bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Impoverishment of Resources
Authors: Gibson Andrew 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
We live in the age of the Anthropocene. Neoliberalism, which might have worked to halt it, has drastically accelerated its pace. This is hugely significant for contemporary thinkers and writers, ontology and philosophy in general, and literature and aesthetics, including literary criticism. Ours is the age that begins to grasp the poverty of Being, or unBeing, calling a range of philosophical and artistic projects into question, though strengthening the grip of others (Pascal, Schopenhauer, Luhmann, Beckett). As such, it is radically opposed to the neoliberal obsession with plenitude, the ‘double dividend’, the ‘upscaling of desire’, and the doctrine of ‘sustainability’ which notionally preserves all three. I show how, in two of his novels, in radical contradistinction to a world of impatient consumption, Coetzee commits himself to a manichaeanism of scarcity. Thought begins in the poverty of Being: scarcity, exiguous resources, direly limited possibilities, closeness to bare life, the edge of inexistence.
The Creation of Difficulty
Authors: Gibson Andrew 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Neoliberalism is intermittently troubled by the idea that it might be stupid, as in its concern with ‘dumbing down’. This chapter briefly surveys the scene, focussing on worries about the effects of mediatization and IT. But then, turning to Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, it changes the ground of the debate. Mbembe identifies neoliberal stupidity as above all moral, the latest manifestation of the age-old racism of the West. This has not changed. It has merely shifted its points of concentration, most blatantly, to borders and crossing points. The chapter examines three of Coetzee’s novels as major challenges, not so much to racism itself as to the stupid mental habits intrinsic to racism. Coetzee excels at the creation of moral difficulty. He is our most rigorous literary opponent of the lazy thinking, the easy solution or response, the contemporary cliché or bromide from which neoliberalism and its ‘planetary apartheid’ are inseparable.
A Hidden Wisdom
Authors: Van Dyke Christina 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Medieval philosophy is primarily associated today with university-based disputations and the authorities cited in those disputations. In their own time, however, scholastic debates were recognized as just one part of wide-ranging philosophical and theological discussions. A Hidden Wisdom breaks new ground by drawing attention to another crucial component of these conversations: the Christian contemplative tradition. The thirteenth–fifteenth centuries in particular saw a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of mystical and contemplative literature in the ‘Christian West’, by laypeople as well as religious scholars, women as well as men. A Hidden Wisdom focuses on five topics of particular interest to both scholastics and contemplatives in this period—namely, self-knowledge, reason and its limits, love and the will, persons, and immortality and the afterlife. This focus centers on the (often overlooked) contributions of medieval women and demonstrates that when we reunite scholasticism with its contemplative counterpart, we gain not only a more accurate understanding of the scope of medieval Christian philosophy and theology but also an increased awareness of a deeply practical tradition that builds up as well as tears down, generates as well as deconstructs. The book’s treatment of topics and figures is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive—a tasting menu rather than a comprehensive study. The choice of topics offers a series of ‘hooks’ for philosophers to connect their own interests to issues central to medieval contemplative philosophy, while also providing medievalists in other disciplines a fresh lens through which to view these texts.
Self-Knowledge
Authors: Van Dyke Christina 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
According to medieval contemplatives, self-knowledge is a precondition for moral and spiritual growth—everything from the development of individual virtues to achievement of our final end as human beings. After establishing a general sense of what self-knowledge is, this chapter lays out three of the most common recommendations medieval contemplatives give for how to acquire it: ‘look outside yourself to know yourself,’ ‘root down in humility to rise up in dignity,’ and ‘use reason and imagination to counter selfish pride.’ Although contemplatives generally agree about the importance of self-knowledge, they disagree sharply about its final purpose; the chapter concludes by laying out the differing ends towards which contemplatives advise applying this knowledge—ends that range from relinquishing all individuality in a selfless merging with God to complete self-fulfillment via union with God.
Persons
Authors: Van Dyke Christina 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
According to late medieval contemplatives, “we” human beings are also persons—a category that includes all rational beings, including God. By the outset of the thirteenth century, the term ‘persona’ had a long history in logical, legal, and theological contexts. This chapter addresses how the overlapping but distinct connotations ‘persona’ assumes in those contexts boil down to three central concepts: individuality, dignity, and rationality (understood broadly to include the full range of rational capacities). These three concepts combine in the contemplative tradition with the use of first- and second-person perspectives, personification, and introspection to yield a complex and rich understanding of who we are and what it is to be a person. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how this concept of person also prefigures Locke’s famous seventeenth-century definition and influences the development of the philosophical theory of personalism.
