bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy
Authors: Kuusela Oskari
Published: February 2019

This book is an examination of Wittgenstein’s early and late philosophies of logic in relation to accounts of logic and its philosophical significance in early and middle analytic philosophy, with particular reference to Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Strawson. It argues that not only the early but also the later Wittgenstein sought to further develop the logical-philosophical approaches of Frege and Russell. Throughout his career Wittgenstein’s aim was to resolve problems with and address the limitations of Frege’s and Russell’s accounts of logic and their logical methodologies so as to achieve the philosophical progress that originally motivated the logical-philosophical approach. By re-examining the roots and development of analytic philosophy, the book seeks to open up covered-up paths for the further development of analytic philosophy. It explains how Wittgenstein extends logical methodology beyond calculus-based logical methods and how his novel account of the status of logic enables one to do justice to the complexity and richness of language use and thought while retaining rigour and ideals of logic such as simplicity and exactness. The book also outlines the new kind of non-empiricist naturalism developed in Wittgenstein’s later work as well as explaining how Wittgenstein’s account of logic can be used to dissolve the longstanding methodological dispute between the ideal and ordinary language schools of analytic philosophy.
The Tractatus’ Philosophy of Logic and Carnap
Authors: Kuusela Oskari
Published: February 2019

This chapter discusses the relation between the Tractatus’ and Carnap’s philosophies of logic, arguing that Carnap’s position in The Logical Syntax of Language is in certain respects much closer to the Tractatus than has been recognized. Explained in Carnapian terms, the goal of the Tractatus is to introduce, by means of quasi-syntactical sentences, logical principles and concepts of a logical language to be used in philosophical clarification in the formal mode. A distinction between the material and formal mode is therefore part of the Tractatus’ view, and contrary to Carnap’s criticism, the sentences of the Tractatus can be clearly distinguished from nonsensical metaphysical statements. Moreover, despite the Tractatus’ rejection of syntactical statements, there is a correspondence between Wittgenstein’s saying–showing distinction and Carnap’s object-language/syntax-language distinction. Both constitute ways to clarify the logical distinction between the logico-syntactical determinations concerning language and the use of language according to such determinations, a distinction absent in Frege and Russell. Wittgenstein’s distinction thus constitutes a precursor of the object-language/syntax-language distinction which the latter in a certain sense affirms. The saying–showing distinction agrees with Carnap’s position also in marking logic as something that is not true/false about either language or reality, a view that underlies Carnap’s principle of tolerance. The standard view that Carnap overcame the philosophy of logic of the Tractatus in the 1930s must therefore be regarded as problematic and misleading.
Resolving the Dispute Between Ideal and Ordinary Language Approaches
Authors: Kuusela Oskari
Published: February 2019

This chapter addresses the long-standing dispute on logic and philosophical methodology between the so-called ideal and ordinary language schools of analytic philosophy, and proposes a resolution to it. While the ideal language school emphasizes the importance of the simplicity and exactness of concepts for philosophical clarity, the ordinary language school regards it as crucial to philosophy to clarify the concepts and the uses of natural language in their actual complexity, viewing emphasis on simplicity and exactness as misguided. For the ideal language school this, again, comes across as a dismissal of good scientific methodology. The proposed resolution draws on the later Wittgenstein’s account of idealization in logic, from the point of view of which the notion of relevance is crucial for understanding the completeness of philosophical accounts. This enables us to satisfy simultaneously the different requirements of the two schools for an adequate method, explaining how one can both meet the ideals of simplicity and exactness in logical clarification and acknowledge the complexity of the concepts and uses of natural language. The last section compares Wittgensteinian clarificatory models with Carnapian explications, and explains the benefits of the former over the latter.
Measuring Metabolic Rates
Authors: Lighton John R. B.
Published: February 2019

Measuring Metabolic Rates demystifies the field of metabolic rate measurement, explaining every common variation of the art, from century-old manometric methods through ingenious syringe-based techniques, direct calorimetry, aquatic respirometry, stable-isotope metabolic measurement, and every type of flow-through respirometry. Each variation is described in enough detail to allow it to be applied in practice. Special chapters are devoted to metabolic phenotyping and human metabolic measurement, including room calorimetry. Background information on different analyzer and equipment types allows users to choose the best instruments for their application. Respirometry equations—normally a topic of terror and confusion to researchers—are derived and described in enough detail to make their selection and use effortless. Tools and skills—many of them open source—that will amplify the innovative researcher’s capabilities are described. Vital topics such as manual and automated baselining, implementing multi-animal systems, common pitfalls, and the correct analysis and presentation of metabolic data are covered in enough detail to turn a respirometry neophyte into a hardened metabolic warrior, ready to take on the task of publication in peer-reviewed journals with confidence.
Constant Volume and Constant Pressure Respirometry
Authors: Lighton John R. B.
Published: February 2019

