bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gridlock, Crisis, and Obama
Authors: Campbell John L.
Published: May 2018

Chapter 7 explains that the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s presidency pushed political polarization into extreme political gridlock in Washington. Americans became disgusted. The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated America’s economic woes and made people angry. The fact that Obama was America’s first African American president made things worse. So did his moves to handle the financial crisis and Great Recession, and reform the national health care system. Trump tapped the public’s anger, turning it to his electoral advantage. He promised that because as a billionaire he wasn’t beholden to anyone, he would unify the country and cut through the gridlock by “draining the swamp” in Washington. And if Congress didn’t cooperate, he said that he would move unilaterally by issuing executive orders that would get the job done. It worked and he was elected president.
The Exchange of Words
Authors: Moran Richard
Published: May 2018

The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but is the socially recognized capacity to make one’s words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another person something and expect to be believed, and what we learn from others in this way is the basis for most of what we take ourselves to know about the world. The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this fundamental human phenomenon. The account concentrates on the difference between what may be revealed in one’s speech (like a regional accent) and what we explicitly claim and make ourselves answerable for. Some prominent themes include the meaning of sincerity in speech, the nature of mutuality and how it differs from “mind reading,” the interplay between the first-person and the second-person perspectives in conversation, and the nature of the speech act of illocution as developed by philosophers such as J. L. Austin and Paul Grice. Ordinary dialogue is the locus of a kind of intersubjective understanding that is distinctive to the transmission of reasons in human testimony, and The Exchange of Words is an original and integrated account of this basic way of being informative and in touch with one another.
Introduction
Authors: Scott Andrew G.
Published: May 2018

An overview of Cassius Dio’s life and career, his role as historian of Rome, his call to history, and his background. This chapter also reviews ancient and modern sources for the period 217–224 A.D. Cassius Dio, born around A.D. 165 into a senatorial family from Nicaea in Bithynia, lived primarily in Rome from approximately A.D. 180 During his lengthy political career, he was both participant in and eyewitness to events, albeit a biased one, in the eighty books he composed about Rome’s history. Although much of Dio’s Roman history was preserved through the work of excerptors and epitomators, a single surviving manuscript, Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1288 (fifth or sixth century A.D.), transmits the text of 79(78).2.2–80(79).8.3.
Book 79(78): Macrinus
Authors: Scott Andrew G.
Published: May 2018

This chapter provides an overview of book 79(78) of Dio’s history, including chronology and Dio’s use of source material. It then gives commentary on important aspects of Dio’s narrative. Within a chronological framework, Dio employs three major themes: Caracalla’s, Macrinus’ rise and fall, and Elagabalus’ rise. Dio moves from a focus on the East to the events in Rome, with a return to action in the East. He closely ties together Caracalla’s Parthian campaign and murder, alternating with anecdotes about the emperor’s way of life, the omens predicting his death, and public reaction. For Macrinus’ reign, Dio employs a somewhat regular annalistic approach, in which the urban affairs of Rome take first position and are followed by foreign affairs (usually centered around military campaigns) and then a final chapter.
Conclusion
Authors: Phillips J. R. S.
Published: May 2018

CONTEMPORARY or near‐contemporary comments upon the character of the Earl of Pembroke ran the gamut from extravagant adulation to execration. Of those favourable to him the most balanced, surprisingly, is that of the Scottish author of The Bruce, who, in describing the English disaster at Bannockburn in 1314, could nevertheless refer to Pembroke in respectful terms despite his earlier leadership of invading English armies in the reign of Edward I....
Neutron stars
Authors: Maggiore Michele
Published: May 2018

Observation of neutron stars as pulsars. Pulsar demography. Magnetars. GW emission from neutron stars. Normal modes of neuton stars. CFS instability; r-mode instability. GWs from the post-merger NS remnant. Ellipticity of deformed neutron stars.
Helicity decomposition of metric perturbations
Authors: Maggiore Michele
Published: May 2018

Decomposition of the perturbations over FRW into scalar, vector and tensor perturbations. Physical and unphysical degrees of freedom. Gauge-invariant metric perturbations, Bardeen variables. Gauge-invariant perturbations of the energy-momentum tensor
Evolution of cosmological perturbations
Authors: Maggiore Michele
Published: May 2018

Evolutions equations for cosmological perturbations. Single-component and multi-component fluids. Super-horizon and sub-horizon limits. Adiabatic and isocurvature initial conditions. Analytic and numerical solutions. Power spectra and transfer functions for scalar and tensor perturbations. GW damping from neutrino free-streaming.
Of Reformed Versifying
Authors: Rhodes Neil
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.
Conclusion
Authors: Rhodes Neil
Published: May 2018

