bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mythological Consciousness
Authors: Dews Peter
Published: November 2022

This chapter begins with a philosophical exploration of what Schelling means by “God-positing consciousness.” It then explains his theory of the “mythological process” which emerges from it. This process, which consists in the dynamic interaction of Schelling’s potentialities, or principles of being, unfolds in the human mind in a compulsive and dream-like manner. Schelling’s theory of mythology clearly anticipates psychoanalytic accounts of the child’s separation from an initial state of merger with the caregiver, and its consequences. The inner dynamic of the mythological process in Schelling also reveals analogues to neurotic mechanisms, and some of these are explored. The stages of the mythological process, and the systems which it establishes, are explained, with reference to Schelling’s interpretation of ancient Greek and other world mythologies. The chapter concludes with his account of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Athens. For Schelling, the Mysteries are the point at which mythological consciousness becomes reflexive: it does so in a mythological mode, which nonetheless points beyond itself, toward a future “absolute monotheism” or belief in a world-transcendent, spiritual God.
History as Liberation
Authors: Dews Peter
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses primarily of the “paradox of autonomy” in the thought of Hegel and Schelling. The paradox arises from Kant’s conception of freedom as rational self-legislation, because it is unclear in what sense the decision to legislate rationally for oneself can itself be rational or free. One way Hegel seeks to resolve this problem is by treating the question of agency, in the last instance, at the level of world history. However, the paradox emerges again in his theorization of the historical process. Similarly, as passages from Hegel’s Logic and the Philosophy of Right show, his effort to eliminate the paradox by suppressing the practical dimension of philosophy are unsuccessful. In contrast, Schelling, in his late philosophy, theorizes what he calls “absolute spirit” as characterized by a duality which reflects the paradox of autonomy, rather than seeking straightforwardly to resolve it. His own interpretation of the history of human consciousness, and the methodology of his interpretation, are then explained as grounded in this conception. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developments in theology and the sociology of religion since the period of German Idealism.
Stories
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter begins with an account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It introduces the concept of moral harm to perpetrators of war crimes and others who decline to show mercy to the enemy or civilians. It discusses war stories that arise from propaganda, nationalist literature, heroic myths masquerading as memories, and personal tales told by veterans about uncommon combat experiences. The chapter utilizes stories drawn from diaries and memoirs, interviews, and more casual reminiscences by ordinary people whose humanity was tested in war. The war stories here are about private acts of profound mercy and conscience, especially when no one was looking.
Heroes
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

War heroes thrive in all cultures. Stories about warrior heroism date at least to Babylonian and Akkadian tablet tales of the great warrior king Gilgamesh and to tomb cults in Iron Age Greece in the 8th century bce. Writers crafted world literature around tales of war heroes that are still read centuries after their cultures died. The chapter explains how war is presented in warping and wrenching classic works, even when its heroes are tragically flawed characters. It highlights how the warrior is upheld as an ultimate exemplar of heroic idealism, seamlessly virtuous even in childhood and destined for greatness. It cites Homer’s morally damaged hero Ulysses as an exemplar that calls to readers across millennia to watch him do great deeds of war, a model replicated across world cultures.
Killers
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers killer-heroes celebrated in every culture, who are upheld to inspire emulation by novice fighters and admiration by civilians. The most acclaimed heroes were also the best killers in classical epics from ancient Greece, Pharaonic Egypt, medieval India, Ming China, and pre-Meiji Japan. Killer-heroes populate heroic poetry, sprawling novels, and now feature films. The chapter reviews the reputation for killing prowess that serves as a feared model to be imitated by ordinary soldiers and is said to represent moral as well as physical courage and superiority. Hero stories about great killers raise morale, or the willingness to fight, in every prideful culture and each flagging nation.
Medics
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

Before the 17th century most wounded soldiers received little medical care beyond that provided by fellow soldiers or women traveling with the baggage train or orders of nursing monks. Ming armies and Ottoman Janissaries were notable exceptions: they built dedicated military hospitals. The chapter highlights the first military hospitals in Europe, which did not replace barebones monasteries and a few charitable hospices until several decades after the Thirty Years War: Les Invalides in Paris in 1676 and Chelsea in London in 1682. French armies pioneered modern military medicine during the wars of Louis XIV. They were the first to utilize mobile field hospitals and “flying ambulances” during the Wars of the French Revolution. France also set up the first corps of modern medics, soldiers minimally trained in battlefield medicine and set up the first female nursing orders. Military medicine expanded immensely in the 20th century, keeping pace with the general expansion of war. That meant female nurses and doctors moved closer to the front while male medics moved directly into combat. Their stories form the bulk of the chapter.
Stealth
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