This chapter describes constant pressure (Gilson) and constant volume (Warburg) respirometry—long-established techniques that are still capable of accurate results. These are useful for measuring the metabolic rates of small organisms, cell cultures, and biochemical preparations. In Gilson respirometry, oxygen consumption is measured by reducing the volume of a sealed system to maintain a constant pressure. In Warburg respirometry, oxygen consumption is measured by quantifying the accompanying drop in the pressure of a sealed system, the volume of which is known. The theory and practical details of implementing both techniques are described in detail. Finally, a more modern, computerized alternative to Warburg respirometry is introduced that can be implemented at low cost.
Cartographies of the Untimely in Postcolonial Historical Realism
Authors: Forter Greg
Published: February 2019

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies develop cognitive-affective maps of empire that reveal its totalizing ambitions. They deploy realist techniques to do so while displaying an intense self-consciousness about such techniques’ limitations. The maps they draw link the Atlantic world (and slavery) with the Indian Ocean (and indentured servitude). This angle of vision moves the historical novel’s frame of reference beyond both the nation and the mono-oceanic paradigms that have emerged as alternatives to nation-based understandings. Finally, and drawing especially on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, the chapter shows that the novels retrieve from historicist time the inassimilable, heterotemporal residues of utopian alternatives to the colonial, which draw upon while radically refashioning “premodern” and pre-secular modes of affinity.
Tragedy, Romance, Satire
Authors: Forter Greg
Published: February 2019

This chapter challenges David Scott’s contention that we should shift from Romance to tragedy in recounting the history of colonialism’s overcoming. This shift in genre means, for Scott, moving from a pre-Foucauldian understanding of power to a Foucauldian view in which the institutions of colonial modernity produce the colonized subject—and hence, cannot be meaningfully overthrown. J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women subvert Scott’s oppositions and reveal the limits of his prescriptions. Farrell’s text develops a satirical form that, in its depiction of the Indian Mutiny, exposes British power-knowledge as an ideological mystification for which there is indeed an “outside”—namely, the Indians’ insurrectionary agency. James’s text shows how power on the colonial plantation relied on the spectacle of the scaffold rather than the insidious tentacles of disciplinary power. The scaffold functioned to prohibit both full humanity and interracial “love,” Enlightenment promises that only the violence of slave rebellion could hope to fulfil.
From National Bildung to Postcolonial Transnationalism
Authors: Forter Greg
Published: February 2019

This chapter links colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism/cosmopolitanism to the genre of the Bildungsroman. The chapter’s theoretical reference points are Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. and Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality: two influential critical works that offer incommensurate analyses of the Bildungsroman in relation to postcolonial nationalism (and the transnational). I show how Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows offer more fruitful accounts of these matters than both theorists. The novels complicate Cheah’s emphasis on the emancipatory potential of national Bildung by revealing the transnational assemblages that precede and exceed the nation’s formation. But they also resist the account of transnationalism identified by Slaughter, in which apparently cosmopolitan commitments disguise the continued coercions of Bildung as a disciplinary technique for subject-formation. Finally, each novel attends to the corporeal dimension of cosmopolitan solidarities and, in Shamsie’s case, links that corporeality to linguistic translation and the concept of the untranslatable.
Afterword
Authors: Forter Greg
Published: February 2019

The Afterword recapitulates the book’s main ideas and discusses some of the paths not taken, especially theoretically. It reiterates the value of postcolonial historical fiction’s effort to anatomize the colonial past and retrieve from that past the residue of utopian futurity. The chapter grants the fruitfulness of a recent turn toward sociological models in postcolonial studies—especially those derived from Pierre Bourdieu—while reaffirming the book’s commitment to a dialectic of critique and utopian recovery. It argues, finally, that the trenchant critiques of colonialism in postcolonial historical fiction make the genre’s utopian visions rigorous, hard-earned—and hence worthy of continued investment.
Greece
Authors: Matsaganis Manos
Published: February 2019

Manos Matsaganis provides an account of the most severe crisis of the Great Recession: that of Greece. He explains the conditions at the start of the crisis and how the situation developed. Greece was the first Euro area member to request a bailout, which was granted in return for massive fiscal consolidation and structural reforms. Matsaganis explains the bailout programme and its conditions, progress, and consequences, particularly the adverse effects of the austerity measures on living standards and poverty. The Greek welfare state was weak before the crisis hit and lacked a minimum income protection scheme. Thus it was incapable of providing shelter against the massive crisis impact, as reflected in the very large increase of financial hardship from 2007 to 2014 in most socio-economic groups. Matsaganis lastly reflects on the politics of welfare and how the crisis has affected the Greek welfare state to date.
Perfect Deterrence Theory
Authors: Zagare Frank C.
Published: February 2019

