bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Italy’s Decline, the Existing Interpretations, and Our Hypothesis
Authors: Capussela Andrea Lorenzo
Published: May 2018

This chapter summarizes the main analyses of Italy’s economic decline, discusses their limitations, and sketches the interpretation offered in this book. The discussion is set in the framework of Schumpeterian growth theory. It moves from the observation that during the 1980s Italy’s TFP performance began to diverge from that of its peers, andG that growth has been stagnant since the early 1990s. The existing interpretations identify the proximate causes of the country’s decline, not its deeper ones, nor do they satisfactorily explain why an unprecedented wave of structural reforms failed to reverse it. This chapter advances the hypothesis, explored in the book, that its deeper causes lie in the political economy of growth, for innovation and economic creative destruction can be hindered if political creative destruction is limited and the ensuing systemic constraints undermine institutional reform.
The Conceptual Framework: Collective Action, Trust, Culture, and Ideas
Authors: Capussela Andrea Lorenzo
Published: May 2018

This chapter completes the theoretical framework of the book by juxtaposing institutional economics with the literature on the collective action problem, social norms, culture, and ideas. It discusses the foundations of the collective action problem and the role of institutions—formal (laws) and informal (social norms)—in overcoming it. It links these studies with those on social capital, civicness, and the origins of generalized inter-personal trust. It criticizes the view—frequent in analyses of Italy—that a society’s culture is an independent obstacle to its development, and argues conversely that institutions, civicness, trust, and culture are part of the extant social order, and co-evolve. It ends with a discussion of the role of ideas, which are freer from the grip of the extant equilibrium and can lead elites, distributional coalitions, and ordinary citizens and firms to revise their assessment of their own interests and support efficiency-enhancing reforms.
Continuity and Instability: The Spiral Sets In
Authors: Capussela Andrea Lorenzo
Published: May 2018

This chapter reviews the 1964–79 period, during which the social tensions accumulated over the previous decades erupted, a wave of political violence without parallel in Europe shook the country, and the steep rise of labour’s bargaining power caused a persistent wage shock. Political consensus was sustained by spending policies aimed at particularistic inclusion, leading to both a fragmented welfare system and growing budget deficits, which were largely monetized. Driven also by a challenging international environment, macroeconomic disequilibria accumulated. Although the country’s institutions were increasingly inappropriate, TFP growth and Italy’s convergence to the productivity frontier nonetheless continued, sustained also by the rise of industrial districts. Several mutually reinforcing vicious circles set in, however: the collusion between political and economic elites intensified, clientelism and corruption rose, organized crime strengthened, and after two decades of convergence the South resumed its decline relative to the rest of the country.
Parentheticalism about “Believe”
Authors: Henning Tim
Published: May 2018

This chapter introduces and motivates parentheticalism about sentences of the form “S believes that P.” It starts from the so-called phenomenon of transparency of first-person sentences of this form. It is argued that this phenomenon is not aptly explained in wholly pragmatic terms. Parentheticalism offers a superior explanation, and it shows that transparent first-person uses are really just special cases of a wider class, a class of parenthetical readings which are available in all persons and many embedding environments. Formal implementations of the semantic and pragmatic elements of the view are suggested, and the role of parenthetical “believe”-antecedents in indicative conditionals is explored.
Parentheticalism and Requirements of Rationality
Authors: Henning Tim
Published: May 2018

It is suggested that parentheticalism obviates the need to think of rationality as a distinct normative category, different from the category of support by normative reasons. So-called structural requirements are discussed as a potential obstacle to this proposal. It is shown that a parentheticalist account of the antecedents of rationality conditionals can explain away the impression that there are structural requirements of rationality. This account also solves the bootstrapping problem without introducing wide-scope oughts or the like. A notion of pseudo-detachment is introduced to describe the inferential behavior of the relevant conditionals. It is also explained how parentheticalism can capture the elusive idea of taking the subject’s point of view.
The Sanctity of Kinship
Authors: Hummer Hans
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores kinship in the late Roman and post-Roman period with an examination of the senatorial aristocracy through the letters and poems of Sidonius Apollinaris, Ruricius of Limoges, and Avitus of Vienne, and the hagiographical works of Gregory of Tours. The chapter observes that these figures were largely oblivious to the genealogical relations modern research has invested with such importance. The writings of these bishops reveal rather a family consciousness wrapped around episcopal institutions and embedded in a wider ecclesiological vision. The chapter concludes with Gregory of Tours, who had very little to say about his (genealogical) family. His relatives embroider his works as stitches here and there within the tapestry of salvific history, and appear episodically to testify to what was most real to Gregory: the miraculous power of God in the world.
Families in Trust
Authors: Hummer Hans
Published: May 2018