Most naval experts before 1914 smugly predicted that no country would ever use such a vicious and petty form of warfare as the submarine. Yet, over the next few years war stories in Scientific American about submarine sinkings, chases, and technology proved among the most popular. Some U-boat captains lusted for kills, sinking passenger liners and illuminated hospital ships and machine-gunning survivors and lifeboats in the water. War from under the sea seemed utterly merciless, cruel, and immoral as submarine war evolved. World War II started the same way from the first day. This time everyone did it: Germans, British, and Americans all practiced sink-on-sight and unrestricted submarine warfare in pursuit of the goal of blockade and starvation of their enemies. Total war, little mercy.
Wings
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

War in the air hardly seems to allow for mercy as fighting reduces to machine versus machine, today using fire-and-forget missiles that streak miles beyond human control. Similarly with bombing. Compared to infantry aiming a rifle, it is much harder to engage empathy for ant-like figures below who scurry over an orangish target grid. It is much closer to long-range artillery, which also kills out of sight and direct moral awareness. This chapter points to rough moral and psychological equations that lower empathy as distance or as altitude and distance increase from bomber to target. It discusses how air war presents in popular media an almost antiseptic violence wherein machines only kill other machines, and the ground explosions are so massive that they obliterate all obscenity. Yet, it also provides examples of moral exceptions from the two world wars that show even in air war, acts of mercy are still possible. It closes with consideration of the moral implications of using drones in targeted killings, and the moral harm inflicted on operators.
The Idea of the Rule of Law
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter uncovers the core idea lying at the center of the rule-of-law ideal, the deep concern that motivates its partisans and gives life to the demands it places on institutions and individuals. It shows that, in a wide variety of political circumstances and cultures over the ages, writers who have thought about conditions necessary for the survival and flourishing of their political communities frequently appealed to a set of interrelated ideas concerning the constitution of and constraints on social and political power. The core idea that emerges is that the rule of law promises protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power through the law’s distinctive tools and modes of operation. The rule of law provides a bulwark of protection against those who seek to impose their will on others, bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity. It defines a politically demanding mode of governance and gives public expression to a morally compelling ideal of association. The chapter concludes with a sketch of the components of the coherent conception of the rule of law that will be elaborated over the next seven chapters.
Power, Accountability, and Law’s Toolbox
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter elaborates in detail the key concepts that populate our proposed understanding of the core aim of the rule of law: to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power, through the law’s distinctive tools. The relevant power is power of one party over another in relationships characterized by dependency and inequality. This power is arbitrarily exercised when its exercise is unilateral and not subject to accountability. The rule of law is concerned with private as well as public governing power, within the boundaries of nations and beyond them, including newly emerging power of digital platforms. The law’s available tools include its positive, directive, deliberative, systematic, rights-defining and protecting, and constitutive dimensions. With these tools, the rule of law seeks to temper rather than disable governing power, to discipline it in its distinctive ways, and thereby provide protection and recourse against its abuse. A key to the success of law’s rule lies in the existence of effective mechanisms by which those who wield power are held accountable for its exercise.
Sovereignty, Equality, and Fidelity
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

