bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Lane Anthony N. S.
Published: November 2019

In 1541, at the Regensburg Colloquy, three leading Protestant theologians (Melanchthon, Bucer, and Pistorius) and three leading Catholic theologians (Eck, Gropper, and Pflug) debated with the aim of producing a joint statement of belief. The colloquy eventually failed, but it began with a statement on justification by faith agreed by all the parties, “Article 5,” which had led to an initial burst of optimism. But from the beginning there were two contrasting reactions to Article 5. Some, notably Calvin, maintained that it contained the substance of true doctrine; others, notably Luther, called it an inconsistent patchwork. These two rival assessments have both persisted over the centuries. The aim of this book is to decide between them.
Rahmat
Authors: Chiovenda Andrea
Published: November 2019

The chapter revolves around Rahmat, a young man, father of two, who lives in a rural village on the border with Pakistan. His case is different from the previous ones in that he embodies apparently all the characteristics that would be expected from an appropriate Pashtun masculinity. He is in fact a well-known and respected figure in his district. Under the surface, however, lies the conflicted personal history of a man who straddled the geographical border of the two countries to engage in drug trafficking and production, and who secretly longs to escape elsewhere to regain the sense of an ideal masculinity, of which he feels he was metaphorically robbed by the distortions of a war-ravaged social context. The sense of responsibility to embody the features of the “perfect” Pashtun man clashes with the inability to do so in the “right” way, due to the perceived degeneration of modern life in Afghanistan.
Flesh
Authors: Kozak Mariusz
Published: November 2019

This chapter connects the notion of affordances with phenomenological investigation to explore how the human body, with its perceptual and animate capabilities, co-creates time together with the sonic environment. The author employs Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh as an inextricable link between a subjective body and the objective world, and considers how time may be viewed as one of the forms that this link can take. Highlighting the similarities between affordances and flesh—arguing that the former describe the interaction between bodily and environmental capacities, while the latter discloses the structure of the system as a whole—the author returns to his earlier proposal that music, as a social and temporal affordance, allows us to consider the listener-music interaction as the very source of time. Time here is enacted when, engaged in this interaction, the body slips back-and-forth between its appearance as a physical object submerged in the world and its function as the seat of subjectivity.
Work-Related Benefits and Employment Protections
Authors: Hershkoff Helen , Loffredo Stephen
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses federal statutes that impact the work lives of poor and low-income people. These statutes regulate some of the terms and conditions of employment, but do not guarantee rights to a job, to a livable wage, or to work as a pathway to economic mobility. The key federal statutes prohibit certain types of employment discrimination, and protect the right of workers to organize and take collective action to advance their common interests. The chapter pays special attention to the wage and hour protections afforded by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, addresses the rights conferred by the act, offers a critique of the federal minimum wage rate, and notes the emerging nationwide movement to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. The chapter also addresses federal programs that provide economic supports for low-income workers, apart from the assistance programs described in other chapters, including unemployment insurance, which replaces a percentage of wages for workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own; the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which reduce or eliminate payroll taxes for most workers with minor dependents, and can increase family income through refundable tax credits; and the Social Security program, which provides benefits to retired, aged, blind, or disabled workers and their families.
Health
Authors: Hershkoff Helen , Loffredo Stephen
Published: November 2019

