bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Review of Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgment of Volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell, under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1946)
Authors: Wight Martin , YOST DAVID S.
Published: July 2023

“In a few hundred years time,” Wight judged, Toynbee’s A Study of History “will probably be regarded as the greatest historical work of the present century.” Toynbee’s master-work presents “a natural history of civilisations. It identifies twenty-one of them, from the earliest we know, the Sumerian Civilisation from which Abraham was a refugee in its latter days, down to our own Western Civilisation whose present state is a matter of anxious conjecture.… Professor Toynbee is no determinist.…. He shows that 20 of his 21 civilisations have broken down, most through internecine warfare but some through being conquered; and that the twenty-first, our own, has reached a stage analogous to the last convulsions of the Roman world before the dubious respite of the Augustan Peace. But this estimate cannot be final, because in the last analysis the fate of our civilisation rests in our own hands. For he takes us back to the tragic interpretation of history.… In fact, it is the greatest Christian interpretation of history since St. Augustine.” D. C. Somervell abridged A Study of History “with consummate skill” and used “almost entirely the original words.… Somervell has added important notes and clarifications, while he and Toynbee have together revised the text and brought it up to the atomic bomb.”
Dame Veronica Wedgwood, O.M.
Authors: Wight Martin , YOST DAVID S.
Published: July 2023

Martin Wight presented this tribute to Veronica Wedgwood on the occasion of her receipt of an honorary doctorate in 1971. As Wight observed, she wrote about vast conflicts such as the Thirty Years War and the Great Rebellion as well as individual statesmen, including Oliver Cromwell, Cardinal Richelieu, and William the Silent. Wight pointed out that “Dame Veronica sees history as the school of moral judgment, an understanding of ourselves. For history shows every kind of person in every kind of situation, the variety of human achievement and suffering, the resilience and tenacity of the human mind.… She interprets the past, not to provide directives for the collective present, but as an education in the human heart. Wedgwood history is a gigantic Rubens canvas, full of detail harmoniously distributed. But when we decipher the great ceiling spread out above us, we have, as in reading all the best history, a dual and contradictory sensation. On the one hand, the past is a strange country, whose language is difficult to learn.… On the other hand, the past is a mirror in which we see our familiar features.… More prodigally than any living historian, Dame Veronica uses literature and the fine arts as ingredients of the necromancy by which she resurrects the dead.”
Review of A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955)
Authors: Wight Martin , YOST DAVID S.
Published: July 2023

Wight praised Taylor’s account of Bismarck’s life and career: “Better than any earlier biographer, Mr. Taylor surveys Bismarck’s personality.… Taylor draws a notable parallel with Disraeli, and shows recurrently how Bismarck’s career marches with that of Gladstone, the great opposite. The comparison with Cromwell is superficial. Their death-beds show the dissimilarity in religious depth, nor is the sociological analogy true. It is Richelieu whom, in character, circumstances and work, Bismarck most closely resembles. Mr. Taylor’s Bismarck is not the patient, systematic aggressor of tradition but an improviser of genius, showing greater moderation in victory than history elsewhere records.… No historian has done more to restore history to literature, but for all that he is not easy. The dazzling arabesques of his exposition arise from a sharp sense of the windings of politics, as when a paragraph begins by saying that Bismarck in opposing the Social Democrats underrated the power of ideas, and ends by arguing that in the long run he was right because to-day men prefer security to freedom. He does not pass the old condemnations on the statesman who corrupted the politics of an entire people. He is concerned to elucidate the historical environment which Bismarck could manipulate with such incomparable skill. Yet the moral judgment is the more true for being withdrawn. Most people are content with a one-dimensional political philosophy; Mr. Taylor’s is two-dimensional, resonantly taut between radicalism and realism.”
Review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, new edition (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948) in International Affairs
Authors: Wight Martin , YOST DAVID S.
Published: July 2023

Wight commended Taylor, “a master of incisive analysis and illuminating analogies,” for having “probably defined the interpretation of Central European history for a generation to come” in this book and The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815. Wight nevertheless expresses certain reservations: “although he has some brilliant and caustic passages on national movements in general, there are signs of differential treatment. He calls the Ruthenians ‘Little Russians’ throughout, and describes Ukrainian nationality as an ‘invention,’ without telling the reader that there is more difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages than between Slovak and Czech, or applying to the Ukrainians a fortiori what he says of the Slovenes, that ‘their misfortune was to have arrived at consciousness too late in the day’.” Furthermore, Wight observed, there is a “moral contradiction” in Taylor’s interpretation. “The contempt with which Mr Taylor treats almost all his characters except Masaryk and Michael Karolyi only makes sense if they could have in some degree modified the course of history. Like the woman in Thurber he is disenchanted with mankind, but determinist assertions disqualify a historian from profound and subtle themes. Professor Butterfield remarked in his Inaugural how the development of historical understanding usually transforms a story from melodrama into tragedy. Mr Taylor reduces the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy from tragedy to a political theorem.”
Incidents in the Life and Language of Debt
Authors: Godden Richard
Published: July 2023

