds across moral and non-moral action. It also outlines the methodological approach and some parameters of the theory, while introducing a useful framework for interpreting its overall argumentative structure. The theory defended aims at a certain level of generality, a simplicity of commitments, and a sparse architecture of components. The objective is to give an account of what it is to be responsible for the various things individuals do in the variety of contexts in which they blame and praise each other.
Basic Agency
Authors: King Matt
Published: June 2023

This chapter sets out and defends the conditions on the basic responsibility relation. It begins with an account of how agents exercise control through flexible and dynamic guidance by their representations. In this way, they have a say over what happens. The chapter distills the conditions on the basic responsibility relation by examining the considerations that undermine blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. When a result is due to an unguided spasm, or a proper accident or mistake, it is no longer to an individual’s credit or discredit. The features that are absent when these excusing considerations are present point to the necessary conditions on basic responsibility. Finally, those conditions are refined to account for certain complexities, and then connected to the mechanisms of basic agency. Satisfying the conditions on the basic responsibility relation requires only modest agential abilities.
Conclusion
Authors: King Matt
Published: June 2023

This final chapter considers some more speculative extensions of the theory of basic responsibility. It defends the implication that animals can be responsible for their activities so long as they satisfy the conditions on basic responsibility. It discusses the development of agency and responsibility, from childhood to maturity, and how the evaluative standards governing activities, and thus the nature of such mitigations, should be understood. It also considers a traditional question regarding responsibility: is it compatible with the thesis of determinism? Though the theory of basic responsibility is officially neutral on that question, this chapter considers how the theory might motivate an affirmative answer. To the extent that activities are flexible and overlapping, the chapter discusses how basic responsibility is a promiscuous notion, such that individuals are responsible for far more things than typically acknowledged by extant theories. Finally, the chapter considers the way in which the theory is compatible, and in tension, with various approaches in ethical theory.
Humanity from the Ice
Authors: Gamble Clive
Published: June 2023

The chapter examines how creatures acknowledged as fellow humans emerged in the fossil record and achieved sufficient adaptability to varieties of environment cognitive and enough creative and social skills to be able to spread over most of the land surface of the planet. Rejecting the notion of a ‘human revolution’, or of early humans who broke with their past, the author tells a tale of global travellers in interlocking contexts: climate, the orbital rhythms of the earth, and tectonic shifts. A regional approach discloses the rhythms of change among ‘7 million versatile hominins’, clever, imaginative, always good with hands, gifted with speech, and socially inventive, who achieved a global range thanks to the use of kinship, social and material storage, and cooperation between males to control and realign resources.
Into a Warming World
Authors: Jones Martin
Published: June 2023

The author takes up the human story as, after a protracted series of climatic swings, global warming resumed some 10,000 years ago, and new techniques of permanent settlement, herding, and tillage represent a novel engagement with nature. The boundary between worlds of food procurement and food production—between a world of hunting, gathering, and foraging and a world of agriculture—seems more transgressive, more traversed by continuities, than commonly supposed. Combining archaeology with environmental and genetic sciences, the chapter reconstructs the processes by which some species lost reproductive independence, and eventually became reliant on their principal predator, humans, to produce a new generation.
The Farmers’ Empires
Authors: Fernández-Armesto Felipe
Published: June 2023

Accelerated cultural divergence—more societies, increasingly different from each other—was the most conspicuous global consequence of the changes that accompanied the spread and intensification of agriculture. The chapter relates the history of how agrarian peoples became increasingly differentiated from one another. Between the fifth and third millennia bce, in widely separated places around the world, the story is of divergence through common experiences: intensified settlement; growing concentrations of population; multiplying social categories and functions of government; emerging states and, in some cases, their transformation into empires; and increasingly diversified and specialized economic activity. Developments in four areas—Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the valleys of the Indus and Yellow Rivers, in what are now Pakistan China respectively—claim special attention, because, albeit on an exceptional scale, they were representative of global developments. In trying to explain the further changes—sometimes fatal, always transmutative—that befell them in the second phase, towards or around the late second millennium, the focus broadens to take in comparable events in the regions where our world tour starts, in the Mediterranean and, first, the New World.
Growth
Authors: Morris Ian
Published: June 2023