Descent is considered to be a basic characteristic of human kinship. This chapter turns to native conceptions of descent as they are expressed in the monastic property records that have been fundamental to the reconstruction of medieval kin groups. It inverts the prosopographical methods conventionally used to reconstruct descent groups and asks what family descent looks like if charters are treated not as grist for genealogical reconstruction, but as evidence of indigenous expressions of kinship. It argues that a medieval kin group’s conception of itself was inseparable from its participation in the monastic endowments that structured its memory, consciousness, and expectations for the future. The chapter establishes the proposition with three groups: the Huosi of Bavaria, the Rodoins of Alsace, and Hrabanus Maurus’s “family cartulary” within the cartulary of Fulda.
“The Genealogical Unity of Mankind”
Authors: Hummer Hans
Published: May 2018

This chapter argues that medieval genealogies are not representations of “blood” connections per se, but functioned as eschatological maps of divine plans and promises. It derives an indigenous conception of genealogy from exegetical works on biblical genealogies, which also inspired the descending form of medieval genealogies. Biblical genealogies also structured medieval historiography, which traced the salvation of history through a lattice of genealogies connected to Jesus’s genealogy. The chapter shows that the genealogies of royal and princely figures in Carolingian Europe, Flanders, and in Lambert of St. Omer’s Liber Floridus were devised to discern the divinely ordained direction of history as Frankish Europe drifted into a conglomerate of kingdoms and principalities between the tenth and the twelfth centuries.
Thinking about Things
Authors: Sainsbury Mark
Published: May 2018

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things like unicorns. The explanation centers on display theory, a theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Display theory explains away these seeming anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking. The book describes how concepts can be learned, originated, and given a systematic semantic description, independently of whether there exist things to which they refer. There being no things we are thinking about does not mean that we are not thinking about things.
Intentionality and Intensionality
Authors: Sainsbury Mark
Published: May 2018

Intentionality is a property of mental states: their being directed on things, or about things. Intensionality is a semantic property, marked by such features as failure of truth preservation when one referring expression is replaced by another with the same reference. Attributions of intentional states are intensional. This first chapter sets out the basic distinctions, describes some puzzles about intensionality (for example, how it is possible to think about unicorns when there are none to think about), and sketches the path to be taken in the rest of the book.
Henry More and the Development of Absolute Time
Authors: Thomas Emily
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the first British account of absolute time or duration, developed in the mid-seventeenth century by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. It explores the evolution of More’s views on time; the relationship More perceives between time, duration, and God; and the motivations underlying More’s views. It argues that, as More’s views developed across the course of his career, an asymmetry emerged in his mature work with regard to divine presence: God is extendedly present in space, yet holenmerically present in time. The chapter concludes with a note on the influence More may have wielded over later British thinkers.
Space and Time in Isaac Barrow
Authors: Thomas Emily
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores Isaac Barrow’s account of time and space. Barrow’s account is important, partly because it is often argued to be one of the sources that Newton drew on in constructing his absolutism. Although Barrow is usually read as a pre-Newtonian absolutist, this chapter argues that Barrow is in fact a modal relationist, identifying space and time with the relational modes of bodies. This new reading entails that Barrow’s account of time may not have played as large a role in the development of Newton’s work as has been thought, but it also raises the possibility that Leibniz drew on Barrow’s relationism.
Later British Reactions to Absolutism: 1690–1704
Authors: Thomas Emily
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers British reactions to absolutism between the 1690 publication of Locke’s Essay and the 1704 delivery of Clarke’s Boyle lectures. These reactions tended to focus on absolutism about space rather than time, and they were extremely mixed. Thinkers such as William King, Joseph Raphson, Richard Bentley, and John Keill adopt absolutism about time, duration, or space. Their absolutisms draw on various sources, including Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton. Of these absolutisms, the Newtonian strain would prove the most influential. In contrast to these early advocates, thinkers such as Richard Burthogge, John Sergeant, and John Toland reject absolutism, advancing a variety of metaphysical and theological worries.
Last Battles over Absolutism: 1704 Onwards
Authors: Thomas Emily
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers the explosion of debate in British philosophy in the decades following Clarke’s 1704 Boyle lectures, and the publication of Newton’s 1706 Optice and 1713 Principia. The early parts of the chapter explain that absolutism about time, duration, or space was defended by thinkers such as George Cheyne, Samuel Colliber, John Clarke and Catharine Cockburn; and attacked by relationists or idealists such as George Berkeley, Daniel Waterland, Edmund Law, and Joseph Clarke. The later parts of this chapter explore the absolutism of British philosopher John Jackson, whose unique views are of special interest: Jackson holds that God is extendedly present in space and time; and connects absolutism with the doctrine now known as ‘eternalism’, on which the past, present, and future are equally real.
The Authority to Define “Belief”
Authors: Zimmerman Aaron Z.
Published: May 2018