Three fundamental questions about law’s ruling arise: Who are bound and in what ways are they bound? Who benefits? and How is it possible for law to rule? This chapter answers these questions. It articulates and defends three principles that immediately follow from the core idea of the rule of law: sovereignty of law, equality in the eyes of law, and fidelity. Sovereignty demands that those who exercise ruling power govern with law (legality), that law governs those who govern with it (reflexivity), and that only acts that are ordained by law are legitimate (exclusivity). Equality in the eyes of the law requires that law’s protection and recourse is available on an equal basis for all who are also bound by it. Fidelity requires that all members of the political community, lay members and as well as the legal or ruling elite, take responsibility for holding each other, and especially law’s officials, accountable under the law. Fidelity is rooted in a community-wide ethos that provides the animating spirit of the rule of law.
Democracy, Rights, and Justice
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the rule of law and two other fundamental concerns of political morality: democracy and respect for fundamental human rights. These three are distinct values, issuing distinct normative demands; nevertheless they are complementary and intertwined. Fundamental human rights can adequately serve vital interests of human beings only with the assistance of law; and the law and its administration, conforming to the demands of the rule of law, serve their grounding values only when the law adequately recognizes and protects these fundamental rights. Strictly speaking, a legal system can meet rule-of-law principles and standards and yet fail to protect against systematic violations of basic human rights. However, the government’s commitment to the values served by the rule of law would be fundamentally compromised, if this were so. Similarly, democracy and the rule of law exist in a unique relationship of interdependence. The rule of law supplies the necessary infrastructure of democracy, while democracy is the natural completion of the ambitions that motivate the rule of law.
Realizing Law’s Rule
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter articulates and illustrates important design principles for the necessary institutional realization of the rule of law. The rule of law makes specific demands on the law itself (formal conditions of legality), on institutions for the application and enforcement of the law (principles of procedural fairness, access to justice), and on institutions that constitute, constrain, and sanction the exercise of ruling power. The latter institutions include separation of powers and a network of mechanisms of horizontal accountability. To realize law’s rule in the modern state, a quasi-fractal separation of powers between and internal to the separated branches is needed. Informal constitutional norms underwrite these formal and informal institutions. They delineate and enforce the autonomy of the agencies while defining modes and limits of accountability. The rule of law also requires extragovernmental organizations and practices rooted in civil society and protected by law. They provide necessary means of vertical accountability. Finally, a robust legal profession that understands and is deeply committed to the rule of law is essential for its realization. Lawyers are conservators of the law and guardians of its integrity. They play a crucial role in tempering ruling power and are essential intermediaries between law, citizens, and the institutions and officials of government.
Conditions and Limits
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the conditions and limits of the rule of law. The institutions and practices that realize the rule of law depend for their meaning and efficacy on the specific material, cultural, and legal conditions of those communities. Because these conditions are variable, rule-of-law institutions may take a variety of forms to take advantage of distinctive resources and answer the distinctive challenges that this variability offers. Sometimes the weakness of rule-of-law institutions lies not in their design but in their underlying cultural conditions. Due to their dependence on background practices and culture, rule-of-law institutions are vulnerable to serious threats. There are also normative limits to the rule of law’s demands. The rule of law is only one concern of political morality among others. Its place in the web of moral values fixes the boundaries of its proper scope. In some circumstances, the rule of law may have to give way to more pressing demands of justice. In addition, the rule of law is limited because the proper reach of the law is limited. In some contexts, law is off limits, because its intrusion is too costly.
Threats to Law’s Rule
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter concludes the work of Part I to articulate and defend a conception of the rule of law, identifying its core aim, fundamental principles, varieties of institutional realization, and circumstantial and normative limits. This chapter identifies the kinds of threats to achieving or maintaining a robust presence of the rule of law in our political communities to which the rule of law is most vulnerable. The chapter argues that law’s rule is threatened in a political community (1) when its institutions are weak or unable to respond flexibly to changes in domestic or global circumstances; (2) when political actors seek to subvert the formal institutions that realize the rule of law or the norms and practices that animate them; (3) when responses to attempts at subversion lack vigor and conviction; and (4) when the moral culture in which the ethos of fidelity exists is corrupted and public spaces in which accountability can flourish shrink. However, these threats need not succeed. The chapter explores avenues of response to subversion of norms and ways to counter erosion of a nation’s rule-of-law ethos.
A Dialectic of Deference and Dissent
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

The rule of law relies on robust practices of vertical accountability; it encourages protest, resistance, whistleblowing, even in some cases defiance of those who claim authority to speak in the name of law. This poses a challenge to the rule of law: fidelity threatens to throw law into perpetual uncertainty, undermining the protection and order that the rule of law promises. This chapter does not explain away the tension between finality and fidelity by rejecting one or the other; rather, it explores ways to manage the delicate dialectic between deference and dissent that lies at the heart of the rule of law. The rule of law insists that law rule, not any individual’s or institution’s understanding of it; hence, any exercise of power, including authoritative determination of what the law says, is in principle open to challenge, disagreement, and dissent. However, due weight must be given to the competence and credentials of those to whom the law has allocated decision-making power. Responsibility for interpreting the law must not lie in the hands of any single department of government, but rather should be shared among departments. The rule of law recognizes the need and appropriateness of civilian and official deference to authorities, but their decisions are also subject to challenge. Thus, civil dissent and even defiance of directives from authorities may be legitimate; resistance by officials may also be legitimate, but it is subject to stricter limits.
The Trust Challenge
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

