bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The 1970s
Authors: Mordden Ethan
Published: March 2023

This chapter looks into the proliferation of gay characters in media such as theatre, magazines, and television from the 1960s onwards. It notes how Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind (1970) became a Zeitgeist novel as a Stonewall-era infrastructure was developing. Likewise, After Dark (1968) became the Zeitgeist magazine that covered theatre, film, pop and classical music, cabaret, fashion, and travel alongside illustrations that are as homoerotic as The Lord Won’t Mind. The chapter then considers how the Stonewall culture was taking shape in New York. Moreover, it recognizes the theatres and musicals’ efforts to up their commitment to discovering the existence of gay people through performances such as Applause (1970), The Boys In the Band (1968), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), and Tubstrip (1973).
The 1990s and 2000s
Authors: Mordden Ethan
Published: March 2023

This chapter looks at how gay culture has been featured in theatre plays. It discusses the quality and themes of Terence McNally’s plays, for example Love! Valor! Compassion! (1994) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993). Most of his works are either openly or subtly gay. Musicals were becoming very comfortable with gay emancipation by the 1990s. Thus, plays like The Faggot and When Pigs Fly seem to have a strong political leaning but they didn’t contain much in the way of comedy. However, Avenue Q (2003) takes a unique stance with catchy music, clever lyrics, and an extra layer of fun similar to Sesame Street. The chapter also raises the problem of characters being stereotyped and Hollywood homophobia.
More than Toil
Authors: Lynn Andrew
Published: March 2023

This chapter introduces the American evangelical faith and work movement. Beginning in the mid-century decades, American evangelicals began pouring resources and energies into organizations and efforts that could confer meaning on secular work. A review of books published through this era reveals a growing worry about the secular world of “Monday,” a term that represents larger anxieties of the economic realm. A sociological analysis suggests that this concern was a product of changing social-institutional dynamics that shaped the lifeworlds of conservative evangelicalism. The result of these shifts was a constituency of conservative religious adherents operating at the intersection of two highly demanding meaning systems: a conservative religious framework demanding whole-life devotion and a careerist-based orientation to high-status work also making demands on energy and identity. The faith and work movement is presented as a means of negotiating American evangelicalism’s entry into these work-intensive, career-centric spaces, a space the author labels “creative-class capitalism.”
From Culture Wars to Cultural Stewardship
Authors: Lynn Andrew
Published: March 2023

This chapter looks at the manner in which high-status leaders of the faith and work movement seek to drastically revise evangelicalism’s more fundamental orientation to wider American culture. An account of a faith and work conference in Manhattan provides a snapshot view of how faith and work thinking seeks to make peace with the “worldly” order of secular institutions and economic structures. Leaders of the movement find themselves working against both a cultural retreatism of earlier fundamentalism as well as a culture-warring mentality of more recent political evangelicalism. The central theological resource for steering theology toward a more peaceful orientation to culture is the work of Dutch theologian and thinker Abraham Kuyper. The author analyzes how a “Kuyperian humanism”—premised on recognizing a common grace present among non-religious activity—provides the means to overcome a church-world dualism or resistance to participation in secular institutions. This Kuyperian humanism is then evaluated as a means of assisting elite American evangelicals in assimilating into the dominant structures of American society, drawing on prior historical work on processes of assimilation among Mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic populations.
On Roads Not (Yet) Taken
Authors: Lynn Andrew
Published: March 2023

This chapter places the faith and work movement within a broader backdrop of various orientations toward the economic sphere within the American Protestant religious landscape. Four major strands of theology or movement are surveyed: sectarian Protestantism, Dominionism, Prosperity Gospel, and Communitarian theology. Each strand is also surveyed for its relationship to the faith and work movement. This chapter concludes with an assessment of the future of the faith and work movement. The rise and continual growth of political evangelicalism is identified as the factor most likely to shape the future of American evangelicalism’s orientations to work and economics.
Introduction
Authors: Desmond Hugh , Ramsey Grant
Published: March 2023

Claims that our species is an “evolutionary success” typically do not feature prominently in academic articles. However, they do seem to be a recurring trope in science popularization. Why do we seem to be attracted to viewing human evolution through the lenses of “success”? In this chapter we discuss how evolutionary success has both causal-descriptive and ethical-normative components, and how its ethical status is ambiguous, with possible hints of anthropocentrism. We also place the concept of “success” in a wider context of biological thought, contrasting it with two other value-laden concepts: evolutionary progress and human uniqueness. Claiming the human species to be an evolutionary success is ostensibly grounded in metrics such as the dominance or the size of the human population, but the claim often goes beyond this, suggesting that humans are a unique species or the pinnacle of evolutionary progress.
Human Success as a Complex of Autonomy, Adaptation, and Niche Construction
Authors: Rosslenbroich Bernd
Published: March 2023

