bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Jürgen Habermas and Public Reason
Authors: Vatter Miguel
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores Jürgen Habermas’s conception of a post-metaphysical idea of public reason as basis of democratic legitimacy in postsecular societies. It discusses Habermas’s interpretation of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of religion in terms of their efforts to ‘translate’ theological substance into ethico-political form, thus giving a secular meaning to the idea of God’s Kingdom. The chapter shows the roots of Habermas’s adoption of ‘methodological atheism’ in the writings of Karl Jaspers and Ernst Bloch on the relation between philosophy and faith in revelation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the similarities between Habermas’s and Jacques Derrida’s defences of an essential messianic component in contemporary democratic theory.
Conclusion
Authors: Vatter Miguel
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses the role played by Gnosticism in the discourse of Christian political theology in the 20th century. It does so in the context of the late debate between Schmitt and Blumenberg on the legitimacy of Modernity, the political meaning of Trinitarianism, and the connection between Gnosticism and revolutionary movements. This debate focussed on the Gnostic motif of a struggle between true and false gods as it reappears in Goethe and the German Enlightenment. The chapter gives a novel interpretation of Blumenberg’s hypothesis that Goethe adopted the Gnostic motif as a reaction to the appearance of Napoleon’s imperial designs. In so doing it draws upon Foucault’s ideas on the philosopher’s duty of parrhesia or frank speech towards the tyrant. The chapter concludes by offering a republican, anti-imperial interpretation of the motif of resistance to omnipotent gods and men.
Life
Authors: Wiggins Benjamin
Published: November 2020

Chapter 1 focuses on the early history of race-based insurance. When the Newark-based Prudential Insurance Company of America incorporated in 1875, it revolutionized the American insurance industry by offering policies to the working class for an affordable three cents per week. What made the Prudential doubly unique was that the company insured not simply industrial laborers, but also African American laborers. The company was not in the progressive vanguard, though. Rather, the Northern upstart, in contrast to its Southern competitors, simply had not thought to craft a company policy to explicitly ban African Americans from purchasing life insurance. Just five years after becoming the first insurer to cover black lives, the Prudential began to charge differential, race-based premiums and commenced a public relations effort to defend its discriminatory practices. This foundational chapter traces how the theoretical work of scientific racism became embedded in the business practices of American insurers.
Crime
Authors: Wiggins Benjamin
Published: November 2020

From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, in the period after the use of branding and before the use of fingerprinting, penal institutions faced the problem of how to identify repeat offenders. In this interim, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police, developed an anthropometric system that measured the bodies of criminals at their intake and catalogued these measurements in order to identify them should they offend again. Calculating Race’s second chapter traces the importation of the Bertillon System of Classification to the United States, where its data collection practices were racialized. It then investigates University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess’s 1920s work on this data set to build a formula for sentencing and parole decisions. The resulting algorithm from Burgess’s work relied heavily on race-based Bertillon data and factored race into its recommendations for length of sentence and supervised release, installing racial statistics as a key variable in matters of criminal justice.
Proxies
Authors: Wiggins Benjamin
Published: November 2020

Calculating Race’s fourth chapter demonstrates that race has become so highly correlated with other social statistics that actuarial science in general has developed a baked-in racial bias. Racial discrimination by proxy (e.g., zip code standing in for race) can be glimpsed in the disparate impact of data-driven decision-making in housing, healthcare, policing, sentencing, and more. Simply leaving out racial data in statistically aided decision-making distances institutions from claims of intentional discrimination, but a disparate, discriminatory impact lingers when other factors correlated with race power actuarial analyses. Chapter 4 considers how insurance law in the United States has defined the limits of acceptable discrimination. By surveying the progression of state-by-state regulations that prohibit or accept the use of race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, age, and genetics in an industry that revolves around the ability to discriminate risk, it uncovers who the United States has historically chosen to protect.
The Dogmas of Empiricism and the Linguistic Turn
Authors: Allen Barry
Published: November 2020

The chapter considers three lines of anti-empiricism in analytic philosophy: Quine and Davidson against the “dogmas of empiricism”; Sellars against the “myth of the given”; and Rorty’s new pragmatism, with its “higher nominalism” and disdain for radical empiricism. These anti-empiricism arguments were chiefly developed with Carnap in mind, and that is their weakness. The empiricism they criticize is theorematic rather than problematic, the empiricism of Russell and Carnap, not Epicurus or Newton. “Problematic” empiricisms like theirs, and including the work of the radical empiricists, are untouched by this entire line of criticism.
Anti-contiguity Crosslinguistically
Authors: Kandybowicz Jason
Published: November 2020