The nature of belief cannot be determined by scientific theorizing alone, but must be relativized to a set of theoretically underdetermined taxonomic choices. Questions about the nature of belief are not wholly scientific. In support of this claim, the author focuses on racial cognition and the various ways in which “belief” might be integrated into our understanding of racism. The stakes are sufficiently high to render blind deference to the stipulations of scientists unwise. Acceptance of the pragmatist definition of “belief” is best seen as a philosophical choice among empirically equivalent but socially divergent alternatives. This is the sense in which pragmatism is not itself an article of science. If we adopt Bain’s definition, we are choosing a picture to live by. The pragmatist confesses to this without embarrassment. She simply insists on a similar admission from those advancing various forms of behaviorism, intellectualism, machine functionalism, and the like.
Geometry
Authors: Henderson Andrea
Published: May 2018

Edwin Abbott’s Flatland dramatizes the implications of dethroning what Victorians regarded as the preeminent representational system: Euclidean geometry. The displacement of the singular Euclidean account of space with a multiplicity of non-referential spatial regimes did more than introduce the possibility of varying perspectives on the world; the challenge to the “sacredness” of Euclid met with resistance partly because it suggested the ideal of a transparent representational system was inherently untenable. Flatland explores the repercussions of this problem for the novel, shifting emphasis from the revelation of the content of character to focus on the vagaries of point of view. The characters are Euclidean figures shown the limitations of their constructions of the world, and epistemic certainty is unavailable because all representational systems are contingent. Abbott finds consolation for this loss of certainty in the formalist, aesthetic character of projective geometry, insisting on the beauty of signs in and of themselves.
Analogy
Authors: Henderson Andrea
Published: May 2018

Analogy was a crucial conceptual tool for Victorian natural philosophers, who regarded the physical world less in terms of material bodies than formal relationships. Thus, even as they aimed for verisimilitude in their theoretical models, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday used analogical figures freely, for they understood nature itself to be structured around analogical relations. Like Maxwell, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote an undergraduate essay on the subject of analogy, conceiving it as fundamental to both scientific advancement and poetic production, where its logic of equivalence subsumes not only metaphor but also rhythm and rhyme. Swinburne’s poems “Before the Mirror” and “Sapphics” dramatize the replacement of the traditional notion of metaphor by the structures of formal analogy.
‘The engrafted word’
Authors: Brownlee Victoria
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the reception and circulation of the Bible and early modern exegetical culture. It begins by tracing how the laity encountered the scriptures, paying particular attention to the accessibility of the Bible’s narratives through non-textual media. Acknowledging the emphasis Protestantism placed on individual reading of the Bible, the discussion then moves to address the question of how the Bible was to be read; that is, the perceived benefit of sequential reading for understanding scripture’s two Testaments. This consideration of the importance of orderly reading then opens into a discussion of the central tenets of biblical typology, and the expansion of this methodology in the sixteenth century to include the present within a continuing process of typological fulfilment. The chapter concludes by elucidating how typology points up the capacious, and contradictory, nature of Protestant literalism, and the contested nature of reformed hermeneutics more generally.
Reading Revelations
Authors: Brownlee Victoria
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the end-point of typological history, apocalypse. The discussion of the Book of Revelation focuses on the ways in which the ongoing struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was filtered through an eschatological lens. Post-Reformation interpretation of this book claimed a special revelation, one that understood the historic juncture of religious change as the final battle between good and evil. Within this schema, the narratives and figures of Revelation became a mechanism to delineate Protestantism visually and ideologically from Catholicism. The work of Spenser, Dekker, and Middleton illuminates the extent to which drama and poetry participated in the extrapolation of Revelation’s meaning for the present. Yet these literary interpretations also highlight the intrinsic difficulty of reading Revelation’s apocalypse in relation to the early modern present, namely, the progression of time. These reimaginings of apocalypse question if the final typological uncovering will be perennially delayed.
Afterword
Authors: Brownlee Victoria
Published: May 2018