The emphasis of the present chapter lies on a neglected feature that can be found throughout evolution. Evolutionary change is to be characterized not only in terms of adaptations to given environments, but also in terms of changes in the degree of autonomy of individual organisms. This is especially evident during the major transitions in animal and human evolution. During the major transitions, organisms increased in stability, robustness, self-regulation, homeostasis, and flexibility. In birds and mammals, this brought about the potential for more flexible and self-determined behaviors. Humans have a special and far-reaching combination of features of autonomy, which serves as the basis for versatility and creativity. The feature of autonomy connects humans to the prehuman history, but at the same time allowed the evolution of human cultural characteristics. Against this backdrop it is proposed that human success cannot be defined only in terms of survival and reproduction, but must include references to autonomy, independence, individualization, and to what is experienced as human freedom.
The Origin and Evolution of Human Uniqueness
Authors: Vermeij Geerat J.
Published: March 2023

Humans are unique among animals in cognition and economic power. Besides some anatomical features that distinguish Homo from other primates, the primary differences that underlie our uniqueness derive from aspects of our exceptional sociality: the use of external energy sources, including the services of other species; a social organization characterized by cooperation among strangers, group identity, and division of labor; the distinctiveness and contributions of named individuals to society; and combinatorial language and music. Our social nature has catapulted humans to planetary monopoly, but it has also allowed the spread of disease and dangerous ideas. Human uniqueness was strongly favored in ecosystems such as those in Africa and Asia, where competition from megafauna was more intense than elsewhere. Human adaptation was initially more strongly influenced by genes, but genetic influences have given way to cultural factors.
Culture as a Life History Character
Authors: Grove Matt
Published: March 2023

Relative to other primates, humans are a uniquely successful species in terms of population size, biomass, and geographical extent. This contribution suggests that the particular constellation of traits that characterizes human uniqueness evolved in concert with our increasing reliance on cultural relative to biological means for dealing with environmental challenges. Ceteris paribus, slower life histories generate less genetic variation per unit time; this leads to the potential for reduced rates of genetic evolution, which in some species leads to a compensatory increase in reliance on the cultural system of innovation and social learning. It is argued that there exists a cognitive continuum, corresponding to a considerable degree to the fast/slow life-history continuum, between animals that reproduce rapidly, have small brains, and rely primarily on the genetic system to track environmental change, and those animals that reproduce slowly, have large brains, and rely primarily on the cultural system to track environmental change. To the extent that Homo sapiens can be regarded as successful, that success stems from an evolutionary trajectory that has positioned our species at the cultural extreme of this continuum.
A Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Perspective on Human Success
Authors: Demps Kathryn , Richerson Peter J.
Published: March 2023

Humans are the last remaining species of hominin, having successfully bested our last human competitors about 50,000 years ago. Big brains and stone tools long predate this success, so why has our recent explosion in biomass happened so recently? This chapter proposes that cultural adaptations, changes in our social organization, and increasing population density led to further developments in cumulative complex culture. In the past 10,000 years, a process of runaway environmental mutualism between humans’ population size, technological complexity, and subsistence productivity has led us through demographic transitions toward an increasing reliance on culture to manage environmental variation. Will our current trajectory lead us to predictable boom-and-bust cycles of population growth or to some sustainable equilibrium? Or will our fleeting success turn out to leave but a thin layer of marine sediments rich in anthropogenic detritus investigated by horseshoe crabs? Perhaps it is too soon to tell.
Anthropocene Patterns in Stratigraphy as a Perspective on Human Success
Authors: Zalasiewicz Jan , Williams, and Mark , Waters Colin
Published: March 2023

The human species has deeply impacted the geology of our planet, our current environmental conditions now being very different from the stable interglacial conditions of the Holocene Epoch, in which human civilization flowered. Hence, a new epoch has been proposed, the Anthropocene, starting in tandem with the mid-20th-century Great Acceleration of population, industrialization, and globalization. One of the clearest measures of human impact on our planet is energy use, as reflected by rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Through this lens, the large-scale historical patterns of human activity show not gradual change but sudden and massive linked changes to geology and ecosystems. This has been driven by growth of the technosphere, a quasi-autonomous and emergent sphere of human-driven processes that interacts with the other Earth spheres. Consequences include the rapid accumulation of unrecycled waste, increasingly threatening the success of this development and hence of humans too.
Utter Success and Extensive Inequity
Authors: Fuentes Agustín
Published: March 2023