This chapter concludes the book by considering Anti-contiguity in a cross-linguistic context. It is shown that the proposal can be successfully applied to derive asymmetries in wh- in-situ distribution beyond the West African languages considered in Chapters 2–4. The chapter focuses on thirteen languages from diverse language families (Romance, Bantu, and Indo-Aryan, among others) and considers the implications of data from these languages for the final formulation of the Anti-contiguity condition. On the basis of these considerations, the Anti-contiguity constraint is parameterized. Among the languages considered against the backdrop of the Anti-contiguity proposal in this chapter are French; Spanish; Catalan; Zulu; Bàsàá; Duala; Shona; Lubukusu; Kiitharaka; Hindi-Urdu; Bangla; Iraqi Arabic; and Malayalam.
The Solfeggio Tradition
Authors: Baragwanath Nicholas
Published: November 2020

The book is the first study of the solfeggio tradition, which was fundamental to the training of European musicians c. 1680–1830. It addresses one of the last major gaps in historical research concerning eighteenth-century performance and pedagogy. The method flourished in Italian conservatories for disadvantaged children, especially at Naples. The presence of large manuscript collections in European archives (almost three hundred in Italy alone) attests to the importance of this kind of exercise. Drawing on research into more than a thousand manuscript sources, the book reconstructs the way professional musicians in Europe learned and thus conceived the fundamentals of music. It reveals an approach that differs radically from modern assumptions. Solfeggi underpinned an art of melody that allowed practitioners to improvise and compose fluently. Part I provides contextual information about apprenticeship, the church music industry, its associated schools, and the continued significance of plainchant to music education. Part II reconstructs the real lessons of an apprentice over the course of three or four years from spoken to sung solfeggio. Part III surveys the primary sources, classifying solfeggi into four main types and outlining their historical origins, characteristic features, and pedagogical purposes.
Humility, Autonomy, and Birth as a Site of Politics
Authors: Rushing Sara
Published: November 2020

This chapter offers a critical political analysis of American birth culture, using the concepts of humility and autonomy as ways of thinking about “choice and control.” How do dominant American childbirth practices produce conditions within which women can exercise and value freedom, self-trust, and self-determination versus conditions within which such aspirations are trivialized, disciplined, or foreclosed? This chapter argues that birth, as a site of potential political awakening, is a context within which particular manifestations of humility and autonomy might inform subjugating practices and experiences, but the alternative understandings advanced in this work might inform empowering practices of actual choice and control. The chapter also explores when and why people might “exit” the clinic and choose homebirth, as a form of “systems-challenging praxis” capable of destabilizing the logic of the dominant system and potentially loosening the hold of its norms.
Odds and the End
Authors: Miller William Ian
Published: November 2020

This chapter ties up many of the themes of the book. It looks back to the discussions of luck by discussing the various uses of ‘odd’ or ‘odds’ in the book, where it especially figures outside the luck chapters in the chapter on the messenger as the third party, the odd man. This leads to a discussion of the collocation of ‘odds and ends’ and then to three stories that are odds and ends. The first deals with two six-year-old girls on their first day of school who engage in a verbal fight to the death that rather brilliantly deals with Austin’s performatives better than most academic literature. The second is a tale of the author as a father to a woebegone nine-year-old son who discerned that day that life has no point as he sobbed uncontrollably, which leads to a brief discussion of Gloucester in Lear and a powerful Middle English lyric and the pointlessness of everything. The third story is short and is a tale of what the author is left to at his end: rereading and being discovered by his daughter to be both knave and fool.
Epilogue: Go Litel Boke amidst a Flurry of Auto-Antonyms
Authors: Miller William Ian
Published: November 2020

This chapter is a commencement address the author gave to graduating law students. It deals with the words graduation, degree, and gray. Degree is simply ‘degrade’ in a Frenchified form. Just as commencements can mark a beginning as well as an end, so reflexes of Latin gradus (step) can indicate going down, going up, or being leveled out. Gradus plays an outside role in the punning and word games in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. So the author meant to give an anti-commencement address by pointing to the down as well as up sense of the degree the students were getting. This provides a fitting end in this book to the number of auto-antonyms that figured in many of the preceding chapters.
Introduction
Authors: Kane Ross
Published: November 2020