Trust is a key ingredient in effective governance and a necessary condition of effective efforts at holding power accountable. However, challengers argue, accountability thrives on distrust and drives out trust. To pull the sting from the trust challenge, this chapter offers a nuanced understanding of trust and distrust as they occur in civic and political contexts and the ways in which being held to account engages these attitudes. Recalling the understanding of accountability appropriate to its task of enabling law to rule set out in Chapter 2, it argues that vigorous efforts at accountability do not drive out trust of an important and valuable kind. Rather, trust is a condition and reasonably hoped-for consequence of it. The rule-of-law ideal does not assume that all power holders are knaves, but it does recognize that even the best of us are at our weakest in conditions that allow or encourage arbitrary exercises of power. Constraints on such exercises recognize and capitalize on other qualities in human nature that can inspire our confidence.
Executive Power Leashed
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

Rule-of-law principles are subjected to extraordinary strain when the nation is in peril and when the chief executive pardons individuals convicted of crimes. This chapter argues that executive pardon powers and emergency powers can and must be legally bridled. It is possible to design standards and processes to strip executive pardon power of its arbitrary features and turn it to its valued use as a corrective for law and legal processes that have gone wrong. In times of crisis, critics charge, law goes silent, that it cannot constrain executive power. However, this claim disguises as either a conceptual or psychological claim the normative claim that law should not limit executive power. This chapter challenges this normative claim, arguing that, in times of crisis, protocols are needed to protect decision makers from characteristic modes of bias and failures of rationality. Several constitutional systems around the world have incorporated carefully calibrated bridling laws, guided by principles like the following. (1) Power to determine the occasion for the exercise of emergency powers must be clearly and narrowly assigned. (2) The scope of emergency powers must be carefully defined. For example, certain fundamental rights must designated as non-derogable and the constitutional order must be protected against amendment. (3) Arrangements must be established for public assessment and accountability of governmental actions, through the courts where feasible or by other tribunals or informal or ad hoc institutions, when they might be expected to do a more effective job.
Digital Domination
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter and the next take up novel challenges to law’s rule posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and the growth of the enormous power of digital platforms (“Big Tech”). It argues for a key role for law and rule-of-law principles in efforts to tame digital Leviathans at the national and global levels. AI technologies represent a potent form of power over people and their communities and are thereby a proper concern of the rule of law. The chapter explores and critically assesses several ways of doing so: internal governance regimes; law-enhanced governance regimes (using property, contract, and privacy models); government oversight, especially using a public trust model; and global digital governance.
Rule of Law beyond Borders
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

Skeptics argue that international law is either nonexistent, impotent, or too costly. This chapter argues to the contrary that the fundamental principles of the rule of law retain their integrity and normative force in the global domain. The core principles and tasks of the rule of law remain, although the global institutions and norms that realize these principles inevitably look rather different for their domestic counterparts. The chapter first explores the distinctive features of law in the global domain. It surveys the resources that contemporary international law provides for constituting and constraining the vast array of power-wielding entities operating in the global domain. It then addresses and answers three versions of Realist skepticism—Power, Practical Reason, and Fiduciary Realism. It locates the moral foundations of law’s rule in the global domain in a global version of the value of membership and protection of the freedom, dignity, and fundamental well-being of persons. The chapter closes with reflections on the value of the rule of law for denizens of the global community. The thesis of this chapter is that the fundamental question we must address is not whether the rule-of-law ideal can speak credibly and with normative force in this context, but rather whether the global community has created a legal order that approximates the ideal. The critics’ challenge properly understood is not a challenge to the intelligibility and force of the ideal in this domain, but to the adequacy of efforts to date to realize it.
“We Need a New Narrative”
Authors: Demetrious Kristin
Published: November 2022

How do public relations language practices become compelling in this world? And how do they work within the Habermasian public sphere to create tolerance for ideas that run counter to humanism and science? One way is when public relations, in the service of neoliberalism, uses specific language practices like narrative to take possession of and shape market-based logic and meaning in communicative realms in order to manage “issues” and “crises.” In a “pincer move,” intrinsic and extrinsic public relations practices as neonarratives are thus deployed to cover over these breaks, simultaneously from different standpoints, to block debate. Neonarratives are a deliberate and specific PR language practice that works to insinuate a range of smooth and innocuous-sounding plastic words in public debate and to privilege neoliberal discourses, at the same time covering up the breaks in logic that have drawn public attention and discouraging further action and inquiry.
“Borderlands”
Authors: Demetrious Kristin
Published: November 2022

