bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Infectious diseases in low-income countries: where are we now?
Authors: Roche Benjamin , Baldet Thierry , Frédéric Simard
Published: August 2018

It is widely documented that infectious diseases have a very deep impact on numerous human populations. While public health campaigns have achieved spectacular successes, they do not appear to be evenly distributed throughout the world. Indeed, although many infectious diseases have been eliminated in the Western world, deadly pathogens are still spreading in many low-income countries. This chapter aims to describe the current epidemiological situations, reviewing control strategies and the progress that has been made in the fight against major human pathogens with the strongest impact in low-income countries. This chapter, therefore, introduces most of the pathogens that will be discussed in the book, and it describes why some epidemiological situations improved for some diseases more than for others.
Research in crises: overcoming obstacles and lessons for the future
Authors: Grais Rebecca F.
Published: August 2018

At present, there is the highest number of displaced persons since World War II. Add to that the approximately one billion people living in so-designated fragile states, as well as multiple large-scale humanitarian crises. These vulnerable populations are subject direct and indirect health effects. Unfortunately, delivering effective interventions to them is fraught with difficulty, and the evidence base is weak. The chapter examines the conditions that give rise to acute and prevalent health risks among vulnerable populations, and the present challenges to research. These issues are particularly pertinent to inform our understanding of the ecology of infectious disease. Research contributions are also essential to address infectious diseases and to weigh the relative benefits and risks of different control options. Effective research in crises provides critical information for our understanding of infections among the most vulnerable.
Environmental change and pathogen transmission
Authors: Gozlan Rodolphe E. , Combe Marine
Published: August 2018

The majority of emerging pathogens has an environmental origin. These pathogens are increasing in incidence and geographic distribution. Because of the continuous worldwide population growth, and global changes, the emergence of pathogens will continue to intensify, particularly in tropical areas where demographic growth is uncontrolled and socioeconomic and environmental changes rapid. Using a set of case studies, we look at the role of biodiversity alteration on zoonoses emergence and transmission routes, as well as the existing links between climate variability and pathogen emergence. Pathogen emergence and transmission are closely associated with habitat alterations and vector or host-species changes. Because of environmental changes, pathogens that were previously in a dynamic equilibrium, with local host communities in a pristine habitat, without human contact, are now redistributed locally, and over long distances, owing to increasing global pathways. Thus, we aim to characterize the environmental determinants of pathogen transmission in the tropics.
Human activities and disease transmission: the agriculture case
Authors: Slingenbergh Jan , Cecchi Giuliano , Leneman Marjan
Published: August 2018

The time is right to fight poverty, food insecurity and disease. The nexus of agriculture, development and health is presented, highlighting global health security threats of animal origin. Food and Agriculture Organization data illustrate how dynamic farming landscapes modulate livestock disease mosaics. In Latin America, lowland pressures facilitate successful transformation from extensive to intensive agricultural production. In South Asia, smallholders produce the bulk of milk in Asia, despite high disease prevalence and low productivity levels. Disease control improves food security and human and animal health and reduces land and water resources use. A One Health approach is called for to address the health of humans, animals and the environment, as part of sustainable development efforts. The perspective varies by location. Ecology, farming systems, economics and markets differ among world regions, as do the challenges. Despite emerging health security threats, progress has been made toward attaining the 2030 sustainable development goals.
Afterword III Tunable methods for public health policies
Authors: Roche Benjamin , Broutin Hélène , Simard Frédéric
Published: August 2018

In Part III, we have highlighted how the fundamental knowledge presented in Part II can be translated into real and concrete public health strategies. Mathematical modeling, inherited from ecological knowledge, has become a fundamental tool to design such strategies, as well as to overcome some crucial caveats like fluctuating sampling effort....
Postscript Evolutionary ecology to reconcile public health, ethics and politics for infectious diseases control in low-income countries: time to move forward!
Authors: Seck Awa Marie Coll , Seck Ibrahima
Published: August 2018

Infectious diseases (IDs) remain a major public health challenge in low-income countries (LICs) despite several striking successes and improvements in their control during the last decades. This includes the eradication of smallpox and rinderpest, and several other pathogens are on the edge of eradication, such as polio or guinea worm. It also concerns other high-profile pathogens that are increasingly more controlled, such as malaria, which has strongly diminished in several regions or measles for which transmission has been strongly impacted by childhood vaccination programs....
Cognitive biases and limitations
Authors: Stern Marc J.
Published: August 2018