Syncretism has been a part of Christianity from its very beginning, when early Christians expressed Jesus’s Aramaic teachings in the Greek language. Yet the category “syncretism,” defined as phenomena of religious mixture, has been poorly understood in both religious studies and theology. Syncretism carries a range of connotations—neutral descriptor, pejorative marker, celebration of indigenous agency. Such differing uses indicate challenges of interpreting religious mixture, challenges that today relate primarily to race and revelation. After outlining the primary arguments of the book, the introduction provides an overview of how the concept of race figures in the book’s overall arguments. It also explains methodological considerations regarding why the book speaks to multiple audiences, notably both theology and religious studies.
Works Righteousness
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

Works Righteousness is the first full-length study of the place of practice in ethical theory. It is a critique of the idealism of dominant approaches, an analysis of alternative models in which practice plays a more significant role, and an argument for taking practice seriously both in broad questions about ethical theory and in concrete case studies. The book’s main argument is that what people actually do should be central to ethical theory. Rather than assuming that pre-established moral ideas guide action, ethicists should acknowledge and explore the ways that practices generate values and the mutual shaping between ideas and actions. This argument challenges dominant philosophical and religious theories that assume that ideas are what really matter. Works Righteousness analyses the place of practice in these traditions, showing the links between their emphasis on internal states and simple, linear relationships between ideas, actions, and results. These themes are challenged by alternative models such as pragmatism, Marxism, and religious pacifism, which give practice a larger role and in the process highlight important themes such as the way social structures condition moral ideas and actions, the dangers of thinking about moral problems as polarized dilemmas, and the complex mutual shaping of ideas and actions. A practice-focused approach sheds new light on concrete case studies, underlining the value of attention to people’s concrete experiences and relationships in efforts to analyse and address contemporary problems such as hate speech, euthanasia, and climate change.
Material Practice and Morality in the Marxist Tradition
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines Marxist thought, which is primarily a sociological rather than an ethical framework. However, both Karl Marx and later Marxist thinkers developed theories with clear moral assumptions and goals, from their anthropology to visions of a revolutionized society. Marxist thought makes “human sensuous activities” central to everything, and that has to include its (implicit) ethical theory. Even though Marx showed little interest in moral theory, both meta-ethical and normative claims run throughout his work. This chapter reflects special interest in Marx’s emphases on the role of material forces in shaping ideas and on the creative tensions between individuals and structures. To explore these issues, the chapter engages the thought of Marx and some of his recent interpreters to understand the ways all ideas, including ideas about value, are grounded in material practices, experiences, and structures.
Religious Pacifism
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter argues that pacifism is not merely an applied ethic—a narrow approach to the particular moral problem of war—but rather a comprehensive ethical theory. The same is true of just war theory, the other main approach to the morality of war. The chapter looks at several pacifist traditions, beginning with the Radical Reformation or Anabaptist stream within Christianity. It also explores the pacifist thought of Martin Luther King Jr., who emphasized the relationship between means and ends, a theme that is also central to the thought of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi insisted that practices are not just tools for achieving predetermined goals, however, but shape the ways we conceive of those ends and of the possibilities and obstacles we face in achieving them. This offers a novel way of conceiving not just of means and ends but of ethics generally, in which practices are central from start to finish
Ideas, Practices, and Climate Change
Authors: Peterson Anna L.
Published: November 2020

This chapter examines climate change, the most pressing environmental problem of our time. It focuses on the ways practice can help us think about key issues, such as the gap between values and practices, the ways economics and technologies shape moral attitudes and actions, and the problem of moral responsibility and consequences. It also considers the question of what individuals can and should do in response to a problem that is far too big for individual actions to fix. The vastness of climate change demands that both environmental and social ethicists rethink some common assumptions and develop innovative models for understanding and mitigating human effects on the natural world.
Self-determination
Authors: Harrison Klisala
Published: November 2020