This chapter introduces perfect deterrence theory and contrasts it with classical deterrence theory, which is the prevailing realist theory of interstate war prevention. How and under what conditions war might be prevented is the principal question addressed by both theories. The assumptions, empirical implications, and policy prescriptions of the two approaches to deterrence are discussed. Classical deterrence theory is shown to have both logical and empirical problems. Perfect deterrence theory, which is composed of a number of interrelated game models that are analyzed under a common set of preference assumptions, is not only logically consistent but empirically robust as well.
Strange Apathy
Authors: Wolff Nathan
Published: February 2019

This chapter challenges the critical consensus that Helen Hunt Jackson fashioned her Indian reform novel Ramona (1884) after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, insofar as sympathy for her indigenous protagonists promises to bring them into the fold of personhood. As Jackson well knew, designating American Indians as persons was fully consistent with policies designed to dissolve tribal affiliations. By recovering Jackson’s stated interest in modeling her novel on the story of a hunted deer, and by drawing on theories of depression as a political emotion, the chapter rejects accounts of Ramona’s “sentimentality” while insisting that the novel’s aesthetic strategies are deeply affective. Specifically, it draws on Giorgio Agamben’s later notion of “bare life” to support a claim that Ramona lingers with animal-like desperation and depression to register the loss of tribal forms of political life and to trouble bureaucratic visions of efficiently managed populations.
Cabinets, Constitutions, and Parliamentary Representation
Authors: Ross Anna
Published: February 2019

This chapter traces the formation of the Brandenburg–Manteuffel and Manteuffel Ministries of State, and their efforts to bring revolutionary unrest to an end. Ending revolutionary instability included addressing calls for Prussia to enter the constitutional age by debating basic rights, the merits of a constitution, and a representative system. The resulting ‘System Manteuffel’ was a surprise to many, especially as Manteuffel elided the interests of those on the political extremes, making their agendas appear dangerously retrograde. And, yet, this impulse to find a moderate path out of revolutionary upheaval was not unique to Prussia. As a result, the analysis of the politics of the Prussian Ministry of State in the 1850s is couched within a larger framework of government activity across the German states.
Conclusion
Authors: Ross Anna
Published: February 2019

This chapter draws together the themes raised in the book. It reminds the reader that the Minister-President Brandenburg was appointed to restore monarchy and this he did with tenacity, but not in the way expected by the king or the court camarilla. Manteuffel too confounded expectations. Throughout their terms in office, these ministers eschewed ideological agendas in preference for realist settlements that would strengthen and extend the reach of the state. The bureaucracy was essential to carrying out these reforms, ushering in new forms of legal certainty, economic growth, and social reform. This chapter concludes that the reforms of the 1850s were formative for the development of the Prussian state—a second Reform Era. And it ends with a reflection on the legacies of this period for the formation of Imperial Germany.
Preliminaries
Authors: Pawl Timothy
Published: February 2019

This chapter sets the stage for the philosophical argumentation to come in the following chapters. It discusses the importance of the ecumenical councils to many Christian denominations. It then goes on to explicate the teaching of the first seven ecumenical councils concerning Christ. Next, it provides an understanding of the metaphysical terms and concepts employed in the councils, including “nature,” “supposit,” and “person.” This understanding is broadly Thomistic. It differentiates multiple meanings that the term “nature” might have, and it discusses which usage fits best with the conciliar evidence. Finally, it discusses the predicates we might rightly say of the human nature that Christ assumed in the incarnation.
Christ and the Interim State
Authors: Pawl Timothy
Published: February 2019

Traditional Christian doctrine teaches that Christ was dead for three days, and that, during those days, he descended into hell. Does this teaching, when conjoined with Conciliar Christology, imply the truth of a contradiction? This chapter considers an argument attempting to show that it does. The argument can be put as follows. Relations require the existence of their relata; so the Son cannot assume something or hypostatically unite it to his divine nature if it isn’t. But during the three days that Christ was dead—during that interim state—there was no human nature there to be assumed. And so, at least for those three days, the hypostatic union was not. But then, it follows that the hypostatic union is not permanent, and that the natures are separable, contrary to Conciliar Christology. Thus, there is a difficulty for Extended Conciliar Christology. The chapter provides six replies to that argument, weighing the costs and benefits of each reply.
Christ’s Knowledge in Relation to his Will
Authors: Pawl Timothy
Published: February 2019

