bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Evolution of the G-matrix on Dynamic Adaptive Landscapes
Authors: Arnold Stevan J.
Published: July 2023

Experimental studies show that the G-matrix can be shaped by directional selection, so it is natural to ask whether the directional selection associated with peak movement will have appreciable, long-lasting effects on G. Simulation studies have explored the evolution of a two-trait G-matrix under a variety of peak movement scenarios. For example, when the adaptive peak moves at a constant, moderate rate, genetic variation is enhanced, not diminished, by peak movement. Furthermore, peak movement along a genetic line of least resistance promotes stability of the G-matrix. Thus, the greatest stability of the G-matrix can be expected when the M-matrix, the G-matrix, and the adaptive landscape are in three-way alignment, and the adaptive peak moves in that direction as well. Under these circumstances the G-matrix evolves towards an especially stable cigar shape. Simulation studies have also shown that both peak movement and correlational selection can promote the evolution of modular structure in the P- and G-matrices. Finally, we note that studies of G-matrix response to realistic selection regimes provide a bridge to genomic study of adaptation.
Evolution Along Selective Lines of Least Resistance
Authors: Arnold Stevan J.
Published: July 2023

In Chapter 4 we introduced the idea of a selective line of least resistance (SLLR), the principal axis of a selection surface. Trait variation in this direction causes the smallest loss in fitness and hence the least resistance to selection. In Chapters 12–14 we showed that successful models of adaptive radiation allow the adaptive peak to move according to a stochastic process (e.g., Brownian motion). In this chapter we connect these two ideas by formulating the supposition of SLLR peak movement, an argument that the adaptive peak tends to move in the direction of the SLLR of the adaptive landscape. After examining the basis for this supposition, we explore the ability of SLLR peak movement to explain allometric evolution and the evolutionary maintenance of bilateral symmetry.
Speciation and Extinction of Lineages
Authors: Arnold Stevan J.
Published: July 2023

This chapter focuses on the roles of speciation and extinction, as well as within-lineage evolutionary process (mutation, inheritance, selection, population size), in shaping adaptive radiations. We begin by pointing out that on theoretical grounds trait evolution associated with speciation is likely to make a smaller contribution than within-lineage processes. We then introduce a theoretical framework that allows us to assess the effects of trait evolution on sexual isolation, speciation, and radiation. Using a sequence of models, we show that the efficacy of the Fisher-Lande process depends on relaxing selection on female mating preferences or allowing random movement of natural selection optima. Finally, we turn to traits that influence resource utilization and competition between species. We show that random movement of natural selection optima of such traits can drive ecological radiation, isolation, and speciation.
From Evolutionary Process to Pattern—a Synthesis
Authors: Arnold Stevan J.
Published: July 2023

In earlier chapters, we established the feasibility of accounting for fundamental processes of evolution and adaptive radiation with models of moving peaks. In this chapter, we review those arguments and examine their implications. A model of the trait mean chasing a perpetually moving adaptive peak provides a strong basis for understanding adaptive evolution and radiation. Both the foundations and the predictions of this model are supported by empirical evidence. Furthermore, adaptive peak models bridge between the domains of evolution and ecology, as well as between micro- and macro-evolution. Peak movement is the common denominator of adaptive peak models that successfully account for data on trait divergence on all timescales, as well as iconic adaptive radiations. Although stochastic models of peak movement can predict the broad features of adaptive radiation, the study of limits on radiation remains a growing point in theoretical work. Regions of trait space densely populated by species means may often represent regions of recurrent peak movement. In addition to shaping adaptive radiations, the adaptive landscape shapes patterns of mutation, inheritance, and peak movement.
Introduction
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: July 2023

This chapter defines ‘appearance’ and explains how lookism, or discrimination on the basis of appearance, is important, not only in its own right but also in terms of its connection with other forms of discrimination. A test is proposed for distinguishing genuine appearance discrimination from cases in which appearance is a proxy for something else, such as membership of a racial group. Different ways in which appearance discrimination may arise are identified: it may be rooted in prejudices or stereotypes, or in non-rational reactions, or in aesthetic or moral judgements. Two normative approaches to appearance discrimination are considered, viz., libertarianism and utilitarianism, in order to distinguish them from my own. The charge that my approach, which is rooted in a pluralist theory of what makes discrimination wrong, is too individualist is considered but rejected on the grounds that it can give a central role to structural injustices.
Non-contingent Wrongness
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: July 2023