The chapter argues that generalized securitization (from 1985) and the subsequent rise of the derivatives market, as a means both to insure against and speculate on the risks attending debt default and price volatility, guaranteed the presence of the numerical as a figure for subtending monetary abstraction. Numbers, pervading generalized financial liquidity, yield “a physicality of the abstract” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel). Three stories, “The English Garden” by Walter Abish (1975), “Janus” by Ann Beattie (1985), and “The Blood Jet” by Christine Schutt (2005), set at key points on the arc of U.S. indebtedness, are read as indexical responses to liquidity’s overample issuance. For Walter Benjamin, responding to inflation in the Weimar period, allegory amounted to a formal reaction to an “empty world”, arguably deadened by the dramatic collapse of money. Reading allegory, in financialized times, as a form derived from the cumulative abstractions generated by financial counting, I further trace, within my stories, an awakening allegorical imperative, as the banal precarity of living in debt, at levels national, corporate, and personal, grows more apparent.
Emotional Immersion
Authors: Ready Jonathan L.
Published: July 2023

The Iliad prompts various forms of suspense in its audience––how-, when-, and what-suspense along with metasuspense. Typical components of the tale’s construction help generate suspense, and the poem prompts suspense not only with its diegetic delays but also with its non-diegetic delays in the form of similes because similes are often closely integrated into their narrative context. Their identification with the characters helps even those recipients who know what will happen feel suspense. The Iliad cues other emotions in its audiences by encouraging their judgments of the characters; the poem also generates emotions like fear and disgust.
Making Central Planning Work
Authors: Bollard Alan
Published: July 2023

Chapter 2 tells the story of the Marxist–Leninist economists from the Eastern bloc who developed socialist economics. It is seen through the eyes of Oskar Lange, the highly skilled Polish economist, who worked out mathematical and practical schema for operating a centrally planned economy efficiently. There was a long argument with Friedrich Hayek, who thought that this could never be possible without free market price information. The arguments were fought out in US universities and later back in the Polish Communist Government. The chapter includes Lang’s encounters with Stalin, who had his own views about Marxist–Leninist economics. In later years, Lange saw the potential of computers to reverse the shortcomings of socialist economies and make central planning work better.
Seeking Growth and Stability
Authors: Bollard Alan
Published: July 2023

Chapter 5 describes the contribution that Joan Robinson made to post-Keynesian dynamic economics across the world. A sometime Marxist economist and rebel from an aristocratic family, and regarded as brilliant and intolerant, from her home in Cambridge, she influenced British post-war labour policies. She travelled and wrote and published a huge amount about Russia and China, extolling the virtues of collective economic direction but often sparking criticism with her argumentative and divisive views. All this was underpinned with her long arguments with US neoclassical economist Paul Samuelson about the political economic aspects of accumulating physical capital and the role of capital in a capitalist economy.
North–South Divide
Authors: Bollard Alan
Published: July 2023

Chapter 7 focuses on the economic ideas of Raul Prebisch, the Argentina economist, and the growing community of southern development economists. Prebisch’s ideas about North–South dependency theory were influential through Latin America, and more broadly through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), but raised intense US suspicion. Prebisch saw inherent disadvantages faced by developing countries trading with the West and proposed government policies to build domestic industrial capacity. He clashed with Walt Rostow, the hard-line US economist, who espoused non-interventionist free markets, an argument that reflected the First World-Third World tension during the Cold War
EXCESSIVE CENTRALIZATION AS A SOCIO POLITICAL PROBLEM
Authors: Kornai János
Published: July 2023

This chapter considers excessive centralization as a sociopolitical problem. It also looks into the emergence of defective methods of economic administration has been associated with a retreat from democratic practices in recent years. The growth of the number of persons engaged in economic administration is one of the most significant social consequences of excessive centralization. The chapter then discusses the issue of confidence in the management of enterprises. It explores the methods and forms of associating the workers with the process of decision-making in enterprises that are best suited for the country’s condition while referencing the arguments in favour of developing democratic institutions at the factory level.
Personal Missives尺牘
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J. , Wang Hwa Yeong
Published: July 2023

