bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: VanLaningham Erin 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Educating for vocation has often focused on the individual’s purpose and meaning in connection with others. Students are encouraged to consider their talents and gifts in conjunction with community needs. Yet, when one considers what those needs of the world might be—what Frederick Buechner describes as the world’s “deep hunger”—then the framework for vocational understanding shifts. How can educators build a language of call that leads first to a consideration of what a good life looks like for others before we consider the good life for ourselves? Exploring vocation through the lens of social connectedness and deep friendship equips students to promote common goods and create more intentional pathways to purposeful living. This includes addressing injustice along with expanding our understanding of lived ecologies of vocation. When we orient vocation toward communal flourishing, higher education can leverage its purpose to contribute to civic society.
Overturning for the Common Good
Authors: Jeske Christine 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter suggests that teaching and learning about the common good must pay attention to the culturally ingrained narratives that shape our underlying assumptions about how to achieve good lives and vocational purpose. Using Willie James Jennings’s term “overturning,” the chapter suggests that teaching vocational discernment involves overturning certain dominant narratives and finding alternative narratives that enhance understanding of vocation for the common good. Specifically, the chapter explores how to move from overly relying on narratives proclaiming that “markets can fix it” and “merit makes me deserve it” toward narratives that affirm “I belong to memberships” and “mutuality makes life good.”
The Vocation of Advocacy
Authors: Hayford Michelle 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter argues that theatre and the college experience are not escapes from the real world, but instead platforms to practice advocacy, seek justice, and challenge oppressive structures. During the liminal college years, students engage in transforming the world as they are transformed by experiential learning in community. Students committed to a vocation of advocacy are answering a call to honor our interdependence by responding to injustice. Students can cultivate skill sets to be change agents and advocates in their field and on their vocational journeys through applied theatre practices. This chapter demonstrates that through applied theatre practices such as participatory dialogue, students are prepared to contribute to the common good and bring skills of transformative leadership to their work and lives. Specific examples come from the Common Good Players, an applied theatre troupe that devises creative scholarship that advocates for a more just world.
Queer Vocation and the Uncommon Good
Authors: Bateman Geoffrey W. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter argues for the queering of both vocation and the common good. By articulating and troubling the normative structures of vocation and the common good, educators can facilitate the inclusive integration of issues and experiences most intimately connected to the lives of LGBTQIA+ people into vocational practices. The uncommon good—the whole range of communal resources and qualities that do not fit neatly into a universalized notion of the common good—has the potential to reveal the unique and sometimes transgressive differences that often adhere to our contemporary notions of queerness. The chapter argues that common work must be more attuned to and radically open to the uncommon differences that defy normative notions of the so-called good life. This openness to the uncommon will support queer students in their vocational discernment as they navigate the productive connection and tension between their desires and the common work of the world.
A Case for Compassionate Pedagogy
Authors: Slining Meghan M. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Those who feel called to protect the common good feel a sense of responsibility and often urgency to the importance of their work while experiencing some of the highest rates of burnout among professions. This chapter argues that discerning a call to care for the common good needs to be tended mindfully and educators have an important role in equipping and preparing students for sustainable vocational responsiveness. Extending lessons of interdependence from public health, the chapter proposes compassionate pedagogy as a framework for preparing students to care for the common good. By intentionally designing learning experiences and modeling compassion, educators can offer a counterpoint to the individualistic emphasis of education and vocational exploration. The chapter emphasizes the communal responsibility of educators to minimize burnout and engage in compassionate caring for students, for colleagues, and for themselves so that they may continue to nurture the common good.
The Yarn in the Tapestry
Authors: Dotterweich Martin Holt 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Memory can weave individuals together with wider communities of the past and present and, in so doing, encourage understanding, love, and service. This chapter argues that memory opens the possibility to be faithful to facts, complexities, and ambiguities in historical record; teaching history with memory contributes to conceptions of, and the pursuit of, the common good. This approach to teaching memory finds connections not only among the dead but also among the living. When histories collide, memory allows for humility, conversation, and grace. While acknowledging the layers of trauma and hurt that have been done in the past, memory can lead people to an emphasis on the common good. When people are generous to the dead, they may find generosity to the living. When people hear other histories and weave them into their own experience, they find a sense of the common good and commonality through competing memories.