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Cultivating Belief
Authors: Lecourt Sebastian
Published: May 2018

This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reworking of religion into an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.
The Rubicon of Language
Authors: Lecourt Sebastian
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers a series of formative debates in British anthropology from the 1840s through the 1860s and uses them to map out the two dominant constructions of religion whose politics the subsequent authors in this study would reinvent. It describes, on the one hand, a liberal and evangelical construction of religion as the common human capacity for spiritual cultivation, and on the other hand a conservative, reactionary model that interpreted religious differences as the expressions of fixed racial identities that neither civilization nor Christianization could erase. In the work of the Oxford philologist F. Max Müller we see how the former model tended to associate religion above all with language. But we can also see the subtle forms of determinism that it contained—an ambiguity that Arnold, Pater, Eliot, and Lang would explore by picturing racialized religion as a resource for liberal self-cultivation.
Arnoldian Secularism
Authors: Lecourt Sebastian
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how Matthew Arnold’s major essays of the 1860s and 1870s took up the racialized readings of religion that Müller had opposed and used them to construct a liberal counter-paradigm for thinking about religion, race, and self-cultivation. In texts such as Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold calls humankind’s religious impulse “Hebraism,” a racial inheritance of the Semitic peoples that can contribute to the development of a many-sided selfhood if it is balanced against the Greek genius for art and knowledge, the Celtic genius for beauty and sentiment, and so on. Yet Arnold’s Hebraism also becomes subtly overdetermined in that it represents simultaneously one particular side of human life and an ideal of one-sidedness that positively rejects any larger pluralist framework. This is the ambiguity at the heart of this study: how race-based religion comes to figure a narrow energy that pluralism wants to incorporate, but also fears as a competitor.
Security Entrepreneurs
Authors: Gheciu Alexandra
Published: May 2018

Focusing on four East European polities—Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania—this book examines the dynamics and implications of processes of commercialization of security that have occurred following the collapse of communist regimes. These processes have been central to post-communist liberalization, and have profoundly shaped those states and their integration into European institutional structures and global economic and political circuits. They have also affected—and been shaped by—the behavior and power of regional and global actors (e.g. European institutions, regional and global corporations) in Eastern Europe. By virtue of the fact that they combine in complex ways local, national, regional, and global dynamics and actors, processes of security commercialization in the former Eastern bloc can be seen as instances of “glocalization.” Several aspects of security commercialization are particularly important. To begin with, private actors—specifically private security companies (PSCs)—have been reconstituted as partial agents of public power. As such, they have come to be systematically involved in performing security practices traditionally associated with the state. In addition, a potent commercial logic has come to permeate public security institutions. This has led to redefinition of the relationship between the state and its population in ways that defy conventional wisdom about the role of the state, and pose difficult normative challenges. More broadly, processes of security commercialization in Eastern Europe, which involve important performative dimensions, have led to the emergence of complex, hybrid networks of security providers that transcend domestic/international, public/private boundaries and behave, in many ways, as entrepreneurs.
Normative Dilemmas and Challenges of Security Commercialization
Authors: Gheciu Alexandra
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 places the analysis developed in this book in a broader normative perspective, focusing on a series of challenges and dilemmas associated with the transformation in the logic of security provision examined in the previous chapters. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the particular dynamics of commercialization of security provision have involved departures from principles of transparency and democratic accountability, and the problems associated with such departures in countries with long histories of anti-democratic governance. Finally, the chapter reflects on the difficulties of promoting liberal-democratic standards of “good governance” in contexts in which (in)security is performed by hybrid networks of security entrepreneurs that blur the boundaries between licit/illicit activities.
‘The Impudent Fellow Came in Swareing’
Authors: Henderson Desirée
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the almost fifty-year-long diary written by Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker woman residing in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century. It argues that Drinker employed her diary as a tool to define the boundaries of her community, which included her immediate family and surrounding Quaker society. The focus of the chapter is on two moments in which Drinker represents and responds to the intrusion of a male stranger into her home and family, and the threats they present to the female members of her community, in order to explore her gendered understanding of belonging. Through the diaristic devices of naming and relational terminology, and by documenting space, movement, and social interaction, Drinker writes her community into being and grants herself the rhetorical authority to keep it safe.
Fixing Language
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