This chapter summarizes some of the most common cognitive biases and limitations in human thinking and provides specific strategies for what we can do about them in various contexts. It serves as a baseline for understanding the flaws in some of our basic assumptions about human behavior and for approaching the rest of the theories discussed in the book with an appropriate dose of humility.
Are we too many?
Authors: Pacchioni Gianfranco
Published: August 2018

The chapter starts by making a comparison between a famous congress of the past, the Solvay Conference of 1927, which was attended by only 29 scientists, and the mega conferences of present day with several thousand participants. This introduces the central question of the book: how many scientists are active today? Are there too many? The discussion looks at the annual growth rate in scientists versus the world’s population, membership totals of scientific societies over time, and the amount of money spent on research and development by different regions, such as the USA, Europe, and East and Southeast Asia. The discussion moves then to the number of PhD students and their goal to gain an academic position. Increasingly strong competition for young researcher is often the reason for cases of misconduct, including fraud.
Introduction
Authors: van Miert Dirk
Published: August 2018

After a short preface defining the geographical and temporal boundaries and terminology of this monograph, the introduction sketches the history of biblical scholarship in Western Europe from Valla to Scaliger. This Introduction shows that biblical scholarship reached an advanced level of sophistication in the course of the sixteenth century, stimulated by the rise of Christian Hebraism. Both Catholic and Protestant parties used philology to buttress their own religious arguments and interpretations of history, although some of the new evidence begged for negotiation before it could be suitable for their confessional identities. The rise of biblical philology posed challenges to religion that were similar to those caused by developments in philosophy and the natural sciences.
Biblical Philology
Authors: van Miert Dirk
Published: August 2018

Chapter 2 gives an example of how historiography has hitherto been skewed in favour of aligning philology with latitudinarian readings of the Bible. Philology was not the prerogative of the more libertine faction in the Reformed Orthodox Church; on the contrary, it was the orthodox Franciscus Gomarus who excelled in biblical scholarship. Philology was only of marginal concern in the highly public theological discussion in the decade following the death of Scaliger in 1609: the ‘Troubles’ over predestination and the relation between the State and the Church, which brought the nascent Dutch state to the brink of civil war. Arminius professed to value philological methods in his letters and showed an insight into recent developments, but this was of no consequence for his dogmatic position. His adversary Franciscus Gomarus proved a far more accomplished philologist than Arminius, but his philological work postdates the Troubles and has therefore been largely ignored.
Mobilizing Biblical Philology
Authors: van Miert Dirk
Published: August 2018

Chapter 3 further develops the argument that philology was not the prerogative of latitudinarian factions of Calvinism and shows that it need not be marginal to theology. In fact, philology proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of the card-carrying orthodox translators and revisers of the Dutch Authorized Version: the States’ Translation. This chapter reveals the philological nature of the discussions that were conducted between the dozen members of the two teams of translators and editors who worked on the translation for over a decade. An analysis of manual annotations in the unique typeset draft of the translation, shows that the revisers often covered up the textual problems and linguistic ambiguities, but sometimes also plainly admitted that the text could be translated in other ways as well. The teams relied on a corpus of philological handbooks, which stood in a humanist biblical philological tradition.
Claude Saumaise and the ‘Hairy War’ (1640–1650)
Authors: van Miert Dirk
Published: August 2018

Chapter 6 shows that Claude Saumaise, who as a teenager was also coached by Scaliger by means of letters and who had taken his chair two decades after Scaliger’s death, was also his successor in terms of biblical scholarship. Moreover, Saumaise advertised biblical philology in the context of a violent public debate over public conduct: the question whether the apostle Paul thought that men could not wear long hair. In this highly advertised controversy, biblical scholarship spilled over into the vernacular, hit the pulpits, and impacted on street behaviour. The split ran right through the heart of Calvinist orthodoxy, with Jacob Revius siding with Saumaise against Gisbertus Voetius in defence of the Christian liberty of a man’s right to choose.
Radical Philology
Authors: van Miert Dirk
Published: August 2018

Chapter 7 shows that Claude Saumaise provided, willy-nilly, a prop for Isaac de La Peyrère to support his heretical theory of the Men before Adam. The chapter demonstrates the importance of the medium in which biblical philology was conducted: La Peyrère made creative use of the scholarship of Scaliger and Saumaise and was accepted as company by the likes of André Rivet, as long as he kept his theory within very limited circulation. As soon as he went public, however, he was ostracized and banished from the Republic of Letters. His book on the pre-Adamites was refuted even in academic disputations. These disputations demonstrate the rise of biblical philology as a subject, fit for teaching students. It was particularly in the 1650s that this type of philological disputation emerged. The pre-Adamites are another example of how biblical scholarship conquered the vernacular public sphere, through accessible pamphlets by Isaac Vossius and Hornius.
Biblical History and Antiquarianism
Authors: Touber Jetze
Published: August 2018

