bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Inference to the Best Explanation and the Receipt of Testimony
Authors: Fricker Elizabeth
Published: January 2018

The chapter develops a local reductionist account of what is required for testimonial beliefs to be justified, and argues that human recipients of testimony typically form their beliefs in accordance with these requirements. Recipients estimate the trustworthiness of a speaker’s assertion by constructing a mini-psychological theory of her, arriving at this by inference to the best explanation, and accept what they are told only if this theory has it that the speaker is expressing her knowledge. The existence of a social norm governing assertion, the knowledge norm, is a key factor making such an explanation accessible to recipients. This local reductionism supports explanationism as a general account of the justification of empirical beliefs.
The Necessity of Idealism
Authors: Segal Aaron , Goldschmidt Tyron
Published: January 2018

This chapter formulates a version of idealism and argues for it. Sections 2 and 3 explicate this version of idealism: the world is mental through-and-through. Section 2 spells this out precisely and contrasts it with rival views. Section 3 draws a consequence from this formulation of idealism: idealism is necessarily true if true at all. Sections 4 and 5 make the case for idealism. Section 4 is defensive: it draws from the conclusion of section 3 to reply to a central, perhaps the central, anti-idealist argument. Section 5 is on the offense: it develops a new argument for idealism based on the contemporary debate in philosophy of mind. The contemporary debate in philosophy of mind has been dominated by physicalism and dualism, with idealism almost totally neglected. This chapter rectifies this situation.
The Idealism of Mary Whiton Calkins
Authors: McDaniel Kris
Published: January 2018

At the beginning of the twentieth century, idealism was the metaphysical view to be beat. Mary Whiton Calkins was an important early twentieth-century philosopher (and psychologist), and a prominent advocate of a version of idealism. This chapter assesses her version of idealism. Among the topics discussed are whether the absolute is a person, whether finite persons have free agency, whether there is a correspondence between apparent physical objects and minds, and the status of relations. In addition, her version of idealism is contrasted with the idealistic views of some of her contemporaries, including F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart.
Causal Idealism
Authors: Bernstein Sara
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.
Idealism and Fine-Tuning
Authors: Ross Jacob
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that, given certain background assumptions, a kind of idealism follows from a version of the fine-tuning thesis. The kind of idealism in question ascribes explanatory priority, not ontological priority, to the mental. The version of the fine-tuning thesis in question is the strong fine-tuning for consciousness thesis, according to which (i) the values of the fundamental physical parameters are fine-tuned for consciousness and (ii) this fine-tuning for consciousness is not the inevitable by-product of fine-tuning for something more basic than consciousness, such as life. The chapter argues that, assuming a particular account of the nature of explanation—namely, the unificationist account—the strong fine-tuning for consciousness thesis entails that consciousness plays a fundamental explanatory role in nature, and so this thesis entails explanatory idealism. The chapter concludes by arguing that similar reasoning leads to the conclusion that consciousness is the final cause of the universe.
The Roles of Set Theories in Mathematics
Authors: McLarty Colin
Published: January 2018

What mathematicians know and use about sets varies across branches of mathematics but rarely includes such fundamental aspects of Zermelo–Fraenkel (ZF) set theory as the iterative hierarchy. All mathematicians know and use the axioms of the Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets (ETCS), though few know ETCS or any set theory by name. The chapter depicts the iterative hierarchy of ZF and constructibility as gauge theories. Since gauge theories are prominently used in physics, so these are used in work on the continuum hypothesis, large cardinals, and provability in arithmetic. But mathematicians outside logic avoid these gauges and work with structures only up to isomorphism, as does ETCS.
Reviving the Philosophy of Geometry
Authors: Corfield David
Published: January 2018

In the Anglophone world, the philosophical treatment of geometry has fallen on hard times. This chapter argues that philosophy can come to a better understanding of mathematics by providing an account of modern geometry, including its development of new forms of space, both for mathematical physics and for arithmetic. It returns to the discussions of Weyl and Cassirer on geometry whose concerns are very much relevant today. A way of encompassing a great part of modern geometry via homotopy toposes is discussed, along with the `cohesive’ variant of their internal language, known as `homotopy type theory’. With these tools in place, we can now start to see what an adequate philosophical account of current geometry might look like.
Category Theory and Foundations
Authors: Ernst Michael
Published: January 2018