Self-determination is at issue for urban poor participating in jams and music therapy using popular songs in the Downtown Eastside. Self-determination, in one meaning, refers to an individual’s capability to determine his or her own actions. The human right to self-determination refers to legally defined peoples that (seek to) determine their own governance. A people cannot emerge, though, if individuals and small groups cannot self-determine to form a larger social unit. The popular music scene of the Downtown Eastside is a social setting that may block the capability of urban poor to determine their own actions as individuals and in small groups. Some music therapists limit and erode the self-determination of urban poor, coopting the poor’s self-determination of their own music-making and music-learning. Suppression of self-determination also emerged when music jam participants excluded original popular songs composed by other participants. Rejecting original songs suppressed the capabilities involved in creating new music, and human rights included in song creation and performance. Other music facilitators respond to various self-determination tensions among music initiative organizers and participants with the social work method of noninterference adapted to music-making. Many of these examples result in human rights conflicts and violations.
When an Immovable Object Meets an Irresistible Force
Authors: Caverley Jonathan D.
Published: November 2020

In a period in which much conventional wisdom about American politics has been thrown into question two essential facts remain: the public popularity of the US military remains high relative to any other US institution and the level of partisan polarization continues to climb. Recent crises in US civil-military relations suggest it unlikely that both of these facts can continue to simultaneously be true. This essay therefore introduces the concept of affective polarization to the study of civil-military relations. When a population is affectively polarized, multiple social identities reinforce a disdain within a group for members outside of it. In the contemporary United States, these social identities have coalesced within political parties. While the US military may not be interested in affective polarization, affective polarization is definitely interested in the US military. This essay lays out how, as it continues to evolve into an exercise in fiscal rather than social mobilization, the US military may grow more prone, like most other national institutions, to being swallowed.
Necessity and Proportionality in Morality and Law
Authors: McMahan Jeff
Published: November 2020

This chapter offers a systematic analysis of the notion of proportionality in both moral philosophy and law, particularly the law of armed conflict. Proportionality is a constraint on different forms of justification for harming people. There are thus different forms of proportionality corresponding to different types of justification. The proportionality constraint should not be conflated with a different constraint—the necessity constraint—which in turn must be carefully distinguished from necessity as a form of justification. The chapter explains how the proportionality constraint and the necessity constraint are distinguished by the different comparisons they require. It further explains the relations between the requirement of proportionality in jus ad bellum and the requirement of proportionality in jus in bello and argues that the criterion of proportionality in the law of jus in bello is actually incoherent. The final section elucidates the various matters of moral theory that are relevant to understanding how the requirement of proportionality applies in practice to the action of combatants who fight in just wars.
The Essential Link between Proportionality and Necessity in the Exercise of Self-Defense
Authors: Corn Geoffrey S.
Published: November 2020

The lawful use of force in the exercise of individual or collective self-defense by states requires compliance with the universally recognized elements of necessity and proportionality. Both of these elements frame the justification of resorting to self-help action. These two elements of self-defense, while often treated as distinct requirements, may be better understood as integrated into the assessment of overall strategic justification, with proportionality defining whether the scope and duration of military action in self-defense is genuinely necessary to protect against the unlawful threat. Thus, there is logic in conceptualizing proportionality not as distinct from the necessity requirement but as an integral component of that requirement. Linking proportionality assessments to the necessity of acting in self-defense leads to a rational link between the threat requiring self-defense action and the strategic scope and duration of operations to protect against that unlawful threat. This will contribute to careful tailoring of self-defense military operations to the overall nature of that threat. Of equal importance, this strategic-oriented focus will ideally offset the temptation to judge jus ad bellum proportionality by applying jus in bello principles. If nothing else, greater emphasis on the important differences between these two variants of the international legal proportionality requirement will enhance the impact on each of these variants on the success and legitimacy of self-defense operations.
Drones Programs, the Individualization of War, and the Ad Bellum Principle of Proportionality
Authors: Mignot-Mahdavi Rebecca
Published: November 2020

This chapter describes how drone programs facilitate the individualization of war and intensify the pressures put on the right of self-defense. Rather than using force in self-defense against an (imminent) act, some states active in the transnational war on terror use force in self-defense against individuals based on their personal characteristics. This strategy leads to authorizing action against individuals who are not presently perpetrating, nor even clearly preparing to engage in, threatening acts. The chapter argues that these changes are not merely the result of how states decide to use force in the context of counterterrorism but also are impacted by what technology allows them to do. As such, drones facilitate and arguably intensify these phenomena of individualization and dematerialization of the use of force. Focusing on one of the justifications for this practice, namely, the right of self-defense, the chapter argues that the framework articulated by some states active in the transnational war on terror, while still highly contested on some points, offers a framework for the continuous anticipation of armed attacks by individuals who show signs of continuing armed activity. The chapter shows that under pressure by state practice and rhetoric, some limitations on using force that were initially interpreted restrictively are currently interpreted extensively. More importantly, the chapter argues that even if some limitations remain, the concessions to the extensive interpretation appear to have a direct cascade effect on the remaining conditions precisely because these limitations are interconnected. It is ultimately shown that this cascade effect is epitomized by the principle of proportionality which is not only extended but transformed to adapt to the individualization of war.
Article 51’s Reporting Requirement as a Space for Legal Argument and Factfulness
Authors: van den Herik Larissa
Published: November 2020