The conclusion uses the contrast between the English verse anthology Belvedere, published by John Bodenham in 1600, and Erasmus’ proverb collection of 1499 to suggest how literary culture in England evolves in the course of the sixteenth century: the role of literary arbiter is transferred from an international scholar of formidable learning to an upwardly mobile grocer with a taste for poetry, and the resources of literature have been transferred from Latin, the common language of Europe, to common English. This concluding chapter reprises the themes and argument of the book and ends with the observation that by 1600 the commonalty was not just the labouring class, but also constituted a readership and an audience.
Non-Classical and Nihilistic Approaches
Authors: Bacon Andrew
Published: May 2018

Given that a single cent seemingly cannot make the difference between being rich and not rich, the sorites paradox purports to show that either everyone is rich or no one is. In this chapter, the logical principles needed to derive the sorites paradox are clarified. Some views solve the sorites paradox by weakening those logical principles. Often the blame is placed on the law of excluded middle. Although the law of excluded middle has some contentious instances, it is argued that the sorites paradox can be derived without them, and that the violence to ordinary reasoning is more far-reaching than is sometimes recognized. Others accept the conclusion that everyone is rich or no one is. Two versions of these views, a semantic version and radical version, are distinguished and it is argued that they either are untenable, or do not solve the original, non-semantic, version of the sorites paradox.
Vagueness and Uncertainty
Authors: Bacon Andrew
Published: May 2018

Recent forms of expressivism attempt to explain the sense in which certain propositions are ‘non-factual’ in terms of principles about attitudes towards those propositions. Following recent expressivist accounts of conditionals and modals, a version of expressivism about vagueness is explored, which maintains that to have a credence in a vague proposition is just to have your credences in the precise propositions distributed in a certain way. Whilst this form of expressivism is ultimately rejected, a consequence of the view can be exploited to partially capture the intuition that certain subject matters are non-factual. This principle, Rational Supervenience’, effectively states that all disagreements about the vague ultimately boil down to disagreements about the precise: any two rational priors that agree about all precise propositions agree about everything. While the Principle of Plenitude states that there is a proposition occupying every evidential role, Rational Supervenience entails conversely that every proposition occupies some evidential role.
Vagueness and the World
Authors: Bacon Andrew
Published: May 2018

According to a fairly widespread assumption, there is some definite collection of completely factual or fundamental propositions upon which all truths supervene and which are unaffected by vagueness. This assumption manifests itself in formal models of vagueness as well—for example, the supervaluationist who represents propositions as sets of world-precisification pairs may divide logical space into propositions that only depend on the world-coordinate. This chapter argues that this assumption leads to paradoxes of higher-order vagueness, and, ultimately, should be rejected in favour of a weaker notion of fundamentality or factuality. It suggests an alternative picture in which there is vagueness ‘all the way down’: logical-space can be divided into basic propositions that settle all precise matters, but it is vague where those divisions lie.
Turning a Project into Reality
Authors: Yamamoto Koji
Published: May 2018

Moving from the republic of letters to Westminster and the West Midlands, this chapter investigates whether the impact of distrust found in Chapter 3 was limited to the likes of Hartlib, whose projects often never materialized. Andrew Yarranton provides an ideal test case. His Stour river navigation scheme was the first of its kind authorized by a private act of parliament after the Restoration of Charles II; it provided a foundation for the Stourbridge Canal, completed in the 1770s. Moving beyond the analysis of promotional strategies, the chapter combines sources conventionally used in parliamentary history and local economic history to establish in what ways the deep-seated distrust of the projector affected different stages of this relatively successful project—parliamentary debate, petitioning campaigns, coordination between Yarranton and financial backers, and the project’s implementation in the West Midlands.
Memories, Propriety, and Emulation
Authors: Yamamoto Koji
Published: May 2018

This chapter moves from the case study of Chapter 4 to a more general investigation into England’s projecting culture after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Drawing on the French concept of convention, it brings together a range of projects promoted and discussed in printed tracts, Privy Council meetings, parliamentary debates, and meetings and publications of the Royal Society. Writers now toned down religious language. Memories of early Stuart projects and grievances dissuaded the restored monarchy and other vigilant actors from pursuing schemes that required extensive compulsion or coercion. This was how the preference shifted decisively towards mobilizing people’s benign desire for emulation, profit, and comfort, a new economic convention that drew squarely on changing attitudes towards human desire, on increasing colonial trade, and on the rising purchasing power of labourers.
Consuming Projects
Authors: Yamamoto Koji
Published: May 2018