This chapter considers the thesis that Christ, via his human intellect, knew all things past, present, and future. Chapter 7 asked whether such an extension implies that we mundane humans are not free. This chapter asks whether Christ himself was not free, owing to his foreknowledge. The chapter considers two arguments for the claim that Christ is unfree, given his foreknowledge. The first argument focuses on the requirements for freedom, which seem to include deliberation. Since one cannot deliberate about something one is certain about, it seems to follow that he couldn’t deliberate about his future actions. The second argument focuses on the explanatory relations between Christ’s knowing and his choosing. Explanatory circles are impossible, but if he knew what he was going to do before he chose to do it, there is some reason to believe that this would imply the possibility of an explanatory circle. The chapter concludes that both arguments are unsound.
Conclusion
Authors: Pawl Timothy
Published: February 2019

The conclusion brings together all five extensions discussed in the book: the claim that multiple incarnations are possible; the claim that Christ descended into hell during his three days of death; the claim that Christ’s human will was free; the claim that Christ was impeccable; and the claim that Christ, via his human intellect, knew all things past, present, and future. Previous chapters have discussed objections directed at subsets of these extensions, but none has focused on whether all five extensions are somehow internally inconsistent. The conclusion considers this question, arguing that there is no good reason to think that they are internally inconsistent. The overall conclusion of the book is stated: There is no extant philosophical argument against Extended Conciliar Christology that shows it to be incoherent or inconsistent.
Greek Tragedy and Hebrew Antiquity in John Milton’s 1671 Poems
Authors: Leo Russ
Published: February 2019

Chapter 5 examines Milton’s detailed engagements with Reformation poetics that render tragedy a precise philosophical and theological resource. In his 1671 poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton responds directly to Reformed poetics, pointing methodically to the limits of tragedy, exposing the extent to which divinity and its agencies exceed and confound the philosophical vision of the Poetics. In Paradise Regain’d, for instance, Milton’s Jesus relocates the birth of tragedy from Athens to the Levant, claiming that tragedy belongs first to the Hebrews. Greek tragedy is thus derivative and degraded; Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristotle, to say nothing of the traditions to which they gave rise, appropriated tragic forms and resources from Hebrew antiquity. Milton advances Pareus’ theses on tragedy and Scripture beyond the scope of Pareus’ own text, arguing for a more comprehensive Christian archive of tragedy as well as a daring account of tragedy’s sacred origins.
Conclusion
Authors: Leo Russ
Published: February 2019

The Conclusion traces how Milton investigates the extent to which tragedy is able to render divinity intelligible. If Reformation tragedy offers pointed insight into probability and necessity in nature, or serves as an object lesson in immanent causality, Samson Agonistes troubles such pursuits, illuminating instead the fundamental limits of both tragedy and human comprehension. In Heinsius’ treatments of tragedy, for instance, miracles are rare, and intervening gods generally confound otherwise laudable attempts to understand causality in nature. Divine intervention is no less difficult to discern in Samson Agonistes; Milton is skeptical, however, of tragedy’s capacity to render either God or totality intelligible as such. The philosophical account of tragedy that emerges across this book reaches an impasse in Milton’s 1671 poems, works that nonetheless look forward to other philosophical horizons for tragedy in modernity.
Adjudicating the European Social Market
Authors: Gerstenberg Oliver
Published: February 2019

At a first glance, to many observers the EU may appear to be an improbable illustration of the possibility of an extension of legitimacy and democratic justice beyond the state. In contemporary European constitutional debate constitutionalism and social democracy have become antagonists, with the survival of the one seeming to require sacrifice of the other. Authors in the tradition of ordoliberalism have celebrated the Europeanization process because it seemed to ultimately disconnect constitutionalism from democratic practice and to firmly entrench a logic of market evolution that marginalizes politics. Social democrats, by contrast, have come to believe that democracy can only flourish if the solidary politics of the nation retains its sovereignty against cosmopolitan, ‘constitutional’ intrusions from without. Proposals to deepen constitutional integration therefore give rise to the social-democratic objection. This chapter offers a stylized account of both views, which more or less mirror one another. This chapter then also provides an in-depth analysis of the CJEU’s jurisprudence in various domains regarding the efficacy of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFREU) in European private law: employment law and unfair terms in consumer contracts in particular. The chapter concludes that, contrary to expectations and concerns about a constitutional asymmetry between economic freedoms and fundamental social rights, the CJEU has in fact in many cases raised the standard of protection beyond the standard envisaged by national legal orders, thereby unblocking development.
Democratic Experimentalism and the Public Sphere
Authors: Gerstenberg Oliver
Published: February 2019