In chapter 3 we chart the potential and the pitfalls of Dutch Reformed biblical philology after 1650, a period that is relatively unknown. Focusing on Old Testament scholarship, a number of case studies serves to trace the paradoxical results of biblical philology in this period, as practised by the likes of Johannes Coccejus and Campegius Vitringa: discussions about the ‘oracle stones’ umim and thummim, reconstructions of the temple described by the prophet Ezekiel, and erotic allusions in the Old Testament. When such specialized debates spilled over to the writings of non-professionals, such as Adrianus Beverland, this could lead to unconventional speculations, unwelcome from a clerical perspective. These case studies show how existing philological work on the Bible became tied up with the textual criticism articulated by Spinoza, how Dutch scholarship connected with international discussions, and how philology radiated from academic specialists to outsiders with their own claims to exegetical authority.
Conclusion: The Bible Human and Divine
Authors: Touber Jetze
Published: August 2018

The conclusion recapitulates the variegated dynamics at play in the interpretation and use of the Bible in the Dutch Public Church when Spinoza articulated his biblical criticism. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus did not suddenly open the eyes of his contemporaries to the technical and philosophical problems of identifying a text with the Word of God. Rather it arrived at an extremely delicate moment, when forces from various directions were already contesting one another over the authority to interpret Scripture in their own ways. These forces had their own momentum when refuting Spinoza’s outlandish appeal to biblical philology, and responded in turn to one another inlight of the new reality. In result, by 1700 the space allowed for exegetical variety within the doctrinal enclosure of the Public Church had gradually widened, but it remained a contested terrain where innovations were easily considered, or branded, harmful to ecclesiastical unity.
Flight of the Swallows
Authors: Nolte David D.
Published: August 2018

The science of modern dynamics takes the simple idea of Galileo’s parabolic trajectory and generalizes it into abstract hyperspaces of multiple dimensions. This chapter introduces the new way that physicists and mathematicians visualize dynamical systems, taking a global view of complex behavior and finding that the laws of physics capture the orbits of planets around suns (and the paths of light around black holes) as easily as the evolution of new species or the rise and fall of economies. This new visualization uses phase space to capture the global behavior of complex systems. The path across life, the universe and so many hyperdimensional worlds is being captured by new disciplines within new sciences like chaos theory, entanglement, network science, econophysics and evolutionary dynamics.
Epilogue: Galileo at Home in the Multiverse
Authors: Nolte David D.
Published: August 2018

This final short chapter sums up the topics of the book, showing how Galileo’s simple parabolic trajectory has matured into an overarching and grand concept that encompasses modern dynamics. Galileo achieved immortality despite his house arrest and despite the banning of his books that he feared had erased his legacy. Ironically, his house arrest gave him time to assemble and record his lifelong investigation into the science of motion—and banning his books made them immensely popular.
The Crimean War and (Self-)Sacrifice in Mid-Victorian Fiction
Authors: Schramm Jan-Melissa
Published: August 2018

Charles Dickens was among those writers who responded to the tragic losses of the Crimean War with renewed attention to the cultural significance of sacrifice. He followed the war effort with care, protesting publicly about the bureaucratic bungling that had cost British lives in Sebastopol. His novels written immediately after the cessation of the war provide us with insight into the aesthetic uses of different models of sacrifice. In Little Dorrit (1856), Dickens explores the vocation of self-sacrifice popularized by feminine service in the war; in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens depends upon the dynamics of barbaric sacrifice to achieve closure as the Christlike Sidney Carton lays down his life for his brother man on the scaffold. This chapter draws upon the work of the theologians Nancy Jay and Yvonne Sherwood to probe the contradictions inherent in Victorian imaginings of sacrifice—both Protestant and Catholic, male and female.
The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice
Authors: Herbert Christopher
Published: August 2018

This chapter tracks the insistent imagery of blood sacrifice that stamps itself on contemporary writing about the Indian Mutiny of 1857–9, including histories, personal memoirs, and novels. Stressing the overwhelming representation of Evangelicals among both partisans of extreme measures to suppress the rebellion and, very consequentially, British field commanders during the war, the essay speculates on the reverberations that echo between the thematics of blood sacrifice in Mutiny discourse and the cult of sacrificial blood that manifests itself, often in religious hysteria, in such texts as Charles Wesley’s hymns. The crux of the analysis is the ambivalence in declarations that British victims of the atrocities were (to quote one historian of the time) ‘mercilessly sacrificed to sepoy vengeance’. Imaginative literature of the period explores the contradictions and complexities of this rhetoric of sacrifice and revenge, affirming, diluting, and experimenting with the Evangelical register.
The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice
Authors: Fuller Randall
Published: August 2018