This section contains fifty-nine short personal missives, a distinctive genre of writing, that Jeongildang sent to her husband covering a wide range of topics, from the management of their household and academy to abstract philosophical issues. They offer invaluable insights into how she and her husband approached the practical demands of Confucian moral self-cultivation in the course of their everyday lives.
Additional Letters (附別紙)
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J. , Wang Hwa Yeong
Published: July 2023

This section contains several letters that were later added to her works.
Commemorations (記)
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J. , Wang Hwa Yeong
Published: July 2023

This section contains three commemorations written by Jeongildang—two on behalf of her husband. Commemorations are short occasional essays that describe and extol the excellence of a person, place, or event from the author’s past. They are a standard genre for Confucian literati, who used them to recall and savor edifying past memories.
Funeral Orations (祭文)
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J. , Wang Hwa Yeong
Published: July 2023

This section contains three funeral orations written by Jeongildang on behalf of her husband. Funeral orations are short encomiums written to commemorate the passing of notable people; they are presented as offerings to the deceased, along with a libation and often accompanied with sacrificial food as well.
Social Media, Jealousy, and Romantic Relationships
Authors: Utz Sonja
Published: July 2023

This chapter focuses on the role social media can play in eliciting jealousy in romantic relationships. After defining jealousy, it describes the dynamic functional model of jealousy, which is used as an overarching framework. Subsequently, it discusses how the affordances of social media can influence the elicitation and manifestation of jealousy. Data on the prevalence of social media–induced jealousy and results from studies on influencing factors as well as consequences of social media–induced jealousy are presented. Individual differences in traits, like trait jealousy, self-esteem, need for popularity, or attachment style, influence the experience of social media–induced jealousy, which is in turn related to lower relationship satisfaction. After pointing out several methodological issues, the chapter discusses practical implications and identifies gaps that should be addressed in future research.
French Lyric Diction
Authors: Nedecky Jason
Published: July 2023

French Lyric Diction: A Singer’s Guide is a thorough account of the language as it is traditionally sung in opera and mélodie. Beginning with a detailed description of French phonemes, the book also treats the setting of mute e in vocal music, how to handle singing the French r, the concept of the ‘consonant-vowel flow’ of the phonetic group, and key elements of French recitative. Explanations are provided for topics that are often overlooked, such as vocalic length and the devoicing of certain phonemes, as are discussions on French rhyme, phrasal and emphatic stress, and conventions in the musical setting of French text. Vocalic harmonization in singing, and French words and numbers that have variable pronunciations are explored. Considerable attention is paid to the complicated subject of liaison: recommendations are given on how to make decisions about optional liaisons in singing, and a special section is devoted to the use of liaison in common vocabulary. Musical examples from the repertoire illustrate all topics treated. A comprehensive guide to French orthography provides instruction on the pronunciation of all French spellings, covering optional secondary pronunciations in specific instances, accepted francisé pronunciation for loanwords, and the many infamous exceptions to the French spelling norms. Pronunciation dictionaries of proper nouns and musical terms provide transcriptions for 10 000 names of composers, poets, artists, roles, performers, characters, and places associated with French art and culture, and for universal Italian musical terms as they are pronounced by French-speaking musicians.
Preamble to Part Two
Authors: Nedecky Jason
Published: July 2023

French orthography is a fairly regular, yet complex system. While French spellings are mostly predictable, they can be complicated, and there are many exceptions. For example, several letters often comprise a single spelling. When it comes to pronouncing the written language, challenges emerge, especially when multiple realizations of letter combinations are possible. It is also important to know which letters are typically silent in French. The key to French pronunciation lies in learning those letter combinations, and how the position of spellings within the word affects the way they are pronounced. This section of the text is a comprehensive pronunciation guide to French orthography. It provides an alphabetic list of the spellings of the French language with detailed instruction on pronunciation norms. Transcriptions for French spellings are provided in IPA. Included are options where more than one accepted pronunciation exists, and specific advice on the usual practices for francisé loanword pronunciations.
Preamble to Part Three
Authors: Nedecky Jason
Published: July 2023