This chapter offers various definitions and distinctions, including definitions of both direct and indirect discrimination, and distinctions between contingent and non-contingent wrongness, between non-contingent wrongness and intrinsic wrongness, and between pluralist and monist theories of what makes discrimination wrong. It begins the process of defending a pluralist theory by identifying two potential sources of non-contingent wrongness. Firstly, the disrespect that is involved when someone who performs an act of discrimination fails to give due weight to the moral status of those who are the victims of it, either by not attributing to them the capacities in virtue of which they have that standing or by not giving due weight to their possession of these capacities. Second, the deliberative unfairness that is involved when a selector fails to give due weight to the interests of each of the candidates in a process of appointing to an advantaged social position.
Contingent Wrongness
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: July 2023

This chapter continues the task of defending a pluralist theory of what makes discrimination wrong. It argues that discrimination is wrong when it plays a role in creating or sustaining unjust consequences. Discrimination may do so by contributing to the production of an unjust distribution of benefits and burdens; or by contributing to lowering the moral status of the members of a group; or by reinforcing the power structures that facilitate these effects. The chapter does not commit to any particular theory of distributive justice, but it sets out some requirements that are compatible with my subsequent arguments and that can be met by a family of such theories. These requirements relate to limits on what inequalities can be just, sensitivity to personal responsibility, and the importance of personal autonomy. It concludes by resisting various attempts to reduce the plurality of wrong-making features of discrimination to a single consideration.
Appearance and Personal Relationships
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: July 2023

Appearance discrimination is rife in personal relationships, such as in the choice of friends or romantic partners, but is widely regarded as morally unobjectionable. This chapter questions that view, partly by comparing appearance discrimination in this context with racial discrimination. It argues that, like racial discrimination, appearance discrimination in personal relationships may be morally impermissible because it is disrespectful or because it is harmful in a way that contributes to the creation of an unjust distribution of opportunities. One way in which it may be disrespectful is by reducing a potential romantic partner to her appearance. There is nevertheless a moral prerogative that permits us to discriminate when forming a personal relationship when otherwise we would be unable to obtain the goods characteristic of that relationship or would be unable to obtain these goods to any great extent.
Prevention
Authors: Mason Andrew
Published: July 2023

There is a powerful case for prohibiting appearance discrimination in the context of employment when it is non-contingently wrong in virtue of being disrespectful or unfair. When appearance discrimination is only contingently wrong because it has unjust consequences, then in principle at least it might be mitigated by compensation. But the injustice to which it contributes may be sufficiently grave to justify preventing it through legislation. Some have suggested that existing legislation against discrimination on the basis of disability might be extended to cover some cases of appearance discrimination in employment. It is argued, however, that it would be better to develop legislation targeted specifically at appearance discrimination in this context. Legislation against appearance discrimination in other contexts, such as personal relationships, would face both practical and normative objections. It could not be enforced in a way that was publicly checkable and did not violate the defendants’ right to privacy.
Pickwickand After
Authors: Patten Robert L.
Published: July 2023

The Pickwick Papers (March 1836–November 1837) consolidates these experiments. With the tale of Gabriel Grub, published at the end of December, and dated for January (a Janus-faced product), Dickens foregrounds a teller and an audience, comfortably ensconced in a rural manor house. Grub, a morose and lonely sexton, is digging a grave on Christmas Eve, when Goblins abduct him to show in moving images that people should be accepting and cheerful despite life’s setbacks. He disappears, returning decades later, a contented rheumatic. Received by the townsfolk, the lesson that life can only be justly evaluated from its end is discounted. There were no memorable midwinter celebrations in Dickens’s next four books: little Nell dies in midwinter, and though Mary Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law, dies in May 1837, ever afterward Dickens consecrated New Year’s Day to her memory. One “up” note: Dickens’s son, Charley, was born on Twelfth Night, 1837.
Behaviours, Learning, and Organizations in Complex and Evolving Environments
Authors: Dosi Giovanni
Published: July 2023

In modern capitalism, business firms are a central locus of technological advance, employ most new technologies, produce and market new products, and operate new production processes. Modern firms operate in environments that are changing over time in ways that cannot be predicted in any detail. Technological advances are one of the primary forces causing permanent uncertainty, but other causes concern the complexity and evolution of markets and competition more generally. In this chapter, we present a capability-based theory of the firm, seen as a problem-solving entity characterized by distinct internal distributions of knowledge and power and patterns of division of labour. From that perspective, analyse ‘what firms do’ and ‘how well they do it’. Distinctive organizational capabilities are also important in that they persistently shape the destiny of individual firms—in terms of, for example, profitability, growth, and probability of survival. Together, we offer a general interpretation of the behaviour of agents in complex evolving environments in terms of routines, heuristics, and higher-level rules apt to change these agents.
Hieroglyphic Worlds
Authors: Parkes Adam
Published: July 2023