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.
‘It is the poems you have lost’
Authors: Goethals Helen
Published: August 2018

This chapter suggests that, after Dunkirk, civilian morale in Britain was galvanized around three sacrificial moments: the purging of the National Government, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz. Accordingly, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and others published powerful poems on the idea of sacrifice, many deriving their power from drafting tradition and mythology into new visions of social organization. In analysing a variety of these poetic visions, this chapter also considers work by Alun Lewis, Louis MacNeice, R. N. Currey, Keith Douglas, Timothy Corsellis, and Sidney Keyes. Three salient issues that bear on sacrifice can help us understand the poets’ hopes and misgivings: the relation of sacrifice to numbers and consent; the moral stasis induced when deaths are ritualized; the insight that members of a given society live in harmony not because of the periodic bloodletting of war, but in spite of it.
Afterword
Authors: Houen Alex , Schramm Jan-Melissa
Published: August 2018

In trying to understand why ‘nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’, Benedict Anderson stresses the importance of the role played by the human imagination—both individual and collective.1 As literacy rose across the course of the long nineteenth century, acts of reading—of newspapers, novels, and poetry—took place contemporaneously within its borders, creating among citizens a shared idea of a political community understood as both ‘inherently limited and sovereign’. Anderson observes:...
Dementia, multimorbidity, and frailty
Authors: Dening Karen Harrison
Published: August 2018

Increasing age is the strongest risk factor for developing dementia, frailty, and other co-morbid conditions. Dementia is not a disease in itself but a syndrome; a collection of symptoms: such as a decline in memory, reasoning, and communication skills, and a gradual loss of skills needed to carry out daily living activities. Whereas frailty is a distinctive health state in which multiple body systems gradually lose their in-built reserves. However, often ‘layered’ on these two may also be several other conditions that coexist within an individual. There is a growing body of evidence to support the psychosocial care for people with dementia as the disease advances but little of the effect and outcomes where there is a combination of these conditions. This chapter explores some of the issues for families affected by these conditions and the care and support that may be of benefit through case management.
The meaning of dignity in psychosocial care
Authors: McClement Susan , Thompson Genevieve
Published: August 2018

Individuals living with life-limiting illness experience a myriad of physical, psychosocial and existential challenges. Psychosocial care is an holistic approach that aims to mitigate the distress engendered by these challenges. One important facet of such care includes tending to patient dignity. This chapter discusses what dignity is, why it is important, and how dignity conserving care can be weaved into daily clinical encounters. Palliative care is a type of health care for individuals facing life-threatening illness and their families that involves ongoing evaluation and management of a person’s pain and other physical symptoms. It also involves the provision of psychosocial care—care that attends to a person’s emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. This whole-person approach to the care of individuals is concerned with addressing a range of needs that can improve quality of life.
What Suffering Is
Authors: Brady Michael S.
Published: August 2018

This chapter examines and explains the nature of suffering. Brady surveys the different kinds of physical and mental suffering, and then introduces a ‘componential’ account of suffering, in line with traditional ways of thinking about emotions. He then proposes that suffering involves two core elements. The first is an experience of negative affect or unpleasantness, which is common to all forms of suffering, whether physical or emotional. The second is an occurrent desire that this unpleasantness cease. Suffering is, in a slogan, unpleasantness that we mind. He shows how this account has a suitable scope. Appealing to occurrent desires allows for animals and young children to suffer, and allows us to accommodate the fact that cognition often plays an important role in determining how much we suffer.
The Nature of Unpleasantness
Authors: Brady Michael S.
Published: August 2018

In this chapter, Brady argues in favour of a desire view of unpleasantness, which is the central element of suffering. He considers, and rejects, distinctive feeling theories of unpleasantness, and then proposes a novel desire view, according to which unpleasantness is a relational property, constituted by having a sensation that we desire to cease. In the chapter he defends this view against the most important objections, he then goes on to show how this view is preferable to rival views, and he ends by explaining how this view of unpleasantness, and the view of suffering given in Chapter 1, are mutually supporting.
Suffering and Virtues of Strength and Vulnerability
Authors: Brady Michael S.
Published: August 2018