This section begins with an alphabetical list of standard French pronunciations of proper nouns. Many of these names are encountered in French vocal music, yet their standard pronunciations are very often difficult to research. Transcription in IPA is provided for over 10 000 names of people, places, and things. The entries are predominantly names encountered in, or directly associated with, French vocal repertoire, as well as the arts and culture of France and French-speaking regions. They include opera and literary titles, the names of well-known fictional or mythological characters and operatic roles, as well as the surnames (patronymes) of composers, singers, instrumentalists, visual artists, conductors, authors, poets, librettists, and historical figures. Common French given names (pronoms) are included, as are the countries of the world, regions, cities, and settlements (toponymes), with particular focus on challenging French place names and the labels for the inhabitants of those places (gentilés). Each name is transcribed in an elevated tone. Where multiple pronunciations are possible, options are provided. Musicians all over the world use Italian musical terms in their vocabulary. Words such as crescendo and legato are routinely anglicized in everyday use in English, and are just as readily francisés in French. The second list in this section is a short guide to the pronunciation of some of the most common Italian musical terms, as they are normally used in a modern French setting. It will be useful for any singer working in a French-speaking environment. Transcriptions are provided in IPA.
Conclusion
Authors: Snow Jennifer C.
Published: July 2023

The concluding reflection highlights recent developments around racial reconciliation, climate justice, and sexuality/gender controversies The current Episcopal Church is constituted in its mission and self-identity largely around the baptismal covenant of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, focused on issues of justice and inclusion as the center of missional purpose. The three hundred year history of race and empire, and experiencing the limitations of a focus on church planting and a spiritual community separated from political action, has pushed the church towards self-reflection, self-critique, and a desire to grow past the boundaries that a colonial past has drawn. In this way, the work of mission has transformed the church, contextualizing it just as it does for those who are “served” by mission.
George Orwell
Authors: Barry Peter Brian
Published: July 2023

George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell’s work reveals an author whose writing was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive philosophical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work.
Murder in a Mill Town
Authors: Dorsey Bruce
Published: July 2023

In December 1832, a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America’s first “trial of the century.” After her death—after she became the country’s most notorious “factory girl”—Cornell’s choices about work, survival, and personal freedom became enmeshed in stories that Americans told themselves about their new world of industry and women’s labor and the power of religion in the early republic. Writers penned seduction tales, true-crime narratives, detective stories, political screeds, songs, poems, and melodramatic plays about the lurid scandal. As trial witnesses, ordinary people gave testimony that revealed rapidly changing times. As the controversy of Cornell’s murder spread beyond the courtroom, the public eagerly devoured narratives of moral deviance, abortion, suicide, mobs, “fake news,” and conspiracy politics. Long after the jury’s verdict, the nation refused to let the scandal go. A meticulously reconstructed historical whodunit, Murder in a Mill Town exposes the troublesome workings of criminal justice in the young democracy and the rise of a sensational popular culture.
A Methodist Family
Authors: Dorsey Bruce
Published: July 2023

Cornell finds a home in Slatersville, Rhode Island, and a new spiritual family to replace her birth family and her strained relationship with them. Her religious transformation, joining the most popular evangelical group in America, the Methodists, parallels a nationwide shift in religious identity that signals the decline of Calvinism and a growing embrace of a new democratic religious faith marked by individual agency and emotions. Though Maria has found a spiritual home, she cannot be sure of the permanence of these familial bonds. She joins a church that proclaims all members to be spiritual equals possessed of free will, while also demanding strict conformity to its rules and discipline. For the rest of her life, Cornell remains torn between maintaining a connection with her own birth family and her desire to be “united heart and hand” with spiritual kin who were all “bound to one home.”
Critical Approaches to Peacebuilding and Gender
Authors: Johnston Melissa
Published: July 2023

Chapter 1 proposes that gender relations and class relations are manifested in and contested by various coalitions of social forces at different political scales. In other words, particular constellations of gender relations and social forces are different at the levels of the state, community, and family. The chapter defines and theorizes gender intervention, liberal peacebuilding, and the critique of the liberal peace. It then delineates a structural feminist political economy of gender intervention along six axes: gender justice, the gender division of labor, war, militarized conflict and violence, kinship, and neoliberal globalization. The synthesis of feminist political economy and a class perspective, as well as the inclusion of kinship as a tool of analysis, forms the unique contribution of the study.
Class, Gender, and the Distribution of State Resources
Authors: Johnston Melissa
Published: July 2023

Building on this historical class analysis, Chapter 3 foregrounds the effect of class formation on gender interventions, contextualizing them within the political economy of the Timorese state. It examines how Timorese elites use the celebration of armed masculinity to justify access to state resources, despite the existence of pro-gender measures such as gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). The distribution of state resources to veterans or so-called military heroes of the independence struggle has cemented a coalition of urban and rural members of the liurai-dato class and the political elite. The gendered distribution of resources has flow-on effects. Significant state resources from petroleum revenues are pooled in Dili, accruing primarily to elite men and their families, while subsistence and unpaid work (much of it performed by women) provides livelihoods for the majority of Timorese people. In this context, GRB and the Bolsa da Mãe program (a cash transfer that directs state resources to vulnerable mothers) have not been successful
Brideprice and the Exchange of Women
Authors: Johnston Melissa
Published: July 2023