Uncertainties continue to exist as regards the function, contents, and application of the proportionality principle in the context of the right to self-defense. Similarly, it has been suggested that the principle of necessity gains new meaning in the context of non-state actor self-defense as it provides the basis for an unwilling/unable test, but this test remains disputed. While appreciating the wealth of scholarly writings on these ad bellum principles, this chapter aims to reflect on how states can be pulled into the conversation more clearly with a view to clarifying the law. It explores how more space can be created for legal argument and factfulness in use of force discourse by states. Specifically, the chapter seeks to enhance necessity and proportionality discourse through the strengthening of U.N. Security Council reporting structures. Building on ideas to “proceduralize Article 51,” the chapter suggests the development of reporting requirements for any use of force on the basis of a duty to explain. It also proposes a more comprehensive architectural rethinking of the institutional environment in which adherence to and application of the necessity and proportionality principles are tested and contested.
Toward the Special Computer Law of Targeting
Authors: Kurosaki Masahiro
Published: November 2020

One of the implications of fully autonomous weapons systems (AWS) as an independent decision maker in the targeting process is that a human-centered paradigm should never be taken for granted. Indeed, they could allow a law of armed conflict (LOAC) debate immune from that paradigm all the more so because the underlying “principle of human dignity” has failed to offer convincing reasons for its propriety in international legal discourse. Furthermore, the history of LOAC tells us that the existing human-centered approach to the proportionality test—the commander-centric approach—is, albeit strongly supported and developed by states and international criminal jurisprudence, particularly since the end of the Second World War, nothing more than a product of the time. So long as fully AWS exhibit the potential for better contribution to the LOAC goals to protect the victims of armed conflict than human soldiers, one could thus seek an alternative computer-centered approach to the law of targeting—a subset of LOAC—tailored to the defining characteristics of fully AWS in a manner to maximize their potential as well as to make the law more responsive to the needs of ever-changing battlespaces. With this in mind, this chapter aims to relativize the absoluteness of the existing human-centered approach to the proportionality test—which is not to deny the role of humans in the overall regulations of fully AWS whatsoever—and then, away from that approach, to propose an alternative one dedicated to fully AWS for their better regulation in response to the demands of changing times.
Reviving Rationality
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health explains how Donald Trump destabilized the decades-long bipartisan consensus that federal agencies must base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. Administrative agencies are charged by law with protecting values like stable financial markets and clean air. Their decisions often have profound consequences, affecting everything from the safety of workplaces to access to the dream of home ownership. Under the Trump administration, agencies have been hampered in their ability to advance these missions by the conflicting ideological whims of a changing cast of political appointees and overwhelming pressure from well-connected interest groups. Inconvenient evidence has been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been used to obscure facts rather than inform the public. The results are grim: incoherent policy, social division, defeats in court, a demoralized federal workforce, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to respond to pressing problems. This experiment in abandoning the norms of good governance has been a disaster. Reviving Rationality explains how and why our government has abandoned rationality in recent years, and why it is so important for future administrations to restore rigorous and even-handed cost-benefit analysis if we are to return to a policymaking approach that effectively tackles the most pressing problems of our era.
Politics and Regulation
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

One of the defining features of politics in the contemporary United States is the central role played by the actions, or inactions, of federal administrative agencies. The complex nature of many policy problems, coupled with the limited ability of Congress to act, has frequently led to statutes that delegate to specialists the task of translating broad policy mandates into fine-tuned regulations. To balance the need for democratic accountability with values such as expertise and impartiality, both political parties have constructed a system of guardrails that cabins political influence over agencies. Some of these guardrails are external and include judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act. Other guardrails are internal to the executive branch. Among the most important of these internal constraints is the use of cost-benefit analysis to inform regulatory decision making.
A Threatening Synthesis
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