Suffering of all kinds is essential to the cultivation and expression of two important classes of virtue. These are virtues of strength, such as courage, fortitude, and patience, and virtues of vulnerability, such as adaptability and humility. Taking his lead from Nietzsche when discussing the former, in this chapter Brady argues that suffering is essential to the development of these virtues, and indeed is often pursued as a condition on the value of certain ends. Taking his lead from Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd, Brady then argues that suffering is essential to the development and expression of virtues of vulnerability.
Hiding a Disability and Passing as Non-Disabled
Authors: Cureton Adam
Published: August 2018

I draw on my experiences of passing as non-disabled to explain how a disabled person can hide his disability, why he might do so, and what costs and risks he and others might face along the way. Passing as non-disabled can bring greater social acceptance and inclusion in joint projects, an enhanced sense of belonging, pride, and self-worth, and an easier time forming and maintaining personal relationships. Yet hiding one’s disability can also undermine some of these same values; for example, it prevents someone from living up to normal social expectations or sharing important aspects of himself with others. Hiding a disability can also interfere with a person’s self-respect, self-acceptance, integrity, and self-development. Although the chapter does not take a stand on whether hiding a disability is, overall, prudent, wise, or morally justified, it draws out some lessons about disability from why someone might want to hide it.
Pretending Not to Notice
Authors: Stohr Karen
Published: August 2018

This chapter explores the moral implications of social conventions about noticing—what we notice and choose not to notice about persons and their circumstances. Conventions about noticing are a crucial way in which we express moral attitudes. To be noticed appropriately is to have one’s moral and social standing affirmed; conversely, to be denied notice or to be noticed inappropriately is often to be denigrated or objectified. The chapter unpacks these moral dimensions of noticing and discusses the implications for interpersonal exchanges involving persons with disabilities. Section 1 lays out the conventions of noticing and how they operate in social interactions. Section 2 puts forward a Kantian argument that these conventions have important moral dimensions and, as such, should be governed by duties of love and respect. Section 3 discusses the implications for social interactions among strangers when one or more of the parties involved has a visible disability.
Disability, Basic Justice, and Habilitation into Basic Good Health
Authors: Becker Lawrence C.
Published: August 2018

Focusing on the human necessity of habilitation leads to a more inclusive and adequate account of the circumstances of justice. Such an account involves paying persistent attention to similarities and differences in the physical and psychological abilities of actual human agents. That in turn leads to equally persistent attention to the basic good health (or lack of it) in such agents, and to their inabilities (disabilities) and abilities. Such attention to basic good health then yields a disability-friendly starting point for the construction of normative theories of basic justice generally. It does this by providing a constant undercurrent of attention to the crucial problems of human habilitation and rehabilitation that any plausible normative theory of justice must address. Those problems of justice, moreover, are framed as part of the inescapable project of working around human disabilities, or through them, toward situations in which their salience for basic justice is minimized.
Early Twentieth-Century America
Authors: Freedman Linda
Published: August 2018

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the reception of Blake as a Whitmanesque prophet–artist became even more closely entwined with literary visions of America. The mysticism and occultism of the Yeats–Ellis edition helped shape the new versions of Blake as Whitmanesque prophet–artist which emerged in the work of cultural nationalists Waldo Frank and Hart Crane. T. S. Eliot opposed the fervour of cultural nationalism and rejected the idea that Blake was any sort of national prophet. Marianne Moore also rejected the idea that Blake was a spiritual forefather but responded strongly to Blake’s composite art and the humanity of his poetry. Blake was a growing presence in the academy and influenced Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. They turned to a Blake of affection, unity, energy, and action, finding purpose and vision that was often, though not always, optimistic, making his voice one of the formative influences of American Modernism.
Romanticism after Auschwitz
Authors: Freedman Linda
Published: August 2018

Saul Bellow’s interest in Blake provides a counterpoint to Blake’s standing in psychedelic counterculture. Bellow despised what he perceived to be the thoughtless sham Romanticism of contemporary youth. For Bellow, as for Blake, imaginative thought was the quintessential moral force in the fight against totalitarianism because it was the sign of the ‘real Man’, the creative individual whose mind is always active. The Blake that Bellow admired was not a mystic who turned away from the world in favour of ecstatic experience but a thoughtful philosopher of freedom. From Henderson (1959) through Sammler (1970) to his most overt expression of Romantic possibility in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), Bellow used Blake to frame, articulate, and explore the redemptive possibilities of Romantic vision.
Continuing Visions
Authors: Freedman Linda
Published: August 2018

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.
The RcvP Model
Authors: van der Hulst Harry
Published: August 2018