With reference to families, clans, tribes, cities, states, and empires, and some attention to other kinds of organizations, particularly churches and businesses, the chapter tells the story of social and political organizations between 1000 bce and 1350 ce in terms of growth. Humans learned or were forced to cooperate on larger and larger scales, as small organizations were swallowed up by larger ones and large organizations got larger still. Behind the long-term, large-scale story of growth, then, lie more complicated shorter-term, smaller-scale stories. The author focuses on five questions: Why did organizations grow in scale, wealth, hierarchy, complexity, and effectiveness? Why did growth differ so much before and after 175 ce? Why did growth so often turn into collapse? Why did the forms of organizations vary so much from one place to another at any given point in time? And why did Eastern Eurasia displace Western as the heartland of the world’s biggest, most powerful states after 175 ce? A big conclusion arises: that between 1000 bce and 1350 ce social and political organizations reached the limits of what was possible under purely agrarian conditions.
A Converging World
Authors: Northrup David
Published: June 2023

After 1350 maritime trade routes tightened connections among people and increased the movement of goods. For the first time ships sailed regularly between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, across the Atlantic, and across the Pacific. Along with goods and people, microbes, plants, and animals spread to the far corners of the planet. Forces for global convergence that had been quite contained became commonplace with consequences, whether good or bad, that by 1815 appeared unstoppable. Meanwhile, the planet was experiencing the most prolonged era of below normal temperatures since the Pleistocene Ice Age of 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. That human population could still increase overall is testimony to the positive effects of the resettlement of new lands, the cultivation of more productive plants, and changing economic circumstances that set the stage for the far more dramatic changes in the next 200 years.
The Anthropocene Epoch
Authors: Christian David
Published: June 2023

In the last 200 years, humans have become a planet-changing species. The chapter offers some measures of the huge changes associated with the Anthropocene and describes the deep historical roots of the current epoch and the major technological, economic, social, and environmental changes of the period from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Human populations rocketed, adding 6 billion more humans, who needed more resources, more food, more clothing, more goods. Energy consumption increased even faster. The amount of energy available per person increased by at least three times in the last 200 years, and by almost fifteen times in comparison with 2,000 years ago. The chapter explores the reasons for and results of these changes.
The Modern World and its Demons
Authors: Bernardini Paolo Luca
Published: June 2023

Through a history of thought and art in the last two hundred years, the chapter explores a paradox: science and philosophy combined to represent the individual, deprived of divine controls, as evolved to such a degree that even machines had to be meant as ‘extensions’ of his (more than ‘her’, so far) powers. Yet in the same period, ideologues placed the masses, collectively, in a key position overturning former systems of power. In the end, neither the masses nor individuals have emerged as sole and indisputable victor. Nor did the West, despite the prevailing flow of influence for most of the period. The apparently globalized, i.e. uniform, world is far from real uniformity. From within the West, and more often from ‘peripheries’, powerful forces challenge the influence of Western cultural traditions.
Politics and Society in the Kaleidoscope of Change
Authors: Black Jeremy
Published: June 2023

The chapter presents hope and fear—inherent human volatility and dynamism—as keys to understanding change in the period. Elements of existing social conventions and political norms survived ideological pressures, many of which were conservative, but the extent and pace of change were even more amazing. Technological change transfixed contemporaries, but, to many, the changing relationships of men and women or of the generations appeared more remarkable still. The decline of deference, the rise of choice, and the individualism of norms were all strikingly different to prior attitudes, and none was limited only to elite groups. The chapter focuses on political and social changes, changing identities, and religion, with an emphasis on paradoxical effects of change: a crisis of confidence at the end of the period, with globalization reviled but unsubverted, and ‘the cohesion, co-operation and unity of purpose that had inspired many who had planned at the international level still only a distant hope’.
The Laws of Restitution
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

The Laws of Restitution is a new, and quite different, account of this large area of private law. Other works seek to oversimplify the subject as governed by a single ‘unjust enrichment’ principle. Instead, there are several different kinds of claim, governed by quite different principles, which interlock with other fields of law. They need to be separated if errors are to be avoided. The work covers: the recovery of payments that are not due; the quantification of claims for restitution; the necessary link between claimant and defendant for a successful claim; rescission; contractual conditions; the consequences of frustration and breach; the discharge of obligations properly borne by another; contribution, subrogation, and recoupment; salvage, general average, agency of necessity; proprietary and promissory estoppel; Equity, tracing, constructive and resulting trusts; accession, mixture, specification, and substitution of things; remedies for torts, breach of contract, intellectual property right violations, and breach of confidence; damages and an account of profits; the duties of fiduciaries to account; defences of change of position, passing on, bona fide purchase, limitation, counter-restitution, and ministerial receipt; and illegality in entering into and performing contracts.
Summary
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