This chapter demonstrates that the mobilization of private desire for consumption and emulation was taken to new heights during the financial revolution. Patenting activities boomed in the early 1690s. The lapse of the Licensing Act gave rise to a deluge of pamphlets promoting joint-stock companies and public subscription schemes; new periodicals reported and commented on them. Equally important was the language of charity and piety that often intersected with the language of empire. Although forms of projecting became more closely aligned with incipient modern stock markets, the moral ambiguity of projectors continued to loom large. Satirical remarks painting as deceitful businessmen sold well, but often masked complex factors behind business failure. Public consumption of shares, news, rumours, and moralizing remarks became integral parts of the all-consuming market. In Defoe’s ‘Projecting Age’, even efforts at taming capitalism became an integral part of its operation.
Animal Locomotion
Authors: Biewener Andrew , Patek Sheila
Published: May 2018

This book provides a synthesis of the physical, physiological, evolutionary, and biomechanical principles that underlie animal locomotion. An understanding and full appreciation of animal locomotion requires the integration of these principles. Toward this end, we provide the necessary introductory foundation that will allow a more in-depth understanding of the physical biology and physiology of animal movement. In so doing, we hope that this book will illuminate the fundamentals and breadth of these systems, while inspiring our readers to look more deeply into the scientific literature and investigate new features of animal movement. Several themes run through this book. The first is that by comparing the modes and mechanisms by which animals have evolved the capacity for movement, we can understand the common principles that underlie each mode of locomotion. A second is that size matters. One of the most amazing aspects of biology is the enormous spatial and temporal scale over which organisms and biological processes operate. Within each mode of locomotion, animals have evolved designs and mechanisms that effectively contend with the physical properties and forces imposed on them by their environment. Understanding the constraints of scale that underlie locomotor mechanisms is essential to appreciating how these mechanisms have evolved and how they operate. A third theme is the importance of taking an integrative and comparative evolutionary approach in the study of biology. Organisms share much in common. Much of their molecular and cellular machinery is the same. They also must navigate similar physical properties of their environment. Consequently, an integrative approach to organismal function that spans multiple levels of biological organization provides a strong understanding of animal locomotion. By comparing across species, common principles of design emerge. Such comparisons also highlight how certain organisms may differ and point to strategies that have evolved for movement in diverse environments. Finally, because convergence upon common designs and the generation of new designs result from historical processes governed by natural selection, it is also important that we ask how and why these systems have evolved.
Al‐Mustansir, Charles of Anjou, and the Struggle for the Central Mediterranean
Authors: Lower Michael
Published: May 2018

Tunis and Sicily had entangled histories in the Middle Ages. This chapter explores how two powerful Mediterranean dynasts—Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, and al‐Mustansir, emir of Tunis—struggled to assert themselves in the Sicilian Straits in the mid‐thirteenth century. While al‐Mustansir wanted Sicilian grain to feed his people, Charles needed African gold to pay for the debts he had accumulated in conquering Sicily in 1266. The question remained how that strategic interdependence would work itself out: would Charles and al‐Mustansir be partners, or would they wage a zero‐sum struggle to control the central Mediterranean? When al‐Mustansir sponsored an expeditionary force that landed on the coast of Sicily in the fall of 1267, it looked as if conflict would prevail. As it turned out, the landing was really the opening salvo in a negotiation that would extend throughout the course of the Tunis Crusade.
Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things
Authors: Domski Mary
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the different ways in which Descartes and Newton balance their claim that laws of nature are true of the natural world with their commitment to our human inability to fully comprehend God’s creation of nature. For both Descartes and Newton, there is a qualified notion of truth at play. Descartes’s laws of nature are true insofar as they capture God’s maintenance of nature only so far as we can understand. Nonetheless, they are afforded the highest degree of certainty and necessity that we can attain. Newton’s laws of motion are true insofar as they accurately describe the motions we witness in the sensible world. However, this truth is not based on mere inductive certainty; this chapter argues it is a truth that is characterized by rational certainty and thus closer to Descartes’s notion than we might expect from Newton’s ‘empirical’ method.
Kant, Marginal Cases, and Moral Standing
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: May 2018