Despite objections from certain constituencies, President Obama placed cost-benefit analysis at the very center of his administration’s governing philosophy. He also pursued an aggressive agenda of new regulatory protections for public health, consumers, and the environment. His time in office demonstrated in powerful terms that cost-benefit analysis need not be associated with an anti-regulatory agenda. The synthesis of cost-benefit analysis and a progressive regulatory agenda helped mitigate intraparty conflict among Democrats but also opened up fissures among prior supporters of cost-benefit analysis, who assumed that its use would generally lead to less regulation.
Manipulating Transfers
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

In addition to obscuring the costs of its deregulatory agenda—by ignoring or minimizing the health harms associated with repealing or weakening environmental standards—the Trump administration has used methodological tricks to exaggerate the benefits of its actions. One way it has done this is by characterizing certain transfers between two parties as a benefit to one, contravening established techniques of cost-benefit analysis going back decades. Transfer payments are not included in cost-benefit analyses because the amount of money leaving the hands of one party is equal to the amount reaching the hands of the other party. By mangling established approaches to cost-benefit analysis, the Trump administration is treating one side of a transfer payment as an impact of regulation while ignoring the other side. And it does so inconsistently: sometimes negative impacts to the federal Treasury are treated as costs and at other times as benefits.
Future Directions
Authors: Livermore Michael A. , Revesz Richard L.
Published: November 2020

Although the system of guardrails developed over the past several decades to balance the competing demands of competent administration and accountability to the political process was far from perfect, the Trump administration’s many failures demonstrate the value of this system for the American public. The question facing both political parties is whether they want to, and can, commit themselves to rebuilding the system that Trump inherited. There are many good reasons to believe that guardrails to constrain political influence at agencies is desirable, and good reasons to specifically endorse cost-benefit analysis and centralized review. But the past success of a practice or institution does not guarantee its future existence. It is possible that the party system has shifted in ways that generate incentives for both parties to defect from their prior consensus.
The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts
Authors: Bowman Paul
Published: November 2020

Chapter 9 examines ‘The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts’ and explores the status of the imagined binaries that often structure interest in ‘traditional East Asian’ arts, as well as the desire for authenticity and the problematic status of change in traditionalist martial arts. The chapter argues for what it calls the micro-ontological inevitability of change, as a consequence of the inevitability of difference even in repetition (or what Jacques Derrida theorized as reiteration). To provide evidence to support what might otherwise be called an entirely theoretical argument, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the changing form, content, and characteristics of the traditionalist Chinese martial art of taijiquan (tai chi).
The Art and Craft of Describing
Authors: Bradley Ben
Published: November 2020

The greatest contrast between Darwin’s and today’s psychologies concerns method. A century of the idealization of controlled experiments in the behavioural sciences has led many to discount without due consideration the highly refined discipline of observation and description at which Darwin excelled. Darwin’s lifelong labours as a naturalist grounded both his evolutionary theory and his psychology. The august tradition of natural history provided him with many of the concepts, practices, and attitudes that, in his own eyes, made his approach to psychological matters incompatible with that of more widely celebrated Victorian psychologists. This chapter outlines and contextualizes the practices which framed Darwin’s scientific investigations, whether of plants, animals, or human beings. These challenge some of the modernist truisms which circulate in contemporary psychology, forcing a reconsideration of the places of observation and description therein.
Spinoza on Learning to Live Together
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

Philosophizing, as Spinoza conceives it, is the project of learning to live joyfully. But this is also a matter of learning to live together, and the surest manifestation of philosophical insight is the capacity to sustain harmonious ways of life. The essays gathered here defend this overall interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy and explore its bearing on contemporary philosophical debates. Part I focuses on Spinoza’s epistemology. Philosophical understanding empowers us by giving us access to truths about ourselves and the world, and by motivating us to act on them. It gives us reasons for living together and enhances our ability to live cooperatively. Part II takes up Spinoza’s claim that, to cultivate this kind of understanding, we need to live together in political communities, and considers how states can develop a cooperative ethos. Finally, living joyfully requires us to look beyond the state to our relationship with the rest of nature. Part III discusses some of the virtues this requires.
Creating Rational Understanding
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes two ways of thinking, imagining and reasoning. Both, he claims, give us knowledge or cognitio; but only reasoning yields truths. Drawing on the Theological-Political Treatise, this essay explores the differences between the epistemological norms guiding reasoning and those at work in imaginative practices such as history or prophecy, and asks how philosophers make the transition from one to the other. The norms of reasoning and of imagining are embodied in particular sets of social capacities and ways of life. Becoming more rational or learning to philosophise is a process of learning to live cooperatively.
Law and Sovereignty in Spinoza’s Politics
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