Contemporary Homo sapiens’s ecological and geographic range, population growth, and adaptability in the face of micro- and macroenvironmental challenges are substantial. Humans have such an impact at a global scale that the most recent epoch has been dubbed, by many, “the Anthropocene.” There is no question that under the basic measures of standard evolutionary theory Homo sapiens is among the most successful, if not the most successful, large-bodied mammal. However, standard evolutionary theory might not offer the most comprehensive assessment framework for measuring or conceptualizing evolutionary success in the 21st century. This chapter offers examples and details as to how and why considering evolutionary success via the extended evolutionary synthesis and a dynamic anthropological approach enables a frame of reference that is more in tune with the actual range of evolutionarily relevant processes at play in the contemporary human niche.
Future Human Success
Authors: Desmond Hugh
Published: March 2023

In one vision of human success, future human evolution lies in enhancing our bodies and especially our minds in order to achieve new levels of cooperation, morality, and well-being. In unadulterated form, this vision combines a pessimism in the human evolutionary heritage with an optimism in what technological enhancement can offer. This chapter points to a crucial blind spot: the role the social and cultural environment has played and continues to play in human evolution. In particular, the chapter emphasizes how enhancement technologies are co-opted in the competition for social status. When this is taken into consideration, the vision of techno-libertarian success seems both less appealing and less plausible. Two desiderata for the concept of human success in the future are identified.
The Defense Industry’s Contribution to National Security
Authors: Vestner Tobias
Published: March 2023

This chapter examines the global defense industry’s function in light of states’ national security. It retraces the global context and dynamics of the defense industry. It identifies, applies, and discusses three mechanisms by which the defense industry serves national security. First, the industry provides access to military goods, technologies, and services. Second, when exporting weapons, the industry creates dependencies and interdependencies with the importing states. Third, the industry can enhance status and national pride. The chapter finds, however, that most states’ defense industries struggle to significantly contribute to national security, the U.S. industry being a notable exception. The chapter argues that there is an ethical dimension to this because, even when defense industries contribute to national security to a limited degree, they still profit by producing tools to kill. To address this issue, the calls for a renewed research agenda on how the defense industry contributes to security.
Kush under the Dynasty of Napata
Authors: Emberling Geoff
Published: March 2023

Centered along the Nile River in what is now northern Sudan, Kush was one of the earliest, longest-lived, and most extensive polities in Africa. Although it is often said that Kush remains little known, this has more to do with the ways in which this ancient culture has been obscured by the long history of racism in scholarship. First appearing in the historical record around 2000 bc, Kush persisted for more than two millennia, finally collapsing after ad 300. Kush reached its largest territorial extent and made its greatest impact on the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East during its Napatan period (ca. 1069–270 bc). Kings of Kush conquered and ruled over Egypt as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (ca. 750–664 bc), when they also came into contact with the Assyrian Empire and left their trace in the Bible. Throughout its long history, Kush maintained contacts with Egypt to the north and with regions of Africa to the west, south, and east, although its wider African connections remain poorly defined. This chapter provides an essentially political history of Kush during the Napatan period, summarizing the long history of research on Napatan Kush and highlighting recent finds, interpretations, and debates. It identifies gaps in knowledge—particularly emphasizing the scarcity of excavations of settlements and associated studies of subsistence practices—and suggests priorities for new research that would make Kush more readily comparable to other ancient states and empires.
Babylonia from Nebuchadnezzar I to Tiglath-pileser III
Authors: Nielsen John P.
Published: March 2023

Between the collapse of the Kassite Dynasty in the mid-twelfth century bc and the assumption of the Babylonian throne by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 728 bc, Babylonia endured a prolonged phase of political decline and decentralization, punctuated by brief periods of dynastic continuity and the rule of strong kings at Babylon. During these centuries, Assyrian power gradually waxed, and while Babylonia occasionally enjoyed the upper hand over its northern neighbor or was at peace with Assyria, by the eighth century bc, the Assyrian Empire was dominant and capable of extending its hegemony over Babylonia. Domestically, Babylonia was destabilized by the appearance of new tribal groups in southern Mesopotamia, most notably the Arameans and Chaldeans, whose members competed with the residents of Babylonia’s traditional urban centers for land and resources, but also allied with some of these cities against Assyria; Chaldean chieftains who claimed the Babylonian crown would organize some of the most effective resistance to Assyrian encroachments. In spite of these tumultuous conditions, or perhaps in response to them, the traditions of cuneiform scholarship and Babylonian culture were maintained and even flourished. The god Marduk’s position as head of the Babylonian pantheon was advanced during these centuries, and literary works such as The Poem of Erra and Ishum, which contemplated Marduk’s supremacy in light of the turmoil that plagued Babylon, were composed.
The Iron Age States of Central Anatolia and Northern Syria
Authors: Weeden Mark
Published: March 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the history of southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria from ca. 1180 to the middle of the sixth century bc, covering those states that emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Hittite Empire and that, for the most part, consisted of single cities and their hinterland. The chapter explores how the various sources available today, from archaeological evidence to texts (principally the Assyrian royal inscriptions and various local evidence written in Anatolian hieroglyphic or West Semitic alphabetic script), inform attempts to reconstruct the history of this region. In distilling and combining this information, the chapter attempts to disentangle the different perspectives that emerge from these sources. The aim is to offer a historical narrative that is not told solely from the perspective of the major powers of the day.
The Southern Levant and Northern Arabia in the Iron Age
Authors: Tebes Juan Manuel
Published: March 2023