In the foundations of mathematics there has been an ongoing debate about whether categorical foundations can replace set-theoretical foundations. The primary goal of this chapter is to provide a condensed summary of that debate. It addresses the two primary points of contention: technical adequacy and autonomy. Finally, it calls attention to a neglected feature of the debate, the claim that categorical foundations are more natural and readily useable, and how deeper investigation of that claim could prove fruitful for our understanding of mathematical thinking and mathematical practice.
Contextuality: At the Borders of Paradox
Authors: Abramsky Samson
Published: January 2018

Contextuality is a key feature of quantum mechanics. We present the sheaf-theoretic approach to contextuality introduced by Abramsky and Brandenburger, and show how it covers a range of logical and physical phenomena “at the borders of paradox”.
Categories of Scientific Theories
Authors: Halvorson Hans , Tsementzis Dimitris
Published: January 2018

We discuss ways in which category theory might be useful in philosophy of science, in particular for articulating the structure of scientific theories. We argue, moreover, that a categorical approach transcends the syntax–semantics dichotomy in twentieth century analytic philosophy of science.
Love and Poetry
Authors: Gray Erik
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the relation between love and poetry by examining different theories of each. It begins with Horace’s Art of Poetry and Ovid’s Art of Love, which give very similar accounts of their respective subjects. Both phenomena are said to involve a counterpointing of contradictory forces: impulse and artistry, spontaneity and deliberate craft. The parallel persists in the work of thinkers across different periods. Thus the Romantics of the early nineteenth century describe a similar balance; both poetry and love, in their accounts, consist of a two-stage process in which momentary inspiration is followed and fulfilled by self-conscious reflection. These dualities find their ultimate model in Plato, who describes love as an effect of simultaneous recognition and disorientation. The same dichotomy is fundamental to poetry, notably through poetry’s use of meter, with its reliance on pattern and variation, and metaphor, with its emphasis on both similarity and difference.
Invitations
Authors: Gray Erik
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes the invitation poem, a genre of love poetry with its roots in the biblical Song of Songs that reflects on major questions that have always surrounded the nature of love. Does love entail recognition or fresh discovery, a completion of the self or a disruption of its contours? Is love primarily a natural passion or a cultural practice? The invitation poem, with its displacement of erotic desire onto an imagined landscape, negotiates these possibilities through its fusion of inward and outward, homecoming and exile, intimacy and alienation. The tradition initiated by the Song of Songs alters over the centuries, as poets including Christopher Marlowe and Charles Baudelaire, among many others, highlight different points of contact between the poetic and erotic imagination. The invitation genre can thus be seen as an archetypal form of love lyric, emphasizing some of the central paradoxes that link love to poetry.
Marriage
Authors: Gray Erik
Published: January 2018

Marital love is rarely represented by poets, at least in their lyric poetry. Lyric, with its brevity, its intensity, its ellipses, seems ideally suited to a particular type of passionate love typified by novelty, absence, uncertainty. Conjugal love, powerful though it may be, lacks these particular qualities. Yet if the pleasure and even purpose of marriage lies in discovering freedom and self-realization within strictly prescribed limits, then lyric could well be seen as the genre most suited to marital love. This chapter examines the tradition of marriage lyric that has developed, for the most part, in recent centuries, as the ideal of loving, companionate marriage has spread. Taking as its starting point the work of the Victorian poet and theorist Coventry Patmore, whose treatise on poetic meter illustrates the same ideals that mark his poems about marriage, the chapter ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Seamus Heaney and other contemporary poets of marital love.
Conclusion
Authors: Gray Erik
Published: January 2018

The brief conclusion reflects on the fact that love and poetry both grapple with the impossibility of ever fully knowing or communicating with another person. Yet both also depend on that impossibility: the distance that inevitably separates one human being from another is the source of pleasure as well as frustration. This dual effect is forcefully conveyed in the poetry of Lucretius concerning love.
Attention, Not Self
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

Attention is of fundamental importance in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, in action theory, and in ethics. This book presents an account in which attention, not self, explains the experiential and normative situatedness of human beings in the world. Attention consists in an organization of awareness and action at the centre of which there is neither a practical will nor a phenomenological witness. Attention performs two roles in experience, a selective role of placing and a focal role of access. Attention improves our epistemic standing, because it is in the nature of attention to settle on what is real and to shun what is not real. When attention is informed by expertise, it is sufficient for knowledge. That gives attention a reach beyond the perceptual: for attention is a determinable whose determinates include the episodic memory from which our narrative identities are made, the empathy for others that situates us in a social world, and the introspection that makes us self-aware. Empathy is other-directed attention, placed on you and focused on your states of mind; it is akin to listening. Empathetic attention is central to a range of experiences that constitutively require a contrast between oneself and others, all of which involve an awareness of oneself as the object of another’s attention. An analysis of attention as mental action gainsays authorial conceptions of self, because it is the nature of intending itself, effortful attention in action, to settle on what to do and to shun what not to do.
Attention and Knowledge
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