This chapter develops an alternative perspective on the British aristocracy and its literary representations by considering the inter-war fiction of two American moderns: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton. Beginning with the provocative question of whether American elites ever count as truly aristocratic, this chapter considers how Fitzgerald and Wharton fashion narratives of social, intellectual, and literary sophistication in order to imagine how upper-class Americans might operate, if only tentatively and precariously, on the same footing as their British counterparts. Examining Wharton’s unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, as well as more familiar works, the chapter proposes that the two novelists stage their Anglo-American encounters as modern re-enactments of what Franco Moretti has called the “doubling” of the ruling classes one hundred years earlier. In the modern as in the earlier instance, the result is a new set of representations of an emergent middle-class aristocracy.
Coda
Authors: Parkes Adam
Published: July 2023

This Coda pulls the major themes of the foregoing chapters into the literature of the present by reflecting on Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels as a latter-day inside portrait of aristocratic monsters after modernism. Blending fiction with personal memoir, and mixing modern modes of comedy, satire, elegy, and tragedy, St. Aubyn presents his own class as a horror show. As well as repeating modernism’s signature poetic technique of allusion, St. Aubyn’s echoes of W.B. Yeats engender a contemporary rewriting that honors the subtleties of the modern poet’s portrait of an aristocracy in decline.
Standing Defined and Distinguished
Authors: Liau Timothy
Published: July 2023

Private law adjudication involves a network of legal relations. The goal in this chapter is to better demarcate a claimant’s ‘standing’ within private law, as opposed to other concepts it might be, or has been, falsely identified with or subsumed by. Thus, homing in on ‘standing’ as a distinct private law concept for further interrogation in subsequent chapters. The main argument in this chapter is that standing is not a ‘right’, in the sense of claim-right. To think of standing, we do not and should not need to think in terms of a claim-right against someone, whether against a defendant, or a court, or even the state. Standing ought not to be mixed up with the other ‘rights’ potentially at play within the larger remedial context of a private law dispute. We can and ought to differentiate more clearly between the enforcer—who has standing, and the subject matter of enforcement—typically a directed duty.
Contract
Authors: Liau Timothy
Published: July 2023

In this chapter it is shown how, within contract law doctrine, loose reasoning about ‘third-party rights’ and ‘rights to enforce’ has elided the concepts of standing, primary rights to contractual performance, and secondary rights to damages for breach of contract. This has inhibited our understanding of privity and obscured what is truly at stake. Privity, it is argued, is more complex than commonly assumed. It is not a singular doctrine. Rather, it has multiple aspects. Thus, appeals to an idea of ‘privity’ are often references to an ambiguous cluster of several superficially similar but distinct component rules. One of these is a cautionary rule concerning the acquisition or formation of primary rights to contractual performance. Another is a rule about damages for breach of contract (and their direction). Yet another is, significantly, a standing rule. This complexity, having gone unnoticed, contributed to a missed dimension in the debate over privity and its English reform. A less drastic reform alternative—third-party standing—was not considered.
Unjust Enrichment
Authors: Liau Timothy
Published: July 2023

This chapter spells out the ‘unjust factors’ which could justify the estate’s right to restitution. It then proceeds to propose an analogy with trusts law procedures in which a trust beneficiary can, exceptionally, enforce the trustee’s right against strangers to a trust, arguing that a standing-based rationalization better explains why the action in Re Diplock is notoriously known as a ‘special’ equitable one. It is special, not because it involved a novel source of sui generis rights to restitution as restitution orthodoxy suggests, but because it involved an exception to the general standing rule, applicable not just narrowly within trusts law or contract law, but also within the law of unjust enrichment. It is no coincidence that judges and commentators had previously referred to the ‘enrichment at the expense’ requirement as one of ‘privity’. Like ‘privity of contract’, ‘enrichment at the expense of’ too contained a standing rule, implicit within it, and is undergoing further unpacking and refinement as the subject develops further. So that misleading analogies between estate beneficiaries and trusts beneficiaries might be avoided in future, the chapter concludes by clarifying four conceptual differences between them.
Theories of Health
Authors: Barnes Elizabeth
Published: July 2023

This chapter gives a big-picture overview of the extant philosophical literature on health. In doing this, it does not attempt to address all approaches or discuss all views. The goal, instead, is to motivate the idea that it is hard—surprisingly hard—to give anything like an adequate, informative answer to the question “what is health?.” Most extant approaches have obvious virtues but also serious—and arguably irremediable—vices. To make this case, the chapter examines the broad landscape of views: the ways in which philosophers have tended to approach the question “what is health?” and the kinds of answers they have tended to give. The aim, in doing this, is skeptical. The chapter seeks to show that the current approach to the question “what is health?”—in which we attempt to define or give necessary and sufficient conditions for health—is doomed to failure. The general (non-exhaustive) overview I give seeks to motivate that skeptical project.
Health and Wellbeing
Authors: Barnes Elizabeth
Published: July 2023