The burnt reality of displaced people, gathering at the gate powerful nation-states, trying to gain admittance and to gain acceptance, has kindled a defining public debate of this century. It is also a debate in which public relations language practices by government and business, and more broadly in society, play a powerful role in narrowing cultural dispositions in ways that passively tolerate or accept prescribed neoliberalist policy settings. To understand the “borderland” as a third space and field of ideas—namely, immigration, refugees, and statelessness—this chapter explores how public relations language practices combine to represent them as “categories.” Connoting certain words, woven into a plot that pushes meaning within set routes, this neonarrative works in both obvious and less obvious ways, to diminish the public’s expectations in human rights matters, to harden stances, and to build consent, while at the same time promoting a particular relationship between culture and politics. And in this, it has been extraordinarily successful.
Brian Eno’s Ambivalent Ambiences
Authors: Szabo Victor
Published: November 2022

The third chapter focuses on the formative ambient albums of Brian Eno and his collaborators: Eno’s Discreet Music and the albums of the Ambient series. It examines the genesis, sound, and reception of these albums, which set the stylistic and discursive terms by which ambient would attain distinction from other genres of atmospheric music, especially new age. It explores how Eno applied the lessons of his experimental art training to the recorded medium, and how he constructed an avant-garde lineage for his records through references to artists like Erik Satie. It also explores how he, with collaborators Harold Budd and Laraaji, exuded pop sensibilities through modal improvisations that displayed a distinctive affective bent toward the detached, dreamy, introspective, and ambivalent. These records’ sensuous sounds, alongside Eno’s erudite authentications, provided the expressive and conceptual latticework for future musicians, listeners, and critics to reconceive ambient audio as hip and highbrow art.
Ambient EDM, or Dance Music That Isn’t Dance Music!
Authors: Szabo Victor
Published: November 2022

The fourth chapter documents the popularization of ambient music as a genre between the late 1980s and mid-’90s by way of its emergence as a subgenre of electronic dance music (EDM). It traces the sounds and tropes by which ambient attained distinction from other EDM styles, as well as the rhetorical means by which ambient became raced, gendered, and classed relative to these styles as a highbrow white male domain. This recounting illustrates how the ambient genre’s formation, far from a linear trajectory out of Eno’s records and chill-out rooms, drew on a wide assortment of pop and electronic styles while taking shape through distinctions from these styles’ genre forms and cultures. It contains sonic analyses of key “ambient house” albums from this time, as well as a discourse analysis that illustrates how ambient became raced and gendered according to a mind/body dualism associating relaxed embodiment and highbrow status with white masculine intellectualism.
Coda: Ambient Music in the 21st Century
Authors: Szabo Victor
Published: November 2022

A coda to the book considers how today’s ambient music is transforming, and how it may continue to transform, into a more inclusive, aesthetically dynamic, and socially enriching genre culture. Through a series of audio spotlights, it offers some insights into the many promising directions ambient artists have explored since the turn of the twenty-first century. After taking stock of the book’s history of ambient music’s psychedelic past and analysis of ambient’s formation as a popular genre, the coda proposes these recent works as trajectories from which to imagine a more expansive place and meaningful social role for ambient music and its genre culture today.
Tin Pan Alley
Authors: Furia Philip , Patterson Laurie J.
Published: November 2022

The cacophony that Monroe H. Rosenfeld of the New York Herald heard on West 28th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway reminded him of rattling tin pans. He thus christened the area, which was occupied by sheet-music publishers, as “Tin Pan Alley.” Songs were made popular through minstrel or variety shows, and once they were popular, the sheet music publishers would publish the songs. Composers and performers went to the music publishers to find ways to get the music to the public. This chapter explores the role of Tin Pan Alley, music pluggers, and composers/lyricists in helping to turn these songs into popular songs.
Fine Romances: Dorothy Fields and Leo Robin
Authors: Furia Philip , Patterson Laurie J.
Published: November 2022