The recognition that attention performs two roles enables one to argue that the epistemology of attention is such that attention provides an immediate improvement to justification, as long as there are no defeaters, and also that suitably expert attention is sufficient for knowledge. Attentional justification is an underived epistemic principle, related to a view known as ‘Dogmatism’ in the epistemology of perception. There is cognitive penetration of attention by beliefs and interests, as well as by past actions, but it is restricted in scope. So attention improves justification, and sometimes, when attention is trained or cultivated, the improvement is such as to deliver knowledge.
Working Memory and Attention
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

Increasingly it is recognized that selection is not the only function of attention; rather, ‘attention gates what comes to be encoded into short-term memory, helps maintain information in short-term memory, and dynamically modulates the information being maintained’ (Nobre and Kastner 2014: 1215; my italics). Recent empirical literature affirms the existence of early and late selective attention as distinct attentional phenomena but points to a dissociation between selective attention of either sort and maintenance of information in working memory. This chapter will demonstrate that the Buddhist concept of javana ‘running’ is a concept of working memory and that all the processes in Buddhaghosa’s pathway to consciousness are associated with functional roles that are actually realized by recognized entities in psychology and neuroscience.
Narrative Attention
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that attention is that in virtue of which one does not merely live in the present, but is also aware of the past and is situated in a social world with others. So a basic kind of attention is past-directed and autonoetic: it is placed on past events whose properties are retrieved in an act of simulated reliving. In episodic memory, the reliving of experience from one’s personal past, one attends to the past in a particular way but there is no reduction of the phenomenology of temporal experience to the representation of oneself as in the past.
Empathetic Attention
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

Attention can be placed on others. Now it is you on whom one’s attention is placed, and what one accesses in focusing on you are your mental states. One does not experience them directly; rather, your movements provide focal attention with a causal channel: they ‘intimate’ your thoughts to one. Empathy is analogous to listening to another, itself a kind of attention. So empathy, one’s awareness of another in their otherness, is an attentional state. While phenomenologists have claimed that empathy, the ability to apprehend the beliefs and emotions of others, is a perceptual skill, this chapter will argue instead that empathy is a distinct kind of attention, attention through embodied comportment to the feelings, commitments, and wishes of others.
Postscript: Philosophy Without Borders
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

This postscript discusses the nature and ambitions of cross-cultural philosophy. It distinguishes cross-cultural philosophy from an older project of comparative philosophy, and argues that philosophy should be a cosmopolitan undertaking. A cross-cultural philosophy claims that it is methodologically essential to consider theories from a plurality of cultural locations if one’s ambition is to discover a fundamental theory true of the human mind as such. So philosophy should be ‘borderless’, straddling geographical and cultural divisions. To think across cultures and languages is somewhat akin to perceiving with two eyes rather one, in that one gains a depth of vision not available in monocular sight.
Introduction
Authors: Ganeri Jonardon
Published: January 2018

This book is an exploration of the reorientations that take place when attention is given priority in the analysis of mind. In this book it is argued that attention has an explanatory role in understanding the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental; the nature of mental action in general; of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing; the character of the phenomenal and of cognitive access; the unity of consciousness; the epistemology of perception; the nature of persons and their identity; the distinction between self and other, and the moral psychology that rests upon it.
Form and function of the musteloids
Authors: Kitchener Andrew C. , Meloro Carlo , Williams Terrie M.
Published: January 2018

The musteloids are the most speciose of the carnivorans and have a global distribution. They display a wide diversity of morphological and physiological form and function, which have been shaped by their adaptation to a wide variety of ecological niches, ranging from the Arctic to the tropics and deserts to the seas. This chapter explores how several morphological and physiological adaptations are key to their successful diversification, including an elongated body, a highly insulating pelage, powerful teeth and jaws, anal sacs for olfactory communication or chemical defence, and reproductive physiologies that allow females to optimise their reproductive output. While many of these adaptations are shared by other carnivorans, it is their combination in musteloids that has allowed them to diversify so successfully globally.
Communication amongst the musteloids: signs, signals, and cues
Authors: Buesching Christina D. , Stankowich Theodore
Published: January 2018