Introduction
Authors: Rosenfeld Michel 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Liberal constitutional democracy has come under attack in the era of globalization, both from within and from the standpoint of illiberalism, populism, and authoritarianism. With spreading wealth inequality, perceived threats to national identity, and increases in “democratic deficits,” the constitutional ideal seems to be failing the requisites of distributive justice in its facets: redistribution, recognition, and representation. Drawing on Rawls’ subsuming “constitutional essentials” under his theory of justice, the liberal constitutional ideal can be understood to require guaranteeing a minimum of distributive justice that can be labeled as the “justice essentials.” As what distributive justice requires is highly contested in contemporary societies, the book sets to inquire into the challenges both practical and theoretical to agreeing to and realizing the “justice essentials.” Moreover, the inquiry in question is intended to yield insights into viability of the ideal of liberal constitutionalism in the present and the foreseeable future.
Local versus Global, Material Well-Being, States of Stress, and the Erosion of Justice
Authors: Rosenfeld Michel 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
This chapter concentrates on novel and unsettling disruptions to patterns of distributive justice regarding wealth and other material burdens and benefits attributable to globalization and associated developments resulting in dramatic increases in inequalities based on wealth. These disruptions pose vexing new challenges to constitutions and to their ability to satisfy the justice essentials in the realms of social, political, and economic distributive justice. In the 1990s after the fall of communism, it was assumed that capitalism would legitimately reign unchallenged, thus warranting a constitutional focus away from questions of wealth and towards questions of identity. More recently, however, questions of wealth have re-emerged and now figure urgently alongside questions of identity and of representation in the quest for constitutional justice. In addition, the twenty-first century has confronted special challenges due to the prevalence of conditions of “stress” that stand halfway between ordinary conditions and states of emergency. Global terrorism and the “war on terror” that ensued as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal, political, and public health handling have fostered prolonged and challenging conditions of stress. Such conditions typically test and reset loyalties while tending to compromise civil liberties for purposes of enhancing security or of meeting pressing public health objectives. These conditions of stress produce shifts in the relationship between the demos and the ethnos posing additional challenges to the justice essentials.
The Dialectics of Comprehensive Pluralism
Authors: Rosenfeld Michel 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
This chapter details how “comprehensive pluralism,” a theory that is pluralist all the way up and all the way down, can yield a pluralist conception of constitutional justice. Comprehensive pluralism, which is distinguishable from the limited pluralism linked to philosophical liberalism and from the value pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, relies on a dialectical approach that incorporates Hegelian elements (without assuming a course of historical progress leading to any definitive resolution of major societal conflicts). Comprehensive pluralism emerges in sharp contrast to both philosophical monism and relativism, and because philosophical liberalism as opposed to liberal constitutionalism is monistic in nature, comprehensive pluralism is presumably better suited to provide normative legitimation to the latter. Because of its dialectical nature, comprehensive pluralism must be successively relativistic and monistic: relativistic to dislodge the hegemony of entrenched conceptions of the good that stand in the way of genuine plurality, and monistic to secure the greatest possible inclusion of competing ideologies without risking mere mutual disengagement or a thoroughly relativistic war of all against all. Furthermore, comprehensive pluralism is a teleological theory that rejects the proposition that justice can be properly conceived as being independent from the good. For comprehensive pluralism, justice as a good must rely to greatest extent possible on accommodation of competing conceptions of the good—including competing conceptions of distributive justice—even if the later are inconsistent with pluralism so long as they do not prove downright incompatible with it.
Unsupervised learning: from representations to generative models
Authors: Cocco Simona , Monasson Rémi , Zamponi Francesco 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Unsupervised learning is the task of inferring the statistical structure common to a set of data. Unveiling this structure may be helpful for multiple purposes, such as interpreting the defining characteristics of the data, allowing for further processing, or even generating new data items. We have already encountered methods for unsupervised learning in the previous chapters. An example is that of Boltzmann machine learning of a probability distribution, which can then be sampled to produce new data. If the learning is good, the generated data should be statistically indistinguishable from the training data. The principal component analysis (PCA) method discussed in chapter 3 is another example, in which one learns some features of the data (the directions in the data space along which data vary the most) that can be used to represent them. The field of unsupervised learning is particularly vast. In this chapter we will only discuss a few examples, in particular autoencoders, restricted Boltzmann machines, and a revisited version of PCA. The emphasis will be put on two major goals of unsupervised learning, that is, the production of adequate representations of the data, and the generative character of the models. Applications to the design of new proteins from sequence-based models will be presented.