According to the marginal cases argument, there is no property that might justify making a moral difference between human beings and the other animals that is both uniquely and universally human. It is therefore “speciesist” to treat human beings differently just because we are human beings. While not challenging the conclusion, this chapter argues that the marginal cases argument is metaphysically misguided. It ignores the differences between a life stage and a kind, and between lacking a property and having it in a defective form. The chapter then argues for a view of moral standing that attributes it to the subject of a life conceived as an atemporal being, and shows how this view can resolve some familiar puzzles such as how death can be a loss to the person who has died, how we can wrong the dead, the “procreation asymmetry,” and the “non-identity problem.”
Kant against the Animals, Part 1
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: May 2018

Kant argued for an “indirect duty view,” which has two independent parts. First, it holds that although we do have duties regarding the treatment of the other animals, we do not owe those duties to the other animals themselves but rather to ourselves. Second, it holds that the reason for these duties is that treating the other animals badly will lead us to treat human beings badly. Chapter 7 will argue against the first thesis. This chapter argues that the second thesis makes our relationship to the other animals incoherent. Kant’s argument requires that responses like kindness and gratitude are appropriate responses to animals, but then invites us to treat having these responses as instrumental to something else. The chapter also examines some puzzles that arise when humans whose attitudes towards each other are influenced by a “moral filter” attempt to relate to amoral creatures like the other animals.
The Role of Pleasure and Pain
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M.
Published: May 2018

Utilitarians argue that animals have interests because they have the capacity for pleasure and pain. Chapter 2 argues that animals are creatures who have a good, because they have evaluative responses, which involve pleasure and pain, to the things that affect their own well-functioning. Having interests and having a good are similar grounds of moral standing. This chapter explains the difference between the role of pleasure in the hedonistic conception of the good and the role of pleasure in the Aristotelian conception of the good. It argues that pleasure is not the good but a perception of the good. However, since perceiving the good correctly is part of well-functioning and well-functioning is the good for an animal, pleasure is also an essential part of the good for an animal.
Through
Authors: Blacklock Mark
Published: May 2018

Chapter 5 considers the development in popular occultism of higher spatial ideas, with an emphasis on the Theosophical Society’s correlation of the fourth dimension with the astral plane. In so doing it describes the theoretical alignment of various speculated supernatural phenomena with higher-dimensioned space and the elaboration of these relationships in overlapping social groupings and a popular but contested body of literature. This chapter stresses a shift in rhetorical emphasis: in these accounts we have moved beyond speculation and into the presentation as empirical of ideas that maintain no basis in the empirical. The popular impact of the appropriation of higher spatial ideas by leading figures in the Theosophical Society and far briefer but no less important engagements on the part of figures whose influence in the period has long been established—Edward Carpenter and W.T. Stead—describes the elaboration and cross-fertilization of these ideas.
Fictions
Authors: Blacklock Mark
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 considers how cultural conceptions of space had been shifted by higher spatial thought in its various forms and how this was reflected in the popular and literary fiction of the fin de siècle. Investigating the production of space in fin de siècle literature, it focuses on embodiment, the senses, and particularly narrative voice and mood. A newly configured spatiality that owes its conception to higher space becomes a driving force behind certain techniques of narrative fiction in the period and plays directly into Modernism. This chapter builds on earlier observations on things as mediating objects and on the philosophy of space to develop a widescreen vision of higher space that explores its reciprocal relationship with colonial space in the fiction of H.G. Wells, George MacDonald, George Griffith, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others.
Reid on Our Mental Constitution
Authors: Etchegaray Claire
Published: May 2018

Reid is suspected to beg the question of belief-justification by referring to our mental constitution as the already truthful constitution of the knowing subject. But Reid does not simply say that knowledge is a natural or a divine gift. He claims that his inquiry into our constitution shows how natural powers operate and how they give us access to reality. He claims to explain our true beliefs. This chapter first distinguishes Reid’s approach from any subjectivism and shows how, for Reid, knowledge depends on “our constitution”: only the discernment of truth (and not the truth itself) depends on our mental constitution. The chapter considers why Reid claims to explain the discernment of truth by referring to our constitution, and concludes on the originality of Reid’s anti-scepticism by assessing the proper sense in which the mind is a subject of knowledge.
Self-referring in Korean, with reference to Korean first-person markers
Authors: Lee Hye-Kyung
Published: May 2018

Lee’s chapter provides a corpus-based analysis of Korean first-person markers by examining the semantic and pragmatic features emerging from their dictionary definitions and their usages in discourse. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the use of the grammatical category of a pronoun does not quite fit the Korean data, because the exceptionally large number of the lexical items are highly specialized in their use. While the first-person markers have the primary function of referring to the speaker, self-referring via first-person markers in Korean is mediated by the speaker’s awareness of his perceived social role or public image, which is expected to conform to honorification norms. The author also argues that the situation with first-person reference in Korean supports the view that the indexical/non-indexical distinction standardly adopted in semantic theory ought to be reconsidered.
De se marking, logophoricity, and ziji
Authors: Chen Hsiang-Yun
Published: May 2018