The chapter provides an overview of the societies that inhabited the arid regions of the southern Levant and northern Arabia during the first half of the first millennium bc. This period was a turning point in the history of the local populations, since they organized themselves for the first time into independent polities of differing levels of social complexity. Commonly studied through the written records of the contemporary Near Eastern empires, the chapter focuses on the local epigraphic and archaeological evidence of the emergence and collapse of these polities, including the tribes and tribal confederacies of the Syro-Arabian desert and the Negev, the oasis towns in the northern Hejaz (Tayma, Dedan), and a chiefdom in the southern Transjordanian plateau (Edom). It also addresses the environmental factors that impacted the local societies—most importantly aridity—and the evidence for economic exploitation of the environment, which was mostly based on nomadic semi-pastoralism and limited agriculture. The first millennium bc also witnessed the incorporation of the southern Levant and northern Arabia into the Near Eastern economic system, particularly through the extension of the commercial networks to obtain mineral resources (copper from Wadi Arabah) and precious aromatics (incense from South Arabia). The chapter highlights how the neighboring Near Eastern states, and particularly the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, strove to dominate the regional trade routes and to co-opt the tribal groups that controlled them, not always successfully.
The Satrapies of the Persian Empire in Asia Minor
Authors: Klinkott Hilmar
Published: March 2023

The administration of Asia Minor within the Persian Empire was delegated to satraps who governed and controlled a specific area of jurisdiction, of administrative and military responsibility, and of official action, dubbed “satrapies” in the Greek literary sources. The satraps of Lydia, Hellespontine Phrygia, Greater Phrygia, and Caria (including Lycia and Cappadocia) were high-ranking imperial officials whose political influence and importance depended on the economic power of the areas they governed, as well as their personal closeness to the Persian king. The positions of the Lydian and the Hellespontine satraps were the most prestigious offices in Asia Minor, traditionally combined with additional imperial powers, in particular of a military nature. The need to safeguard the empire’s stability made regional adjustments necessary in order to check the increasing power of individual satraps, and this led to the creation of new satrapies (Caria and Lycia). It is generally challenging to outline the exact topography and administrative definition of the individual satrapies. The details of the internal administrative structures of the satrapies are almost entirely unknown, particularly as local particularities, be they cultural or political, continued and were supported under Persian imperial rule. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the satrapies of Asia Minor were important and dynamic hubs for the Persian Empire’s diplomatic, economic, cultural, and military activities on its western border, oriented toward the Aegean and the Black Sea.
Muslim Dynasties on the Indian Subcontinent
Authors: Matthiesen Toby
Published: March 2023

This chapter expounds on the Muslim dynasties in the Indian Subcontinent. It highlights how Sunnism and Shiism also flourished on the Indian subcontinent. Competing dynasties espousing Sunnism or Shiism supported separate Sunni and Shii revivalisms, which resulted in wider traction of debates that allowed them to resonate beyond the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, the religious policies of the Indian Muslim rulers are multifaceted, since most of them embraced Sufism in one form or another. In the context of Nurbakshis, people following Shii and Ahl al-Bayt were fewer in number. The chapter considers the networks of the British Empire after it extended its control over the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
Reform and Reinvention in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Matthiesen Toby
Published: March 2023

This chapter covers the reform and reinvention in the 18th Century. The 18th century witnessed massive political and economic transformations, such as the collapse of several Muslim Empires, the rise of European powers, and the rejection or adoption of sectarian identity by some rules and movements. The growing European economic, political and military penetration led Muslims to argue that Islam needed to reinvent itself to counter the Western presence. The chapter considers various arguments, such as Sunni-Shii unity or renewed focus on the scriptures and early Islam history. It explains how early modern rulers identified with an interpretation of Islam and used the aforementioned interpretation to legitimise themselves while accommodating new territories and populations.
The Muslim Response
Authors: Matthiesen Toby
Published: March 2023

This chapter explains the Muslim response to the growing European political, economic, and cultural influence. It cites how political Islam emerged as an alternative language of politics. Pan-identities, such as pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, further contended that there were more important supra-national loyalties apart from national loyalties. Moreover, dominant groups often saw the confessional identity as overlapping with national identity. The chapter highlights the diversity and stretch of Arab nationalism. Despite the efforts of Rashid Rida and others, Pan-Islam remained a powerful idea but failed to unite Muslims in one state, so it did not become a central religious authority after the end of the Caliphate.
Export and Containment of Revolution
Authors: Matthiesen Toby
Published: March 2023