Fixing Language is a book about ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective and improved. In all parts of philosophy there are philosophers who criticize the concepts we have and propose ways to improve them. Once one notices this about philosophy, it’s easy to see that revisionist projects occur in a range of other intellectual disciplines and in ordinary life. That fact gives rise to a cluster of questions: How does the process of conceptual amelioration work? What are the limits of revision (how much revision is too much)? How does the process of revision fit into an overall theory of language and communication? This book is an effort to answer those questions. In so doing, it is also an attempt to draw attention to a tradition in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy that isn’t sufficiently recognized as a unified tradition. There’s a straight intellectual line from Frege (e.g. of the Begriffsschrift) and Carnap to a cluster of contemporary work that isn’t typically seen as closely related: much work on gender and race, revisionism about truth, revisionists about moral language, and revisionists in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These views all have common core commitments: revision is both possible and important. They also face common challenges: how is amelioration done, what assumptions need to be made, e.g., about the nature of concepts, and what are the limits of revision?
Introduction to Conceptual Engineering
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This book is about the process of assessing and improving our representational devices. This first chapter introduces the process of assessing and improving our representational devices, an activity that is called ‘conceptual engineering’ by the author. This nomenclature has some problems, which will become clear in later chapters, but it is useful for seeing the commonalities between various different projects that attempt to improve our representational devices. The chapter then lays out the structure of the book, introduces a distinction between representational complacency and representational skepticism, and introduces some of the central themes that will return in the chapters to come.
Illustrations
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers a wide range of examples of conceptual engineering, both within and outside of philosophy, and then provides a taxonomy of conceptual engineering. Section I provides a range of examples of philosophers trying to improve their representational devices, with examples from various philosophical sub-disciplines (including philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, and ethics). Section II gives examples of conceptual engineering occurring outside philosophy, and makes connections with semantic drift and contextual negotiation. Section III provides a taxonomy for understanding conceptual engineering, laying out a series of distinctions we can use to show the commonalities and differences linking and differentiating between the examples we considered.
Externalist Conceptual Engineering
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This chapter continues to consider some foundational semantic issues important for the author’s theory, and for conceptual engineering in general. It argues that conceptual engineering is not—despite the nomenclature—concerned with concepts, but rather with the intensions and extensions of words. It introduces externalism about meaning, which is a key component of the Austerity Framework, and draws connections between meaning change and externalist discussions of reference shift. It responds to the objection that externalism makes changing meaning either impossible or extremely difficult by denying the first—it’s built into externalism that meaning change is possible—and frankly accepting the latter. It then argues that not only semantic values but also metasemantics can change over time, draws out some consequences, and discusses expressions that do not have intensions or extensions.
Corollaries of Externalism
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This chapter, which continues the argument of the previous one, elaborates the Austerity Framework, considers how it relates to some alternative theories of conceptual engineering, and responds to some objections. First, it introduces the principle that underlies the author’s theory: Inscrutable—Lack of Control—Will Keep Trying. This principle says that the processes that underlie meaning change are inscrutable, and accordingly we typically lack control over meaning change. However, despite this, we are compelled to keep trying, because conceptual engineering is a worthwhile enterprise. The author goes on to argue that there are no safe spaces from conceptual engineering, and that meaning change is not a luminous condition. In closing, the chapter considers some similarities and some differences between the Austerity Framework and Sally Haslanger’s theory of conceptual engineering, and it closes by considering some objections.
The Limits of Revision
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This chapter articulates the central challenge to the project of conceptual engineering, which is called the Strawsonian Challenge. The central idea is that if conceptual engineering involves changing the extensions and intensions of our terms, then a successful change of meaning will not give us a better way to talk about the issues and questions we were concerned with; rather it will simply change the topic. This challenge was first articulated in Strawson’s response to Carnap’s project of explication, but reoccurs throughout work on conceptual engineering in various different forms. The chapter articulates various different forms of this challenge, and previews the author’s responses to them.
Metalinguistic Negotiation
Authors: Cappelen Herman
Published: May 2018