This chapter addresses the assumed connection between de se attitude ascription and logophoricity in the case of Chinese ziji. It is widely believed that logophors are among the paradigm cases of de se marking, and that long-distance ziji is logophoric. Drawing on a critical examination of a variety of analyses, this chapter argues that long-distance anaphora, de se interpretation, and logophoric marking are overlapping but distinct phenomena. Even if ziji is logophoric, it does not automatically trigger de se requirement. A de se-neutral analysis of ziji is consistent with pragmatic derivations of interpretations that emphasize the self. The findings point to a new approach to long-distance binding, and identify the blocking effect as the key issue for further research.
On the essentiality of thoughts (and reference)
Authors: Corazza Eros
Published: May 2018

It is often assumed that experiential reference, in particular the references we make using so-called essential indexicals (I, here, and now), is irreducible to other forms or reference. In focusing on Donnellan’s insights concerning the referential use of definite descriptions and empirical evidence coming from cognitive sciences (in particular Pylyshin’s work on situated vision), Eros Corazza discusses and defends this view. In so doing, he shows how experiential reference rests on a form of egocentric immersion underpinning agent-centered behaviours. It is further argued that our capacity to express de se thoughts (i.e. thoughts about ourselves) supervenes on the ability we have to master viewpoint-dependent thoughts. This constitutes the cognitive grounds upon which philosophical insights concerning the notions of essential indexicals, self-locating beliefs, and self-centered behaviours should be understood.
Introduction
Authors: Gazis George Alexander
Published: May 2018

Readers of Homer since antiquity have noticed that the poet narrates events as if they were enacted in front of their eyes; as one ancient scholiast comments, the poetry of Homer is not only heard but also seen by its audience as some sort of spectacle. The first part of this chapter offers a comprehensive literature review of the studies in visibility and Homeric enargeia. It further sets out the aims of the book and the methodology which is followed throughout it. Finally, an introduction to the idea of Hades as a poetic resource is offered in the second part of the chapter.
The Odyssey and the ‘Poetics of Hades’
Authors: Gazis George Alexander
Published: May 2018

In this chapter the way Hades is portrayed in the Odyssey is explored. Following the discussion from Chapter 1, it is argued that Hades’ invisibility is literally spelled out in the Odyssey, bringing to the forefront the poetic challenge Homer’s gaze had already faced in the Iliad. Hades, by being the most remote realm within the—already remote from Olympian influence—universe of Odysseus’ ‘Apologoi’, presents the poet with the most difficult poetic goal to be conquered. Homer, by sending his protagonist into Hades, gains access to the invisible realm, which further means that he and the audience can access the stories of the past, thus initiating the poetics of Hades.
Conclusions
Authors: Gazis George Alexander
Published: May 2018

This chapter offers an overview of the book’s chapters and the discussions included therein. The conclusions of each chapter are summed up and presented as the overarching argument of the book, namely that Homer’s portrayal and treatment of the Underworld is conscious and intentional and gives rise to the poetics of Hades, which is a device used by the poet to escape from the norms and confines of traditional epic storytelling. Homer takes advantage of this characteristic to create a poetic space which allows for a self-consciously alternative encounter with the heroic past, one that has affinities with the lyric art of Stesichorus and others.
Subsequent Practice as a Means of Treaty Interpretation
Authors: Buga Irina
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on the well-established role of subsequent practice in the interpretative process. It begins by examining the concept of ‘subsequent practice’ in light of the drafting history of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. It also sets out the constitutive elements of subsequent practice pursuant to Articles 31 and 32 VCLT, including the non-exhaustive notion of ‘practice’ and relevant actors, the scope of the term ‘subsequent’, the related notions of subsequent practice and subsequent agreement, the meaning of practice ‘in the application of the treaty’, and, crucially, the requirement of establishing the parties’ agreement. The chapter then explores the varying role accorded to subsequent practice by different dispute settlement bodies in the interpretative process, and, particularly, in relation to two special forms of dynamic interpretation: evolutionary interpretation and the doctrine of implied powers.
Of fluency, beauty, and truth
Authors: Schwarz Norbert
Published: May 2018