Most intentional communication is intra-specific and benefits both sender and receiver. Typically, the more complex a species’ social system, the more complex is its communication. Because only ca. 10% of musteloid species are truly social, their communication is generally quite basic, while their solitary, nocturnal lifestyle is reflected in a predominance of olfactory signals. This chapter first discusses the properties of different signal modalities (visual, acoustic, olfactory and tactile), and then provides a review of musteloid communication in the context of signal functionality, starting with a section on defensive signals (warning-, alarm-, and distress signals), proceeding to other modes of inter-specific communication, such as eavesdropping on predator cues by smaller prey species (odours increasingly applied in conservation management), before moving on to more specialised intra-specific communication. It discusses resource defence and territorial marking, before concluding with a section on individual advertisement, including recognition of individuals and group-membership, and fitness advertisement.
Musteloid diseases: implications for conservation and species management
Authors: Newman Chris , Byrne Andrew
Published: January 2018

The role of disease in population regulation is often overlooked in ecology and conservation. Due to their diversity, the musteloids host a wide range of pathogens. These include diseases of commercial importance, such Aleutian mink disease virus which impacts mink ranching, or bovine tuberculosis leading to interventions to manage European badgers. Skunks and raccoons are major rabies hosts in North America, and because these small carnivores insinuate themselves into close proximity with people, they can pose substantial zoonotic risks. Musteloids also share diseases between species, such as mustelid herpes virus, canine distemper and infectious hepatitis viruses, along with a range of nematodes and protozoans; presenting a contagion risk when vulnerable musteloids are being conserved or reintroduced. Managing host density, vaccination and host isolation are thus the best tools for managing disease, where we advocate the UN-led ‘One Health approach, aimed at reducing risks of infectious diseases at the Animal-Human-Ecosystem interface
Asian badgers—the same, only different: how diversity among badger societies informs socio-ecological theory and challenges conservation
Authors: Zhou Youbing , Newman Chris , Kaneko Yayoi , Buesching Christina D. , Chen Wenwen , Zhou Zhao-Min , Xie Zongqiang , Macdonald David W.
Published: January 2018

Of thirteen extant species of true badger, eleven have a distribution in Asia, as do the more loosely affiliated stink- and honey-badgers. Even though these badgers show superficial similarities, they exhibit very different societies, even within same species under different circumstances, and provide an informative model to advance understanding of socio-ecology. They illustrate how group-living is promoted by natal philopatry, and food security; enabled by omnivory and hibernation in cold-winter regions. Conversely predatory, carnivorous species, and those competing for food security within a broader trophic guild, tend to be more solitary. This socio-ecological diversity poses conservation challenges, with Asian badgers vulnerable to habitat loss, urban and road development, direct conflict with people, culling to manage zoonotic disease transmission, and hunting pressure – often for traditional medicine. These threats are ever-more prevalent in expanding Asian economies, where cultural and attitudinal changes are urgently needed to safeguard biodiversity for the future.
Causes and consequences of coati sociality
Authors: Hirsch Ben T. , Gompper Matthew E.
Published: January 2018

Coati species exhibit a level of sociality uncommon among carnivores, and coatis can provide a valuable test of models relating ecology to social behaviour. This chapter draws principally on the authors’ research in Panama (Nasua narica) and Argentina (Nasua nasua), but also discuss insights gained from work conducted in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Brazil. Based on these comparisons, the authors posit that predation and feeding competition have been two of the strongest forces shaping coati social patterns and discuss how socio-ecological pressures affect almost every aspect of coati biology, including; morphology, feeding ecology, reproduction, demography, and disease spread.
Conservation genetics of red pandas in the wild
Authors: Hu Yibo , Qi Dunwu , Wei Fuwen
Published: January 2018

The red panda is listed on the 2016 IUCN red list as Endangered. It is now distributed only in China, Myanmar, India, Bhutan and Nepal. Human activities such as poaching and large-scale deforestation have caused serious declines in this forest-dwelling species. Although its ecological research has made much progress in the past decades, only recently witnessed the population genetic research advances of this species. This chapter reviews the advances in wild red panda conservation genetics from non-invasive genetics, genetic diversity, phylogeographic structure, population genetic structure, demographic history, subspecies differentiation, to its conservation and management. It presents detailed estimates of genetic diversity, assesses the role of paleo-climate changes, human activities and landscape features in shaping the genetic structure and demographic history of red pandas, and discusses the implications of conservation genetics findings for effective genetic monitoring and conservation management.
Law and Revolution
Authors: Sultany Nimer
Published: January 2018