What We Are Up Against
Authors: Mathewes Charles 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter argues that educators’ core function is not learning but formation, superintending students’ process of becoming adults. That process explores a human’s dual experiences of freedom and obligation—of being both called to (inevitably particular) obligations and yet also empowered to become what one is not yet, yet might become. Higher education is a privileged site of disciplined reflection wherein these central challenges are articulated and responses to them explored. This process of “becoming an adult” never ends but unfolds across the whole life course; therefore, higher education’s “student body” properly includes everyone, age eighteen and up, who faces the perpetual challenges of being an adult. This means that higher education confronts one profound tension that stands at the center of human life. Making this the fundamental focus and thematic core of “higher education” as a whole provides opportunities for the transformative reconception of our vocations as humans and as educators.
Epilogue
Authors: VanLaningham Erin 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Ecology—as applied to campuses, communities, and systems of thought—emphasizes the idea of a web that needs to be built and sustained so that all can flourish. The language of restoring, rebuilding, overturning, and serving means that in seeking the common good, our individual work contributes to a larger ecosystem that is complex, demanding, and, indeed, precarious. Courageous conversations, deep reflection, border crossing, reckoning with past traumas, and deliberate dialogue are all part of the building of the common good through vocational discernment. This concluding chapter emphasizes four aspects of our call to an ecology of the common good: deep ecology, ecology and economy, the home place, and community gardens and gardening. As we steward resources and gifts toward mutual benefit, educating for vocation can help us prioritize diversity, justice, and care for all.
The Elementality of Personhood in Early Buddhism
Authors: Robertson Matthew I. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter discerns an early Buddhist theory of personhood as recorded in the Pāli Canon. Though Buddhist doctrine avows that, in truth, no person exists, Pāli sources indicate that persons are nevertheless to be understood according to their elemental composition and perceptual capabilities. The elemental examination of the person leads to insights into the fundamentally “not mine” character of elementality. The kasiṇa meditation, as described in the Cūḷasuññata Sutta, is analyzed and proposed as a key practice in the service of bringing about these insights, as well as the development of supernormal powers (iddhis) and enlightenment (nibbāna). The end result of the kasiṇa, involving the “empty” abiding of perceptual extensions (āyatanas), reveals enlightened personhood to be a matter of perceptual horizons, devoid of personal identification and attachment.
Persons in a Bewildered World
Authors: Robertson Matthew I. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Using a text historical approach, this chapter discerns several approaches to personhood in the pre-Classical era epic, the Mahābhārata. Personhood is earliest tied to concerns of manhood, virility, and sovereignty. These concerns evolve through the characterization of Kṛṣṇa, the divine and cosmically sovereign Person, whose sovereignty is dictated by the frameworks of Sāṃkhya and yoga. Human persons necessarily relate to Kṛṣṇa’s personhood by means of their elemental perception and their sensory and mental yoga, which furthermore determines the nature of their experience of the world. Typical persons are “bewildered,” meaning they are limited and imprecise in their perceptual awareness of the world. Fully realized persons, by contrast, having rectified their buddhi, recognize their inherent identity with the cosmic Person, and thereby behave in ways confluent with and supportive of the world-at-large.
Charles Darwin vs. Herbert Spencer on the Origins of Music
Authors: Piilonen Miriam 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Chapter 2 compares Darwin’s and Spencer’s competing evolutionary accounts of music, as articulated in texts such as Spencer’s “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) or Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871). Whereas Darwin understood music as an proto-language that emerges alongside instinctual urges for domination, conquest, and sexual reproduction, Spencer described music as an advanced province of the human species, which alone possesses the emotional “force” and “variation” necessary for musical expression. This chapter highlights finer points of agreement and disagreement between these two. If Darwin and Spencer had a debate, who was the winner? This chapter is interested in resisting the “Darwin-ization” of music-evolutionist history: the tendency to treat Darwin as the only relevant historical figure. Rather than adjudicate Spencer and Darwin’s musical debate, this chapter demonstrates that their positions were mutually constitutive, and that ultimately their differences dissolved into a shared position that opposes a more historicized view.