The theory of phonological structure (called ‘Radical CV Phonology’) is first outlined in Chapter 2. This theory is a development of Dependency Phonology. The chapter introduces a theory of elements and minimal vowel representations based on the Successive Division Algorithm. Other topics of relevance are underspecification, markednes, and enhancement. The model of Radical CV Phonology functions as the theoretical background of the set of elements that are active in the harmony systems that will be analyzed in Chapters 4–10 and is, as such, of interest to readers who want to know why we have these particular elements.
Case studies of African tongue root systems
Authors: van der Hulst Harry
Published: August 2018

This Chapter presents a variety of case studies of tongue root harmony in African languages. These case studies are arranged according to language family membership. The cases selected are those which have occupied a significant place in the theoretical literature. The objective is to demonstrate that the theory developed here can handle the cases that other theories have been built on: Niger-Congo (Yoruba), Nilo-Saharan (Maasai, Turkana), Afro-Asiatic (Somali, Kera) among many others. The RcvP model demonstrated that it can deal with all harmony patterns that were discussed, including most extra complications that individual systems exemplify.
Reading at Home
Authors: Brundin Abigail , Howard Deborah , Laven Mary
Published: August 2018

For laypeople in the Renaissance, pious reading was supposed to be a daily household activity, to be interwoven into the other demands of domestic life in a pragmatic way. This chapter explores different practices of domestic devotional reading, arguing for an expansion of the category of ‘devotional reading’ to include communal activities in which most participants had limited literacy. An examination of readers’ marks in devotional books allows us to track their reading in an intimate way. Archival sources reveal interactions with books of all kinds. Finally the chapter considers owners and readers of manuscripts before the introduction of printing.
Thresholds
Authors: Brundin Abigail , Howard Deborah , Laven Mary
Published: August 2018

This chapter explores the transmission of religious objects, ideas, and practices between the household and the wider community. Occupying a central place in the discussion is the Holy House of Loreto, the Virgin’s own home, which was supposedly transported by angels in the thirteenth century from the Holy Land to the Papal States. Despite Counter-Reformation attempts to impose boundaries between sacred and profane space, the Italian Renaissance casa was not a bounded, sealed space but was infinitely receptive to outside influences. In attending to thresholds, this final chapter insists on a fluid conception of the home: a locale with a special place in the divine cosmos, protected by Christ, the Virgin, and saints and open to the presence of the supernatural.
Conclusion
Authors: Brundin Abigail , Howard Deborah , Laven Mary
Published: August 2018

The conclusion offers a brief analysis of a set of textual and visual annotations that are preserved on a piece of paper pasted into a late sixteenth-century devotional work. The interaction of the owner with the book provides a focus for the book’s concluding remarks on the domestication of devotion.
Plato against Democracy
Authors: Kraut Richard
Published: August 2018

This essay examines the Republic’s most important argument against democracy, and claims that it remains, even amidst the dominance of democratic theory, a powerful critique not only of Athenian democracy but also of representative democracy. Plato’s basic idea is that a regime is inherently defective if it gives people a right to participate in political office whether or not they have demonstrated any qualifications for doing so. I examine several ways in which modern and contemporary democratic theorists respond to Plato’s critique, and argue that they are problematic. Perhaps Plato was right, then: democracy is not the best possible political system.
Plato’s Philebus and the Value of Idle Pleasure
Authors: Harte Verity
Published: August 2018

Early in his Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick quotes with approval William Lecky’s claim that ‘the pleasure of virtue can be obtained only on the express condition of its not being the object sought’. This makes the pleasure of virtue idle—a pleasure that falls outside of the motivational framework of the activity in which the pleasure arises. In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates identifies certain so-called ‘true pleasures’ as the only pleasures that are, without qualification, good. These true pleasures are idle in the relevant sense: they are pleasures one gets without aiming at them, that is, without pleasure having a practically guiding role in the activities that give rise to them. This is non-accidental: these are pleasures one will get only by not taking pleasure as one’s guide. Further, this fact about the motivational structure of these pleasures is essentially connected to their goodness.
Aristotelian Feelings in the Rhetoric
Authors: Gottlieb Paula
Published: August 2018

Feelings play an important role in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but the discussion of them is scanty. A longer discussion is to be found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but as Irwin points out, there are important differences between the context and content of the two works. I consider how far the discussion of the feelings in Aristotle’s Rhetoric can be used to elucidate the feelings mentioned in the Nicomachean Ethics. I conclude by contrasting Aristotle’s views about feelings with those of Hobbes, arguing that the clash between Aristotelian naturalism and Hobbesian voluntarism shows up even in their respective accounts of the passions.
Deliberation and Decision in the Magna Moralia and Eudemian Ethics
Authors: Nielsen Karen Margrethe
Published: August 2018