The relationship between health and wellbeing is a vexed “it’s complicated” tangle. And sorting through this tangle is vital to understanding both what health is and why it matters. In this chapter, I’ll first (section 1) argue for the importance of the distinction between health and wellbeing. I’ll then (section 2) argue against the view that, even if health and wellbeing are different things, the value of health is its contribution to wellbeing. Let’s call views that collapse the distinction between health and wellbeing “constitution views” and views that say that health is valuable (only) insofar as it contributes to wellbeing “contribution” views. Both types of views on the relationship between health and wellbeing, I’ll argue, end up being overly simplistic and fail to allow for the complex, non-linear ways in which health and wellbeing can be related. I’ll then argue (section 3) that the relationship between grief and wellbeing gives us a useful model for thinking about the connection between health and wellbeing.
Ameliorative Skepticism, Shifting Standards, and the Measure of Health
Authors: Barnes Elizabeth
Published: July 2023

The crux of the skepticism defended in Chapter 5 is this: the things we’re tracking when we talk about health are real and important, but there’s no consistent way of understanding their connections, interdependencies, and tensions that will give us an explanatorily adequate theory of health. This chapter builds on the idea that skepticism like this needn’t be destructive and can serve as a guide for thinking about complicated puzzles related to health. The goal of this chapter is to sketch, using the work of Delia Graff Fara, a model for two interrelated claims: (i) it can still be useful and informative to talk about health, even if there’s no clear, settled thing that health is; (ii) acknowledging that there’s no clear, settled thing that health is can help us communicate more effectively when talking about health.
The Unions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1535–1922)
Authors: Jackson Alvin
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses the origins, survival, and adaptation of the unions of the United Kingdom—the unions binding England and Wales, England and Scotland, Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the author’s earlier OUP work, The Two Unions, the chapter compares the Scottish and Irish unions, on the basis that they were each parliamentary unions and shared a wide range of interlinkages. But the chapter also introduces a lengthy consideration of the Welsh union, and sustains a comparison between it and the Irish and Scots unions. The chapter seeks to demonstrate through comparison the relative strengths and weaknesses of the historic union relationships binding these different polities. In particular it emphasizes some of the key agencies and institutions upholding union across the different polities of the United Kingdom. Through sustained and systematic comparison, the chapter seeks to reflect on the current health of the unions of the United Kingdom.
Centrifuge
Authors: Jackson Alvin
Published: July 2023

This chapter identifies some of the key explanations for the failure of multinational union states. It argues that such states were often pragmatic and functional arrangements which lacked compelling creation narratives or wider binding statements of purpose and vision. It argues, too, that these states were often characterized by profound imbalances in terms of their component polities and nationalities; and these imbalances (in the absence of detailed constitutional correctives) could act as weakening agents. The chapter identifies challenges to union arising not just from major nationalist mobilizations, but also—ultimately—from unionist disinvestment from union. It argues, too, for the importance of external relations in the life and health of complex union polities. It suggests that dysfunctional union states may look to unifying external ‘enemies’ as a means of creating short-term internal order; but that such strategies have been associated with cataclysmic failure.
Opposites and Explanations in Heraclitus
Authors: Neels Richard
Published: July 2023

This paper offers a new interpretation of Heraclitus’ use of opposites and how they feature in his explanation of the cosmos. It argues that the so-called “unity of opposites’ thesis does not exhaust Heraclitus’ interest in opposites. It contrasts Heraclitus with his Ionian predecessors, Anaximander and Anaximenes, who treated opposites as fundamental explanantia for the cosmos. Viewed from this perspective, Heraclitus’ opposites appear to be explananda—things to be explained. The paper argues that this analysis of Heraclitus’ use of opposites reveals some features of his theory of explanation. Heraclitus rejects explanatory fundamentality but promotes the idea of a cosmos whose various parts explain its other parts. Opposites are both explananda and (non-fundamental) explanantia along with all the parts of the cosmos. Interestingly, Heraclitus’ cosmos itself appears to be both an explanandum and an explanans.
Is Plato a Consequentialist?
Authors: Bobonich Christopher
Published: July 2023

This paper examines the relations between Plato’s ethical and political philosophy and modern consequentialism. It focuses on the Republic’s and the Laws’ criterion for the correctness of laws since that is where the similarities are greatest. It argues that this criterion is consequentialist in some fundamental respects. Section 3 considers various objections to seeing Platonic affinities with consequentialism and argues that although the most common objections are not convincing, there is reason for caution about this attribution. Section 4 thus looks for consequentialism’s distinctive features in the Republic and the Laws. Section 5 discusses an argument in Republic Book 1 whose conclusion is, in principle, inconsistent with consequentialism. Section 6 argues that Laws 10’s theology leads Plato in a fully impartialist direction and to endorse a strong form of consequentialism.
Aristotle’s Argument for the Necessity of What We Understand
Authors: Mendelsohn Joshua
Published: July 2023