Restitution has been thought to be reducible to a single ‘unjust enrichment’ principle. This in turn has been divided into four distinct questions. Is the defendant enriched? Is the enrichment at the expense of the plaintiff? Is the enrichment unjust? Does the defendant have any defence? These questions have been treated as independent of one another, as constituent parts of a cause of action independent of other areas of law. The negative purpose of this work is to show that this is misleading. The positive purpose is to distinguish the different principles governing the various claims there are. In particular, it looks at: payments made that are not due, and cognate cases such as the rendering and acceptance of a service that is unjustified; a performance rendered conditionally under an agreement, where the condition has failed; the discharge of an obligation properly borne by another; why claims for salvage, general average, and other examples of ‘necessitous intervention’ are justifiable; how the right to things may be lost through accession, mixture, specification, and conveyance; when and why obligations to (re-)transfer rights give rise to constructive and resulting trusts, and how equitable tracing and subrogation can be explained; the limited circumstances in which a gain-based remedy for wrongdoing is possible; when and why the different defences applicable to the different kinds of claim arise; and the impact of illegality on claims for restitution.
Performance
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

If a plaintiff by mistake makes another person better off, and himself correlatively worse off, this does not alone suffice to bring a claim for restitution. What then is, or are, the necessary connection(s) between the plaintiff and defendant to justify an obligation to make restitution? One category is where a payment has been made by the plaintiff to the defendant, or a service rendered by the plaintiff accepted by the defendant. Controversially, it is maintained that the defendant must share the responsibility for the performance rendered. Pollock C B’s aphorism that ‘One cleans another’s shoes, what can the other do but put them on?’ is endorsed. A number of claims do not seem to require such a connection between the parties. A tripartite division of the law obligations into contract, torts, and restitution leads to over-generalisation, and a watering down of the necessary conditions of the different kinds of claim, in order to create a universal test capable of capturing all cases.
Contract
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

What is the relationship between the restitution and contract law? Where a performance is rendered conditionally under an agreement, a claim for restitution may be brought where that condition fails. How this simple proposition applies where the claim is brought against a party who is in breach of contract or by a party who is; whether it is to the return of money or some other kind of performance; or whether the performance of a contractual obligation is frustrated, varies. The central question in determining when restitution is available is the correct construction of the bargain between the parties. The most important qualification to this proposition is that penal deposits are recoverable.
The Performing Arts: Festival, Music, Drama, Dance
Authors: McGowan Margaret
Published: June 2023

In the Renaissance, the performing arts flourished most conspicuously in festival. Across Europe, in churches, cities, and courts, actors, musicians and dancers, poets, artists, and composers, supported by a vast army of craftsmen, developed and practised their arts in the service of spectacle. As courts became less peripatetic, and as knowledge of the ancient world increased and provided a stimulus for performance, settings for performance such as gardens, courtyards, and churches were supplemented by permanent public theatres. Spectacles were occasioned by feast days (notably Corpus Christi), Carnival, princely parades, and ceremonial entries. Dance, drama, public theatre, and learned drama were all important strands in Renaissance culture.
Vernacular Literature
Authors: Boutcher Warren
Published: June 2023

The subject of this chapter lies at the intersection of two broader histories first constructed by the western European nation-states in the nineteenth century: the rise of the national European vernaculars, and the Renaissance. The first of these traditional histories traces the emergence between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries of a particular group of vernacular western European literatures, including some that in the modern period have spread across the globe. The second is that of the period of change and renewal in the arts and culture, c.1300-c.1650, designated since the late nineteenth century as the Renaissance. Renaissance humanists succeeded in making their style of analysis and composition of what was then called ‘poetry’ (fictive or imaginative writing) central to all elite European culture and knowledge in several languages, including vernaculars, by the mid-sixteenth century. The study and meditation of texts in non-native languages, particularly Latin, French, and Italian, became the fundamental pedagogical and literary activity for lay people (including some elite woman) with access to advanced education. Vernacular literatures were transnational because of shared languages, especially neo-Latin, Tuscan, and French, and Renaissance Europe shared as a common body of vernacular and neo-Latin, literary, and learned writings composed and circulated in many languages.
The Global Renaissance
Authors: Fernández-Armesto Felipe , Burke Peter
Published: June 2023

The Renaissance has traditionally been viewed as a European cultural movement. This chapter proposes a global Renaissance, one conceived as cultural exchange rather than cultural influence. This interpenetration of cultures went far beyond the so-called ‘Columbian exchange', which acknowledged the exchange of food and diseases between Europe and the Americas. It is the case that colonists, conquistadores, and missionaries were influential in parts of the world far from Europe, but European encounters with Byzantine culture and the Islamic world were in many ways reciprocal. Greek studies in Europe were revived by exiles from the Ottoman world, and Islamic culture influenced the art and architecture of Europe both from the Ottoman Empire and from Moorish Spain. There was also Chinese influence, in part mediated by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, and influences from the Americas and Africa. There is also an important strain of cultural hybridity, often emanating from people of mixed cultural heritage.
Introduction
Authors: Campbell Gordon
Published: June 2023