This chapter, along with the next two, discuss alternative accounts of conceptual engineering, both for their own sake and to help bring out the author’s theory more by contrast. This chapter discusses and criticizes the appeal to the notion of metalinguistic negotiation found in both Ludlow and Plunkett and Sundell. Ludlow’s claim that we are constantly negotiating meanings is inconsistent with the claim that changes in meaning are out of control, and so should be rejected, and his appeal to microlanguages is problematic. While Plunkett and Sundell can avoid these problems, their view that engineering is a matter of metalinguistic negotiation is bad because someone who is interested in improving our representational devices for talking about torture (for example) doesn’t care about English word ‘torture’, but about torture itself. It closes by discussing some worries about the examples used to motivate the idea of metalinguistic negotiation.
Jesus’ Body
Authors: Jacobi Christine
Published: May 2018

Despite its heterogeneous contents, the Gospel of Philip expresses themes that bring it into contact with the canonical gospels. It refers to Jesus’ virginal conception through the Holy Spirit, as attested in Matthew and Luke, only to reject it—together with the emphasis on the fulfilment of prophecy and continuity with the history of Israel. Jesus had an earthly as well as a heavenly father, and Mary was defiled by no supernatural power. The author juxtaposes two views of the (fleshly) resurrection: that of the canonical gospels, where appearances of the risen Jesus occur after his death, and his own distinctive view of resurrection as a present reality, prior to death, both for the Lord himself through his baptism and for believers in union with him. The author of this gospel draws from both Jesus traditions and the Pauline corpus, even as he criticizes concepts integral to the canonical gospels.
Rejection at Nazareth in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke—and Tatian
Authors: Crawford Matthew r.
Published: May 2018

While Jesus’ rejection in his hometown is common to all three synoptic accounts, the placement of this episode differs. Mark and Matthew narrate his rejection at the synagogue of Nazareth only after a period of successful ministry elsewhere. Luke collapses the Markan timeline by relocating the scene in the synagogue in Nazareth to the initial preaching tour through Galilee, and he also recounts an unsuccessful attempt to cast Jesus from the cliff outside the town. This trajectory of rewriting can be extended to include the Diatessaron of Tatian, where the first half of the Lukan pericope is left in the preaching tour through Galilee, while the second half is postponed until later in the narrative. In his redaction of prior sources, Tatian’s editorial work is comparable to that of Matthew and Luke. His work was regarded by its primary users as the Gospel, and not just as a ‘gospel harmony’.
The Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs
Authors: Garipzanov Ildar
Published: May 2018

The first two sections delineate the early history of the nomina sacra, staurogram, and chi-rho, from the late first to third centuries ad as well as relevant early Christian discourse on the symbolic meanings of certain letters and graphic signs, and show how the staurogram and chi-rho developed from utilitarian abbreviation signs into symbolic visual proxies for God and Christological concepts. The next two sections provide an overview of the use of graphic signs as protective seals among various religious communities, with reference to artefacts such as the Bruce Codex and votive leaves from Water Newton, and compare the early usage of more acceptable Christian signs with the concurrent culture of the so-called ‘magical’ characteres. The final section underscores that the early development of Christian graphicacy should be seen in the context of a general predilection for apotropaic graphic devices in the Imperial period, and in late antiquity in particular.
The Power of the Cross and Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World
Authors: Garipzanov Ildar
Published: May 2018