This chapter addresses the issue of health care for low-income people. The United States, virtually alone among developed nations, does not offer universal access to health care, leaving many millions of individuals without health insurance or other means of obtaining necessary medical services. In 2010, Congress enacted the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—popularly known as “Obamacare”—marking an important but incomplete response to the nation’s health care crisis. This chapter examines the ACA in detail, including its impact on Medicaid and Medicare, the major government health programs in the United States, its creation of Health Insurance Exchanges and tax credits to help low-income households obtain private health coverage, and the reform of private health insurance markets through a patient’s bill of rights, which, among other measures, prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage for preexisting medical conditions. Perhaps the most critical aspect of the ACA was its expansion of Medicaid to cover virtually all low-income citizens (and certain immigrants) who do not qualify for other health coverage. Although several states opted out of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, the Medicaid program nevertheless remains the largest single provider of health coverage in the United States. This chapter also provides a detailed description of Medicaid, its eligibility criteria and scope of coverage; the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a government-funded health insurance program for children in households with too much income to qualify for Medicaid; and Medicare, the federal health insurance program for aged, blind, and disabled individuals.
Consumer Rights and Credit Protection
Authors: Hershkoff Helen , Loffredo Stephen
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses consumer laws that protect—but in practice may hurt—low-income people, involving such matters as debt collection, consumer reporting, and lending. People with low income, people of color, and women face many legal, practical, and structural inequalities in commercial markets. In particular, minimum wage jobs do not lift full-time workers out of poverty, and many low-income people, vulnerable to predatory practices that exploit their financial instability, become trapped by debt. The U.S. Constitution does not specifically address many of these problems. The Equal Protection Clause in part protects against companies that refuse to do business because of a person’s race or gender; the Due Process Clauses provide some protection against companies that deploy judicially-sanctioned procedures to deprive a person of property without notice or an opportunity to raise objections; and the Eighth Amendment bars cruel and unusual punishment—and jailing a person who is too poor to pay a debt, which can include an unpaid court fee, should certainly be seen as cruel and unusual punishment. Congress has enacted various laws to protect consumers from unfair and arbitrary treatment. Attention in this chapter is given to debt collection, consumer reporting, access to credit, and limits on garnishment. In addition, the chapter discusses the fringe economy, including the dangers that payday, auto title, and online lending present, as well as private loans used to finance higher education. The chapter also touches on tax collection by the federal government.
The Right to Vote
Authors: Hershkoff Helen , Loffredo Stephen
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses the right to vote. Democracy demands that every vote count and that every voter be able to shape social and economic policy. Equality of participation, however, is seriously undermined by the outsized role that money plays in American electoral politics—making the exercise of the franchise even more important for persons who are poor or have low income. The chapter discusses the legal and practical barriers that low-income citizens face when they go to the polls, including demands for identification cards, the need to take time off from work, and long waiting periods at the ballot box in neighborhoods that are poor or populated by persons of color. The chapter sets out the constitutional basis for the right to vote, locating current restrictions in past practices that excluded the poor and unpropertied, and impeded the political rights of African Americans after emancipation. Discussion focuses on conditions that states have attached to the right to vote, on protections afforded under federal statutes, and rules governing voter registration campaigns.
The Special Case of Anesthesia
Authors: Wears Robert L. , Sutcliffe Kathleen M.
Published: November 2019

Anesthesia became the only medical specialty to undertake systematic and dramatic improvements in safety over time. Evidence suggests that this process began through the fortuitous engagement of engineers in anesthesia work, supported by respected leaders in the field. The goal was not simply to solve a problem. The aims were too deeply understand the nature of the technology, the work, and the complex interactions that take place in work as carried out. Oddly, healthcare more generally failed to emulate these efforts. This state of affairs may be attributed to the substantive influence of non-clinical safety scientists in anesthesia, and also to differences in widely accepted methodological and investigative research approaches.
Halting Steps
Authors: Wears Robert L. , Sutcliffe Kathleen M.
Published: November 2019

Early studies of medical harm appeared in the 1950s, with rates of injury little different from those reported 50 years later. Philosopher Ivan Illich criticized medicalization of everyday life, using annual deaths from auto accidents as an example. Malpractice concerns became entangled with safety, and the first malpractice crisis in the US came about due to advances, rather than deficiencies, in care. The Harvard Medical Practice Study (HMPS) renewed interest in medical harm as a cause of malpractice suits in a series of four papers in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Although it was not a pre-defined outcome of the study, one paper by Lucian Leape reframed the problem as one of medical “error”; the other three did not use the term. Lucian Leape fortuitously drew on error research in cognitive psychology and other safety science work on “error” stemming from the research triggered by the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and other accidents. He formulated those concepts in a form digestible by health professionals and published them in the widely read medical journal JAMA—Journal of the American Medical Association. The figure of 100,000 annual deaths was first circulated.
The Future of Patient Safety
Authors: Wears Robert L. , Sutcliffe Kathleen M.
Published: November 2019

Patient safety has been evolving and changing since its conception, and this evolution will inevitably continue as it competes for attention with other social problems and as healthcare struggles with conflicts among increasing workloads, performance and production pressures, technological innovation, and increasingly limited human and economic resources. Patient safety is, at present, a reform movement becalmed, captured by the industry it set out to reform. The authors see four possible futures: congealing into bureaucracy (already in progress), rebranding as something else (similar to quality improvement rebranding itself as patient safety), simply dying out, or fundamental reform. Fundamental reform is unfortunately the least likely possibility. It will require healthcare to relinquish its dominant position in patient safety and to develop substantive, equal partnerships with safety sciences.
Mahler's Seventh Symphony
Authors: Stoll Knecht Anna
Published: November 2019

Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. This book offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler’s compositional materials, combined with a close reading of the finished work. The Seventh has often been heard as “existing in the shadow” of the Sixth Symphony or as “too reminiscent” of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Focusing on sketches previously considered as “discarded,” this study reveals unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger. These connections confirm that Mahler’s compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past, and that this referential aspect should be taken as an important interpretive key to the work. Providing the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, this book sheds new light on its complex compositional history. Each movement of the symphony is considered from a double perspective, genetic and analytic, showing how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. The compositional materials raise the question of Mahler’s reception of Richard Wagner, and thus lead us to rethink issues concerning his own cultural identity. A close reading of the score enlightens these issues by exposing new facets of Mahler’s musical humor. The Seventh moves away from the tragedy of the Sixth toward comedy and shows, in a unique way within Mahler’s output, that humor can be taken as a form of transcendence.
Structure, Interpretation, and Genesis
Authors: Stoll Knecht Anna
Published: November 2019

How do genesis, structure, and interpretation relate to each other? This chapter first examines the structure of the Seventh in five movements, beginning with an overview of its tonal trajectory, before outlining its inner connections. The five movements of the Seventh are not unified by a program, but the subtle links that relate these movements to each other challenge the idea that the work lacks coherence. These inner connections are counterbalanced by a centrifugal force, pointing toward other works, inside and outside the Mahlerian corpus (Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal). The second section presents the web of interpretive leads pursued in this study. It concludes with some reflections about what constitutes the genesis of a work and how the genetic history relates to issues of interpretation.
Rondo-Finale
Authors: Stoll Knecht Anna
Published: November 2019

The long-held view of the Finale as an “embarrassment,” largely influenced by Theodor Adorno’s judgment, as well as the fact that most of the extant compositional materials for Mahler’s Seventh concern this movement, make it a good starting point for a close reading of the work. This chapter begins by examining the Finale in its finished form, in terms of structure and motivic treatment, with a focus on its strong rhetorics. Two significant aspects of the Finale are emphasized: moments of interruption in the musical flow—“in-between” spaces that have both an introductory and a concluding function—and the persistent cadencing of the movement. Early and more recent readings of the Finale are then discussed, all highlighting the interpretive difficulties raised by this movement.
Introduction
Authors: Adler Matthew D.
Published: November 2019

This chapter is a brief introduction to Measuring Social Welfare. The book provides an overview of the social welfare function (SWF) framework for assessing governmental policy. This introductory chapter motivates the framework via some stylized examples of policy choices involving environmental protection, redistributive taxation, infrastructure planning, climate change, and health policy. These examples illustrate recurring features of policy choice: that policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being; have “losers” as well as “winners”; produce a range of well-being changes (losses or gains) to individuals starting at a range of well-being levels; and may require a tradeoff between overall well-being and inequality. The SWF framework is able to take account of these recurring features of policy choice, and is applicable to a wide range of policy domains.
The Social Welfare Function
Authors: Adler Matthew D.
Published: November 2019

This chapter provides a synopsis of the social welfare function (SWF) framework. It presents the key components of the framework, which are then developed in greater detail in subsequent chapters: an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, which converts each outcome into a list (“vector”) of well-being numbers, one for each person in the population; a rule (the SWF) for ranking well-being vectors, such as the utilitarian SWF or a continuous-prioritarian SWF; and a procedure for ranking policies, understood as probability distributions across outcomes. The chapter then discusses the relation between the SWF methodology and ethics. This framework provides an ethical evaluation of governmental policies—an evaluation that is consequentialist and, specifically, welfarist. Finally, the chapter contrasts the SWF framework with cost-benefit analysis (CBA); and explains how the framework succeeds in producing a well-behaved ranking of outcomes and policies, notwithstanding Arrow’s theorem.
The Landscape of SWFs
Authors: Adler Matthew D.
Published: November 2019

One key component of the SWF framework is a rule (the SWF) for ranking well-being vectors. This chapter presents the major such rules used by SWF scholars or suggested by the philosophical literature: the utilitarian SWF (which adds up well-being numbers); the continuous-prioritarian family of SWFs (which sums well-being numbers plugged into a strictly increasing and concave transformation function); the leximin SWF; the rank-weighted family of SWFs; and the sufficientist family. The chapter then discusses the key axioms that are used in the literature to categorize SWFs: the relatively uncontroversial axioms of Pareto Indifference, Strong Pareto, and Anonymity, and the more contested axioms of Pigou-Dalton, Separability, and Continuity. The landscape of Paretian, anonymous SWFs can be divided into various regions, depending upon these latter axioms; and the utilitarian, continuous-prioritarian, leximin, rank-weighted, and sufficientist SWFs can be placed within this landscape. Axioms for applying an SWF under uncertainty are also discussed.
Implementing the SWF Framework
Authors: Adler Matthew D.
Published: November 2019

The SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment. One important application in the economic literature concerns taxation (termed “optimal tax” scholarship); but the framework is applicable to any type of governmental policy choice. This chapter illustrates the implementation of the SWF framework, using the regulation of fatality risks as a case study. Risk regulation is chosen because this is the major application of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the U.S. government. The chapter focuses on the utilitarian and continuous-prioritarian SWFs. Utilitarianism gives priority to the young in reducing fatality risks and to those with higher income. Continuous prioritarianism intensifies the preference for the young, but mitigates or reverse the preference for those with higher income. CBA is significantly different from both utilitarianism and continuous prioritarianism. It markedly intensifies the utilitarian preference for reducing the risks of those with higher incomes; and, unlike both SWF-based approaches, is insensitive to the distribution of policy cost.
Media Sourcing
Authors: VanSickle-Ward Rachel , Wallsten Kevin
Published: November 2019

Chapter 6 examines how the presence of female reporters and gender-balanced newsrooms shaped sourcing patterns in the media’s coverage of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. Drawing on an extensive analysis of newspaper articles between August 1, 2011, and August 1, 2012, this chapter offers strong evidence that gender mattered for the substance of the media’s reporting. Specifically, men and official sources were quoted more frequently than women and unofficial sources. More importantly, this chapter demonstrates that the tendency to rely on men was significantly dampened in reports written by female authors and in reports appearing in newspapers with more gender-balanced staffs. These findings provide support for the increasingly vocal concerns of media watchdog organizations that lobby for increased newsroom diversity and offer a clear answer to the oft-repeated question of whether having more women in the media leads to a qualitatively different kind of reporting on issues affecting women.
Continual Raving
Authors: Gilsdorf Janet R.
Published: November 2019

This book explores the lives and work of scientists who unraveled the mysteries of meningitis and describes the steps (and sometimes missteps) they used to accomplish their splendid achievements. Although symptoms of meningitis were recorded as early as the time of Hippocrates, its origin remained obscure. Then, in 1892, one of the bacteria that cause meningitis in children, Haemophilus influenzae, was discovered when Richard Pfeiffer saw it in material coughed up by a patient with influenza. Pfeiffer mistakenly thought the bacteria caused influenza, and it has carried that unfortunate, erroneous name since that time. Discovery, however, marched forward, and Quincke discovered how to obtain spinal fluid by inserting a needle between two bones in the patient’s back. Pittman discovered the sugar overcoat that protects H. influenzae from being eaten by white blood cells. Flexner managed epidemics of meningitis with serum from a horse. Griffith unknowingly stumbled on DNA, the master of all life. Weech gave the first antibiotic used in America to a little girl with meningitis. Alexander learned why antibiotics sometimes fail in such patients. Smith won the Nobel Prize for showing how DNA invades bacteria, the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. And four scientists, in two teams, vied to be the first to create the best vaccine to prevent meningitis in infants.
Meningitis—What Is It?
Authors: Gilsdorf Janet R.
Published: November 2019

Before the advent of antibiotics, meningitis was a dreadful infection by any standard; many of its victims were young children, and almost all died, succumbing to the disease from days to six weeks, or sometimes longer, after the onset of their illness. Incredibly, patients occasionally survived but were often left with varying degrees of neurologic damage. Before the first spinal tap, the diagnosis of meningitis was based on clinical signs and symptoms and could be confirmed only by pathologic examination of the brains of deceased patients during an autopsy. Since the advent of the spinal tap, the diagnosis of meningitis rests on examination of the cerebrospinal fluid. Treatment of meningitis depends on which bacteria cause the infection. Helen Keller may be a famous surviving victim of this disease.
The Flu and Richard Pfeiffer
Authors: Gilsdorf Janet R.
Published: November 2019

For decades, scientists puzzled over which influenza virus was actually responsible for the Russian pandemic. Finally, in 2014, phylogenetic techniques (examining evolutionary patterns of the virus genes) and seroarcheologic techniques (measuring antibodies likely present in people at various points in time) were applied to the question of which virus caused the Russian flu of 1889–1892. Thus, Pfeiffer’s proclamation that his bacillus caused influenza was finally proven wrong. His identification of Bacillus influenzae in the respiratory tract, however, was a major contribution to the scientific understanding of bacterial infections and moved the field of bacteriology forward in allowing other investigators to unearth its full potential as an important human pathogen. Further, in the course of his studies of B. influenzae, Pfeiffer pioneered the field of nutritional requirements of bacteria. Finally, Pfeiffer’s identification of Haemophilus influenzae launched subsequent studies of the causes of bacterial meningitis and initiated in-depth explorations of bacterial meningitis-causing pathogens that ground our concepts of pathogenesis, and guide our management, of the infection.
Antibiotic Treatment—Much Better than Nothing
Authors: Gilsdorf Janet R.
Published: November 2019