Recent commentators, feminists among them, have emphasized the consensual aspects of Spinoza’s politics. But Spinoza also insists that the powers of a sovereign are non-negotiable: sovereigns must have sole authority to make and enforce civil law. To see why he defends on this latter claim, I turn to his radical analysis of law. Following Hobbes’s lead, Spinoza undermines a traditional image of sovereign power backed up by a divinely ordained law of nature. In its place he offers an image of a fragile sovereign whose precarious power only extends as far as its subjects allow. For such a sovereign, the capacity to limit negotiation is a condition of its own survival, just as recognizing this fact is a condition of its subjects’ capacity to maintain a cooperative way of life.
The Affective Cost of Philosophical Self-Transformation
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2020

Some early-modern philosophers portray a perfectly philosophical way of life as a condition approaching the divine. The philosopher becomes as like God as a human being can, and in doing so experiences unparalleled and unalloyed joy. Spinoza advocates a version of this view and defends it with impressive consistency. To suggest that the process of philosophical enlightenment involves any affective cost, he argues, is simply to display a lack of understanding, and thus to fall short of the insight and joy that understanding ultimately yields. Nevertheless, something seems to be missing. I turn to a pair of novels by J. M. Coetzee to elucidate a significant though suppressed form of emotional loss that is integral to Spinoza’s image of the philosophical life.
The truth about reasons
Authors: Müller Andreas
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores constructivism’s commitments in the theory of truth. It starts by considering in more detail what an account of the truth of reason judgements that is compatible with constructivism would have to look like. It then introduces a neo-pragmatist conception of truth that builds on the work of Crispin Wright and others, which meets those requirements and fits well with the constructivist’s overall approach because it connects the truth of a reason judgement to the soundness of the corresponding episode of reasoning. This conception of truth is embedded in a pluralist account, according to which there are different ways of being true in different domains of judgement. Finally, the chapter discusses the account of practical reasons that combining this conception of truth with the constructivist’s overall approach yields.
Mind-dependence and objectivity
Authors: Müller Andreas
Published: November 2020

Constructivism takes practical reasons to be mind-dependent: facts about our mental states and activities figure ineliminably in its account of why some consideration is a reason for an agent to do something. This chapter defends constructivism against the objection that its commitment to mind-dependence renders it unable to accommodate the objectivity of practical reasons and our judgements about them. It distinguishes various versions of mind-dependence and argues that the constructivist’s alethic version is compatible with the three features that those who raise the objectivity objection are most often concerned about: the fallibility of our reason judgements, the universality of some reasons, and the modal robustness of some of those reasons.
Point perturbations
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

This chapter discusses the energetics of point perturbations arising from intrinsic and extrinsic defects, and intentional and unintentional impurities. Point perturbations can be short range or long range. This requires the inclusion of core potential, exchange correlation and Hartree or Hartree-Fock potential. Hubbard energy, which is useful for Hartree calculations in a localized state, is introduced. An approach to calculating the behavior arising in shallow dopants (long range) and deep centers (short range) is presented. The tight binding defect-molecule model is used to explore the appearance of bonding and antibonding states in vacancies, interstitials and substitutional deep centers and some common complexes, such as the DX center, using configuration coordinates to understand the electronic and lattice energy contributions in the defect behavior. Finally, the chapter summarizes other important centers, such as the Pb center and the F center, before reviewing the implications of centers in light interaction and Poole-Frenkel conduction.
Causality and Green’s functions
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

The chapter elucidates causality to prevent its erroneous use. It then develops Green’s functions to analyze and predict systems under stimulation in the presence of cause and chance. Causality is the tracing of an observed phenomenon entirely to an identified cause. Cause and chance both lead to observations in the natural world. Chance is tackled through probabilities. A toy quantum model emphasizing uncertainty is used to illustrate cause and chance. Several examples are discussed to illustrate the development of Green’s functions—examining both advancing Green’s functions and retarding Green’s functions—for classical and quantum evolution. The S-matrix is also discussed.
Quantum confinement and monolayer semiconductors
Authors: Tiwari Sandip
Published: November 2020