Aristotle holds that scientific understanding in a strict sense (epistēmē haplōs) is only of necessities, but his reasons for this position are not easy to discern. This paper expounds a highly elliptical argument Aristotle gives for this claim at Nicomachean Ethics 6. 3, 1139b19–23. Analysis of this argument, which has not been well understood in the literature, shows that Aristotle’s view allows him to maintain that scientific understanding is at once a relative and a stable quality. His restriction of the objects of epistēmē haplōs thus permits scientific understanding to be at once dependent on an object and yet never such as to be lost on account of changes in the external world.
Originality and Attribution
Authors: Orr Leah
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines the reasons why women wrote for print and argues that most women did not make much money from publication, nor were they writing for self-expression. Instead, they often wrote in response to external influences, because of divine inspiration, or to carry out moral aims. Finally, it concludes with a case study of Aphra Behn, showing how her prefaces can be read as rhetorical self-fashioning rather than biographical revelations. She showed readers how to criticize a play and engaged in debates over dramatic theory, but her imitation of male playwrights’ rhetoric failed in her response to the accusation of plagiarism of The Rover. This demonstrates the limits of a woman writer’s ability to succeed in the marketplace by employing the rhetoric men used.
The Author as Subject
Authors: Orr Leah
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines representations of women writers in autobiography and biography as well as images of women writers in portraits and frontispieces. It argues that women’s lives are often adapted to present them as though they are like the characters or readers of their work. Representations of women writers are therefore rhetorical rather than historical and should be read alongside their works rather than as factual reports of their lives. It concludes with an examination of the autobiography of Laetitia Pilkington, in which she adopts several contrasting, popular models for a woman writer for rhetorical effect: a poet, a coterie writer and reader, and a subscription- and patronage-hunter.
Forging Nations
Authors: Blaazer David
Published: July 2023

This book is a study of the relationships between money, power, and nationality in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the first attempts to unify their currencies following the Union of the Crowns in 1603 to the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–8. Through successive crises spanning four centuries, Forging Nations examines critical struggles over monetary power between the state and its creditors, and within and between nations during the long, multifaceted process of creating the United Kingdom as a monetary as well as a political union. It shows how and why centuries of monetary dysfunction and conflict eventually gave way to the era of the sterling gold standard, when elite and popular beliefs about money converged around a set of almost unassailable monetary dogmas that transcended differences of nationality, party, and class. Sustained by a mixture of historical myths and imperial hubris, this consensus effortlessly reinforced the authority and served the interests of the monetary elite, even after its economic foundations had collapsed under the pressure of war and international competition. The book concludes by showing how the end of the UK’s global hegemony and the prospect of Scottish independence have resuscitated historical differences between England, Ireland, and Scotland in attitudes to currency’s role in defining national identity, while the Global Financial Crisis has revived forgotten debates over the nature of money and monetary power.
Spectrality in Modernist Fiction
Authors: Ross Stephen
Published: July 2023

Spectrality in Modernist Fiction challenges the prevailing view that spectrality articulates melancholic, traumatic, or terminal forms of mourning. Instead, it claims, writers such as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Mary Butts, and Elizabeth Bowen use the rhetoric of spectrality to explore a logic of tendential utopianism. As these writers engage variously with problems of sex and sexuality, revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and desire, they begin to theorize an ethical perspective that prefigures much contemporary theorization of spectrality and ethics. Driven by a historical period defined by uncertainty, as is our own, these writers haltingly chart a new mode of ethical thought that depends on unmeetable imperatives and unanswerable demands. As they sort these relationships in their fiction, these writers must find ways to articulate values on a shifting continuum in a constantly changing set of contexts. It is ethical thought at its most distilled, when no solution will be adequate and yet some solution must be sought. The result, as Conrad, Forster, Butts, and Bowen demonstrate, is a key element of modernism’s celebrated difficulty: an ethical determination to tackle insuperable problems, issuing in tentative, even contradictory, feints towards potential future resolutions that are equal parts impossible (yet) and necessary. There is hope in these ghosts, not resignation. The impasses encountered are not final, but temporary, and the drive to overcome them embedded in Conrad, Forster, Butts, and Bowen’s spectral rhetoric constitutes a tensile optimism that remains essentially utopian.
Novel Environments
Authors: Hildebrand Jayne
Published: July 2023