The Introduction discusses the model of cultural descent known since the nineteenth century as the Renaissance. The model has the clear advantage of illuminating debts to classical antiquity, but the disadvantage of paying insufficient attention to cultural continuities. Shakespeare, for example, inherited the traditions of medieval English drama, and so divided his plays into scenes. When his plays were printed, however, they were presented according to classical convention in five acts, and when gathered in the First Folio, were organized according to three classical genres of comedy, tragedy, and history, the last of which was borrowed from an ancient non-dramatic genre. By such means, his plays were appropriated to the model of the Renaissance.
Courtship
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter is concerned with Thomas Hardy’s and Emma Hardy’s depictions of their courtship (1870–4), which mainly took place in St Juliot and the surrounding region in Cornwall. Hardy spent only about fifteen weeks with Emma on the Cornish coast, but these visits inspired numerous poems as well as many scenes in his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes. Poems assessed in this chapter include ‘Beeny Cliff’, ‘Under the Waterfall’, and ‘The Young Churchwarden’. It considers the impact of her alcoholic and mentally unstable father’s angry response to their plans to marry, and the poems of foreboding, such as ‘I Rose and Went to Rou’tor Town’, ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’, and ‘Where Three Roads Joined’, in which Hardy later responded to his curt dismissal by John Attersoll Gifford, who apparently called him ‘a low-born churl’. Although Emma later destroyed all the letters the couple exchanged during their courtship, much to Hardy’s regret, her memoir and his poems as well as extracts from his diary included in the Life are here collaged to tell the story of these four crucial years in Hardy’s career.
Divisions Dire and Wry
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter focuses on the bleak final years of the Hardys’ marriage and on the many anguished poems of self-recrimination that recall incidents from their unhappy domestic life together in Max Gate. It opens with a detailed reading of ‘Lonely Days’, which was versified from entries in Emma’s diary, and ‘The Spell of the Rose’, which allegorizes the construction of Max Gate in medieval terms and regrets the ‘divisions dire and wry’ that came to alienate husband from wife. It analyses the poems in which Hardy imagines that he sees Emma’s ghost returning to their garden, such as ‘The Going’ and ‘The Shadow on the Stone’, as well as those such as ‘Lost Love’ and ‘Penance’ that record her attempts to broker a peace with him by performing his favourite songs on the piano. It explores how the final division separating them caused by her death both echoes and reconfigures the divisions that separated them in life.
Dear Ghost
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores Hardy’s depictions of Emma’s afterlife as a ghost in poems such as ‘The Haunter’, ‘The Voice’, ‘His Visitor’, ‘After a Journey’, and ‘At Castle Boterel’ (all from the sequence ‘Poems of 1912–13’). It pays particular attention to the influence of Virgil on some of these poems, arguing that Hardy creates a series of parallels between himself and Emma and Aeneas and Dido. It suggests that engagements with Emma’s ghost enabled Hardy to recover a more intense and immediate experience of nature, of the kind enjoyed by such as Wordsworth, and resulted in some of his most powerful and moving poems. Further, it makes the case that these poems channel the influence of canonical precursors such as the Shakespeare of Hamlet and the Ovid of the Orpheus and Eurydice episode of the Metamorphoses, while also demonstrating a link between their irregular patterning of the sequence and Hardy’s notions of the Gothic.
Fascism, the War, and Structures of Feeling in Italy, 1943-1945
Authors: Falasca-Zamponi Simonetta
Published: June 2023

The book examines the years immediately after the fall of the fascist regime in Italy. Drawing on personal diaries and correspondence written between 1943 and 1945, it asks: What did Italians feel and think about fascism as they witnessed the regime’s demise? Did the historical circumstances, including foreign occupation and a civil war, lead to a hurried, unreflective liquidation of the regime? Ultimately, can we draw on people’s experiences of this period to illuminate contemporary Italy’s ambiguous relationship to its fascist legacy? By emphasizing the seemingly banal power of everyday experience, the book offers a new interpretive approach to the past.
Introduction
Authors: Falasca-Zamponi Simonetta
Published: June 2023