Few women are well known as a lyricist for Tin Pan Alley. Dorothy Fields was one of them. Teamed with Jimmy McHugh, she wrote for the Cotton Club. Fields’s work (“I’m in the Mood for Love”) demonstrated her subtle, sensuous wit. Her style was more that of Hart, Gershwin, and Porter than her female predecessors (Donnelly or Jacobs-Bond). She and McHugh had a “seamless” blend of words to music. He wrote driving, repeated phrases, and she put “vernacular catch-phrases” to it. Another lyricist was Leo Robin, who frequently worked with Ralph Rainger. The two are best known for Bob Hope’s theme song, “Thanks for the Memory,” a song sun with Shirley Ross in The Big Broadcast of 1938. Robin’s lyrics include romantic recollections showing the connection that remained between the divorced couple. This chapter celebrates the writing of romance.
The Great American Songbook
Authors: Furia Philip , Patterson Laurie J.
Published: November 2022

As this chapter begins, “The songs that constitute The American Song Book have done what popular songs are not supposed to do: stayed popular.” The chapter discusses the various reasons for their endurance: singability, performability, and lyrics of “wit and verve.” These songs have endured and continue to be used in movies and commercials. Broadway frequently brings back the musicals of the golden age. Audiences continue to hear and know the music, especially when sung by more contemporary and well-known singers, not only Frank Sinatra but others such as Lady Gaga, Michael Bublé, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Van Morrison.
Obligations Implied from Human Rights Treaties
Authors: Mayer Benoit
Published: November 2022

This chapter identifies obligations that may be derived from treaties requiring states to protect human rights. The notion that human rights treaties imply an obligation of states to mitigate climate change has been instrumental to the development of climate litigation. Yet, the identification of implied obligations faces important challenges in light of the territorial nature of the relevant treaty obligations and the relatively indirect link between a state’s mitigation action and the effective enjoyment of human rights within its jurisdiction. The chapter argues that human rights treaties require a state to cooperate on climate change only if and insofar as this really helps with the protection of the rights within the scope of the treaty. As such, implied obligations allow the interpreter of human rights treaties to open only, at most, a narrow window onto the applicability of general mitigation obligations.
Can You Feel the Force?
Authors: Mee Nicholas
Published: November 2022

The introductory chapter addresses misconceptions about gravity, such as the idea that there is no gravity in space. The text explains why we don’t actually feel gravity. It describes the fact that all objects fall with the same gravitational acceleration, as can be seen when objects are dropped in a vacuum. This was demonstrated by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott who dropped a hammer and a feather onto the surface of the Moon. The text discusses Einstein’s equivalence principle and explains why astronauts feel weightless when in orbit. The chapter closes by imagining what we would feel if we were close to an extremely dense object such as a black hole. We would then feel the stretching effects of gravity, which is known as tidal gravity, as it is key to Newton’s explanation of the tides.
The Magic Spyglass
Authors: Mee Nicholas
Published: November 2022

Kepler revolutionized theoretical astronomy with the publication of his New Astronomy in 1609. This chapter tells the story of two other key figures in the development of astronomy and mechanics. Galileo transformed observational astronomy with the introduction of the telescope, which he first used in the same year 1609. Galileo discovered four satellites of Jupiter, he saw the mountains and valleys on the Moon, and discovered that there were myriads of stars in the Milky Way that are invisible to the naked eye. Galileo also made important contributions to our understanding of mechanics. Jeremiah Horrocks is not so well known, and his contributions are often neglected, but he was a key stepping stone between Kepler’s model of the planetary system and the Newtonian synthesis. Horrocks was the first person to predict and observe a transit of Venus. Tragically, Horrocks died at a young age.
Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!
Authors: Mee Nicholas
Published: November 2022

The belief that geometry is synonymous with Euclid was overthrown in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter looks at the geometry of curved spaces—non-Euclidean geometry—and how this was used by Einstein to construct a theory of gravity that does away with the idea of a gravitational force. Einstein’s general relativity explains gravity as due to the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime in the vicinity of massive objects. Einstein used this theory to explain the precession of the orbit of Mercury identified by Le Verrier. While seriously ill in a trench during the First World War, Karl Schwarzschild found the most important solutions of general relativity that would later be used to describe black holes. Arthur Eddington tested Einstein’s theory in his eclipse expedition of 1919. Its success projected Einstein to world-wide fame. General relativity now has an everyday application in global positioning system (GPS) navigation systems.
Introduction
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2022

The general objective of the book is introduced, which is to argue, in Part I, that in perception we are aware of the way the physical world manifests itself to us, and that this involves awareness of sense-data. Then, in Part II, it is argued that behind this manifestation, the world is best understood in a Berkeleian manner, as a nomological structure in the mind of God, the ultimate purpose of which is to sustain our manifest, empirical world. Then a brief account of each chapter is given, and, finally, there are clarifications of how the term ‘sense-datum’ should be understood, which are intended to dispose of certain objections to the notion of sense-data.
The Causal Argument for Sense-data, ‘Philosophers’ Hallucinations’, and the Disjunctive Response
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2022