This book shows how Victorian novelists helped to imagine the modern idea of an environment. The environment concept has shaped humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the concept’s emergence in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments reconstructs a longer—and a specifically literary—history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel, this book argues, that the environment was first transformed from a scientific abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description of physical surroundings—from gardens and landscapes, to weather and atmospheres—to model interactions between life and its environment. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman world as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development. By showing how the novel elaborated the environment concept over the course of the nineteenth century, this book sheds new light on the relationship between Victorian literature and the life sciences, and reveals how literary form has shaped the ecological concepts through which we apprehend the nonhuman world.
Thomas Hardy’s Virtual Environments
Authors: Hildebrand Jayne
Published: July 2023

This chapter considers Thomas Hardy’s fiction as a response to the notion of a singular “environment” in the work of Herbert Spencer, who laid the groundwork for modern ecology with his theory that organisms and societies evolve into harmony with a surrounding environment. Focusing on The Woodlanders (1887), the chapter argues that Hardy casts skepticism on Spencer’s concept of a singular environment through descriptive techniques this chapter calls “virtuality effects”—phantasmagorically vivid descriptions that evoke the state of being enveloped in a virtual environment. By immersing his characters in virtual environments that displace their physical surroundings, Hardy questions the existence of any shared singular environment that stably grounds social and organismal life. In its place, Hardy envisions a world fractured into as many environments as there are organisms, anticipating recent ecological debates about the limits of the organism–environment dichotomy.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Islands and the Poetry of Circumstance
Authors: Hildebrand Jayne
Published: July 2023

This chapter argues that Robert Louis Stevenson’s fin-de-siècle island novels mediate the emergence of an idea we now call the environment: the notion that the natural world forms a totalized system coextensive with the planet. Stevenson’s islands experiment with the formal category of setting—what Stevenson called “circumstance”—to grapple with the environmental space of global empire. The first part of the chapter contends that Treasure Island (1883) imagines the enclosed island setting as the site of an ecological consciousness that counters the exploitative treatment of colonial environments prevalent in late Victorian adventure fiction. In its second half, the chapter argues that Stevenson’s late career romances The Ebb-Tide (1894) and The Wrecker (1892) draw on the descriptive strategies of island biogeography to represent the environmental effects of empire. Ultimately, these novels’ archipelagic vision anticipates the twentieth-century transformation of “the environment” into an object of political and ethical concern.
Coda
Authors: Hildebrand Jayne
Published: July 2023

The coda explores how the Victorian affinity between descriptive practice and ecological thinking extends to a more recent historical moment by turning to contemporary environmental sound art. Examining compositions and installations by Hildegard Westerkamp and Anna Winderen, this coda argues that these environmental sound artists share with Victorian novelists an aspiration to create vividly perceptible virtual worlds as a means of rendering concrete and palpable the abstract concept of an environment. In their sonic foregrounding of environmental phenomena ordinarily relegated to the background, these artists employ descriptive practice as a means of illuminating the modern concept of “the environment”—a global totality that encompasses the whole of the natural world.
Introduction
Authors: Hicks Michael Townsen , Jaag Siegfried , Loew Christian
Published: July 2023

A central question in the philosophy of science is: What is a law of nature? Humeans, in the wake of David Hume, argue that the laws of nature are nothing over and above what actually happens and reject irreducible facts about natural modality. According to non-Humeans, by contrast, the laws are metaphysically fundamental or grounded in primitive modal structures, such as dispositional essences of powerful properties, necessitation relations, or primitive subjunctive facts. This introductory chapter outlines and motivates pragmatic Humeanism, a recently influential version of Humeanism that puts the needs of limited agents like us front and center. We show how the book chapters jointly provide a roadmap that highlights the challenges and opportunities for developing pragmatic Humeanism.
Naturalism, Functionalism, and Chance
Authors: Fernandes Alison
Published: July 2023

Here are three motivations for being Humean. Firstly, one might be worried about admitting ‘mysterious’ elements into one’s ontology. Secondly, one might be motivated by a kind of functionalism. Thirdly, one might be motivated towards Humeanism by naturalism of a kind that envisages a close connection between science and metaphysics. The argument of this chapter is that two of these motivations do not count in favour of Humeanism. If one is motivated by functionalism, one has no reason to adopt Humeanism over its rivals. If one is motivated by a naturalist connection between science and metaphysics, one has reason to reject Humeanism. Motivations of the first kind (finding modal entities strange) may still lead one to Humeanism. But for those more concerned with the function of modal relations and the fit between science and metaphysics, one should look elsewhere.
Generalizing the Problem of Humean Undermining
Authors: Demarest Heather , Miller Elizabeth
Published: July 2023