To evaluate whether a claim is likely to be true, people attend to whether it is compatible with other things they know, internally consistent and plausible, supported by evidence, accepted by others, and offered by a credible source. Each criterion can be evaluated by drawing on relevant details (an effortful analytic strategy) or by attending to the ease with which the claim can be processed (a less effortful intuitive strategy). Easy processing favors acceptance under all criteria—when thoughts flow smoothly, people nod along. Ease of processing is also central to aesthetic appeal, and easily processed materials are evaluated as prettier. This sheds new light on why beauty and truth are often seen as related, by poets and scientists alike. Because people are more sensitive to their feelings than to where these feelings come from, numerous incidental variables can influence perceived beauty and truth by influencing the perceiver’s processing experience.
Making the most of individual differences in joint decisions
Authors: Bahrami Bahador
Published: May 2018

Evidence for and against the idea that “two heads are better than one” is abundant. This chapter considers the contextual conditions and social norms that predict madness or wisdom of crowds to identify the adaptive value of collective decision-making beyond increased accuracy. Similarity of competence among members of a collective impacts collective accuracy, but interacting individuals often seem to operate under the assumption that they are equally competent even when direct evidence suggest the opposite and dyadic performance suffers. Cross-cultural data from Iran, China, and Denmark support this assumption of similarity (i.e., equality bias) as a sensible heuristic that works most of the time and simplifies social interaction. Crowds often trade off accuracy for other collective benefits such as diffusion of responsibility and reduction of regret. Consequently, two heads are sometimes better than one, but no-one holds the collective accountable, not even for the most disastrous of outcomes.
Managing epistemicity among the Yucatec Mayas (Mexico)
Authors: Guen Olivier Le
Published: May 2018

Many studies have supported the idea that human interaction relies on cooperation and joint action, implying that everyday communication has primarily a social motivation. According to Grice, interlocutors are expected to meet the informational needs of their interactional partner(s) in both accuracy and informativeness. However, conversional principles incompatible with Grice’s maxims have been found to be implicitly applied in traditional societies from Madagascar, the Pacific Islands, and Mesoamerica. This chapter considers the management of epistemicity among the Yucatec Mayas of Mexico, focusing on the function and use of evidential particles and the broader cultural context into which they fit. Another is to present the implicit rules that adults and children follow to evaluate and endorse claims of knowledge. Such rules might explain why Yucatec Mayas tend to be linguistically accurate in stating and evaluating knowledge sources. Because they expect others to lie or withhold information, they constantly monitor how their and others’ assertions and information are shared.
Depletion and deprivation
Authors: Schjødt Uffe , Jensen Jeppe Sinding
Published: May 2018

Religious beliefs represent striking examples of culturally transmitted ideas that guide individual metacognition. This chapter examines how religious practices facilitate the adoption of such beliefs. Beginning with the two simple assumptions that effective metacognition requires (1) considerable attentional and executive resources and (2) access to interpretive frameworks, it is noted that these vary across contexts. Many characteristic features of religious practices appear to limit the cognitive resources required for individual metacognition. It is proposed that such features may in fact be designed to facilitate the adoption of a shared metacognition. Using a predictive coding framework, two pathways for this process are analyzed: depletion and deprivation. Finally, the philosophical implications for social functional accounts of shared metacognition are discussed in light of human evolution.
The Moral Appeal of Legal Monism
Authors: Gragl Paul
Published: May 2018

This chapter looks beyond the mere epistemological and descriptive horizon of legal monism and enquires as to what follows from a unitary view of the law in normative sense. Furthermore, this necessitates the question of whether monism is indeed capable of improving the law as it is, and if the answer is yes, in what way it can achieve this goal. It will be argued that especially regarding international law, the pure theory of law is very open to extra-legal elements, namely in three distinct areas, which will also form the main sections of this chapter: ideological criticism; democracy (as well as constitutional review); and pacifism (as well as cosmopolitanism).
The Conceptual Framework: Growth, Institutions, and Social Orders
Authors: Capussela Andrea Lorenzo
Published: May 2018

This chapter lays out one part of the theoretical framework of the book, drawn from institutional economics. This literature maintains that institutions are the main determinant of long-term growth, and that to remain ‘appropriate’ institutions must evolve in synchrony with an economy’s progress through the stages of its development. Their evolution depends on a society’s openness to political creative destruction. Limited-access social orders tend to constrain it, to safeguard elites’ rents, and typically undermine progressive institutional reforms, breaking that synchrony. The transition from that social order to the open-access one is an endogenous and reversible process, in which inefficient institutions, which allow elites to extract rents, coexist with appropriate ones, which constrain their power and make it contestable. The hypothesis is advanced that Italy has not yet completed this transition, and that the tension between its efficient and inefficient institutions can endogenously generate shocks, which open opportunities for equilibrium shifts.
Conclusions
Authors: Capussela Andrea Lorenzo
Published: May 2018