The Introduction lays out the structure of the book and articulates the challenges of using diaries to study people’s lived present in a past epoch. It first addresses Italy’s remarkably complicated historical situation after the collapse of Mussolini’s two-decades-long regime on July 25, 1943. It then makes the case for using Raymond Williams’s theoretical framework of “structures of feeling” to address the disparate moods that emerged from Italians’ reactions to the events of 1943–45. What did people think of the past twenty years and how did they relate to fascism? Central to the study’s analytical approach is the dichotomous couplet of ordinary and extraordinary, following which Italians’ routine practices are counterposed to the exceptional circumstances of war and foreign occupation. Turning to the diaries, the Introduction discusses their interpretive limits and potentialities. It particularly considers the aspiration to objectivity present in the model of modern private journals that focus on the self, and it evaluates how differing levels of literacy as well as unequal access to expressive means affected common people’s writing ambitions and styles. It also points to the relationship between form and content (how and what one writes) as fundamental for assessing the meaning of journal entries. Ultimately, the Introduction argues for the importance of examining Italians’ interpretations of their dramatic past and present from the standpoint of everyday experience. Diaries’ intimate connection to daily life provides a unique frame within which to access people’s convictions as well as contradictions.
The Personal and the Political
Authors: Falasca-Zamponi Simonetta
Published: June 2023

Focusing on social relations and everyday life, Chapter 5 looks at the micro level of interaction as it surfaces from intellectual diaries. It examines political hybridity in light of personal ties and highlights the struggle intellectual diarists experienced as they engaged in the operation of distinguishing friend from enemy, or the good fascist from the bad ones. Within an environment saturated by the fascist past, old networks and sentimental connections complicated the work of assigning blame. The controversial process surrounding official attempts at “epuration” mirrored intellectual diarists’ internal conflict as they contemplated how to minimize the deleterious effects of the twenty-year-long dictatorship. Eventually opting to look ahead rather than back, the diarists’ choice of divorcing the fascists of the Social Republic from those of the past regime carried long-term critical consequences for the country’s process of “defascistization.” The chapter examines normalcy as the notion through which diarists tackled the exceptional reality in which they were embedded. A countermeasure to a perceived sense of both material insecurity and psychological instability, the banality of daily rituals and practices helped intellectual diarists overcome despair at the same time that it confronted them with the inadequacy of their self-assigned role of reporters. Did writing have any meaning when all they jotted down was a repetition of the same? Although generally more reflective than ordinary scribes, intellectual diarists communicated a similar sense of impotence in the face of history.
Platform Regulation
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores three good reasons for regulating digital platforms. Following van Dijk, it describes platforms as both techno-cultural constructs and socio-economic structures that together exercise a commanding power over a global mode of production based on multiple and diverse transactions across numerous sectors in society. It deals (1) with algorithmic governance and its regulation—meaning the ways in which algorithmic governmentality shapes choices, behaviours, and options and the power of predictive AI to control human futures, (2) anticompetitive behaviours of Big Tech that relate to the incumbency factor and power of a handful of search and sociality platforms to set agendas, and (3) the Google tax—the fact that Big Tech has routinely evaded paying taxes in the jurisdictions that they operate in.
The EU, Platform Regulation, and the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

The chapter focusses specifically on a novel and complex concept—the right to be forgotten, that the EU has made a case for, within its wide-ranging approach to the regulation of Big Tech that is best expressed in the GDPR and associated legislations such as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. The right to be forgotten needs to be viewed in the context of personal and non-personal data becoming monetized—the fuel for platform capitalism and the basis for wealth creation by a handful of Big Tech oligopolies. The right to be forgotten explicitly gives individual consumers control over the data that they generate, the rights to data portability and the rights for consumers to determine data use by platforms that they are involved in transactionally. It highlights the contentious issue of privacy. While this right can be viewed as an ‘aspirational’ right, and a bold attempt to give power over data back to citizens, the chapter also deals with the rather complex operationalization of this concept.
Platform Regulation in the United States
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

The regulation of platforms in the United States has become a bipartisan political issue. But it is also a complex issue since all the major platforms apart from the ones located in China are of US origin. So, on the one hand and from a geo-political perspective, the United States simply has to protect its platforms and its operations in the rest of the world although, on the other hand, the US government has had to act in the context of global evidence of platform manipulations in elections and their anti-competitive behaviour. The chapter highlights ‘anti-trust’ actions against Big Tech in the United States along with contestations over ‘privacy’. It also highlights the contradictory stance on regulation taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). While the FTC is keen to promote competition and limit the power of Big Tech, it is yet to be seen whether any drastic steps will be taken to rein in or break up Big Tech as was done to Standard Oil and AT&T in the past.
Platform Regulation
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