For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively ‘about’ particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. This chapter investigates some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. The chapter examines that example in detail and argues that popular existing strategies such as ‘holding the laws fixed as laws’ or ‘holding the laws fixed as true’ are of no help. Interestingly, it shows how a new proposal that draws on the resources of the Mentaculus can yield the right results—but only on the assumption that the Humean can make cross-world identifications. The chapter goes on to argue that the Humean cannot make such identifications, and concludes that the root of this trouble is deeper, and its reach broader, than the familiar cases suggest. It is very much an open question whether the Humean has sufficient resources to properly conceptualize macroscopic objects or to analyze these ‘local’ counterfactuals.
The Package Deal Account of Naturalness
Authors: Bhogal Harjit
Published: July 2023

The Humean typically appeals to some variant of the Best Systems Account (BSA). Very roughly, the BSA says that the laws of nature are the propositions that best balance simplicity and informativeness. A problem, however: consider the property F which applies to all and only the things in the actual world. Then it seems like the proposition, everything is F, would be very informative, and very simple. But clearly it is not one of the laws. In response, Barry Loewer has suggested a way to identify a special set of properties—he claims that the natural properties can be defined up along with the laws. We can, he thinks, adapt the BSA so that it doesn’t just output the laws; it also outputs the natural properties at the same time. Loewer calls this the Package Deal Account (PDA). However, the PDA hasn’t been developed in detail. This chapter aims to rectify this, developing and discussing the PDA in a way that it hasn’t been before.
Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible
Authors: Olyan Saul M.
Published: July 2023

In this book, the author considers whether there are biblical texts that ascribe an implicit form of legal personhood as well as genuine legal rights to animals and, if so, which rights, to which animals in particular—domesticated, wild, both—and for what purpose? He also explores how the evidence of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) might contribute to contemporary debate about animal rights in the academy, in the courts, in the public square, and in religious communities. Given the increasing interest in the status of animals in the Americas, Europe, and across the world, the strides forward made in recent years by animal rights advocates in any number of countries and sub-national constituencies, and the fact that experts in the biblical field have mainly ignored the question of animal rights, while non-specialists in law or philosophy who argue on behalf of animals have tended to read the Hebrew Bible superficially and in an overly generalizing manner, an exploration of what the Hebrew Bible has to contribute to the question of animal rights is both timely and necessary.
Conclusion
Authors: Olyan Saul M.
Published: July 2023

A number of biblical texts extend both legal personhood and genuine rights to animals. The rights conferred on animals in biblical texts are, for the most part, specific and situationally conditioned, and the legal personhood associated them is best characterized as limited. Nevertheless, there is an exception to this biblical pattern of animals bearing a limited legal personhood and specific, situationally conditioned rights in the remarkable utopian vision of Hos 2:20 (Eng. 2:18), which appears to ascribe to animals, along with human beings (or, perhaps, Israelites specifically), broad, substantive rights such as an absolute and unconditional right to life, to safety and security, and to bodily integrity. That legal personhood and genuine rights can be granted to animals in the Hebrew Bible without challenging the notion that animals are property according to the law is a not insignificant finding of this investigation.
Collaborative Assessment Methods
Authors: Aschieri Filippo , van Emmerik Arnold A. P. , Wibbelink Carlijn J. M. , Kamphuis Jan H.
Published: July 2023

Collaborative assessment methods (CAMs) involve working with clients during all phases of the assessment process, from goal definition to interpretation of the testing results to the recommendations and conclusions. This chapter defines CAMs, provides clinical examples, and then meta-analyzes the published literature assessing their effectiveness on distal treatment outcomes. The meta-analytic results indicate that CAMs have positive effects on three outcome domains: a moderate effect on treatment processes, a small to moderate effect on personal growth, and a small effect on symptom reduction. There is little research evidence on the immediate, in-session effects of CAMs. The chapter concludes with diversity considerations, training implications, and therapeutic practices grounded in this research evidence.
Strength-Based Methods
Authors: Flückiger Christoph , Munder Thomas , Del Re A. C. , Solomonov Nili
Published: July 2023

Strength-based methods in psychotherapy represent efforts to respond sensitively to the patient’s strengths without neglecting their challenges. This chapter defines and illustrates strength-based methods in individual psychotherapy and summarizes their probable indications. It presents a systematic summary of process-outcome studies that investigate in-session strength-based methods and then provides meta-analytic evidence demonstrating that strength-based methods have the potential to increase the treatment efficacy of bona fide psychotherapy across mental health outcomes at post-treatment. The results indicate that strength-based methods may not be a trivial by-product of treatment progress and may provide a unique contribution to psychotherapy outcomes. The chapter concludes with implications for diversity, training, and therapeutic practices, all grounded in research evidence.
Chairwork
Authors: Pascual-Leone Antonio , Baher Tabarak
Published: July 2023