This chapter deals with the causal-hallucinatory argument against naïve realism—also known as ‘relationism’. The argument rests on the possibility of ‘philosophers’ hallucinations’; that is, hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions, and which depend on the same brain processes as the corresponding perception. As such hallucinations involve subjective phenomena, and as ‘same proximate cause, same immediate effect’ seems to be a compelling principle, all perception must involve subjective phenomena of the sense-datum or representational type. Responses to this argument from M. J. M. Martin, W. Fish, and M. Soteriou are discussed. Martin’s claim that hallucinations involve states indistinguishable from perception, but possessed of no phenomenal properties in their own right, has been particularly influential, and this receives the longest discussion.
Naïve Realism and the Argument from Illusion
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2022

Objects often, and perhaps always, look somewhat different from the way they actually are. How can the naïve realist reconcile this with the claim that we are directly aware of the object itself? Some philosophers—Martin, for example—extend the disjunctivist account to these cases. A consequence of this approach is that nearly all perceptions consist, not of genuine awareness of a property, but of a sense of indistinguishability from cases where the property is really perceived. Craig and French claim that only the actual property of the object is presented to the perceiver, leaving it a mystery how the illusion is constituted. Brewer and Campbell defend a perspectivalism, according to which perspectival properties are real properties of an object, which seems open to the response that objects do have properties from a point of view, though they appear in a certain way from a point of view. The conclusion is defended that the naïve realist fails in his attempts to explain away the phenomenal properties apparently involved in ‘illusion’.
Objectivity
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2022

It seems reasonable to assume that our notion of an objective, public world, which exists independently of us, must somehow be derived from our perceptual experience. For what else tells us about the world outside of us? But what is it about experience that delivers to us the idea of an objective world? This chapter consider three accounts. Two are defended at length in the recent literature. The third has only recently been suggested—or revived—and has not yet been generally influential. It is this last account that is correct. According to the first account, it is only by being directly in contact with the physical world in normal perception that we can have a conception of such a world: if experience were in some way internal, then we could never even conceive of an external reality. The second theory is that objectivity comes from the dependence of our concepts on the existence of a causal connection between events internal to the individual and the external world. The third theory is that our conception of objectivity comes from the way our experience is organized: what David Hume called the coherence and consistency of our experience. As with most classical empiricist insights, it is wilfully ignored in much of contemporary debate.
Semantic Direct Realism, Critical Realism, and the Sense-Datum Theory
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2022

The purpose in this chapter to investigate in just what sense the rivals to the sense-datum theory, namely intentionalism and relationism, in their own terms, would, if correct, put us—in ‘direct’ contact with the world, and to suggest at the end that the form of directness they achieve is not significantly different from that available to the sense-datum theory. A discussion of the wrongly neglected theory known as critical realism will help in this task. It is argued that semantic direct realism is all that survives of realism within intentionalist and even naïve realist accounts, even on their own terms. This will prepare the way for the rehabilitation of the sense-datum theory in the following chapter.
Whistleblowing
Authors: Lewis Jeremy , Bowers QC John , Fodder Martin , Mitchell Jack
Published: November 2022

This book has been substantially updated since the previous edition, reflecting major case law developments. Chapter 1 introduces the work and considers significant proposals for reform and the new EU Whistleblowing Directive. Part 1 then sets out the statutory framework for the protection of whistleblowers under the Employment Rights Act. Chapter 2 sets out the structure of the UK legislation, and principles of construction, as a matter of domestic law. Chapter 3 describes the interface between whistleblowing protection and the interpretive requirement to conform with the European Convention on Human Rights (Chapter 3). There are two chapters. The first, on extra-territoriality (Chapter 8), covers material previously included within what is now Chapter 7 but also includes consideration of the position post-Brexit. The second addresses the important considerations which arise in relation to privilege and judicial immunity (Chapter 14). Part 2 (Chapters 15 to 20) deals with whistleblowing-related issues beyond the specific legislative scheme and also, in Chapter 17, section 43J ERA which makes void and provision in an agreement with a worker which would preclude protected disclosure. The final part of the book considers practical aspects of whistleblowing protection. Chapter 21 considers significant developments on the approach to this in the Health and Financial Services sectors, including the new provisions in the ERA prohibiting discrimination on the ground of protected disclosures against NHS applicants (and though not yet in force applicants in Children Social Care). Chapter 22 then considers whistleblowing policies more broadly, and the interface with data protection requirements. Finally, the Appendices include an illustrative case study, a survey of awards in relation to injury to feelings and aggregated damages (to be read with Chapter 12 on Remedies), and precedents relevant to whistleblowing claims.
Overview of the Protected Disclosure Provisions and Related Protections
Authors: Lewis Jeremy , Bowers John , Fodder Martin , Mitchell Jack
Published: November 2022