This chapter argues that democratic-experimentalist forms of judicial review should not be confined to socioeconomic rights but can also be invoked with negative liberties and dignitarian personal rights. An apparent dilemma is this: on the one hand, modern, pluralist democracies are increasingly, and often irreconcilably, divided when it comes to fundamental choices which affect and express the self-understanding of a polity as a whole in matters such as, say, the right to religious freedom, free speech, the rights of transsexuals, and so forth. These matters have even become the subject of entrenched culture wars. And yet, on the other hand, there is an ever-accelerating reliance on courts and the judiciary for addressing those fundamental choices. The judiciary’s influence extends beyond settling disputes and seeps into all aspects of society, codifying the values of our times. But doesn’t this overstretch the resources of consensus-based legality? The concern is that judges are drawn into the crucible of pluralistic politics. By considering the jurisprudence of both the ECtHR and the CJEU, this chapter argues that even here courts can play a benign proceduralizing role, giving voice to the hitherto marginalized. The chapter addresses selected topical issues: the important example of freedom of conscience, which in Europe emerged after many centuries of religious persecution; the clash between free speech and personality rights; and personality rights in the context of (trans-) gender rights and same-sex marriage.
Conclusion
Authors: Gerstenberg Oliver
Published: February 2019

By engaging with democratic-minded objections and rule-of-law based critiques of constitutionalism, this book has suggested that, counterintuitively, a retreat from judicial supremacy becomes the most promising route towards redeeming fundamental social and personal rights under modern conditions of deep moral dissensus and complexity. But this step would indeed amount to an abdication of judicial role and responsibility—as both these critiques fear—unless it goes hand in hand with a moral-practical emphasis on the proceduralizing—that is, forum-creative and agenda-setting—role of courts in the process of a progressive clarification of the meaning of a right. But ongoing deliberation does not mean indefinite postponement of substantive resolution because the underlying proceduralist consensus is robust enough to express a commitment to mutual recognition of participants as stakeholders with legitimate interests. This proceduralist move addresses uncertainty in encouraging joint learning about unforeseen possibilities and limits. It helps legitimize decisionmaking in pluralism by authorizing the participation in the undertakings that concern them and by making a best-practice consensus routinely corrigible. Outcomes are legitimate as long as procedures are sufficiently inclusive to allow citizens whose interpretive views do not prevail to (re-) initiate scrutiny and revision of shared constitutional understandings in the light of new experience. Courts require attentions to relevant reasons. Over time, when interpretive answers have crystallized in the light of experience and mutual reason giving, courts can then shift towards stronger forms of judicial intervention that consolidate best practice. It is this proceduralizing move that Euroconstitutionalism epitomizes.
Pre-Aristotelian Homeric Scholarship and Aristotle’s Poetics 25
Authors: Mayhew Robert
Published: February 2019

This chapter has two parts, each of which discusses an aspect of the context necessary for understanding the Homeric Problems. The first surveys the ancient Homeric scholarship that came before Aristotle: early critics of Homer on moral grounds, defenses of Homer through allegorical interpretation, the critiques of Plato and Zoilus. The second part discusses Aristotle’s recommendations for responding to objections to Homer, through a close study of Poetics 25, which specifically deals with providing solutions to Homeric problems.
The Evidence from the History of Animals
Authors: Mayhew Robert
Published: February 2019

This chapter attempts to expand our knowledge of Aristotle’s Homeric Problems through an examination in context of the nine references to Homer in Aristotle’s History of Animals. Topics include: the unusual anatomical description in the account of the death of Thoön in Iliad 13; the longevity of Odyssey’s dog Argos; the two names of a bird in Iliad 14 (chalkis and kumindis); and the powerful eagle of Iliad 24. It is argued that, taken together, they likely provide additional evidence about the content of the Homeric Problems, and how Aristotle approached some of the debates engaged in by Homeric scholars in antiquity.
The Evidence from Poetics 21
Authors: Mayhew Robert
Published: February 2019

This chapter attempts to expand our knowledge of Aristotle’s Homeric Problems through an examination in context of a select number of references to Homer in Aristotle’s Poetics 21. This chapter consists of a classification of the kinds of names or words, with a view to analyzing tragedy and epic poetry. The focus is particularly on the longest and most important section, words classified according to usage or form (that is, words that are foreign, made-up, lengthened, shortened, or altered). The chapter shows that there can be little doubt that the content of Poetics 21 reflects material that also appeared in the Homeric Problems.
Aristotle on the Meaning of τάλαντον‎ in Iliad 23
Authors: Mayhew Robert
Published: February 2019

Unlike most of the chapters in this volume, the present chapter is focused on a set of related Homeric scholia that have received a fair amount of attention. They contain Aristotle’s solution to a problem concerning the value of a talent in Iliad 23, specifically: Why does Achilles give the greatest prize (two talents of gold) to the fourth-place contestant in the chariot race? But though these texts have received scholarly attention, their presentation—in editions of the scholia and in the collections of the fragments of Aristotle—is not always clear or complete, and the discussion of this material not always or entirely satisfactory. So this is a fresh look at the available evidence, going back to the manuscripts themselves.
The Making of an Eclectic Archive
Authors: Anderson Clare
Published: February 2019