This chapter defines, illustrates, and reviews the research evidence on the effectiveness of chairwork in individual psychotherapy. Meta-analyses and narrative syntheses were conducted for process as well as symptom outcomes. Single-session chairwork was more effective in deepening client experiencing than empathic responding (d = 0.90) but similarly effective as other methods for facilitating emotional arousal and shifting the credibility of core beliefs. A single session of chairwork also demonstrated noteworthy pre-to-post symptom change (d = 1.73), although these improvements were comparable to those of other methods (d = 0.02). The chapter concludes with diversity considerations, research limitations, training implications, and, based on the research, recommended therapeutic practices.
Cognitive Restructuring
Authors: Ezawa Iony D. , Hollon Steven D.
Published: July 2023

This chapter reviews the empirical literature on cognitive restructuring (CR) in individual psychotherapy. CR is defined as the set of strategies used to teach clients how to identify, evaluate, and correct their inaccurate cognitions and underlying dysfunctional schemas. The chapter presents results of a meta-analysis of studies examining the effect of CR measured within session on psychotherapy outcomes. The overall literature is accumulating encouraging evidence regarding the therapeutic effect of CR; however, there have been limited efforts evaluating the direct impact of therapists’ use of these methods on client outcomes. The chapter concludes by reviewing limitations of the research and advancing implications for clinical training and therapeutic practice.
Skills and Methods That Work in Psychotherapy
Authors: Hill Clara E. , Norcross John C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter reviews how authors have defined and assessed skills and methods and outcomes. The results of judgments of outcomes in terms of being demonstrably, probably, neutral/mixed, or insufficient research are presented for 27 pantheoretical psychotherapy skills and methods at the immediate, intermediate, and distal levels of outcome. Evidence was found for demonstrable or probable effectiveness of one of eight skills and 16 of 19 methods. Limitations of studies include the lack of inclusion of moderators given that we know that all these skills and methods work for some clients but not others, lack of attention to the context and complexity of psychotherapy, the need for more studies of distal than immediate outcomes, low power, and lack of attention to diversity and harmful effects. Implications for training and practice are described. Conclusions are drawn including the need for more research, especially in terms of immediate outcomes and qualitative methods.
Child-Directed Child Welfare Research and Development in Denmark
Authors: Petersen Mimi
Published: July 2023

Based on two studies, this chapter examines children and young people’s experiences and challenges in participating in social work research and community development. One is a three-year research project called the Roskilde Project, which investigated children’s participation in decisions about their safety. The other project, Project Bella, involved young people as researchers and change agents in Bellahøj, an area in Copenhagen. This project aimed to counter young people’s marginalization and promote their motivation and interest in continuing their education. Children and young people were active researchers in both projects. The chapter analyzes how the participation of children and young people in research contributes to empowering them and improving their well-being. It demonstrates the need for an intersectional perspective of children and young people’s participation, underlines the importance and quality of children’s participation, and reflects on recognizing children and young people as competent actors by transcending the dichotomy between children as vulnerable and resourceful.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Križ Katrin , Petersen Mimi
Published: July 2023

The concluding remarks summarize the book’s central themes related to the pathways to children and young people’s participation that children, young people, and adults forge. It argues that “participation generators”—the conditions that promote children’s participation—include a participation ethic, facilitative and transformative authority, and participatory skills and methods. Legal, policy, and practice contexts can generate a participation ethic and create facilitative and transformative power. Participatory skills and strategies build emotional bonds and horizontal relations between children and adults and counter biases and stigmas about certain groups of children or children in general. They generate time, space, and logistical support for children’s participation and promote the capacity building of children and professionals.
Ismaili Women’s Lifeworlds, 1890–1970
Authors: Khoja-Moolji Shenila
Published: July 2023

The second chapter traces the childhoods of my interlocutors and their memories of their foremothers to reconstruct their forced migration within India and from India to East Africa and East Pakistan. This older story of Ismaili migrations is often told from the perspective of empire, celebrating Ismaili men who thrived in the colonial political economy. I instead home in on the details of women’s everyday lives to show how they reinforced communal affinities while cultivating ethical sensibilities: how Puribai Velji’s Ismaili neighbors helped her start a small shop in Zanzibar in the early 1900s to make ends meet after the death of her husband; how reproductive and productive care work encircled prayer times for Sherbanu Lalani in Bukoto (Uganda) during the 1930s; and how Ismaili women grappled with the farmans of their Imam. Interlocutors recall the trauma of fleeing their homes but also the generosity of strangers and coreligionists who helped them escape.