The main conclusions of the book are four. Without the credible prospect of an equilibrium shift even well-designed reforms of Italy’s political or economic institutions are likely to yield limited results, because they shall be undermined by the constraints posed by the extant equilibrium. The country’s political and economic elites are unlikely to be either willing or able to promote an equilibrium shift, however, by reason of those same constraints. Two consequences follow. First, absent an external shock the country is likely to remain on the extant equilibrium for as long as its material and moral consequences shall be tolerable. Second, a strategy to reverse Italy’s decline should focus on the variable that is freer from the grip of that equilibrium, namely ideas.
Parentheticalism and (Ir)rational Agency
Authors: Henning Tim
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers various cases of irrationality (such as akrasia, weakness in executive commitments, doxastic incontinence, etc.), all of which involve a break between an agent’s considered judgment and her effective mental states. It is shown that parentheticalism can solve puzzles that these phenomena typically raise. The discussion leads into a deeper grasp of the rationale behind parenthetical and non-parenthetical uses of verbs like “believe” and “want”: They are associated with aspects of rational agency that normally coincide but can come apart. In the latter cases, our willingness to use verbs like “believe” and “want” is conflicted in a way that confirms parentheticalism. Finally, I suggest that parentheticalism can help us understand the role of the agent in rational agency and solve the Missing Agent Problem.
Germanist Scholarship and the Kinship Enterprise
Authors: Hummer Hans
Published: May 2018

For intellectuals in the nineteenth century the fate of the Roman Empire was decisive for understanding the course of Western history. The study of kinship was deployed to explore and conceptualize the changes believed to have been unleashed by the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire, after which putatively primitive forms of Germanic kinship and communalism were believed to have shaped the feudal civilization of medieval Europe. This chapter examines the episodic treatment of family and kinship in early Germanist scholarship by Jacob Grimm, Reinhold Schmid, and Georg and Konrad Maurer, and the transformation of kinship into something paradigmatic and explanatory by 1900 with the reception of kinship analysis in medieval studies as historians and social theorists pondered the origins of modern civilization.
The Made and the Given, the Carnal and the Spiritual
Authors: Hummer Hans
Published: May 2018

This chapter outlines an alternative approach to kinship that is free of modern biogenetic biases and is derived from Karl Schmid’s concept of “self-consciousness” and recent anthropological work on kinship by Janet Carsten, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among others. It surveys David Schneider’s classic critique of kinship studies, anthropologists’ rejection of kinship as a primordial or base form regulating a society, the shift to meaning over function, and the critique of constructionism. It emphasizes the need to take the new kinship studies into account if one wishes to illuminate indigenous social ontologies and understand what kinship meant in medieval Europe.
The Evidential Commitments of Infallibilism
Authors: Brown Jessica
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines what commitments concerning evidence and evidential support a non-shifty infallibilist needs to take on in order to avoid scepticism. In particular, it argues that the infallibilist needs to endorse Factivity (p is evidence only if true); the Sufficiency of Knowledge for Evidence (if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence); and the Sufficiency of Knowledge for Self-Support (if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence for p). Certain infallibilists have endorsed some or all of these claims. However, given that chapters 3 and 4 will argue that these claims are problematic, it’s important to show that infallibilists are committed to these claims. This is the burden of the second chapter.
Nonspecificity
Authors: Sainsbury Mark
Published: May 2018

This chapter criticizes Quine’s classic discussion (from the 1950s) of “John wants a sloop”, which he claims is ambiguous between a specific and a nonspecific reading. By contrast, the negation test shows that attributions like this are not ambiguous, but simply nonspecific. Nonspecificity is extended from indefinite noun phrases to other expressions, including plurals. It is also extended from language to psychology, from the sentence “John wants a sloop” to what state John is in when wanting a sloop. There are no nonspecific houses or trees, or ordinary things more generally. But there are nonspecific intentional states, as opposed merely to nonspecific attributions of intentional states. A nonspecific state is one that involves the exercise of indefinite concepts. Both specific and nonspecific intentional states may be correctly ascribed nonspecifically.
Inference
Authors: Sainsbury Mark
Published: May 2018

Display theory predicts that no inferential relations among attitude attributions are based on the logical or semantic properties of the expressions in attribution complements. This chapter shows various ways in which there may be an illusion that such relations obtain. One common basis for the illusion is that we implicitly appeal to psychological facts. Since there is no reason to think these are necessary, the inferences are not truth preserving of necessity, even if they generally have true conclusions when they have true premises. They are examples of “plausible reasoning”. Wanting and fearing are discussed in detail as potential sources of the apparently inferential phenomena.
Relationality and Representation
Authors: Sainsbury Mark
Published: May 2018