This chapter takes a transnational and connected history approach to the papers of Surgeon-General J.P. Walker, who was employed in the Indian Medical Service in the nineteenth century. Upon his retirement he began the process of compiling a great dictionary that reflected his medical interest in eclectic and specific medicine. Despite the surprising elision of ‘India’ from the draft of his great medical dictionary, its incorporation of the medical knowledge of Africans and Indigenous Americans reveals the globality that underpinned his medical knowledge and practice. In this respect, a critical reading of the epistemology of Walker's archive enables a new understanding of the relationship between medicine in and of Britain, South Asia and North America during the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Authors: Bhrugubanda Uma Maheswari
Published: February 2019

The introduction outlines a genealogy of how cinema and other media created new cultural contexts and new cultural subjects in the twentieth century India, thereby transforming religion and producing the hybrid figure of the citizen–devotee. The first section presents conceptual debates on secularism, citizenship, religion and media, embodiment and affect that frame this study. The second section is a detailed account of the mythological and devotional genres in Indian cinema and the predominant critical frameworks. The third focuses on the history of Telugu cinema tracing the different performative traditions and oral and printed texts that form a basis for these genres. It argues that both cinema technology and new political contexts mediate existing texts and traditions significantly. The final section describes the historical and ethnographic methods adopted in the study and the range of materials—film texts, publicity material, interviews, memoirs, and biographies of film-makers—used.
Embodied Engagements
Authors: Bhrugubanda Uma Maheswari
Published: February 2019

Through ethnographic explorations of the question of viewership, this chapter shifts the focus from film texts to film-viewing contexts. It critically reflects upon the embodied character of viewer engagement with mythological and devotional cinema through a special focus on the figure of the possessed spectator. It theorizes the interesting intersections between film viewership and religious practice through the concept of habitus. It engages with the question, does affective engagement necessarily preclude critical and rational engagement with the narrative? It argues that viewers bring with them to the cinema embodied dispositions and sensibilities, that is, a particular habitus that has been cultivated in traditional performative contexts and this shapes their responses. However, this does not necessarily render them passive or uncritical in their engagement with film.
Marketing Sudhā (1927–41)
Authors: Nijhawan Shobna
Published: February 2019

Chapter 2 provides an introduction and discussion of Sudhā’s peritext as well as of Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā and Sudhā’s contributors, objectives, customer care, and marketing strategies. It begins with a horizontal reading of the periodical, showing how it consisted of two major parts that disseminated knowledge through the essay and through poetry and fiction offering a blend of ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ (Part I) and through a diversity of more practically oriented columns, one of which was a readers’ digest and a lengthy editorial, which also offered a blend of entertaining and educational knowledge (Part II). It considers the periodical’s visual layout as central to understanding its positioning as modern while also being rooted in Vaishnava tradition and devotion towards Rama and Krishna in particular. The visuals are also indicative of new conceptualizations of women in liminal spaces and their relationship to the publishing world in the Hindi public sphere.
Sensationalizing Hindi
Authors: Mody Sujata S.
Published: February 2019

Dwivedi’s attempt to sway his public through verbal and visual rhetoric is the primary focus of Chapter 1. Resorting to scaremongering and sensationalism, Dwivedi issues a variety of warnings concerning the fate of Hindi via a series of satirical literary cartoons. His concepts for the cartoons convey a literary-visual narrative in which obstacles to Hindi loom large and, unless appropriate measures are taken, foretell its doom. Dwivedi reproaches self-serving editors, dated patrons, foolhardy critics, and pandering authors; he also identifies specific adversaries to Hindi’s advancement both within and outside his field of influence. The cartoons vividly convey Dwivedi’s vision of a disparate Hindi public riddled by threats and his preferred agenda for progress. They represent a pioneering experiment in influencing public literary sentiment via a multimedia rhetorical strategy and signal the beginning of a new era in which Hindi literature moves forward in direct collaboration with visual content.
Prescriptive Prose
Authors: Mody Sujata S.
Published: February 2019

Chapter 2 examines Dwivedi’s programmatic essays, focusing on his construction of literature as a culturally embedded category of national consequence. His theorization of Hindi literature as broadly inclusive in its definition and function, though faced with some criticism from his peers, serves an immediate need: to stimulate the growth of a national body of literature. At the same time, historical and linguistic parameters and a prioritized plan of literary production reify the notion of a modern category oriented towards a narrowly constructed national collective that seeks to establish its sovereign identity via literature in only Khari Boli Hindi. Dwivedi’s prose prescribes a project of literary self-determination that privileges Indian literary activity with this variety of Hindi as the preferred lead language of the emergent nation, with all the risks that such restriction entails.
Shikar in the Princely Reserves
Authors: Mandala Vijaya Ramadas
Published: February 2019