The final chapter in this volume highlights the complex nature of platform regulation. In the context of data ubiquity, what data to regulate remains a contentious issue. Furthermore, given the extent of Big Tech entanglements with politics, governments are often conflicted in their approach to platform regulation. There are, however, very interesting recommendations that if taken up could see platforms being treated as public utilities on a par with other essential infrastructures such as electricity grids and dams for the supply of drinking water. The chapter also highlights the fact that there is an absolute need for data literacies. Big Tech of course is contesting attempts to regulate them in jurisdictions around the world and, they have, in the recent past, invested in self-regulation initiatives. However, it would seem that the momentum is with individual nation states and it would seem that the clamour for regulation will become louder. This chapter deals with the challenges but also opportunities for platform regulation.
Space for Deliberation
Authors: Carroll Michael
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents a close reading of the metaphors employed by Pelasgus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants as he responds to the Danaids’ request to grant them asylum. Using a range of cognitive tools, notably the notion of image schemas but also relevance theory and blending, it reads the metaphors as not merely a form of literary expression but also a mechanism through which Pelasgus evaluates the situation and considers what courses of action are open to him. The chapter explicitly confronts the question whether cognitive literary theory is capable of generating new readings, and argues that the reading presented in it could not have been arrived at by means of conventional accounts of metaphor.
Thinking Through Things
Authors: Noel Anne-Sophie
Published: June 2023

This chapter aims to refine the understanding of the cognitive role of some famous objects in Greek tragedy. It does so by engaging with Lambros Malafouris’ notion of the ‘cognitive life of things’, whereby material objects are seen as an intrinsic part of humans’ cognitive processes. The case studies in this chapter are the house in the Oresteia, the recognition tokens in Choephori, the bow in Hercules Furens and Philoctetes. However, it is argued, this attribution is a conscious form of make-believe: the characters know that they are engaging in a fiction when they momentarily envisage things as human ‘minds on stage’, so as to manage solitary and desperate situations. Greek tragedy therefore allows in-depth analysis of the fictional and affective dimensions of the ‘cognitive life of things’. The chapter ends by arguing for the relevance of work on anthropomorphism in developmental and social psychology.
Situated Cognition
Authors: Corthals Bob , Sluiter Ineke
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the situatedness of cognition by comparing three models of human behaviour, underlying Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 bce), Stanley Milgram’s infamous psychological experiments (1960s/1970s), and twenty-first-century cognitive linguistics. Each explanandum is a scenario of conflict between an individual’s moral values and the tasks he or she has agreed to perform. Each author has a different intellectual framework to understand this (situated metacognition). Sophocles explored the sophistic interest in the tension between Neoptolemus’ natural disposition and (rhetorical) argument. Milgram’s desire to understand the Holocaust generated the hypothesis of ‘obedience to authority’. Cognitive linguist Herb Clark reinterpreted the Milgram transcripts in ‘cognitive’ terms and observed the natural human tendency to collaborate gone wrong. The models can be mutually applied, but on disobedience (on display in Milgram’s subjects and Neoptolemus), Sophocles offers more than the others. Thus, the three models are not mutually exclusive, but are shown to have differential situated salience.
‘God is with the Patient People’
Authors: Kaur Raminder , Mohammed Faisal Syed
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers the extent to which, while preparing for and celebrating religious festivals, relatively rigid ethno-religious categories disassemble and reconfigure themselves according to the specifics of positionality, locality, and temporality. The focus is on people who, among their composite configurations, self-identify as Muslim in two contrasting localities where the festival dedicated to the Hindu deity, Ganesh, is celebrated in Mumbai. The argument goes beyond the polarities of Hindu–Muslim communalism and communal harmony to consider the ambivalence or ‘deep interconnections’ that (non-)involvement in the Ganesh festival might raise. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, arguments are reassessed about, on the one hand, narrow communally drawn lines, and on the other, an uncritical expression of syncretic celebrations. The focus is on Hindu–Muslim interrelations, but the chapter also goes beyond the ideological understandings of these terms as evident in Hindutva politics and processes of Islamicization in India, for such phenomena have only tangential bearings on the proximal lives of diverse communities in the city. People may not foreground ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ in their self-identifications, but deploy other categories that allude to an intersection of caste, region, or sect among other identifiers. Discourses of dis/engagement with the festival therefore reveal a spectrum of us–them relations.
Taxis as Public Micro-Spaces of Religion
Authors: Stausberg Michael
Published: June 2023