Over the past five decades, many animal experiments as well as clinical trials of antibiotics in humans treated for meningitis have defined the levels of antibiotics that are present in infected meninges and in the blood, thus informing the drug doses necessary to successfully treat the infection. In spite of the different kinds of bacteria that cause meningitis and the availability of various antibiotics to treat it, several basic principles of effective management for all common forms of bacterial meningitis have emerged from the decades of research. As a result of these studies, most children with meningitis in America receive appropriate antibiotic treatment (the correct antibiotic and the correct dose for the correct duration of therapy), and their outcomes are much, much better than the disastrous outcomes of earlier eras.
Antibiotics
Authors: Gilsdorf Janet R.
Published: November 2019

Many scientists can claim one or possibly two very important discoveries in a lifetime. Hattie Alexander’s notable discoveries number many more than that. Further, they emerged from her astute clinical observations and commitment to her patients as well as her deep understanding of microbiology and immunology and bacterial genetics. She pioneered the first medical therapy for Haemophilus influenzae meningitis but didn’t stop when she learned that her immune serum improved the survival rate to nearly 60% because that wasn’t good enough for her patients. She subsequently learned that treating patients with both immune sera and a sulfa drug further improved the patients’ survival rate. Later, she found that streptomycin was even better, and when a patient failed streptomycin therapy, she figured out the mechanism for the resistance of H. influenzae to that antibiotic. Her work in DNA transformation in H. influenzae helped lay the groundwork for all future studies in bacterial molecular genetics.
Engaged Followership and Engaged Fellowship
Authors: Reicher Stephen D. , Haslam S. Alexander
Published: November 2019

In this chapter the authors argue that the human capacity for harming or else helping others flows from the same basic psychological group processes. They start by reanalyzing Milgram’s classic “obedience studies” in terms of “engaged followership”. This analysis suggests that participants obey toxic instructions to the extent that they see these as necessary in order to advance a worthy cause with which they identify. They argue that such engaged followership explains real-world as well as laboratory examples of harm-doing. They then reanalyze both laboratory and real-world examples of helping as engaged fellowship. This indicates that people aid others to the extent that they are construed as part of a common in-group. The difference between harming and helping, then, depends upon how one draws the boundaries of “us” and “them” and, hence, the extent to which one identifies with either perpetrating authorities or their victims.
The Aftermath of Genocide
Authors: Vollhardt Johanna Ray , Twali Michelle Sinayobye
Published: November 2019

This chapter reviews research on how historical genocide continues to affect victim and perpetrator groups’ beliefs, emotions, and intergroup attitudes in the present. The authors organize their review around four central psychological processes that help in understanding why and how members of victim and perpetrator groups respond in such divergent ways: which psychological needs members of these groups have in light of the events (e.g., needs for meaning, agency, power, acknowledgment), how central the genocide is to their identity and how relevant it is seen to the present, how they perceive the scope of genocide and who is considered a victim, and the various lessons group members draw from the events. The authors also discuss possibilities for bridging these divergent responses and factors that complicate the picture such as when groups were both victims and perpetrators.
The Historical Pattern of State Formation in Upland Southeast Asia
Authors: Han Enze
Published: November 2019

Chapter 3 introduces the historical background of the upland Southeast Asia borderland area. It analyzes how the upland area and its people were perceived by valley states and attempts made by those states to approach them militarily and politically. It examines existing historiographies coming from the perspectives of the Chinese, Myanmar, and Thai states, paying attention to how those states used a variety of means—military, political, and economic—in their efforts to deal with the mosaic of people living in the upland area. It also considers the perspectives of the upland people themselves in terms of how they viewed their relations with those valley states, if such accounts are available. The purpose of the chapter is to put this borderland area in a historical perspective, while emphasizing the overall lack of state and national consolidation of the territories and people before the modern period.
Dynamics of Transboundary Economic Flows
Authors: Han Enze
Published: November 2019

Chapter 6 discusses the economic logic of cross-border relations. To illustrate the economic dynamics of borderland state building as a result of economic asymmetry between Myanmar and its two more powerful neighbors, this chapter mainly examines two interrelated processes. The first is cross-border movement of goods and people between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. The chapter specifically examines the phenomenon of labor migration from Myanmar to Thailand, as well as the integrated trade networks across the borderland. It also discusses cross-border resource development dominated by Chinese as well as Thai capital in Myanmar. Here it mainly looks at agribusiness as well as investment in the hydropower, lumber, and mining sectors in Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan states.
Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