Chapter 4 examines the complex relations between the British and Indian princes in relation to shikar and the political subtext of power politics at play. The reconstitution of Indian ruling values and identities between the British and Indian princes under the umbrella of big-game hunting is an important arena of colonial fabric. The Britons successfully mobilized these in establishing elitism and hierarchy in the realm of hunting, and enlisting the support of the Indian princes for the continuation of the colonial enterprise. The other important aspect of hunting in India was shikar in the princely reserves, maintained exclusively by Indian rulers for the highest ranks of the colonial elite. Hunting on such occasions was an extravagant affair involving state elephants and other elaborate entourage, in a powerful display of ancient and more recent ruling privileges, and underlining critical political alliances between the princes and the Raj. For the British, the royal shikars lent ritual credence to their political authority in a staged show of solidarity with the traditional rulers of the land. While confirming the solidarity of the ruling classes, the shikar expeditions also tested the strength of bonds between the British and Indian rulers. The colonial government’s endeavour to devise a series of British royal tours in the princely states involving big-game shoots and associated courtly trappings implies a shared aristocratic lineage and desire to promote the idea of Indian empire.
A Political History of Literature
Authors: Jha Pankaj
Published: February 2019

Vidyapati was a poet and a scholar who lived in the fifteenth century north Bihar and composed nearly a dozen texts on varied themes in three languages. The book focuses on three of Vidyapati’s texts: Likhanāvalī, a Sanskrit treatise on writing letters and documents; Puruṣaparīkṣā, a Sanskrit compilation of mytho-historical stories focused on masculinity and political ethics; and Kīrtilatā, a political biography in Apabhraṃśa of a prince of Mithila composed in the ākhyāyikā style. Together, these compositions provide an exciting entry point into the knowledge formations of the fifteenth century. As such, the book marks a fascinating reading of politics in the literatures of a time that is known for a notorious absence of any ‘imperial’ formation. It does so by placing each of the three texts side by side with other texts composed earlier on identical or similar themes, genres, and ideas in the same and other languages. A critical historicization of the language, composition, and contents of the texts reveal an exciting and messy world of idioms, ideas, and skills drawn from different literary-political traditions. Strikingly, each upheld the ideal of imperium and provided for the cultivation of skills, ethics, and useable pasts appropriate for imperial projects. The book argues that the literary visions that sustained (and gained from) the imperial states in the earlier centuries did not disappear with the disintegration of the Delhi Sultanate. They lingered and found hospitable grounds in humbler locations. Vidyapati inherited and reworked these visions into newer, more ‘actionable’ knowledge forms.
Entangled Vines of Glory
Authors: Jha Pankaj
Published: February 2019

This chapter focuses on Kīrttilatā, a political biography of a Mithila prince, composed in Avahaṭṭha, a register of Apabhraṃśa. It locates the text within the larger literary traditions of Sanskrit, Persian, and Apabhraṃśa vis-à-vis language, genre, narrative structure as well as political ideals. Its language is marked by a large number of both Sanskrit and Persian words, a practice that signals a deeper, if less visible, move towards a politico-ideological mutation. The chapter demonstrates that at the core of the ideals of Kīrttilatā was the aspiration for an imperial formation with universal claims, majestic courts and supreme authority. Clearly, the age-old Sanskritic ideal of rājyam was not forsaken in the middle of the ‘vernacular’ century. Rather, it found a renewed articulation in a reworked form in a language that was, according to Vidyapati ‘sweet to all’.
The Imperial Record Department
Authors: Bhattacharya Sabyasachi
Published: February 2019

The Imperial Record Department was formed in March 1891. This chapter looks at the objectives and issues before the new Record Department in the first 25 years of its life. While the stronger voice from within the bureaucracy spoke of the archive as an instrument of governance, there was another approach that laid emphasis on ideological issues, Britain’s imperial image, and the interpretation of the past of the Indian Empire. The chapter also explores the routine functions that the Imperial Record Department was expected to perform. It also traces the events that serve to illustrate, first, the stout resistance of the bureaucracy to opening the records not only of the British Indian government, but also records of pre-British regimes in their possession, and second, the equally staunch struggle of the Indian intelligentsia to recover their own historical records.
Anticipations of Freedom
Authors: Bhattacharya Sabyasachi
Published: February 2019

In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. In the domain of archiving these were chiefly felt in the form of reversal of earlier policies. The biggest change was that the habit of looking at the records as resources exclusively to be used by the civil servants for purposes of governance was abandoned. The resistance of the bureaucracy from the 1860s to opening the records to the Indian public was overcome. And, above all, the locus of policymaking shifted in the 1920s to the Indian Historical Records Commission, consisting of leading Indian historians who outnumbered the ‘official’ members who represented the government record offices. The period spanning the beginning of the nineteenth century to the last years of British rule in India saw the evolution from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric approach.
The First Miracles
Authors: Wiśniewski Robert
Published: February 2019