What is the effect of revolutions on legal systems? What is the role of constitutions in legitimating regimes? How do constitutions and revolutions converge or clash? Taking the Arab Spring as its case study, this book explores the role of law and constitutions during societal upheavals, and critically evaluates the different trajectories they could follow in a revolutionary setting. The book urges a rethinking of major categories in political, legal, and constitutional theory in light of the Arab Spring. The book is a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, and Bahrain. It also provides the first thorough discussion of the trials of former regime officials in Egypt and Tunisia. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including an in-depth analysis of recent court rulings in several Arab countries, the book illustrates the contradictory roles of law and constitutions. The book also contrasts the Arab Spring with other revolutionary situations and demonstrates how the Arab Spring provides a laboratory for examining scholarly ideas about revolutions, legitimacy, legality, continuity, popular sovereignty, and constituent power.
The Physics of Shower Development
Authors: Wigmans Richard
Published: January 2018

The processes that play a role in the absorption of different types of particles in dense matter are described, with emphasis on the aspects that are important for calorimetry. A distinction is made between particles that develop electromagnetic showers (electrons, photons) and particles that are subject to the strong nuclear interaction, such as pions and protons. A separate section is dedicated to muons, which are typically not fully absorbed in practical calorimeters. The energy dependence of the various processes, and the consequences for the size requirements of detectors, are discussed in detail. The practical importance and limitations of Monte Carlo simulations of the shower development process are reviewed. The chapter ends with a summary of facts deriving from the physics of shower development that are important for calorimetry.
New Calorimeter Techniques
Authors: Wigmans Richard
Published: January 2018

This chapter is dedicated to calorimeter techniques that have been developed since the first edition of this monograph was published (2000). The Dual Readout Method (DREAM) aims to combine the advantages of compensation (linearity, excellent hadron resolution, Gaussian line shape) with a certain amount of design flexibility. This method, based on simultaneous detection of scintillation and Cherenkov light produyced in the shower development, eliminates some of the disadvantages of compensating devices, and in particular the dependence on efficient neutron detection of the latter. The Particle Flow Analysis method aims to combine the information provided by a good tracking system with that provided by a fine-grained calorimeter system to obtain excellent performance for the detection of jets. The results achieved with both methods, and the challenges faced in practice, are described in detail.
Contributions of Calorimetry to the Advancement of Science
Authors: Wigmans Richard
Published: January 2018

In this last chapter, some scientific discoveries are described in which calorimeters have played a crucial role. The chosen examples were all awarded a Nobel prize in physics. The first example concerns the discovery of the intermediate vector bosons (W and Z) by the experiments UA1 and UA2 at CERN (1982). More than anything else, this discovery has been crucial for the dominant role that calorimeters have played in the design of experiments at the subsequent generation(s) of particle accelerators. The second example concerns the discovery of the fact that neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass, by the SuperKamiokande collaboration (1998). This discovery inspired the development of the even larger water Cerenkov calorimeters discussed in Chapter 10. The third example concerns the discovery of the Higgs boson, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (2012). In all three cases, the role of the calorimeters, and their importance for the discoveries, is described in some detail.
Reef fisheries and reef aquaculture
Authors: Sheppard Charles R. C. , Davy Simon K. , Pilling Graham M. , Graham Nicholas A. J.
Published: January 2018

Fisheries are of key importance in provision of protein, livelihood opportunities and income to islanders and coastal populations with few alternative food sources, including some of the world’s poorest people. The variety of reef fisheries for reef-associated invertebrates and vertebrates around the world is examined. Fishing methods used and particular issues with these fisheries are discussed. Exploitation of reef resources also occurs to supply luxury food markets and hobbies related to aquaria, and the international live reef fish trade is highlighted. The development of reef-based aquaculture is examined, and issues that need to be addressed to deliver sustainable expansion of this approach are discussed. In the face of increasing pressures on reef resources from a number of sources, resultant impacts on reef renewable resources and the reef ecosystem are detailed, and potential ways in which fisheries management may control these pressures are described.
Grattius’ Cynegetica
Authors: Fanti Giulia
Published: January 2018