This chapter brings together several themes and perspectives by exploring them in quantum-confined conditions or in monolayer crystals. In it, confinement of electrons and holes at heterostructure interfaces, in inversion layers, in quantum wells and in superlattices is analyzed using the envelope function to illustrate the variety of interactions that must be properly accounted for. The formation of subbands in confinement, minibands in superlattices, and transmission, reflection and resonance at confined barriers and wells is discussed. Propagation, screening, scattering and the behavior of shallow dopants are discussed to illustrate changes with reduction of dimensions. Particular emphasis is placed on optical transitions to illustrate the changes in selection rules for interband and intraband transitions. Confined semiconductors are contrasted with monolayer semiconductors, using graphene and nanotubes as examples whose analysis and electronic properties are discussed, to compare them with the semiconductor discussions in earlier chapters.
John among the Apocalypses
Authors: Reynolds Benjamin E.
Published: November 2020

The central place of revelation in the Gospel of John and the Gospel’s revelatory telling of the life of Jesus are distinctive features of John when compared with the Synoptic Gospels; yet, when John is compared among the apocalypses, these same features indicate John’s striking affinity with the genre of apocalypse. By paying attention to modern genre theory and making an extensive comparison with the standard definition of “apocalypse,” the Gospel of John reflects similarities with Jewish apocalypses in form, content, and function. Even though the Gospel of John reflects similarities with the genre of apocalypse, John is not an apocalypse, but in genre theory terms, John may be described as a gospel in kind and an apocalypse in mode. John’s narrative of Jesus’s life has been qualified and shaped by the genre of apocalypse, such that it may be called an “apocalyptic” gospel. Understanding the Fourth Gospel as “apocalyptic” Gospel provides an explanation for John’s appeal to Israel’s Scriptures and Mosaic authority. Possible historical reasons for the revelatory narration of Jesus’s life in the Gospel of John may be explained by the Gospel’s relationship with the book of Revelation and the history of reception concerning their writing. An examination of Byzantine iconographic traditions highlights how reception history may offer a possible explanation for reading John as “apocalyptic” Gospel.
Introduction
Authors: Reynolds Benjamin E.
Published: November 2020

The Gospel of John has long been recognized as being different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The theme of revelation and the portrayal of Jesus as descending from heaven are some of the more obvious and significant differences from the Synoptic Gospels. The theme of revelation is evident in the Gospel’s language and presentation of Jesus as the Revealer, but John’s revelatory perspective is often assumed. Revelation, which is the disclosure of knowledge by divine or supernatural means, is evident in Jesus’s signs, his teaching, the Gospel’s emphasis on sight, and its language of revealing, seeing, and knowing. The background for this revelatory telling of Jesus’s life may be found, not in Gnosticism as Rudolf Bultmann and others have argued, but in early Judaism. More particularly, the revelation portrayed in Jewish apocalypses offers insight into the Gospel’s central focus on the theme and its depiction of Jesus as the one who makes the Father known.
Genre, “Apocalypse,” and the Gospel of John
Authors: Reynolds Benjamin E.
Published: November 2020

Comparing the Gospel of John with Jewish apocalypses requires some understanding of what an apocalypse is. This chapter discusses contemporary understandings of what genre is and how it is determined by readers and authors. Recent genre studies have shown that humans categorize things in relation to cognitive prototypes (i.e., how closely something relates to a prototypical example). The Semeia 14 definition of “apocalypse” functions as a prototype definition, especially with its underlying “master-paradigm.” The genre of apocalypse should not be determined only by eschatological content but also by its revelatory form, spatial content, and function. The Gospel of John has been noted to share some similarities with Jewish apocalypses, but the most methodologically sound way of comparing John’s apocalyptic characteristics is to compare the Fourth Gospel with the genre of apocalypse.
Conclusion
Authors: Reynolds Benjamin E.
Published: November 2020

The Gospel of John is similar to Jewish apocalypses because it is revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which an otherworldly mediator discloses heavenly revelation to a human recipient. The Gospel of John is a revelatory narration of Jesus’s life. Modern genre theory’s use of prototypes to assess participation in a genre allows for a methodologically sound way to compare the Gospel to Jewish apocalypses. Although it is similar in numerous ways, the Gospel does not participate in the genre of apocalypse. Instead, it participates in the gospel genre, yet is qualified by the genre of apocalypse. This understanding of the Gospel as “apocalyptic” Gospel aids in the interpretation of John’s presentation of the Law of Moses and may have been influenced more specifically by its relationship with the Apocalypse of John. This apocalyptic mode explains John’s distinctiveness from the Synoptic Gospels and its affinities with Jewish apocalyptic tradition.