This chapter tackles how the Iranian revolution transformed Shiism, Sunnism, and Sunni-Shii relations. It cites how local factors shaped how local elites perceived Iran and to what extent this antagonism became violent or not. Opposition to the revolution took many forms, such as Sunni Arab nationalists like Iraq’s Saddam Hussain and global Salafi networks and the anti-Shia ideologues and movements in South Asia. The history of Sunni-Shii relations involves the history of the Iranian revolution and reactions towards the conflict between export and containment. Most Middle Eastern politics focus on the Sunni-Shii divide that ranges between the rivalry between Iran and Sunni-led countries and the shift of many Sunni Islamic movements from a pan-Islamic vision to an anti-Shii stance.
Does thinking cause atheism?
Authors: Jong Jonathan
Published: March 2023

This chapter tells the story of an experiment published in one of the most prestigious journals in the world. The original experiment found that participants who were shown images of Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker reported lower levels of religiosity than those who were shown images of the ancient Greek sculpture of the Discus Thrower. Since it was published in 2012, other teams of scientists have tried to repeat the experiment and failed to replicate the finding: but journals seem reluctant to publish such failures to replicate. This story is a cautionary tale, but also carries hope that scientists can work together to improve one another’s research.
Is God like Superman?
Authors: Jong Jonathan
Published: March 2023

For centuries, theologians—including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians—have noticed that, despite official religious teachings, people are prone to “anthropormorphize” God, thinking of God like a human person. This chapter looks into Justin Barrett’s research that applied classic methods from cognitive psychological research on memory to study this tendency, discovering that people often hold contradictory views about God in their own minds. Methodologically, the noteworthy thing about the approach taken here is the use of stories featuring supernatural characters, as such stories are cross-culturally commonplace vehicles of religious teaching. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on the early history of the cognitive science of religion.
Tempted Like Achilles
Authors: Chappell Sophie Grace
Published: March 2023

This chapter considers the notions of role-compliance and role-recalcitrance by starting from a simple argument-schema for role-reasons: (1) that role-recalcitrance is a human universal; (2) that at least some role-recalcitrance is ethically interesting; (3) that at least some ethically interesting role-recalcitrance is a very good thing. The argument for (1) and (2) examines some well-known claims that Alasdair MacIntyre offers about “heroic societies” in After Virtue: in particular, his connected claims (a) that people in those societies cannot “step back” from their roles, and (b) that there are arguments across the Is–Ought Gap that are based on “functional concepts”. A re-examination of the Iliad’s central figure of Achilles refutes (a), and suggests an a fortiori argument for (1). Analysis of (b) leads to a distinction—which refutes (b)—between logical and psychological/sociological cogency; to some reflections on analyticity in general; and to the conclusion, which is a rephrasing of (3), that at least sometimes the ability to be role-recalcitrant is precisely “what makes us truly human”.
A Good Doctor but a Bad Person? A Puzzle for Role Ethics from Løgstrup
Authors: Stern Robert
Published: March 2023

This chapter considers the following challenge to social role ethics: 1. Role ethics holds (a) that you can be a good occupant of a role by fulfilling the obligations associated with the role, and (b) that this is sufficient to make you a good person (at least to some degree) provided that the institution itself is a good one 2. But a person can count as having fulfilled their role obligations while being a moral monster 3. So role ethics is not an ethics. The chapter shows how this challenge is suggested by what K. E. Løgstrup says about social norms and roles, but also how he might provide resources with which to meet it, thereby offering a way for the role ethicist to escape the problem outlined above. Finally, the wider implications of Løgstrup’s view for some of the standard issues in role ethics are discussed.
Are Obligations of Friendship Role Obligations?
Authors: Jeske Diane
Published: March 2023

Are the obligations of friendship role obligations? This chapter argues that the ways in which ‘friend’ differs from paradigmatic social roles such as ‘spouse’ or ‘daughter’ are more significant than the ways in which it is similar to them, and, thus, we ought not to understand being a friend as a social role nor ought we to understand the obligations of friendship as role obligations. In fact, to conceive of ‘friend’ as a social role would be to diminish the ways in which friendship adds value to our lives and binds us to certain other people. The significance of friendship is in part a matter of how it is constructed by the parties involved and provides a space for understanding oneself in relation to another independent of everyone else and, very importantly, apart from societal expectations and norms.
Participatory Wellbeing and Roles
Authors: Barber Alex
Published: March 2023