This chapter assesses aspects of Grattius within the didactic tradition, paying particular attention to the ways in which the author constructs his own persona as instructor and his envisaged addressee(s), and projects his attitude to teaching. This is compared and contrasted with other Greek and Roman didactic poems, with particular reference to his Roman predecessor Lucretius and contemporary Manilius. The chapter argues that Grattius’ work may be seen as a protean poem that combines several of the most characteristic didactic features: in particular, a declared educational aim that is undercut somewhat by a more playful attitude towards the earnestness of the lesson.
Grattius and Augustus
Authors: Green Steven J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that, although Grattius’ poem is not ostensibly designed for Augustus—who is nowhere evoked in the poem and showed little interest in the subject of hunting—it remains prudent to think about the Cynegetica as a poem about Augustus, or rather, Augustan Rome. Through extensive use of anthropomorphic language, the craft of hunting is subtly configured to promote Augustan-style leadership, in the figures of the master of hounds, the dog breeder, and the tree cultivator, and to celebrate the expanse of the Roman Empire; this is all set, however, within a divine framework that plays out the implications of Augustus’ (at times radical) programme of religious reform.
Elective Monarchy in Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, 1569-1587
Authors: Roșu Felicia
Published: January 2018

This book examines the transformation of elective monarchy in Transylvania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1570s. It does so by focusing on the foundational and experimental character of the first elections of 1571 (Transylvania) and 1573 and 1575–6 (Poland-Lithuania). In this period, the two polities adopted constitutions based on the same fundamental principles: elective thrones, state-sanctioned religious pluralism, and legal guarantees for the right of disobedience. Despite the important differences between them, Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania had one essential thing in common: they were the only two polities in early modern Europe that secured the succession of their rulers through large-scale elections in which the dynastic principle, although still important, was not binding. Apart from chapter 1, which has a chronological approach, the rest of the book thematically follows the development of an election: from voter inclinations and campaigning strategies, to voting procedures, to the contracts between voters and their chosen candidates, to the authority of the newly elected rulers. The conclusion examines the two elective systems from a more theoretical perspective. It argues that mixed government was accompanied by a mixed language that combined attachment to virtue, liberty, and self-government with a pragmatism that became particularly visible during interregna and elections. The constituents of Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania acted, talked, and saw themselves as both citizens and subjects of the rulers they elected. The phenomenon was not a contradiction but the logical consequence of a system in which those who were ruled were periodically called to rule themselves.
Choosing to Elect
Authors: Roșu Felicia
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1 introduces the Transylvanian and Polish-Lithuanian stories chronologically. The Transylvanian part gives an overview of Hungary’s medieval institutions and Transylvania’s separation from the rest of Hungary after 1526, and examines in more detail the period preceding the election of Stephen Báthory as ruler of Transylvania in 1571. The Polish-Lithuanian narrative introduces elective monarchy under the Jagiellons (1385–1572) and then examines the first interregnum (1572–3), which resulted in the election of Henry Valois. The second interregnum (1574–6) is presented in more detail, because it brought together Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania in the person of Stephen Báthory and also because it was not inevitable: Henry’s abandonment of the throne in 1574 put the estates in the delicate position of having to withdraw their allegiance to him and organize a new election, a difficult decision they hesitated to make. The conclusions explore the connection between liberty and security during interregna.
Voting
Authors: Roșu Felicia
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 analyses electoral assemblies with a focus on voting principles and procedures. It argues that the two countries’ voting practices, while seemingly chaotic, reflected the values, priorities, and immediate circumstances of each electorate. In Poland-Lithuania, politics was seen as a communal, public, and hands-on affair, where debate, negotiation, and persuasion trumped efficiency and speed. Those principles were reflected in the preference for voting in person rather than by electors, and what would later be known as the unanimity rule. In Transylvania, where the majority rule was used and voting was done by delegates, speed and efficiency prevailed mainly due to a constant sense of being under threat. The chapter analyses the theory and practice of consensus and gives an overview of voting methods in the two countries against a broader European background. To illustrate these points, the elections of 1571 (Transylvania) and 1575 (Poland-Lithuania) are analysed in detail.
Conclusions
Authors: Roșu Felicia
Published: January 2018

The Poles are too proud a Nation to agree with those Politicians that measure the Grandeur of a Prince, and Happiness of a State, by the Despotic Power of him that Governs it. … This vassalage would suit well enough with the Slaves of Asia...
Carl Schmitt's State and Constitutional Theory
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