Necessity, Responsibility, and Character
Authors: Janaway Christopher 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
In On the Freedom of the Human Will, Schopenhauer argues that an individual human being’s acts of will are not free: all human actions are causally necessitated, as are all other events in empirical nature, hence there is no absolute freedom in the sense of the traditional notion of liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. However, our sense of responsibility or agency (being the ‘doers of our deeds’) is nonetheless unshakeable. To account for this Schopenhauer invokes the Kantian distinction between empirical and intelligible characters. Schopenhauer and Kant differ over the intelligible character, which for Schopenhauer cannot be rational and cannot causally interact with anything. The chapter questions whether the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer’s position, and whether it can coherently belong to an individual agent, suggesting that for Schopenhauer a more consistent position would be to deny freedom of will to the individual altogether.
What’s So Good about Negation of the Will?
Authors: Janaway Christopher 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Some commentators have asserted that for Schopenhauer negation of the will is the ‘highest good’. But Schopenhauer states that there cannot be a highest good or summum bonum literally, only figuratively. What is the reason for this ambivalence? Schopenhauer defines good as whatever is conducive to the will, but by this criterion absence of will could not be good, much less the highest good. Schopenhauer implicitly recognizes two ways of being good, corresponding to two kinds of willing: ordinary willing, aimed at the well-being of individuals, and a will to be without ordinary individualistic willing. Thus he can hold that negation of the will is the highest good, while also making clear that it is not the highest of the goods attainable by ordinary individualistic willing. However, although his position seems to require the second kind of willing, it remains unclear how his metaphysics can accommodate it.
Schopenhauer’s Christian Perspectives
Authors: Janaway Christopher 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
The chapter begins from some of Nietzsche’s remarks in The Gay Science, and argues that Nietzsche is right that Schopenhauer defends values from a distinctly Christian ‘ascetic moral perspective’ while ‘dismissing faith in God’. The chapter aims to show that Schopenhauer is genuinely an atheist; to understand the nature of the Christian values—those of selfless compassion and ascetic release from the world—that he nonetheless espouses; to assess Schopenhauer’s claim that Christianity represents truths allegorically; and to examine the coherence or plausibility of his position. Merely continuing Christian values is not the same as being ‘stuck’ in them (a phrase Nietzsche had borrowed from Plümacher). Nietzsche’s claim is that Christian values ought not to survive the death of God and, having supported Nietzsche’s description of Schopenhauer, the final question is whether he is also right in this evaluation.
On the Very Idea of ‘Justifying Suffering’
Authors: Janaway Christopher 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
The chapter examines whether Nietzsche is concerned with a kind of ‘theodicy’, or with justifying or finding meaning in suffering. In the ‘aesthetic justification’ in The Birth of Tragedy, ‘justification’ is used in a loose sense of ‘enabling a positive attitude’. In his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ Nietzsche does not endorse his earlier notion, but praises The Birth of Tragedy for its refusal to find a moral meaning in existence, in explicit contrast to Schopenhauer’s view. While Nietzsche’s later position is continuous with the tradition of theodicy in seeking to relate suffering’s value to some wider whole, it does not hold that suffering as such has a fixed normative value, has a meaning, happens for a reason, is justified, or that we ought because of suffering to value our lives one way or another.
Who—or What—Says Yes to Life?
Authors: Janaway Christopher 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
The chapter examines attitudes or processes that Nietzsche describes as ‘affirmation’ or ‘Yes-saying’. He often speaks of something other than an individual as saying Yes, for example, cultural products, practices such as art forms and value-systems, and subpersonal items such as instincts and drives. The chapter argues that Nietzsche gives priority to affirmation that is the direct expression of instincts or drives in action. However, many drives or instincts are acquired through cultural transmission, and operate outside conscious control to influence culture in turn. The notion that a drive ‘in us’ says Yes to life and the notion that a surrounding culture says Yes to life do not conflict but are two sides of the same coin. Nietzsche himself must fail to embody the highest affirmative ideal because he inhabits a culture that has moulded his drives in ways that impede affirmation.
The Relationship between Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees
Authors: Ní Ghráinne Bríd 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to set out in more detail the precise nature of the relationship between IDPs and refugees. First it explains the concepts of IDP and refugee and gives a brief overview of the current figures and demographics of both categories of forced migrants. It then explains the similarities and differences between IDPs and refugees, explores whether these two categories of forced migrants should be merged, and sets out areas where the protection of IDPs and refugees might complement and conflict with each other. The chapter argues that, because of the close relationship between IDP and refugee protection, an analysis of how the protection of these two categories of forced migrants interact with each other is long overdue.