Brideprice—a globally widespread practice that is a type of reverse dowry in which the groom makes a payment to the bride’s family—is a controversial topic in Timor-Leste. Timorese women’s organizations have long campaigned against brideprice, but there has been no explicit, long-term, or well-funded intervention to challenge the practice. Indeed, this chapter argues that the uneven outcomes of the LADV can be explained by the enduring and central role of brideprice, and in particular because of the material link it creates between gender relations and class relations. The discussion focuses on kinship, but the state is not absent from the argument. Many scholars have demonstrated the centrality of Timorese kinship networks, and these networks are structured to cope with poverty in the absence of state welfare (see Chapter 4). However, the networks are formed not by relations of equals but by relations between ranked families, and the payment of brideprice creates and reproduces these hierarchies.
Politics, Possibility, and Risk
Authors: Philips Menaka
Published: July 2023

The concluding chapter synthesizes the full scope and nuance of Mill’s arguments regarding women’s emancipation, class reform, and British imperial practice as a resource for contemporary political thought. Mill’s politics of uncertainty is applied to three areas: (1) contemporary studies of gender and cross-cultural politics, (2) discussions of empire and imperialism, and (3) the practice of political theorizing today. Scholarly preoccupation with liberalism in these areas bears the same methodological and political risks that we find in receptions of Mill: namely, a narrowing of our interpretive horizons and by extension, of the political possibilities we envision. Moving beyond that trap, however, outlines new spaces for cross-cultural collaboration on issues of gender equity, as well as for a more expansive and comparative analysis of empire and the legacies of imperialism in the modern age. In its concluding remarks, the book reimagines contemporary interpretive practices through Millian uncertainty and beyond the trap of liberalism.
Meditation and the Ethic of Authenticity
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: July 2023

The ethic of authenticity in modern western thought envisions individuals in their uniqueness in an antagonistic relationship to the surrounding cultural norms. One’s unique, authentic self is discovered or created by transcending cultural conditioning. As Buddhist meditation became intertwined with western thought, it came to be seen as a method for overcoming alienation and social masks and achieving individual authenticity. Recent critiques of the dualistic idea of a pure, transparent interior self set over against external objects and social forces have implications for meditation practices intertwined with this ideal. They raise the specter of meditation as narcissistic or socially irrelevant. Attempts to rehabilitate the ideal, however, suggest an interpretation of meditation not just as a means for private self-fulfillment and enrichment but also as an aid to thinking deeply, clarifying one’s commitments, and mobilizing these commitments not only in the personal but also in the social and political arena.
Meditation and the Ethic of Autonomy
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: July 2023

In classical Buddhist literature, meditative practices were usually geared toward transcendent freedom, but they also served immanent purposes. In the West, the freedom that meditation leads to is often interpreted along lines of western theories of autonomy. There is a tension between the “inner citadel” model, in which meditation creates an interior space of invulnerability to external influence, thus allowing freedom to choose, decide, and act for oneself, and the “situated autonomy” model, which offers a more contextual notion of freedom and ethical agency as embodied, embedded in social contexts, and systemically intertwined with other individuals, social institutions, and political structures. This chapter argues that the latter is more convincing. On this model, meditation entails complex dynamics of autonomy and submission, training and spontaneity, deconditioning and reconditioning.
Individualism and Fragmentation in the Mirrors of Secularism
Authors: McMahan David L.
Published: July 2023