This chapter shows the unquestionable role of the sign of the cross as the primary sign of divine authority in Carolingian material and manuscript culture, a role partly achieved at the expense of the diminishing symbolic importance of the late antique christograms. It also analyses the appearance of new cruciform devices in the ninth century as well as the adaptation of the early Byzantine tradition of cruciform invocational monograms in Carolingian manuscript culture, as exemplified in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and several other religious manuscripts. The final section examines some Carolingian carmina figurata and, most importantly, Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis, as a window into Carolingian graphicacy and the paramount importance of the sign of the cross as its ultimate organizing principle.
In Defense of ‘Ought Implies Can’
Authors: Leben Derek
Published: May 2018

Two recent papers have presented experimental evidence against the hypothesis that there is a semantic connection between OUGHT and CAN, rather than a pragmatic and defeasible one. However, there are two flaws with their designs. One is temporal ambiguity: just asking whether “x ought to A” is underspecified as to when the obligation exists. Another is failing to distinguish between prior obligations and all-things-considered obligations. To test these potential confounds, the chapter author ran two experiments. The first paired some of the original stories with a visual timeline specifying the time of the obligation. The second flipped the wording of the original “obligated but can’t” question into the reversed: “can’t, but still obligated.” In both experiments, there were large and significant differences between the original and modified conditions. These results undermine the conclusions of the previous experiments and remain consistent with the Semantic Hypothesis.
NGOs for International Justice
Authors: Lohne Kjersti
Published: May 2018

Kjersti Lohne describes the impact of non-governmental organizations at the International Criminal Court (ICC), in particular discussing the relative lack of regard for defendants’ rights, and especially highlighting the difficulties encountered by those acquitted. After the Coalition for the International Criminal Court contributed to the establishment of the ICC itself in the fight against impunity for international crimes, that Coalition has continued a victim-oriented approach, arguably at the expense of defendants’ rights. The ICC’s focus on victims, ‘truth’, and ‘memory’ may challenge the legitimacy of the Court in the longer run.
Syphilis
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: May 2018

By exploring the wide range of names given to the ‘new’ sexually transmitted disease—the Great Pox—this chapter dispels notions held for two centuries or more. Instead, no tit-for-tat-naming war among nations accused of carrying the disease ensued. The ‘French disease’ alone became standard in medical texts, but not among commoners and not after the late sixteenth century for physicians. The chapter challenges a second truism of the historiography: that naming meant blaming. Although the disease was named after the French, no laws or pogroms ensued against them or any other ‘other’. However, physicians increasingly identified humans as the essential carriers of this new disease and became concerned with tracking human contacts. By the end of the sixteenth century, medical texts had renamed it the territorially neutral lues venerea. Coincidently, with the rise of this new name, blame placed on women, the poor, and victims of the disease increased.
Myths of Plague
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: May 2018

This chapter delves in greater detail into the culture, politics, and ideologies of plague protest principally in India, distinguishing it from cholera riots in Europe and assertions by colonial magistrates and foreign newspapers that religious fatalism, prejudices against Western medicine and science, and mythologies of poisoning sparked the Indian protests. Instead, this chapter catalogues the abuses suffered by Indian communities and their efforts to negotiate with governments to reform outdated and damaging anti-plague preventive measures. Demonstrations, town meetings with concrete resolutions, and petitions united castes, classes, and the subcontinent’s two major religions. The chapter then compares the Indian ideologies and protests with those in China, Europe, and San Francisco.
Yellow Fever
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: May 2018

The chapter begins with the history of yellow fever in the Spanish Empire and its absence in spawning riots or attacks against the victims of the disease in the New World, despite great fear, panic, and the death principally of newly arrived and impoverished immigrants. The chapter then concentrates on yellow fever across the Deep South, the creation of ‘shotgun’ quarantines, and the first threats of collective violence from the end of the nineteenth century to the US’s yellow fever finale in 1905. These threats derived from recently arrived Sicilian workers on bayou sugar plantations and possessed the imprint of Old World cholera threats. Yet, unlike Europe’s cholera riots, suspicions relating to yellow fever never erupted into widespread rioting, destruction, or murder. Through campaigns by Italian-speaking neighbours and priests, the Sicilian workers soon gained trust and joined the campaigns to tackle the yellow fever peril.
The Great Influenza
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: May 2018