This book analyzes Carl Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory and shows how he conceived it in response to the Weimar crisis. Schmitt modeled his theory on past state theory, particularly Hobbes’ Leviathan. Schmitt sought to address the unique problems posed by mass democracy. Extremists recognized a path to legal revolution lay in the constitution’s combination of democratic procedures, total neutrality toward political goals, and positive law. To prevent the subversion of the state and civil war, Schmitt theorized ways to depoliticize conflicts and restore the state’s authority. He argued the constitution imposed absolute limits on democratic will. And he insisted those limits were determined by the liberal democratic constitution’s prior commitment to basic rights. Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory remains important today because the problems he identifies within liberal democratic states have not gone away. Schmitt’s thought anticipated “constrained” or “militant” democracy, a type of constitution that guards against subversive expressions of popular sovereignty and whose mechanisms include the entrenchment of basic constitutional commitments and party bans. Although today’s political challenges are not identical to those Weimar faced, the threat of constitutional democracy committing suicide has not gone away. Liberal democrats can learn from Schmitt’s analysis and theory to address today’s challenges.
Introduction
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

The Introduction analyzes both how the popular appeal of the Nazi and Communist parties posed a dilemma for Weimar democracy and how Schmitt thought this dilemma illustrated the broader problem mass democracy posed for twentieth-century constitutional democratic states. The dilemma begged the question of whether the will of the people could be legitimately constrained. The Introduction contextualizes Schmitt’s analysis of this dilemma by reconstructing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates in German jurisprudence about the nature of valid law, arguing that Schmitt’s thought emerged out of an anti-positivist movement. This Introduction also assesses some of the problems facing scholarship of Schmitt, including his occasionalism and anti-Semitism. While acknowledging how damning these charges are, it argues that Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory can be separated from his personal failures and that his thought provides a valuable and original solution to the problems modern mass democracy poses.
The Challenge of Mass Democracy
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.
The Concept of the Political
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 reinterprets Schmitt’s concept of the political. Schmitt argued that Weimar developments, especially the rise of mass movements politically opposed to the state and constitution, demonstrated that the state did not have any sort of monopoly over the political, contradicting the arguments made by predominant Weimar state theorists, such as Jellinek and Meinecke. Not only was the political independent of the state, Schmitt argued, but it could even be turned against it. Schmitt believed that his contemporaries’ failure to recognize the nature of the political prevented them from adequately responding to the politicization of society, inadvertently risking civil war. This chapter reanalyzes Schmitt’s political from this perspective. Without ignoring enmity, it argues that Schmitt also defines the political in terms of friendship and, importantly, “status par excellence” (the status that relativizes other statuses). It also examines the relationship between the political and Schmitt’s concept of representation.
The Absolute State
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 analyzes Schmitt’s state theory. It begins with Schmitt’s criticism of “the mechanical state,” a conception of the state that he associated with positivism. Schmitt denied that the state was only machine-like and that it should merely execute whatever commands were fed into it. Instead, drawing on his interpretation of Hobbes, he argued that a legitimate state must make an absolute commitment to some substantive value, some political commitment, if it was to overcome the state of nature. Schmitt insisted that the state could not allow this commitment to be compromised by challenges from “indirect powers” without leading to instability and civil war. This chapter also discusses Schmitt’s typology of state neutrality: the state as a neutral power mediating social forces and the state as a neutralizing power preventing internal politicization. It concludes by discussing Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes’ total state and how that maps onto his own state theory.
Conclusion
Authors: Schupmann Benjamin A.
Published: January 2018

The Conclusion uses Schmitt’s thought to analyze what is today known as “constrained” or “militant” democracy. A constrained democracy is a constitutional regime with mechanisms to prevent its own democratic subversion. Although this regime is present to varying degrees in most liberal democratic states today, efforts to provide its comprehensive normative theory and justify its use have fallen short. The conclusion argues that Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory, when used to theorize Weimar’s liberal counter-constitution, provides that comprehensive normative theory of constrained democracy. Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory provides liberal democrats today with an alternative way to think about the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state and the limits of democratic legal change. This chapter concludes by briefly discussing how to move constrained democracy beyond Schmitt and by describing some recent parallels between early twentieth-century extremist movements and today’s political world.
Q. M. Pictures; Heisenberg Equation; Linear Response; Superoperators and Non-Markovian Equations
Authors: Horing Norman J. Morgenstern
Published: January 2018

Three fundamental and equivalent mathematical frameworks (“pictures”) in which quantum theory can be lodged are exhibited and their relations and relative advantages/disadvantages are discussed: (1) The Schrödinger picture considers the dynamical development of the overall system state vector as a function of time relative to a fixed complete set of time-independent basis eigenstates; (2) The Heisenberg picture (convenient for the use of Green’s functions) embeds the dynamical development of the system in a time-dependent counter-rotation of the complete set of basis eigenstates relative to the fixed, time-independent overall system state, so that the relation of the latter fixed system state to the counter-rotating basis eigenstates is identically the same in the Heisenberg picture as it is in the Schrödinger picture; (3) the Interaction Picture addresses the situation in which a Hamiltonian, H=H0+H1, involves a part H0 whose equations are relatively easy to solve and a more complicated part, H1, treated perturbatively. The Heisenberg equation of motion for operators is discussed, and is applied to annihilation and creation operators. The S-matrix, density matrix and von Neumann equation, along with superoperators and non-Markovian kinetic equations are also addressed (e.g. the intracollisional field effect).
Quantum Mechanical Ensemble Averages and Statistical Thermodynamics
Authors: Horing Norman J. Morgenstern
Published: January 2018