How the Left Moved Right
Authors: Snegovaya Maria 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Chapter 1 outlines the book’s key theoretical argument. This chapter also introduces the comparison between processes in Western and postcommunist party systems. In Western Europe, the rebranding of center-left parties as pro-market entities and their participation in neoliberal reforms became known as the Third Way. It contributed to the recent rise of populist right parties in the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and other countries. This chapter then discusses the parallel trends in the postcommunist context. It demonstrates how the postcommunist center-left parties’ adoption of pro-market stances and participation in reforms arose from their desire to imitate Western European left practices and were fostered by the conditions imposed by the EU and IMF. Chapter 1 goes on to review the pro-market rebranding of ex-communist left parties in the Eastern European context, traces the subsequent decline of these parties, and explains how and why populist right parties became the primary beneficiaries of antiestablishment sentiment in the region.
How the Postcommunist Left Reformed and Lost
Authors: Snegovaya Maria 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter tests empirically how pro-market positions of left-wing parties in the region influence their support across various socioeconomic groups. It presents the results of a cross-country analysis of postcommunist European countries using data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. The quantitative cross-country analysis makes it possible to test for larger trends across a set of different countries and therefore extends the theoretical argument’s external validity. The findings reveal that the increasingly pro-market positions of left parties are associated with a decrease in electoral support. These effects are more pronounced among economically vulnerable voters, particularly working-class electorates. In countries with reform-oriented left parties, such groups are more likely to be incorporated by right-wing (conservative and radical) parties. Contrary to many studies arguing that positions on the sociocultural dimension largely determine the electoral fortunes of left-wing parties, this chapter presents empirical evidence that the economic axis has a stronger impact.
A Science of Human Nature?
Authors: Nathan Marco J. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Chapter 2 outlines some influential attempts to investigate human nature from an empirical standpoint. The survey kicks off with a primer of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Next, the chapter moves on to sociobiology, which provides a gloomy portrait of humanity grounded in a simplistic story about how our heritable psychological traits must be encoded in the genes no less than our physical characteristics. Human sociobiology was harshly criticized in the 1980s, resulting in public distancing from its excesses. Then, in the 1990s, old stories came lurching back, repackaged as Darwinian anthropology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. The second part of the chapter sketches these revamped projects, together with cautionary voices. Regardless of whether we view these fields as a revolution or a red herring, one thing is clear. Science struggles no less than philosophy to provide a clear, cogent, and plausible account of human nature.
What Makes a Trait Innate?
Authors: Nathan Marco J. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Chapter 4 explores the issue of innateness, drawing connections to human nature. After brief stage-setting remarks, it considers what innateness is not. It surveys a handful of popular definitions and shows why, despite shedding light on their target, they all fall short of an adequate comprehensive analysis of innateness. Next, the focus is on arguments suggesting that we abandon the concept of innateness altogether. The final sections explore a different route. Instead of pursuing a definition of innateness directly, they review some evidence about the inborn human cognitive endowment, a feature referred to in developmental psychology as core knowledge. The central question, from our present standpoint, is whether innateness and cognate notions provide a surrogate for human nature, enabling an empirical analysis of who we are. The verdict is negative. Debates about innateness and inborn cognitive endowment presuppose a human nature rather than explain it.
Oppression or Emancipation? Part (i)
Authors: Nathan Marco J. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Chapter 6 focuses on human races, a loaded concept with deep social implications. After a preliminary overview of genetic variation, the bulk of the module presents three general stances concerning races. First, naturalism strives to establish the objective biological “reality” of races. Second, constructionism also conceives of races as “real.” However, unlike naturalism it treats these as social as opposed to natural groupings. Third, eliminativism treats races as fictions to be abandoned, like witches or ghosts. This chapter raises the overarching question of whether empirical and theoretical discoveries legitimize some concept of race and, if so, which one. It is also concerned with the deep connections between races and human nature. Specifically, it’s hard to see what could replace human nature as a baseline for a fair, egalitarian treatment of all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, or ancestry, whatever these notions turn out to be.
Can Science Explain Human Nature?
Authors: Nathan Marco J. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Human nature is central to the natural and social sciences, as well as philosophy and other fields of the humanities. Yet an adequate characterization eludes us. Why? Chapter 10 suggests that looking at science for an elucidation of human nature is a mistake. If human nature is something that science cannot explain, where else should an explanation be sought? Traditional humanistic approaches fared no better. How do we get out of this quagmire? The chapter begins by revisiting an influential debate between Chomsky and Foucault. Foucault quips that human nature constitutes an “epistemological indicator,” a designator of a specific kind of discourse. Sparked by Foucault’s intriguing remarks, the chapter develops a more systematic notion of epistemological indicator that captures why, although there can be no scientific explanation of human nature, the concept nonetheless remains central to scientific inquiry. The final section revisits one final time the ten philosophical questions tracing the book’s intellectual adventure.