The wellbeing that can accrue to individuals through their participation in collective endeavours, here called their participatory wellbeing, is a fundamental component of human wellbeing more broadly. It is also difficult to conceptualize, let alone quantify, and has been neglected in philosophy, apparently falling into a gap between the literature on collective agency and the literature on wellbeing. As a contribution towards filling in that gap, this chapter uses the notion of a role within a group—encompassing anything from familial and professional roles to being a friend or a citizen—to solve a puzzle about participatory wellbeing. The puzzle, crudely stated, is that while wellbeing is an essentially individualistic notion, participation is essentially social. By conceiving of participation as a matter of occupying and performing a role, we can recognize and model the complexity (i.e. the multifaceted nature) of participatory wellbeing.
Virtuous Chameleons
Authors: Brunning Luke
Published: March 2023

Most people occupy several social roles. How are these roles to be managed? This chapter examines one strategy: the compartmentalization of roles, in which actions and mindsets change with the roles people occupy. People might worry, however, that compartmentalization is in tension with integrity or one’s commitment to the good. Might an integrating approach to roles be better? This chapter argues that compartmentalization is a fine way to manage multiple social roles. Central to the argument is a response to those who think compartmentalization must inhibit practical reflection, or is in tension with having integrity, or is alienating. In fact, the task of compartmentalizing roles is itself a valuable practical activity. Maintaining clear boundaries between roles and their attendant mindsets enables us to be guided by fully specified virtues, and flexible boundary work can help us avoid inappropriate forms of immersion in roles at the expense of other people.
Interrogative prosodic structure
Authors: Kandybowicz Jason , Baron Bertille , Duncan Philip T. , Katsuda Hironori
Published: March 2023

This chapter examines the internal prosodic structure of wh- expressions and the prosodic integration of interrogative items in Ikpana wh- questions. Insight into the prosody of Ikpana interrogatives is achieved through an examination of hiatus resolution in wh- questions. Owing to its lack of codas and abundance of vowel prefixes and vowel-initial lexical expressions, vowel hiatus is a widespread phenomenon in Ikpana. The chapter focuses on the description and quantitative analysis of vowel hiatus and its repair strategies at word boundaries, wielding these as indicators of prosodic structure and prosodic integration. The chapter demonstrates that vowel hiatus is handled differently at different syntactic boundaries and that vowel reduction is significantly more likely to occur within prosodic phrases than across prosodic phrase boundaries. This leads naturally to a number of generalizations regarding the prosodic structure and integration of Ikpana interrogative expressions in a variety of wh- constructions.
Seneca against Luxuria
Authors: Berno Francesca Romana
Published: March 2023

Luxuria is a major theme in Seneca’s prose works. Being linked with desire, which lies at the root of each and every vice according to Stoic philosophy, it combines most vices into one, and thus represents a sort of archenemy of philosophical life. Men subjected to luxuria live a life against nature, subverting every rule; they are enslaved by their stomach, the vilest of organs, and this shows that they have lost their human connotations to wear beast attitudes. Luxuria itself is often personified as a powerful woman, who dwells in Baiae, a famous vacation place in Campania. Her champions are degraded, notorious figures such as Marc Antony, Apicius, and Maecenas; her opponents are less famous, as Q. Aelius Tubero, a loser in politics, and Scipio Aemilianus, but only after his political defeat. Healing this vice is almost impossible, because temptations arise everywhere, and this vice, far from representing an annihilation of reason, uses it for its aims, showing inventive and creative skills. Indeed, people devoted to luxuria show much more commitment to their aims than those involved in philosophy.
Quantum Equilibrium Theory: Particles to Fields
Authors: Delaney Fredrickson , Delaney Kris T.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 3 shows how an equilibrium collection of quantum particles with Bose statistics can be converted into an imaginary-time, coherent states field theory. Field operators are identified that yield structural and thermodynamic properties. Extensions are provided to continuum models with external potentials and artificial gauge fields. Quantum lattice and spin models are shown to be described by the same framework.
INTRODUCTION
Authors: Plotz John
Published: March 2023

This is a deeply personal book, about how one professor of Victorian literature regained his childhood love of fantasy. It begins, though, as an extended response to the six works of fantasy that Le Guin wrote about the sprawling archipelago called Earthsea, my childhood half-residence. More than any other series I know, Le Guin’s Earthsea holds the secret to fantasy’s present-day appeal—and its radical political potential. Le Guin teaches her readers—both by constructing fantasy worlds and by deconstructing the reality within which we all live and breathe—that “secondary worlds” are not only found in the section of the library labeled fantasy. Although its creators may have been reluctant to admit its fantastical qualities, one of Le Guin’s central ideas is that in some ways we’ve been living within a sort of collectively authored fantasy for as long as we’ve been human.
EARTHSEA AND THE FANTASY TRADITION
Authors: Plotz John
Published: March 2023