Particular elements of the zeitgeist of secularity have served as “magnets” that have drawn forth and transformed certain elements of Buddhism—especially the doctrine of nonself (anātman), dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda), and certain meditative practices. These elements of Buddhism have been transformed and embodied by modern people in ways that both embrace and attempt to ameliorate certain aspects of modern secularity as a lived experience. Specifically, they attempt to negotiate the tension between two modes of secular subjectivity: the sense of selfhood as singular, independent, and autonomous—an image rooted in the European Enlightenment and enshrined in public discourse, education, and the judicial system—and the felt sense of fragmentation of the self into multiple, disembedded identities, a sense that recent social thinkers have argued is endemic to late modernity.
Who Was Nietzsche’s “Good European”?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil works very hard to present us with an author who is a disunified agent. In fact, this agent is discombobulated enough so that both by its own (elaborately worked-out) theoretical lights, and by our own, it does not support the full-fledged attribution of propositional attitudes. (That is, there’s no straight answer to the question, What does he think?) We are being presented, first, with a challenge to our historiographical practice, which is directed primarily to reconstructing the beliefs of past philosophers. And second, we are being made pointedly aware that we do not have available a notation adequate to the states of mind we encounter when faced with disintegrating agency; this remains a challenge for philosophy of mind today. The authorial character with which Nietzsche is presenting us—his “Good European”—is an exaggerated version of ourselves. (Nietzsche argues that we’re all “Europeans.”) We had better be in the business of inventing values. But how can people like that—like us—do so successfully?
Who Was Nietzsche’s Psychologist?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

The new agenda for philosophers which Nietzsche was attempting to set was inventing values. But what are values for? And how are we supposed to assess evaluative innovations? To be sure, like other inventions, they can have many purposes, but Twilight of the Idols gives them a surprising function, that of a prosthetic which serves a disunified agent as a surrogate for a coherent, controlled, and effective decision-making process. The use is demoed via the book’s implicit author—his “Psychologist”—and the work introduces ad hominem argumentation as its “first example” of an evaluative innovation: assessing both views and values by looking behind them, to the person who has them, is recommended not as what we already count as a good argument, but to be counted that way from here on out. And the book puts on display a way of motivating evaluative shifts of this kind.
Who Was Nietzsche’s Antichrist?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

When Nietzsche launched his program of inventing personalized and idiosyncratic values, he noticed a very large obstacle to its success: those values are most urgently needed by disunified agents, but the enterprise of inventing values seems to demand highly unified agency. Nietzsche’s never-completed Revaluation of All Values started off with The Antichrist, a work that dramatizes the problem by presenting its own implicit author as someone whose psychology was built around an internally incoherent drive; the literary models for that drive came from the political antisemitism of Nietzsche’s day. Once we see the shape of that problem clearly, we also see how the intended “revaluation of values” was not simply the substitution of one set of values for another. Rather, it was—in today’s vocabulary—metaethical.
Who Wrote Nietzsche’s Autobiography?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche addresses the question of whether he is a “decadent”—a disunified agent—by putting his own lapses of control on display. Because decadents aren’t in control of their psychic parts, which Nietzsche thought of as drives, a decadent can be forced to manage his personality by inventing values to stimulate and appeal to his drives. The values which Nietzsche famously introduces (the Eternal Return, the Overman, will to power, and so on) were there to hold him together, but they also show off the advantages of disunity of agency: who else but a decadent would have a need for, and so, produce them?
What Was Nietzsche’s Perspectivism?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

A Nietzschean perspective, seen through the lens of bounded rationality, provides heuristic representations: some things are left out and others are simplified in order to facilitate fast and effective responses. The shortcuts that one perspective takes can be visible from other perspectives—what one of them misses, another catches—and so being able to switch from perspective to perspective is an invaluable reality check, especially for someone in the business of inventing values. The paradigm and central case of a perspective is a human personality, and the previous chapters have been showing how each of Nietzsche’s later books is a depiction of its author. Each of these personalities was configured differently—that is, each of his later books is presenting us with a different perspective, typically on shared content. Institutionalization of values was not an acceptable monitoring and quality control method for the sort of values Nietzsche was after, but the poster boy of disunified agency could not help but lurch from perspective to perspective. And so only a decadent like himself, he decided, would have available the multiple points of view needed to imagine and make real the idiosyncratic but self-aware evaluative innovations on which he was insisting.
What Was Nietzsche’s Tragedy?
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: July 2023

In his very first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had proposed a theory of the ancient Greek dramatic form: the double vision it induces, of an illusory world of order overlaid on the horrifying chaos that is reality, reconciles one to one’s own life. In retrospect, we can see that Nietzsche managed to arrange his own life to conform to this model. Because his collapsing agency enabled him to be an inventor of values—and of his metavalue, the overwhelming importance of inventing values—there was a very clean story to tell as to why his painfully difficult life had been worth living, all of it. That story was superimposed on a chaotic and disintegrating life, one culminating in the sacrifice of its tragic hero. The final meaning of life he invented for himself allowed Nietzsche to construe his own life as a tragedy, and so, in his own eyes, to redeem it.
Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System
Authors: Dettlaff Alan J.
Published: July 2023

Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System presents a call to abolish the American child welfare system due to the harm and destruction it causes Black families. The book traces the origins of the modern child welfare system, which emerged just following the abolition of slavery, to demonstrate that the harm and oppression that result from child welfare intervention are not the result of “unintended consequences” but rather are the clear intents of the system and the foreseeable results of policies put in place over decades. By tracing the history of family separations in the United States since the era of slavery, Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System demonstrates that the intended outcomes of those separations—the subjugation of Black Americans and the maintenance of White supremacy—are the same intended outcomes of family separations today. What distinguishes contemporary family separations from those that occurred during slavery is that today’s separations occur under a façade of benevolence, a myth perpetuated over decades that family separations are necessary to “save” the most vulnerable children. Yet what if we could see past the mirage of benevolence and recognize family separations for what they truly are—state-directed, state-sponsored terror? The book presents evidence of the vast harms that result from family separations to make a case that the child welfare system is beyond reform. Rather, the only solution to ending these harms is complete abolition of this system and a fundamental reimagining of the way society cares for children, families, and communities.
Shakespeare: 1607–8, 1612–13
Authors: Sharpe Will
Published: July 2023

This chapter defines the kind of collaborator Shakespeare was in his late period, and considers in detail the particular authorial and wider artistic characteristics of Shakespeare’s late collaborations, Pericles, All Is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, also briefly considering Cardenio. Considering the late-Victorian idea of ‘romance’ in all we conventionally associate with Shakespearean lateness, it explores how he worked with George Wilkins and John Fletcher, his two late collaborators, and compares the literary and dramatic outcomes of these collaborative enterprises with those of his early career. An extended coda addresses Shakespeare’s discernible attitudes towards literary authorship, how that changed across the course of a long career, and how collaboration finally fits into that ideal.
Determining Collaboration
Authors: Sharpe Will
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks at both the editing of collaboration, and the identification of it. In doing the former, it looks at how the kinds of textual theory and book-history knowledge germane to the task of editing can help us identify collaboration, and suggests ways in which textual editing can, and should, supplement stylometry (itself often performed on unedited digitized texts). In the latter, it examines the difficulties of identifying a Shakespearean ‘style’ in his collaborative works, and the difficult politics surrounding attribution study in general. It discusses attribution techniques and the rise of technologies that can be considered under the broad heading ‘stylometries’, digital humanities computer-based work that has nonetheless caused controversy for its application of apparently mathematical processes to literary texts. The analysis does not assume specialist knowledge, and all technical terms are explained. It argues that stylometry must be recognized as a legitimate form of textual criticism with a particular outcome in mind, though argues that finding authorial ‘identity’ within texts, and attempts to establish an authorial ‘fingerprint’ for Shakespeare and others are more difficult problems than stylometry sometimes allows, and examines issues around diversity, inclusivity, and equality, towards which attributionists are increasingly perceived as hostile by their opponents.
The Child-King
Authors: Landy Francis
Published: July 2023

In chs 7–11 there is a succession of marvellous children, all of whom are signs of the new age. These chapters also present the apogee of Davidic ideology in the Hebrew Bible. The new king will rule preternaturally in justice and righteousness over a non-violent earth, and contrasts with the imperial folly of Assyria. The figures of the child and king are intertwined; in 9.5–6 the newborn baby is divine. The chapter analyses the vision of the peaceable kingdom in 11.1–9 in the context of the reassertion of Davidic sovereignty in 11.11–16. This is followed by a reading of ch. 32, in which a just king presides over a realm characterized by linguistic clarity and a transformed nature. I argue that this chapter contributes to the trajectory from the idealized image of kingship in chs 7–11 to its metaphorical displacement in Deutero-Isaiah.
Spinoza, Life and Legacy
Authors: Israel Jonathan I.
Published: July 2023

Contrary to what was long thought, Spinoza was the most controversial and challenging all the thinkers of the early Enlightenment era and also the most frequently attacked and refuted. Already in his own time and the years after his death, many dozens of books and public addresses were published aiming to obliterate his arguments. This biography, using the latest research, which in recent years has revealed a great deal of new information, seeks to present a rounded and detailed picture of Spinoza’s remarkable life, activities, and uniquely contested legacy and explain why his ideas proved more controversial, far-reaching in their effects, and more widely and bitterly contested in English, French, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Italian than those of any other thinker of the age. Rather than portraying Spinoza as reclusive, as many biographers have in the past, the author sets out to correct the balance and show how engaged, active, and involved in the battle of ideas of his time, in the face of near universal opposition, Spinoza actually was, and how his friends and allies forming an underground network, operating to an extent clandestinely, forged Spinoza’s philosophy, his books, and ideas into an anti-establishment subversive ideology designed to overthrow the religious, political, and educational assumptions of the European societies of his day in favour of a freer, more open, more democratic approach.
Belief and Credence
Authors: Greco Daniel
Published: July 2023