In the first half of the fourth century Christians did not expect to see miracles in their lifetimes. This chapter explains how this attitude changed throughout the following decades. Above all, it emphasizes the importance of the newly created infrastructure of Christian sanctuaries owing to which they developed into healing centres. It discusses their monumental architecture, the teeming crowds of pilgrims, almsgiving practised in martyria, and the presence of the sick in sanctuaries. Also, it sets the belief in power of relics against the wider background of Christian thaumaturgy and addresses the question of how the belief in the power of relics spread throughout the Mediterranean.
Relics and Divination
Authors: Wiśniewski Robert
Published: February 2019

As early as in the second half of the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus assured his audience that the saints, living or dead, had the power to predict the future. This chapter seeks to explain how such predictions were obtained. There were at least three divinatory practices in which relics could be used: incubation in martyrs’ sanctuaries, interrogation of demoniacs in the presence of relics, and the drawing of lots on martyrs’ tombs. The problem is that the literary evidence for the first practice in the early period is rather scarce, for the second, exceedingly scanty, while for the third it is simply non-existent (we only know about it from material evidence). This reticence of the written sources does not necessarily reflect the actual popularity of these methods and plausibly results from their ambiguous character—neither praised nor condemned, they have left very few traces in literature.
Touching Relics
Authors: Wiśniewski Robert
Published: February 2019

It is often implied that adherents of most religions naturally seek to come close to sacred objects. This chapter shows that in early Christianity this was not always the case. It studies the evolution of attitudes toward the physical remains of saints, dealing with the question of how the taboo of contact with a dead body lost its power. Also, it deals with how close, direct, and frequent the physical contact with relics was, how and how often they were exposed for veneration, whether it was possible to touch a reliquary or relics themselves, how indirect relics were produced, and what made them efficient.
Eastern, Western, and Local Habits in the Cult of Relics
Authors: Wiśniewski Robert
Published: February 2019

The cult of relics spread with what was an astonishing speed. This chapter addresses the questions of whether in this process the cult of relics evolved locally, and especially whether the general distinction between Eastern and Western customs is useful for describing it. The chapter argues that although several practices did indeed develop in specific places and remained more popular in their regions of origin, they did proliferate nonetheless. The diversity of customs in this field never disappeared, but is mostly due to limited contacts between different regions and to a lack of interest in making the cult of relics uniform.
Comparison: Critiques and Challenges
Authors: Freiberger Oliver
Published: February 2019

This chapter addresses theoretical critiques that have been raised and challenges with which comparison is confronted. It first demonstrates that comparison has been used in service of different and contradictory agendas—affirmative or critical of religion—and is therefore not tied to any specific ideological framework. It discusses the most common objections: that comparative studies decontextualize and essentialize religious phenomena. It then engages with postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques of the comparative method and their insistence on acknowledging difference. Turning to the opposite side of the academic spectrum, the chapter reviews the relation of naturalistic approaches (such as the cognitive science of religion) to comparison and their focus on universals and sameness. Acknowledging the critiques and challenges and recognizing their limitations sets the stage for the reflections about comparative methodology in Chapter 3.
Comparison in Theory: A Scholar-Centered Approach
Authors: Freiberger Oliver
Published: February 2019

Incorporating the insights gained from discussing the postmodernist and postcolonialist critiques as well as the naturalistic approaches in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the epistemology of comparison. It takes a close look at the origin and genesis of the comparands and the tertium comparationis as well as their mutual relationship, arguing that they have been connected to each other in the mind of the scholar and/or in the academic discourse long before the actual comparative study begins. It explores how items are being delineated and distinguished from their context by identifying both empirical and theoretical properties in view of them becoming comparands. It also reflects upon the role of the tertium comparationis, the point in view of which items are compared. Finally, the chapter proposes a scholar-centered approach to comparative methodology that takes the situatedness of the scholar seriously but also acknowledges her or his agency in conducting a comparative study.
Science granting councils in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends and tensions
Authors: Chataway Joanna , Dobson Charlie , Daniels Chux , Byrne Rob , Hanlin Rebecca , Tigabu Aschalew
Published: February 2019

This article documents recent trends in science funding support in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We analyse these trends at the SSA regional level alongside a summary of four case studies of science funding in four Science Granting Councils (SGCs) in East Africa. Our findings support the literature on science funding in SSA regarding low levels of funding, cross-country engagement, and the need for capacity building. However, we also find there are tensions among funding and policy actors around the perceived ways in which investment in science will benefit society. We argue that the narratives and logics of science funders and their roots in ‘Republic of Science’ vs. ‘Embedded Autonomy’ rationales for SGC activity must be more transparent to enable critical engagement with the ideas being used to justify spending.