Chapter 6 introduces quantum-mechanical ensemble theory by proving the asymptotic equivalence of the quantum-mechanical, microcanonical ensemble average with the quantum grand canonical ensemble average for many-particle systems, based on the method of Darwin and Fowler. The procedures involved identify the grand partition function, entropy and other statistical thermodynamic variables, including the grand potential, Helmholtz free energy, thermodynamic potential, Gibbs free energy, Enthalpy and their relations in accordance with the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Accompanying saddle-point integrations define temperature (inverse thermal energy) and chemical potential (Fermi energy). The concomitant emergence of quantum statistical mechanics and Bose–Einstein and Fermi–Dirac distribution functions are discussed in detail (including Bose condensation). The magnetic moment is derived from the Helmholtz free energy and is expressed in terms of a one-particle retarded Green’s function with an imaginary time argument related to inverse thermal energy. This is employed in a discussion of diamagnetism and the de Haas-van Alphen effect.
Non-Equilibrium Green’s Functions: Variational Relations and Approximations for Particle Interactions
Authors: Horing Norman J. Morgenstern
Published: January 2018

Chapter 09 Nonequilibrium Green’s functions (NEGF), including coupled-correlated (C) single- and multi-particle Green’s functions, are defined as averages weighted with the time-development operator U(t0+τ,t0). Linear conductivity is exhibited as a two-particle equilibrium Green’s function (Kubo-type formulation). Admitting particle sources (S:η,η+) and non-conservation of number, the non-equilibrium multi-particle Green’s functions are constructed with numbers of creation and annihilation operators that may differ, and they may be derived as variational derivatives with respect to sources η,η+ of a generating functional eW=TrU(t0+τ,t0)CS/TrU(t0+τ,t0)C. (In the non-interacting case this yields the n-particle Green’s function as a permanent/determinant of single-particle Green’s functions.) These variational relations yield a symmetric set of multi-particle Green’s function equations. Cumulants and the Linked Cluster Theorem are discussed and the Random Phase Approximation (RPA) is derived variationally. Schwinger’s variational differential formulation of perturbation theories for the Green’s function, self-energy, vertex operator, and also shielded potential perturbation theory, are reviewed. The Langreth Algebra arises from analytic continuation of integration of products of Green’s functions in imaginary time to the real-time axis with time-ordering along the integration contour in the complex time plane. An account of the Generalized Kadanoff-Baym Ansatz is presented.
Random Phase Approximation Plasma Phenomenology, Semiclassical and Hydrodynamic Models; Electrodynamics
Authors: Horing Norman J. Morgenstern
Published: January 2018

Chapter 10 reviews both homogeneous and inhomogeneous quantum plasma dielectric response phenomenology starting with the RPA polarizability ring diagram in terms of thermal Green’s functions, also energy eigenfunctions. The homogeneous dynamic, non-local inverse dielectric screening functions (K) are exhibited for 3D, 2D, and 1D, encompassing the non-local plasmon spectra and static shielding (e.g. Friedel oscillations and Debye-Thomas-Fermi shielding). The role of a quantizing magnetic field in K is reviewed. Analytically simpler models are described: the semiclassical and classical limits and the hydrodynamic model, including surface plasmons. Exchange and correlation energies are discussed. The van der Waals interaction of two neutral polarizable systems (e.g. physisorption) is described by their individual two-particle Green’s functions: It devolves upon the role of the dynamic, non-local plasma image potential due to screening. The inverse dielectric screening function K also plays a central role in energy loss spectroscopy. Chapter 10 introduces electromagnetic dyadic Green’s functions and the inverse dielectric tensor; also the RPA dynamic, non-local conductivity tensor with application to a planar quantum well. Kramers–Krönig relations are discussed. Determination of electromagnetic response of a compound nanostructure system having several nanostructured parts is discussed, with applications to a quantum well in bulk plasma and also to a superlattice, resulting in coupled plasmon spectra and polaritons.