To be good citizens or statespersons, we need practical wisdom—the moral skill and will to know how to do the right thing in particular situations. Institutions work best when they cultivate practitioners who have the wisdom and judgment to choose the right aims and pursue them in the best way possible. Practical wisdom can be destroyed, however, when institutions rely too heavily on rules and incentives that encourage people to compete for extrinsic rewards or to avoid punishments. This book focuses on the ethical implications of institutional failures and identifies competitive utility-maximizing as a frequent source of such failures. Practical wisdom is often squeezed out of institutions by the market forces unleashed by neoliberalism. In the political sphere, hyper-partisanship is an expression of excessive competition, and it can undermine the deliberation necessary for a healthy democracy. There is, however, an alternative. A citizens’ democracy would aim at human flourishing. This book calls on social scientists to recognize the ethical foundation of our work, integrate the moral dimension of politics in our analyses, and accord greater attention to first-person perspectives in our ontologies. The cultivation of practical wisdom in politics, work, and everyday life is our best response to the pressures arising from market forces that threaten to destroy institutions and drive human activities toward catastrophic outcomes.
Runaway
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

Institutions often fail, sometimes spectacularly. A tragic train derailment provides an example of an institutional failure that can be analyzed through the prism of three schools of ethics: Bentham’s utilitarianism, Kant’s deontological or rights-based approach, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. By stressing the importance of the wise practitioner, a virtue-ethics approach offers a way of thinking about what makes an institution good or bad. Institutional failures are often due less to the absence of well-specified rules and incentives than the erosion of the capacity of practitioners to perform the activities associated with their roles and offices. Good institutions enable practitioners to focus on the aims of these activities. To do so, however, competitive utility-maximizing must be restrained.
Competitive Utility-Maximizing
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

Competition between individuals seeking to maximize utility can lead to perverse outcomes like the tragedy of freedom in the commons. Cooperation to achieve common goods—like preventing the tragedy of the commons—requires the suspension of some forms of competition, but political theorists since Hobbes have been skeptical about the possibility of agreement on the good. Hobbes criticized Aristotle’s emphasis on wisdom or prudence based on experience. In defense of Aristotle, I argue that common goods are rooted in experience, in pro-social sentiments like empathy, and in the capacity to see the self and others from multiple perspectives. But Aristotle also believed that reason and judgment played a role in the cultivation of the good.
Wise Practitioners
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

What kind of rulers and citizens do we need to attain the aims intrinsic to democracy? Two activities are central to democratic politics: citizenship and rule (or statespersonship). The performance of these activities, especially the latter, demands practical wisdom. This chapter explores three examples of the need for practical wisdom in politics. In the first, a political novice learned the importance of good judgment in politics, the primacy of the particular, the value of entering politics for the right reasons, and the need to use persuasion tailored to specific audiences. In the second, an expert politician with an instinct for doing the right thing in the right way and for the right reasons demonstrated a capacity to bend the rules in order to achieve the intrinsic aims of an institution. Finally, a practitioner who was unable to accomplish the aims of her practice within an institution created a new one, and in the process helped to redefine a major social problem.
Citizens’ Democracy
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

Aristotle argued that the supreme good of human life was eudaimonia, which means happiness or flourishing. Scholars working on both human development and the quality of democracy have converged on the idea that democratic citizenship is part of human flourishing. Citizenship implies agency, the set of capabilities necessary to play a part in self-government. Agency has a basis in natural and cultural evolution: it emerged with the development of the self as a human person, as a legal person, and finally as a self-legislating sovereign. The functional differentiation of roles in a balanced constitution is necessary for human flourishing and the cultivation of the virtues associated with self-government.
Conclusion
Authors: Cameron Maxwell A.
Published: November 2019

Practical wisdom is necessary in the practice of the social sciences. The embrace of competitive utility-maximizing within positivist theories of institutions reflects an untenable desire to separate facts and values, and an unwarranted skepticism about the good. The result is a social science that neglects the moral dimension of politics and denies the centrality of first-person experience, which is the basis for any conception of the good. The fact that the unity of the virtues is an impossible ideal in complex, pluralistic societies does not diminish the importance of diverse constructions of the good in politics, much less does it eliminate the tensions between these diverse constructions and the pressures arising from market forces that destroy institutions and drive human activities toward catastrophic outcomes. Against these pressures, the cultivation of practical wisdom is our best response.
Meter and Rhythm in the Sung Poetry of Iranian Khorasan
Authors: Blum Stephen
Published: November 2019