Cities are spatial arrangements characterized by a high density of interaction between strangers that takes place in public places. This article analyses taxis as one kind of urban public place and as microsites for religion. Religion comes into play in three ways in Mumbai taxis: the religious practices, interests, and ideas of the drivers; religious material symbols placed on the outside and inside of taxis; and religion as a topic of communication between drivers and passengers. The importance of the car for the subsistence of its operators (drivers and owners) is often reflected in acts of worship related to it. The perceived risk of their business on the streets of Mumbai can make religion a potentially relevant protective device. Most taxis carried one or several religious symbols—with a preference for Ganesh and the Shirdi Sai Baba—but the aesthetic codes of Hindu and Muslim operators are markedly different. While religion was not a common topic of conversation between drivers and passengers, some drivers expressed a kind of common all-embracing universalist folk-theology: God is the same, even though religions differ.
Hegel’s “Philosophic” Approach to World History
Authors: Sedgwick Sally
Published: June 2023

Hegel appears to follow in Kant’s footsteps in characterizing his idea of the purposive development of history as “a priori”. But he also asserts that his “philosophic” treatment of world history must pass the test of actual history. Hegel is committed to the assumption, then, that his unique philosophic approach is somehow both a priori and empirically verifiable. He therefore presents his readers with the challenge of explaining how he can represent his method in these apparently incompatible ways. It is suggested in this chapter that the solution to this puzzle sheds considerable light on Hegel’s unique conception of human reason and freedom. He aims to persuade us that these special capacities and their products must be understood to in some way combine the a priori and the empirical.
Freedom’s Necessary Limits
Authors: Sedgwick Sally
Published: June 2023

The purpose of this chapter is to further illuminate and explore implications of Hegel’s claim that our freedom is anchored in nature, or more broadly, in the realm of what is. In his view, human freedom is a capacity we possess not as “noumenal” natures but as animals endowed with special powers of abstraction and reflection. Hegel in addition argues that freedom’s products (that is, its concepts and laws) are indebted to nature and history in some way. Freedom’s concepts and laws are not pregiven; rather, they are acquired in human time and in the course of world history. Our idea of freedom develops, as does our understanding of the conditions of our freedom’s satisfaction. This development is propelled forward by interactions obtaining between our natural capacity for reflection and concrete forces of nature and history.
Empowering Future People by Empowering the Young?
Authors: John Tyler M.
Published: June 2023

This chapter starts from the claim that the state is plagued with problems of political short-termism: excessive priority given to near-term benefits at the expense of benefits further in the future. One possible mechanism to reduce short-termism involves apportioning greater relative political influence to the young since younger citizens generally have greater additional life expectancy than older citizens and thus it looks reasonable to expect that they have preferences that are extended further into the future. But the chapter shows that this is unlikely to make states significantly less short-termist: no empirical relationship has been found between age and willingness to support long-termist policies. Instead, the chapter proposes a more promising age-based mechanism. States should develop youth citizens’ assemblies that ensure accountability to future generations through a scheme of retrospective accountability.
An Education Resource Account for Early School Leavers
Authors: Cormier Andrée-Anne , Brighouse Harry
Published: June 2023

This chapter argues that school should cease to be compulsory at age 16 and that an education resource account (ERA) should be established for students who leave school at that age. The ERA would be sufficient to cover three years of full-time education. It could be linked to inflation and early school leavers could use it in accredited non-profit educational institutions at any later point in their lives. Two sets of arguments are discussed in support of the proposal. The first, building on the empirical literature, focuses on efficiency and highlights the advantages of an ERA with respect to the ‘disruptive’ students issue in particular. The second set of arguments is anti-paternalistic. The chapter distinguishes three anti-paternalistic arguments: the view that individuals are the best judges of their own welfare, the idea that autonomous decision-making is a component of well-being, and a respect-based view of what renders anti-paternalism wrong.
Ageing in Place and Autonomy
Authors: Angell Kim
Published: June 2023

This chapter discusses the ‘age-friendly cities’ initiative aimed at enhancing people’s opportunity to age in place. It presents an autonomy-based defence of the idea and examines the moral claim that the elderly can make in support of their ability to age in place. The chapter emphasizes, among other considerations, that ageing in place can have cognitive benefits through the routines and habits made possible by familiar environments. However, the chapter also highlights that the claims of the elderly can come into conflict with the claims of the young. We should not only look at today’s elderly but also anticipate how today’s young will fare when they get old. The chapter concludes by making the case for an ‘all-age-friendly’ (or even ‘young-friendly’) interpretation of the age-friendly cities initiative, while also insisting on the importance of policies benefiting low-income families (regardless of age) and promoting intergenerational housing initiatives.
Two Types of Age-Sensitive Taxation
Authors: Valente Manuel Sá
Published: June 2023