This chapter explains the aims of the legislation covering whistleblowing. The scheme is set out, with the key definitions of qualifying and protected disclosures. A flowchart is provided which shows the routes to protection through three tiers of disclosure, depending on the recipient of the disclosure: a first tier, essentially to the employer or other person thought to be accountable for the matter which concerns the worker; a second tier to an appropriate regulator; and a third tier for wider disclosures. The chapter describes the means by which protection is provided: the right to be protected against ‘detriment’ and the right not to be unfairly dismissed. The case law showing the courts’ purposive approach to construction of whistleblowing protection is also discussed. Other protections which may complement protection under the protected disclosure scheme are compared and contrasted: those for employees and workers in relation to health and safety at work activities, for employees who assert a statutory right, and for those who do protected acts under the Equality Act.
Interpretation and the European Convention on Human Rights
Authors: Lewis Jeremy , Bowers John , Fodder Martin , Mitchell Jack
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers the principles of interpretation which apply where domestic legislation would otherwise be non-compliant with rights recognized under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). The chapter focuses in particular on ECHR, Article 10 (on freedom of expression), read together with Article 14 (the principle of non-discrimination). It considers the criteria developed by the European Court of Human Rights specifically in relation to disclosure of wrongdoing by employees, and the potential implications for the development of whistleblowing protection in the UK.
Protection of the Identity of Informants
Authors: Lewis Jeremy , Bowers John , Fodder Martin , Mitchell Jack
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers how the public interest in protecting whistleblowers by keeping their identity secret from those whose wrongdoing they disclose is balanced against the rights of those whom the whistleblower has informed upon in a disciplinary context. It then deals with the jurisdiction of the Court to order disclosure of the identity of informants, known as Norwich Pharmacal orders. The special protection extended to journalists (and those who pass information to journalists) under section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is described, before addressing the scope for Norwich Pharmacal orders specifically in the context of information provided to the employer.
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Authors: Ryan Matt
Published: November 2022

This chapter explains how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be used to compare different instances of deliberation. QCA is a method for establishing the configurations of conditions that are necessary or sufficient for an outcome. QCA uses learning from the mathematics of set theory to map and analyse the constellations of attributes of cases of a social phenomenon like democratic deliberation. In deliberative democracy research, QCA is useful for comparing a number of cases and understanding the conditions for good and bad deliberation. The chapter provides a guide to the approach and outlines the assumptions that distinguish QCA from other methods. It provides a quick stepwise guide to undertaking QCA. The chapter presents examples of how QCA has been used to understand when and how different designs of deliberative forums affect policymaking in Brazil, and how analysis of necessary conditions can better specify the contexts in which participatory budgets allow citizens to control decisions in participatory forums. Those findings give scholars and practitioners a greater confidence and justification for designing and implementing deliberative projects in diverse contexts.
Rhetorical Criticism
Authors: Rountree John
Published: November 2022

This chapter describes rhetorical criticism as a research method for studying democratic deliberation. It begins by defining rhetoric and rhetorical criticism and outlining the major theoretical assumptions underlying this approach. In doing so, this chapter situates rhetorical criticism in a broader scholarly context to highlight its strengths and weaknesses. Influenced by post-structuralism, critical theory, and feminist theory, rhetorical inquiry stresses how discourse constructs reality and how various material and symbolic contexts shape communicative practices. This chapter explicates rhetorical criticism as a type of close textual analysis of deliberative discourse. Drawing on examples from recent scholarship, it outlines rhetorical criticism’s key research questions, its units of analysis, its approach to building a data set, and its method for translating textual evidence into interpretive arguments. In reviewing contemporary rhetorical methods, this chapter argues for rhetorical criticism’s utility as a way of opening the ‘black box’ of democratic deliberation to reveal how citizens create meaning in deliberative encounters.