The Magna Moralia has long been the ugly duckling in the Aristotelian pond, shunned on account of its ungainly composition, flat-footed argument, and peculiar linguistic habits. In this essay, I examine one influential argument against its authenticity, namely the hypothesis that the author of the MM was a student or a later compendium writer, attempting to reconstruct the argument of the Eudemian Ethics or Nicomachean Ethics. My test case is the analyses of deliberation (bouleusis) and decision (prohairesis) in the three ethics. I argue that the MM diverges on important points from the EE and the EN, and that even an inept compendium writer or note taker could not have extracted the analysis in the MM from the other treatises. I conclude that the MM may resemble the EE because the former is an early and immature version of the latter.
London
Authors: Roberts Richard
Published: August 2018

At the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007 London was one of the two foremost global financial centres, along with New York. London experienced a 12 per cent fall in wholesale financial services jobs in 2008–9, but a recovery got underway in 2010 and London’s wholesale financial services sector staged a wavering advance. But now there were new challenges, in particular the avalanche of financial regulation coming from the UK, the EU, the US and the G20. Fintech engendered new uncertainties. The impact of Brexit was uncertain, but mostly expected to be negative, at least in the short-term. Furthermore, there was growing competition from Asian and other financial centres. Nevertheless, London remained pre-eminent as one of the two largest global concentrations of wholesale financial services activity and at the top of the Global Financial Centres Index.
Running the Restaurant
Authors: Assael Brenda
Published: August 2018

Chapter 2 examines the restaurant as a business. It offers an explanation for the dramatically contrasting fortunes of London’s restaurants, a sector of the economy characterized by success and expansion as well as by failure and bankruptcy. Consideration is given to how restaurants were financed, how they secured staff and supplies, the incorporation of new technology, and the often ingenious ways that they sought out customers. Restaurant proprietors and managers (and even cooks and chefs) explored a variety of schemes to establish their status as professionals, but these rarely compromised the vigorous pursuit of financial reward, in a sector of the economy in which profit margins were often relatively small. In an era characterized by a moving frontier between state and economy, the restaurant revealed the ongoing commitment in Victorian and Edwardian culture to the power of free enterprise and the maintenance of a robust commercial domain.
Framing the issues
Authors: Babor Thomas F. , Caulkins Jonathan , Fischer Benedikt , Foxcroft David , Humphreys Keith , Medina-Mora María Elena , Obot Isidore , Rehm Jürgen , Reuter Peter , Room Robin , Rossow Ingeborg , Strang John
Published: August 2018

The use of psychoactive substances is commonplace in many parts of the world, despite the efforts of policymakers, government officials, public health advocates, and concerned citizens to prevent, eliminate, or control it. If previous experience can serve as a guide, in the future many countries will face periodic drug-use epidemics, followed by aggressive policy responses to suppress them. Continued endemic drug use generates a patchwork of policy responses that never quite keep up with the problem. The scientific evidence on the impact of policy constitutes the core interest of this book and consists of three broad approaches: programmes to prevent drug use, treatment and harm-minimization services that help heavy drug users change their behaviour, and supply control programmes to restrict access to illicit substances. This book suggests that public health concepts provide an important vehicle to coordinate supply control and demand reduction.
Drug use in global perspective
Authors: Babor Thomas F. , Caulkins Jonathan , Fischer Benedikt , Foxcroft David , Humphreys Keith , Medina-Mora María Elena , Obot Isidore , Rehm Jürgen , Reuter Peter , Room Robin , Rossow Ingeborg , Strang John
Published: August 2018

The use of illicit psychoactive substances is commonplace in many parts of the world, with significant variations in the extent of drug use and problem use. This reflects differences in drug markets, drug availability, and legislation, as well as political, economic, and social conditions. Cultural and historical conditions can also play an important role. Overwhelming evidence from epidemiological research conducted over the past 50 years shows that adolescence is the period of greatest risk for the initiation of drug use. Most of those who have tried illicit drugs do not go on to develop drug dependence or drug-related problems. Problem drug users are more often males and are likely to have a family history of substance dependence, delinquent behaviour, and mental health problems. Strategies to prevent drug use or drug related harms need to address the complexity of drug-related problems.
Preventing illicit drug use by young people
Authors: Babor Thomas F. , Caulkins Jonathan , Fischer Benedikt , Foxcroft David , Humphreys Keith , Medina-Mora María Elena , Obot Isidore , Rehm Jürgen , Reuter Peter , Room Robin , Rossow Ingeborg , Strang John
Published: August 2018