This chapter discusses what maximin egalitarians should think about two types of age-sensitive taxation. One is a form of cumulative income taxation, which taxes yearly incomes taking into account all earlier income years instead of only the last one. The second is age-differentiated taxation, which taxes yearly incomes adjusting the rate to the taxpayer’s age. The chapter first presents the main reasons supporting cumulative income taxation and then proceeds to look at how it affects fiscal obligations across life. Then it argues that egalitarians should aim at a fiscal reform that benefits the young and the elderly but not the middle-aged. Finally, it questions whether cumulative income taxes can deliver this without resorting to age-differentiated taxes. The chapter shows that while cumulative income taxation can benefit the young derly.
European Migration Law
Authors: Thym Daniel
Published: June 2023

This book has been written to help readers navigate the often Byzantine European rulebook on migration at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to keep an oversight. More than three dozen directives and regulations are discussed throughout this volume, together with numerous court judgments, international treaties, reform proposals, and factual developments. Our objective is to provide readers with a mental map which empowers them to find solutions to pressing political, practical, and legal challenges. Eighteen chapters present core features of visas and border controls, asylum and legal migration, integration and return, association agreements, and international cooperation. This comprehensive assessment of ‘European migration law’ introduces beginners to the state of the art and serves as a reliable inventory for experts. Several audiences will consult this reference work: policy experts, legal practitioners, and academic researchers. Careful inspection of EU legislation and Court judgments shall be accompanied by due attention to domestic and international developments, as well as contextual factors influencing the real world of migratory movements. Whereas newcomers will use this book as a gateway into a fascinating area of study, experts will benefit from extra information. Policy experts and critical observers will appreciate the interdisciplinary comments on the driving forces of migration and the theoretical models that lie beneath the legal material.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Methodology
Authors: Thym Daniel
Published: June 2023

Knowledge of the multiple economic, social, political, and cultural drivers of migration is essential for the design of reasonably well-functioning policies, especially in the areas of asylum and return. The rich literature sheds light on the underlying dynamics. Comments are not limited to the drivers of migration. Whereas legal experts concentrate on the interpretation of the law, other disciplines explore the making and the effects of migration policies. Sceptical public opinions support restrictions in times of increasing politicisation, and critical studies emphasise that perceptions of threat and normative preferences can be influenced by the use of language. Sociolegal research in the ethnographic tradition shows the impact of migrant agency and street-level bureaucracy. Policy experts can use these interdisciplinary insights to improve the policy output, whereas legal scholars can develop sophisticated research designs; doing so combines doctrinal hermeneutics with a critical awareness of the law as an instrument of government.
Human Rights and State Sovereignty
Authors: Thym Daniel
Published: June 2023

Despite being a cross-border phenomenon by definition, migratory movements are not governed by public international law to a significant extent. The Refugee Convention and human rights are the exception to the rule. Chapter 5 concentrates on the tension between state sovereignty and human rights in the evolution of European migration law, which builds upon earlier forms of state control over the entry and stay of foreigners that emerged during the long nineteenth century as a by-product of the formation of sovereign statehood. Human rights serve as a counterpoint to state sovereignty in contemporary Europe, with elements of dynamism coinciding with scenarios of standstill in the human rights case law. Our remarks focus on the contribution of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Refugee Convention, and international treaty bodies or diplomatic fora, including the Global Compacts adopted in 2018. These general explanations on the international dimension of migration law prepare the ground for sector-specific comments on human rights, refugee law, and international treaties in the substantive chapters.
Doctrinal Foundations of the Case Law
Authors: Thym Daniel
Published: June 2023

An intimate knowledge of the structure of legal argument at the supranational level is essential for anyone trying to understand—or influence—the outcome of the interpretative exercise. Inspection of the case law of the Court of Justice unearths the predominance of seemingly technical arguments of doctrinal hermeneutics in the continental tradition, focusing on the wording, the general scheme, objectives, and the drafting history. To do so is easier said than done. While many judgments explore overarching features and cross-linkages between the different pieces of legislation on migration, other rulings exhibit an almost bewildering lack of coherence, for instance with respect to teleological interpretation in light of objectives. Individual rights of migrants often have similar effects as human rights, under the conditions laid down in secondary legislation. Their doctrinal contours underlie many Court rulings and can be used by lawyers to advance the rights of migrants. Practitioners will appreciate that familiarity with doctrinal arguments increases legal certainty, supports interpretative coherence, and forms the basis for forward-looking proposals.