Legal and Institutional Protection of Internally Displaced Persons
Authors: Ní Ghráinne Bríd 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
This chapter explains the development of the current IDP protection framework. It identifies three key stages in this respect, which correspond with the chapter’s structure: (i) the era of ‘preventive protection’ in the 1990s and early 2000s; (ii) the development of a distinct IDP legal framework from the 1990s onwards; (iii) the parallel development of an IDP institutional framework from the 1990s onwards. The chapter argues that despite these significant strides, the issue of refugee protection continues to dominate the international agenda, to the detriment of the IDP protection framework. Specifically, it is clear that the development of the IDP protection framework was significantly motivated by the desire to reduce refugee flows, and that the legal and institutional framework for IDPs is significantly weaker than that for refugees.
Hume's Philosophy in Historical Perspective
Authors: Stewart M. A. 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
David Hume was a highly original thinker. Nevertheless, he was a writer of his time and place in the history of philosophy. In this book, M. A. Stewart puts Hume’s writing in context, particularly that of his native Scotland, but also that of British and European philosophy more generally. Through meticulous research Stewart brings to life the circumstances by means of which we can get a deeper understanding of Hume’s writings on the nature and reach of human reason, the foundation of morals, and, especially, on the philosophy of religion. Stewart pays particular attention to Hume’s intellectual development, beginning with his education at the College of Edinburgh, the writing of his Treatise of Human Nature, and his subsequent philosophical responses to criticisms of that book. He argues that Hume’s scepticism set him at odds with the Christian Stoicism of Scottish contemporaries including that of Francis Hutcheson - and shows that this conflict played a major role in his failure to obtain the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair in 1745. Stewart’s detailed study of the physical character of Hume’s surviving manuscripts in Chapters 8 and 9 provides the best available dating of his early ‘Essay on Modern Chivalry’, his ‘Early Fragment on Evil’ and the periods of composition of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Other chapters compare Hume’s theory of abstraction with that of Locke and Berkeley, provide the 17th and 18th century philosophical context of the central argument of his essay ‘Of miracles’, and consider the 18th and 19th century reception of his writings in England and Ireland.
The Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Stewart M. A. 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Situates Hume in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Shows that the intellectual environment in which Hume developed his ideas was shaped by the academic culture developed in Scotland in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Emphasizes the importance to that culture of Francis Hutcheson. Suggests that Hume could have been influenced also by criticism of the broadly Lockean consensus on the part of Thomas Halyburton and Archibald Campbell. Argues that Hume’s major contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment was his critique of the rationality of religious belief. Argues also that the significance of this critique for the development of Scottish philosophy more generally was in the critical reaction it provoked in his contemporaries and successors, including Henry Home of Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown. Also briefly discusses the relation of Hume’s moral philosophy to that of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.
The Stoic Legacy in the Early Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Stewart M. A. 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Focuses on Hume’s generally hostile philosophical engagement with the neo-Stoicism that dominated Scottish university life in the early eighteenth century, giving particular attention to the essays ‘The Epicurean’, ‘The Stoic’, ‘The Platonist’, and ‘The Sceptic’. Argues that for Hume, Stoicism was a species of philosophical enthusiasm, and that the scepticism that Hume endorses in ‘The Sceptic’ is scepticism about overrating the power of reason to impose upon human nature. Describes how Hume’s scepticism about the capacities of philosophy divided him from his Scottish contemporaries, including Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, and John Pringle. Considers the political dimension of Scottish neo-Stoicism, and the influence upon it of Robert Molesworth.
Academic Freedom
Authors: Stewart M. A. 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Puts Hume’s failure to get an academic appointment into the wider political context of contemporary Scottish discussions of academic freedom. Makes particular reference to the internal politics of Glasgow University, and to Francis Hutcheson’s Lockean defence of religious toleration. Points out that Hutchesonian toleration did not include toleration of those who, in a university context, questioned the providence of God and the goodness of creation. Argues this was why, twenty years later, erstwhile liberals such as Hutcheson and Wishart opposed Hume’s candidacy for the Edinburgh chair.
Abstraction and Representation in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
Authors: Stewart M. A. 
Published: November 2022

Abstract
Focuses on the theories of abstract ideas developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Uses early drafts of Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge to reconstruct how his theory developed out of his study of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Argues that Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s doctrine of abstract ideas proceeded from a misreading of Locke’s text; and that Hume’s account of abstraction was predicated upon a failure to see that Berkeley never claimed that general words signify ideas which represent more than one individual. In conclusion, reflects on the different motivations behind Berkeley’s and Hume’s discussions of abstraction and their rejections of the claim that space and time are infinitely divisible.