Amongst the plethora of school, education, and community-based prevention programmes, there is evidence that some approaches can delay the initiation of drug and alcohol use. A small number of high quality studies find evidence of protection from specific family-based or classroom-management programmes in preventing drug or alcohol use. It is notable that these programmes do not focus exclusively or specifically on drug or alcohol use per se. Rather, their aim is to improve behaviour and social skills more generally, within the family or classroom environment. These programmes also show evidence of wider effect beyond drugs or alcohol. In contrast, purely didactic prevention programmes have no evidence of effectiveness, whether delivered through the mass media, in the community, or in the classroom.
An Introduction to Uncertain Futures
Authors: Beckert Jens , Bronk Richard
Published: August 2018

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for considering how imaginaries and narratives interact with calculative devices to structure expectations and beliefs in the economy. It analyses the nature of uncertainty in innovative market economies and examines how economic actors use imaginaries, narratives, models, and calculative practices to coordinate and legitimize action, determine value, and establish sufficient conviction to act despite the uncertainty they face. Placing the themes of the volume in the context of broader trends in economics and sociology, the chapter argues that, in conditions of widespread radical uncertainty, there is no uniquely rational set of expectations, and there are no optimal strategies or objective probability functions; instead, expectations are often structured by contingent narratives or socially constructed imaginaries. Moreover, since expectations are not anchored in a pre-existing future reality but have an important role in creating the future, they become legitimate objects of political debate and crucial instruments of power in markets and societies.
Arctic Futures
Authors: Andersson Jenny
Published: August 2018

The Arctic region is the site of a geopolitical scramble for two major future assets: the opening up of the Northeast Passage and access to enormous gas reserves. Meanwhile, many other possible futures define the ongoing struggle to establish claims to the Arctic among a variety of ‘Arctic nations’, including the rights of indigenous people, the preservation of pristine nature, future tourism, and the reestablishing of historical connections with previous colonizing countries in Scandinavia and Russia. The chapter discusses a wide repertoire of future making, including scenario gaming, forecast technologies, and forms of nation branding used as geopolitical instruments for defining expectations and future interests in the Arctic. At a theoretical level, the chapter examines the mutual constitution of imaginaries and interests and highlights ways in which actors attempt to ‘close’ the future by establishing the dominance of particular expectations or scenarios that suit their interests.
A Tractable Future
Authors: Holmes Douglas R.
Published: August 2018

Markets are a function of language. This chapter examines ethnographically how central bankers create and enter a communicative field in which market participants and members of the public model economic phenomena for their own purposes, employing their own pragmatic insights. Central banks increasingly manage the expectations of others with official statements and forward guidance constructed in words. But this chapter focuses also on the role of conversation both within central banks and between the central banks and their publics and shows how this discursive input is crucial to central bankers’ own sense of the future. The influential stories that policy-makers tell are partly the product of internal conversation and listening to the way other market protagonists envisage the future. The efficacy of monetary policy rests on a two-way discursive interaction between central bankers and other market protagonists, who together must orchestrate prospectively the contingencies of economic stability and growth.
Uncertain Meanings of Risk
Authors: Besedovsky Natalia
Published: August 2018

This chapter studies calculative risk-assessment practices in credit rating agencies. It identifies two fundamentally different methodological approaches for producing ratings, which in turn shape the respective conceptions of credit risk. The traditional approach sees ‘risk’ as an only partially calculable and predictable set of hazards that should be avoided or minimized. This approach is particularly evident in the production of country credit ratings and gives rise to ordinal rankings of risk. By contrast, structured finance rating practices conceive of ‘risk’ as both fully calculable and controllable; they construct cardinal measures of risk by assuming that ontological uncertainty does not exist and that models can capture all possible events in a probabilistic manner. This assumption—that uncertainty can be turned into measurable risk—is a necessary precondition for structured finance securities and has become an influential imaginary in financial markets.
Discounting and the Making of the Future
Authors: Doganova Liliana
Published: August 2018

Discounting future revenues and costs is the main tool used to assess investments. This chapter develops a sociological analysis of discounting by examining how, and with what effects, economic actors discount the future in order to make statements about the value of investments and determine relevant courses of action. The argument that discounting is an instrument of valuation that forms uncertain futures is developed through two case studies: forest management in the middle of the nineteenth century, and drug development today. Rather than as an inherent characteristic of the future, uncertainty is analysed as the result of valuing investments through this particular instrument. The chapter identifies three distinct expressions of uncertainty in the formulas and practices of discounting—uncertainty as measurable risk, uncertainty as a concern for investors, and uncertainty as the multiplicity of explored possibilities—and it discusses the different forms of uncertain future they entail.