In chapter five I apply some lessons from chapter four to questions about the relationship between folk psychological categories like belief, and decision theoretic categories like credence. I argue that the idea that folk psychology has a distinct and ineliminable role to play in explaining certain aspects of our cognitive lives—one that cannot be coopted by decision theory—looks a good deal less plausible once these lessons are appreciated. This is because decision theory can make liberal use of certainties, and these certainties can do the theoretical work often claimed to be the distinctive purview of folk psychological belief.
The Early History of MDMA
Authors: Passie Torsten
Published: July 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the early history of the molecule MDMA, which was first synthesized by the pharmaceutical company Merck, in search of a synthesis of the blood-clotting agent hydrastinine. As the original synthesis of hydrastinine had already been patented by another company, Merck needed to find an alternative synthesis. After a few failed attempts, the company’s chemists developed a rather complicated synthesis to circumvent the patent. Their new synthesis produced MDMA as an intermediate. Although it had no medical significance itself, Merck’s chemists subsequently resynthesized MDA a few times for specific purposes and conducted animal experiments, without, however, discovering its effects on humans. Two myths about the origin of MDMA often encountered in the literature—that the prominent German chemist Fritz Haber first synthesized MDMA whilst working on his dissertation, and that MDMA had been developed and tested as an appetite suppressant—are discussed and shown to be false.
The Toxicity Debate
Authors: Passie Torsten
Published: July 2023

This chapter covers the history of research and events related to the possible toxicity of MDMA, from the first cases of death involving MDMA and early toxicological research through to studies on its neurotoxicity in humans. It also provides some of the background stories behind the research and the debate about MDMA’s possible toxicity. Some ‘anti-Ecstasy campaigns’ related to the toxicity debate are also described. Complex issues and research related to the toxicity question are presented. Some early studies were obviously biased by compromised research methodologies. This is illustrated by the scandal surrounding a Johns Hopkins University researcher who, in 2000, claimed that MDMA could cause Parkinson’s disease; it was later discovered that he accidentally administered methamphetamine, instead of MDMA, to his experimental monkeys. When research on possible toxicological consequences of recreational MDMA began in earnest, a lot of studies were conducted internationally about possible changes in the brain and the long-term consequences for cognitive functions. Some of the more important, sometimes biased, studies and their implications are presented and discussed. A study undertaken with Mormon subjects, who had consumed MDMA, but no other drugs, showed that if MDMA is used alone, it has no long-term effects on cognition. The use of research results in anti-Ecstasy campaigns are described.
The natural laboratory paradigm
Authors: Whittaker Robert J. , Fernández-Palacios José María , Matthews Thomas J.
Published: July 2023

‘The natural laboratory paradigm’ explores the study of islands as model systems in the life sciences. It explains the key features of islands that makes them exemplary natural experiments, highlights their contribution to global biodiversity, and their importance in the development of ideas in biogeography, ecology, evolution, and conservation science. It highlights the variety of forms of insular systems and the importance of scale in framing their study, and it introduces the idea of filters on island community assembly. It closes with a brief historical account of the development of island biogeography, highlighting seminal contributions by scientists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Leopold von Buch, Olof Arrhenius, David Lack, Sherwin Carlquist, Robert MacArthur, and Edward Wilson, and outlining how key research foci, methods, and theories have changed over time.
Island types, origins, and dynamics
Authors: Whittaker Robert J. , Fernández-Palacios José María , Matthews Thomas J.
Published: July 2023

‘Island types, origins, and dynamics’ focuses on how islands emerge and develop as platforms for life. It introduces the classic subdivision into oceanic islands, continental fragments, and continental shelf islands and reviews more recent geological subdivisions of categories of oceanic island. It highlights distinctions between island geodynamics linked to divergent, convergent, and transverse plate boundaries, and those associated with various intraplate settings. These dynamics are also shown to be linked to biogeographical debates about disjunct distributions. A general ontogeny is described for islands of hotspot origin involving steep, high, active volcanos, giving way to more complex and dissected terrain, followed by decline as islands erode and/or subside. The processes of island origin, development, and eventual disappearance are illustrated with specific reference to Macaronesia (including the Canary Islands), Hawaii, and the Caribbean. The characteristics and origins of coralline islands, reefs, atolls, and guyots are also described.