Healthcare and Carbon Reduction
Authors: Richie Cristina 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Healthcare directly impacts the environment through use of resources to cure, treat, and prevent diseases. Healthcare indirectly impacts the environment by extending lifespans, decreasing child mortality, and creating not only the possibility of new births (for instance, by preventing infertility and helping people to reach sexual maturity), but also actually creating new humans through reproductive technologies. The indirect environmental impact of healthcare resource use contributes to climate change and climate change health hazards. The direct environmental impact of healthcare puts pressure on earth’s carrying capacity and contributes to overpopulation. The carbon emissions of medical care have been underconsidered in part because of the belief that all medical care is clinically necessary and therefore carbon emissions are morally irrelevant. However, safe amounts of carbon in the atmosphere have been exceeded—in part because of medical lifestyles, which include both essential and elective treatments.
Purpose of Healthcare
Authors: Richie Cristina 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
In biomedical ethics, it is widely agreed that individuals have a right to healthcare, which includes access to clinicians, medicine, and medical services. However, this argument does not necessarily imply that individuals have a right to healthcare insurance. Subsidized healthcare was initially established to provide limited treatment of illnesses and make efforts to contain diseases. Today’s healthcare insurance often goes beyond basic medical needs and preventive and catastrophic care. Healthcare insurance often recognizes the low prioritization of MR by placing stricter limits on artificial fertilization than actual treatment or cure of infertility. Countries that subsidize MR provide a handout of a non-lifesaving treatment. Hence, there is ethical support for putting limitations on access to the treatments, just as policymakers may put limits on other elective healthcare offerings.
Rights and the Ethics of Sex and Procreation
Authors: Richie Cristina 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Modern procreative ethics has divorced sexual intercourse from reproductive ethics due to the advent of effective, available contraception. Since sexual intercourse need not lead to procreation, the fields of sexual ethics and procreative ethics have distinct trajectories, with intersections at the point of reproductive sexuality. The birth control revolution provided the options of limiting the number of children born and of being childfree. With these options, procreation morphed from an inevitability to something within one’s control and children moved from being an obligation that must be accepted to being a managed commodity. As such, procreation became a matter of applied—and not merely speculative—ethics. As both an elective choice, outside of rights claims, and a parenting preference, MR is subject to the standards of biomedical and environmental ethics.
Making Sense of Polarization
Authors: Merrill III Samuel , Grofman Bernard , Brunell Thomas L. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Widely separated and internally homogeneous political camps, each responsible to its respective base, characterize American politics in the early 21st century. The resulting government is beset with gridlock, obstruction, and the inability to compromise to get things done. We focus on the difference between the mean ideological positions of the Democratic and Republican delegations in the US House, along with the intraparty variance within each of the delegations. Our theoretical model of polarization—driven by the feedback loop binding national party discipline to voting in Congressional districts and abetted by voter party loyalties and the influence of activists within each party—accounts for the inverse relationship between party separation and intraparty variance in Congress. We focus on processes that reinforce polarization operating “behind the scenes,” to which even the involved actors may be oblivious. We show that, once a polarization threshold is crossed, office-seeking parties and candidates gain from putting more emphasis on mobilizing their base rather than appealing to the middle.
Consequences of Polarized Politics
Authors: Merrill III Samuel , Grofman Bernard , Brunell Thomas L. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Polarization within Congress reduces the number of competitive districts, reduces split-ticket voting, and can increase even in the absence of polarization among voters. Whereas legislator-centric government is associated with partisan overlap and relatively stable policy outcomes keyed to the chamber median, party-centric government is associated with party separation and legislative outcomes that track the majority-party median and may oscillate greatly. If the minority party is sufficiently concentrated, the chamber median legislator can, during periods of significant partisan overlap, be ideologically closer to the minority party median than to the majority-party median. Striking policy reversals typically occur when unified control of government flips back and forth; whereas gridlock is likely in eras of divided government and increases substantially with polarization. In particular, change in party control affects not just the ideological location of legislators at the median but also super-majoritarian pivots; thus, a polarized environment can generate large increases in the range of issues facing gridlock.