This chapter is a scholar’s journey through the century of speculative fiction that precedes Earthsea. Although an unproductive faceoff between Christian and Marxist accounts of fantasy has proven surprisingly dominant among scholars, I take a different way in. That means exploring the implicit (and at times explicit) debate between J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of fantasy novels as self-contained “secondary worlds” and Samuel Delany’s opposing vision of fantasy as intimately and complexly linked to our shared world. The tension between those two standpoints brought me back to Le Guin, who offers a new way to think about fantasy’s distinctive role in our technology-filled world: what the poet Yeats called “the cry of the heart against necessity.” E. M. Forster’s speculative stories and his novel Where Angels Fear to Tread form one important stepping-stone.
LE GUIN’S FIRST EARTHSEA
Authors: Plotz John
Published: March 2023

I pack into one long chapter what might make a book all its own: the notions of responsibility and of naming (a known name stops time, confers power) of balance and the virtues of inaction, of anarchism as aesthetic practice that Le Guin spent a career exploring. Notions she never expressed so beautifully, so lucidly as she did in Earthsea. This is a chapter about the simple joy of reading Le Guin. It also explores the complexity of the construction project that goes into making that readerly pleasure so easily available. As she herself wrote, in fantasy “There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the Imagination, … only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed.”
Reading Harry Potter in Abu Dhabi
Authors: Williams Deborah Lindsay
Published: March 2023

Drawing on experiences of teaching Harry Potter to college students at NYU Abu Dhabi, who come from almost every country in the world, this chapter argues that the Potter books offer a way to talk about conceptions of world literature and education as well as censorship and authoritarianism. The near-complete universality of the books also enables a discussion of cosmopolitan reading experiences, which are simultaneously local and global. This chapter also explores the recent controversy over J. K. Rowling’s stance on trans people as a way to understand how—or if—adolescent readers can separate writer from text. The chapter also suggests that leaving the Potter books out of critical discussions about world literature and translation theory highlights the generally marginalized position of YA literature in academic discourse.
Self-Awareness and The Elusive Subject
Authors: Howell Robert J.
Published: March 2023

The existence of a self seems both mysterious and inevitable. On the one hand, philosophers from the Buddha to Sartre doubt its existence. As Hume writes, when we introspect we find thoughts, feelings, and conscious states, but nothing that has them. The subject of experience is elusive, but its existence seems certain. Descartes’ cogito is beyond doubt and the thought that “I am thinking” involves an undeniable form of self-awareness. Self-Awareness and the Elusive Subject develops and defends the claim that we don’t find ourselves in introspection, and that consciousness is, in general, impersonal. It then develops an account of self-awareness that takes these phenomenological data seriously. Our grasp of ourselves is epistemically robust but introspectively slight: we know ourselves most fundamentally as the bearers of our conscious states.
Introduction
Authors: Russell Meg , James Lisa
Published: March 2023

This chapter introduces Brexit—the UK’s exit from its European Union membership. It acknowledges the controversy Brexit triggered as it highlighted UK politics and parliament’s role. The Westminster parliament has various functions that allude to representation. Moreover, the arguments over Brexit reached high media performance as it dominated headlines for months. The chapter clarifies what actually happened in the parliament during the UK’s negotiations with the UK following the framework provided by Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union. The vocal attacks that were made on parliament over Brexit show how the process generated doubts about the core institutions of UK democracy.
The 2019 General Election and the Brexit Mandate
Authors: Russell Meg , James Lisa
Published: March 2023

This chapter focuses on the 2019 general election and the final stages of Brexit. It starts with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which governed the process for calling general elections and is known for being the cause of the Brexit deadlock. Prime Minister Boris Johnson negotiated an alternative deal which included significant regulatory differences between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Additionally, Johnson persuaded parliament to grant him an early general election, which he won with an 80-seat Commons majority after he recanted and sought an Article 50 extension. The chapter then covers the eventual passage of Johnson’s European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, which paved the way for the UK to leave the European Union on 31 January 2020.
Language for actuality
Authors: Tolchinsky Liliana , Berman Ruth A.
Published: March 2023