Thinking about Obama and thinking about Pegasus seem to be the same fundamental kind of thing, yet one is relational and the other not. I address this puzzle by distinguishing various different kinds of relationality. The Obama-thought and the Pegasus-thought are both metaphysically relational in that both thinkers are in states that relate them to representations. The relationality is covert: it is not overtly expressed in attitude attribution, and the second term of the relation is not what the intentional state is about. Are representations relational? It is natural to think so, because representation is often analyzed by tracking relations that connect the concepts to entities in the world. I argue that we can understand representation in a non-relational way. The upshot is that all intentional states are relational in that a subject is related to a representation, and some intentional states have a further dimension of relationality if the relevant representation is a relational one.
Substantive Moral Theory
Authors: Cullity Garrett
Published: May 2018

What is a substantive moral theory? The chapter begins with an answer to this question—one that requires us to distinguish between different kinds of justification in ethics. The sense in which such a theory must have foundations is explained, and the challenges faced by a plural-foundation theory are described. An initial explanation is given of how such a theory could seek to combine insights from rival welfarist, Kantian, contractualist, and perfectionist traditions of moral thought. The book’s epistemological assumptions are laid out.
Normative Derivations
Authors: Cullity Garrett
Published: May 2018

From the foundational norms of morality, other moral norms can be derived. In one kind of derivation, recognized by Ross, a derived norm is subsumed under a more fundamental one. This chapter describes and illustrates two further derivation relations, which it labels ‘enabling’ and ‘responsive’, to be added to the subsumptive ones. Each of these three types of derivation is divided into further subtypes, and it is shown how derivations of these different kinds can be combined. The chapter concludes with an account of the role of rights and justice in morality, according to which their moral importance derives in all of these ways from all of the foundations of morality.
Content-Undermining
Authors: Cullity Garrett
Published: May 2018

The fitness of concern as a response to others’ welfare, or respect as a response to their self-expression, can be undermined when their welfare or self-expression has the wrong content: for example, when a person takes pleasure in others’ suffering. This chapter shows how, by treating presumptive fitness relations as foundational to morality, we can not only allow for such exceptions, but explain them. The explanation draws on an insight from Brentano: loving the bad is bad, as he puts it. Adapting a Brentano-style value theory, simple structural principles can be repeatedly applied to explain how the complexity of morality is generated. A view with this structure can avoid circularity, and accommodates an Aristotelian view about the value of pleasure.
Using Others as a Means
Authors: Cullity Garrett
Published: May 2018

This chapter offers an account of the moral importance of not using others as a means: why, when, and how this matters. In Kant, a formulation of this thought is treated as the foundation for morality. On the view presented here, its significance is derivative. We each have a right of self-ownership, whose main derivational source is the equal respectworthiness of every self-expressing agent. This right functions as a context-underminer: the fact that my use of you will promote a personal end of my own fails to count towards infringing it. But other reasons can generate justified infringements. The chapter concludes with applications, including to the Trolley Problem.
Early British Reactions to Absolutism: 1664 to 1687
Authors: Thomas Emily
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers early British reactions to absolutism between the start of Barrow’s pertinent lectures in 1664, and the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687. Although the amount of discussion absolutism received in Britain during this period was much less than it would receive later, it was already capturing the attention of some important thinkers. The reactions to absolutism were mixed. Different kinds of absolutism about space or time was adopted by thinkers such as Samuel Parker, Robert Boyle, and John Turner. In contrast, absolutism was rejected by philosophers such as Margaret Cavendish, Ralph Cudworth, Nathaniel Fairfax, and Anne Conway.
Varieties of Electoral Dilemmas: Partisan Jousting over Welfare States and Immigration in a Changing Europe
Authors: Morgan Kimberly J.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the dilemmas that parties face in the welfare democracies as they attempt to respond to shifting constituencies, the rise of new issues, and steadily growing rival parties on the periphery of the party system. Based on an analysis of parties’ positions on immigration and the welfare state in sixteen countries using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, and a closer look at electoral campaigns in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, the chapter shows how pushing too far with market reforms or austerity policies opens up the center-left and center-right parties to electoral challenges, in particular during the Great Recession from 2008–12. The rising salience of immigration on political agendas across the continent, on the other hand, puts pressure on the center parties while fueling the growth of radical right-wing parties.