The rhythmic theory developed by al-Fārābī remains relevant to the analysis of sung poetry in the contemporary Middle East, not least with respect to the question of how duration comes to be determined and the conception of verse as a constituent of melody (Arabic laḥn) in the fullest sense. This chapter reviews some of Fārābī’s concepts in relation to Christopher Hasty’s discussion of projective potential. Analysis of eight examples of sung verse in Persian and Khorasani Turkish focuses on coordination of tunes with rhythmic cycles associated with different types of poetic meter. I argue that the best analytical work on Persian traditional music, notably that of Dariush Talā’i, provides an excellent foundation for studies of Iran’s regional musics.
New Music—New Rhythm
Authors: Hasty Christopher
Published: November 2019

This chapter undertakes an exploration of rhythmic practices in twentieth and, especially, late twentieth-century European-International modernist music, focusing on attempts to reduce or eliminate durational projection and taking into account the role of notation in crafting experiments with a newly emancipated rhythm. It is suggested that this emancipation of rhythm is at least as significant as the “emancipation of dissonance” and, indeed, far more significant if “rhythm” is given a properly broad scope. Principal examples are taken from Morton Feldman’s De Kooning (1963), Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree for percussion (1981), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Muro d’Orrizonte (1997).
“The Most Beautiful Area”
Authors: Kulezic-Wilson Danijela
Published: November 2019

Chapter 2 provides a historical context for exploring core questions about the production of soundtracks in the digital age, focusing on the relationship between score and sound design and the various ways in which their functions can overlap under the influences of technology and the musical approach to soundtrack. The blurring of the line between score and sound design is examined from two different angles: one looks at scoring techniques that move the score towards the realm that is usually covered by the sound department, including ambient sound and sound effects; the other involves the musicalization of sounds that are traditionally tasked with a purely mimetic role and the creation of a “realistic” sound environment.
Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Kulezic-Wilson Danijela
Published: November 2019

Chapter 6 offers concluding thoughts on various methods of blurring the line between score and sound design and their common themes such as integration, inclusion, the erasure of boundaries, and the toppling of hierarchies. The chapter notes the inner dialectics of this trend, epitomized in the forces of change understood as progression and those explained by the cyclical reappearance of certain tendencies. The former are manifested in the use of a contemporary musical language that draws on the whole world of sound and the use of digital technology; the latter include the musical approach to soundtrack, aesthetic trends such as the aesthetics of reticence, and a fascination with the materiality, texture, and hapticity of sound, which all have precedents of some kind in the past. This chapter asserts that the main methods of blurring the line between score and sound design are inspired by music or informed by musical logic.
Latin
Authors: Kraft Robert A.
Published: November 2019

Various “Jewish” texts have survived in Latin, those considered canonical as well as others such as the "Liber antiquitatum biblicarum;" falsely attributed to Philo, and "4 Ezra, 5 Ezra, and 6 Ezra," which are known only or primarily from Latin. Many other Latin texts have also survived in Greek, and it is usually assumed that the Latin versions were translations of Greek originals (e.g., from Septuagintal texts), produced by Christian translators. The possibility that there may have been Jewish translators into Latin (working from Greek, or even from Semitic originals) is seldom explored in any depth, but deserves closer attention. Some of the "Old Latin" scriptural materials, for example, may have been originally Jewish (not Christian) productions.
Ethiopic
Authors: Piovanelli Pierluigi
Published: November 2019

The first wave of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha reached Eritrea and Ethiopia in the wake of the Christianization of the Aksumite kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century of our era. Their Ethiopian acculturation was a part of the process of translating the ensemble of the Scriptures, including “apocryphal” texts, from Greek originals into Gǝʿǝz, or Classical Ethiopic. As a result, the pseudepigrapha were copied for centuries in the same manuscripts as other biblical texts. After a long period of relative isolation, the re-establishing of regular relations with Egyptian Christianity, in the thirteenth century, led to a complete re-examination and revision of Ethiopian Scriptures and other religious texts. The pseudepigrapha were scrutinized, discussed, edited, eventually newly translated from the Arabic or, in a few cases, abandoned. The theological debates about the status of some of these texts played a major role in their active preservation in Ethiopian culture.
Slavonic
Authors: Kulik Alexander
Published: November 2019

The corpus of Jewish literature of the Second Temple period is represented in the Slavonic tradition by biblical pseudepigrapha (especially of apocalyptic genre) and Josephus. The extant Slavonic manuscripts containing these documents belong to the period spanning the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. However, in some cases their language enables us to date the earliest of their proto-texts reliably to the tenth to eleventh centuries. Like the majority of early Slavonic writings, all the texts in the corpus under discussion have been translated from Greek, and most of these translations were produced in South Slavia. Some of these texts have been preserved uniquely in Slavonic, while others have parallel versions in non-Slavonic languages. Some texts must be faithful rendering of ancient originals. Other texts in their present form are products of medieval Byzantine or Slavonic reworking. The differentiation between ancient and medieval materials is not always easy to make.
Irish
Authors: McNamara Martin
Published: November 2019