This chapter presented a peculiar challenge in dealing with how people talk and write about the present and goings-on in their lives. We found almost no psycholinguistic or developmental studies of the topic beyond young children’s adherence to the ‘here and now’ of concrete physically present events. We approached the topic as a platform for discussing different communicative contexts where people talk and write about the actual world—conversational interchanges in peer talk or family meals to self-sustained monologic productions in writing diaries. We distinguish between discourse functions that people deploy in talking and writing about current states of affairs (describing, informing, arguing) and the linguistic means that people use to do so (for example, contrasting languages that do or do not distinguish grammatically between ongoing events and the extended, habitual present of general truths). We attend in some detail to the topic of register in the sense of levels of language use from everyday colloquial to more formal and elevated. We also discuss the neurobiological foundations of actuality, whether and how our brains distinguish fact from fiction, real from imaginary, present from past, actualized from hypothetical. The chapter concludes by tracing developmental trajectories from initial caretaker-child interchanges across peer- and school-related settings in talking and writing about the actual world. The communicative contexts and discourse functions that serve these purposes are increasingly diverse with age, and more abstract and distanced as a function of age-schooling growth and experience.
European Constitutional Imagination
Authors: Dani Marco , José Menéndez Agustín
Published: March 2023

In this chapter the characterization of European law as a constitutional order is challenged from two related standpoints, namely, the ambiguity of the qualification of European law as constitutional and the lack of a well-argued narrative explaining how European law became constitutional and what type of constitutionalism it has developed. We start by clarifying the concept and conceptions of constitution, with an emphasis on the structural and normative conceptions of constitution. Against this preliminary conceptual background, we elucidate what exactly is being argued when it is claimed that European law is constitutional, and what implications are consequently justified. We then note that while the process of constitutionalization plays a key role in structuring European law as a discipline, normative reasons underlying such characterization remain, if anything, more assumed than explicit and fully demonstrated. This leads us to conclude by arguing that it may be preferable not to imagine contemporary European law in constitutional terms. At the same time, however, we observe that the power effectively held by the European Union reaches so many corners of national legal and socio-economic structures as to render it insufficient to merely reject any claim to its constitutionality. The predicament of European Union law is that of a legal order that de facto discharges functional tasks proper of constitutional orders, while lacking the requisite democratic and social credentials.
Beyond Neoliberal Federalism?
Authors: Lokdam Hjalte
Published: March 2023

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) originally conformed to the neoliberal theory of interstate federalism by structurally circumscribing the effective exercise of activist public authority. In particular, the separation of monetary and fiscal policy meant that no single actor had the right to control all the main levers of economic government. The eurozone crisis revealed the problems associated with this construction and led to structural reforms of the EMU. Under the heading of ‘European sovereignty’, European elites have presented a constitutional imaginary that builds on these reforms and foresees more centralized public authority at the European level able to control economic developments across the Union in accordance with certain objectives. This marks a turn away from neoliberal federalism, which, while incomplete, has also been evident in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where mechanisms of the reformed EMU have been used to pursue non-neoliberal objectives.
The Peoples Imagined
Authors: Nicolaïdis Kalypso
Published: March 2023

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests that if polities need to rest on some sort of social imaginary, their collective horizons can be uttered in two contrasting languages—that of ideology or that of utopia—and that, moreover, both these vernaculars can be saved from their pathological expression. Where the former entrenches reality and the other transcends it, the chapter asks under what conditions can either ideology or utopia help transform reality to constitute a transnational European polity from a demoicratic perspective. The core argument is that our capacity to both imagine and operationalize the concrete expression of interconnected European peoples can help navigate this constitutional challenge. The chapter starts with setting out why the idea of demoicracy helps push back against ‘technopolism’. Secondly, it argues that in order to imagine a democratic union of peoples we must first ‘un-imagine’ oneness as a foundation for the EU, although a weak version of demoicratic theory does allow for what we can call a ‘thin concept’ of European peoplehood. Thirdly, it moves on to argue that the demoicratic third way is a fragile equilibrium that needs to be nurtured over time. Fourthly, the very essence of this demoicratic balancing act is to ground the European act of togetherness on horizontal ties whereby vertical delegation of authority serves to nurture and reinforce these ties. Finally, the chapter points to the next democratic frontier, namely the EU’s pivot from the politics of space to the politics of time—a pivot that requires deep democratic ownership of policies shaped and enforced by the EU as the guardian of the long term.
MOBILITY
Authors: Francis Gavin
Published: March 2023

Browne’s social mobility is examined, from his origins as the son of a silk merchant, through the death of his father and the eventual securing of his inheritance and entrance to Oxford University. His geographical mobility too was above average for his age, taking in London, Ireland, Oxford, Yorkshire, Norwich, as well as his Continental travels to France, Italy, and the Netherlands. The author’s own travels in the training and practice of medicine are considered in context, as part of a long tradition exemplified by the Danish physician Thomas Bartholin, who wrote ‘no one puts much faith in the authority of a physician who has not set foot outside his native land.’ Other examples of Browne’s interest in travel are considered: his editing of his son Edward’s travel journals for publication, and his love of travel writing evidenced by a list of books read to him in his old age by his daughter Betty. His posthumously published Museum Clausum ranges widely across both time and space, imagining a series of objects and writings that might have transformed human history and understanding.