This chapter asks comparative questions: did other countries experience the same outpouring of volunteerism as the US in the Great Influenza? Did women man the front lines of charity and self-sacrifice? It begins with the Deep South, which diverged from the national picture in the US. Here, men and their clubs, not women, played the dominant role, especially in New Orleans—the pattern set by a half-century of yellow fever resistance. The chapter moves on to Italy where there was some evidence of denial, though no blame or social violence. In contrast to the US, no outpouring of volunteerism emerged; rather, governments and the military intervened. France, Switzerland, and the British Isles likewise show no social violence or blaming, and no outpouring of volunteerism, especially among women. However, volunteerism was stronger in Ireland and Switzerland. Reliance on military intervention in civilian health care is the key to explaining these differences.
The Great Influenza
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: May 2018

This chapter asks whether Canada, Australia, and India followed the US pattern in their responses to the Great Influenza. These countries were involved in the war with heavy losses, but, as in the US, their civilian populations were beyond the battlefields and their militaries did not play a significant role in providing physicians, nurses, hospitals, and material aid to civilians suffering from the pandemic. They show patterns resembling the US’s charitable outpouring, especially in Australia, with heavy reliance on women. Canada differed slightly in that the charitable impetus was more top-down, and India differed further in that its response, like the Deep South’s, was principally centred on men’s organizations. In all these countries, the Great Influenza did not instigate blaming but rather proved to be a force for charity, self-sacrifice, and unity, bringing Muslims and Hindus together in India, even during a period of heightened antagonism between the two.
Introducing the Energy Security Paradox
Authors: Nyman Jonna
Published: May 2018

Chapter 1 introduces the book. It begins by outlining the puzzle through a discussion of existing debates on energy security and their limits, emphasizing the importance of considering what it means to understand energy as a security issue. It places this discussion in the contemporary geological context of the Anthropocene, to illustrate the importance of asking these kinds of ‘bigger picture’ questions. It then develops the framework of the energy security paradox to highlight the broader, overlooked consequences of contemporary energy security politics. It then outlines the methodological starting point through a discussion of what it means to study security as practice and detailing the empirical analysis undertaken. It ends with a brief overview of existing debates on energy security and an overview of the contents of the book.
‘Common Sense’ Energy Security in China
Authors: Nyman Jonna
Published: May 2018

Chapter 5 provides another analysis of common sense energy security practices that cause insecurity, this time in China. The chapter provides some historical context on energy in China and policy-making procedures, and then looks directly at how energy security (nengyuan anquan) has been practised in Chinese energy security policy since 2004. It examines how energy security was constructed in official discourse in the same time period, drawing out key themes. It notes the ways in which these practices interact to create an accepted ‘common sense’ notion of energy security, where self-sufficiency is key to national security and how this leads to a focus on increasing domestic production of coal, oil, and gas. The chapter concludes by showing how these practices produce an energy security paradox.
Conclusion
Authors: Nyman Jonna
Published: May 2018

Chapter 7 begins to reimagine energy security. It returns to the bigger question of what energy security can and should mean, relating the empirical discussion back to the broader context and discussion of what it means to be secure in the contemporary world. It draws together the range of notions of energy security presented in the previous four chapters, and relates these to the debate over the value of security, to theorize the value of energy security based on the analysis undertaken. The book ends by using this to consider how we might reimagine energy security. It explores how change could come about and what it would need to look like, considering both the possibilities for, and the obstacles to, change.
Discourse, Time, and Space
Authors: Hinton Alexander Laban
Published: May 2018

This Preamble to Part I describes the work of the International Center for Transitional Justice in their ‘Making an Impact: Guidelines on Designing and Implementing Outreach Programs for Transitional Justice’ and how this relates to Cambodia, the ECCC, and the work of the Khmer Institution of Democracy.