In the early Irish Church (600–800 CE) there were apocrypha of Oriental origin and in the tenth-century poem Saltair na Rann (“Psalter of Quatrains”) the account of the Fall of Adam and Eve is recognized as having analogues with rabbinic tradition and also a poem on Adam’s head. This essay first considers Jewish texts that have, or may have, influenced Irish tradition. Jewish influence on Irish traditions is then considered: Latin conjoined treatises on Adam and Eve; Adam created in agro Damasceno, in the field of Damascus; the seven or eight parts from which Adam was made; the four elements from which Adam was made (with rabbinic analogues); the naming of Adam (Slavonic Enoch and Sibylline Oracles 3:24–26); Penance of Adam and Eve; Sunday, Sabbath, respite for the damned; XV Signs before Doomsday; Jewish traditions in Saltair na Rann; the influence of Hebrew Bible traditions on early Irish genealogies and imagined prehistory.
The “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” as Category and Corpus
Authors: DiTommaso Lorenzo
Published: November 2019

The recent publication of the first volume of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures offers scholars an ideal vantage point from which to review the major trends in Pseudepigrapha research since the publication of the last milestone collection, James H. Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, thirty years ago. Most significant in this regard is the radical expansion of the corpus in the new collection, which signals a return to the “maximalist” conception of the Pseudepigrapha that defined the category during its early history. This chapter discusses the Pseudepigrapha as category and corpus, their historical relationship and the dynamics of change, and the impact of changes over time on issues regarding early Jewish texts and traditions in Christian transmission.
Philo of Alexandria
Authors: Sterling Gregory E.
Published: November 2019

The largest corpus of Jewish writings from the Second Temple period was preserved not by Jews, but by Christians. This chapter explores the transmission of the writings of Philo of Alexandria by using “historical contingency” to address why Christians preserved the works of Philo. It identifies four major contingencies: the destruction of the Alexandrian Jewish community in 115–117 CE, Origen’s move from Alexandria to Caesarea c. 232 CE and the impact on the Episcopal library, Philo’s role in the embassy of 38 CE and the later Latin translation of some of his works, and the adoption of a selection of Philo’s texts in the curriculum at Constantinople and the translation of selections from his work into Armenian. The preservation of Philo’s corpus was not a foregone conclusion in the first century CE. If any of these events had turned out differently, we would have lost the bulk or a significant portion of his writings.
The Jewish Calendar and Jewish Sciences
Authors: Ben-Dov Jonathan
Published: November 2019

This chapter surveys the reception and development of the Enochic 364-day calendar in later Jewish and Christian traditions, focusing on sources from Ethiopia. It traces the creation of Enochic astronomy and of the 364-day calendar in their Mesopotamian and ancient Jewish setting, and then continues to assess this legacy in the Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, in a rather different way, in 2 Enoch and other Jewish apocalypses. This is done with an eye toward the transmission of other branches of ancient sciences, such as astrology and physiognomy. The chapter then continues to assess the path of the Enochic teaching in Christian Ethiopia, dwelling on the tension between the preservation of the ancient tradition and its acculturation to other, later, branches of Ethiopic astronomy.
Manichaean
Authors: Reeves John C.
Published: November 2019

Mani and the initial generations of his followers were readers and transmitters of biblically affiliated apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings. This essay briefly discusses the various ways that Mani and his followers encountered, expropriated, adapted, and reformulated a wide range of Jewish and Christian parascriptural writings for their own communal purposes. It is also suggested that what might appear to be hostility toward the Jewish Bible is in fact a nuanced critique of how “ancestral scriptures” were misunderstood or, in some cases, even deliberately distorted, by their present-day custodians. It is hoped that the present chapter will stimulate further comparative work and contributions to the study of Manichaeism and its biblical affiliations.
Parenting and Family
Authors: Miller Scott A.
Published: November 2019

The parental beliefs that affect children’s development are not limited to beliefs about children; they also include what parents believe about themselves as parents and what they believe about the family as a unit. The first half of this chapter addresses beliefs about parenting of several sorts: knowledge of parenting processes, feelings of self-efficacy as a parent, and attributions for parenting outcomes. Also discussed are effects of the transition to parenthood on how parents think. The second half of the chapter is directed to beliefs about the family. It begins with two topics that are often the source of parent–child conflicts: household responsibilities and decision-making and autonomy. The chapter concludes with beliefs about the value of children, including the beliefs of older parents whose children have grown.