The chapter discusses the issue of the evaluation of the validity of international legitimacy. This issue is important because it concerns how true international legitimacy can be distinguished from false international legitimacy, especially in the midst of change. This chapter concentrates on this matter, with its philosophical resonance, by looking into when international legitimacy, established or changing (change of/in an international system and its legitimacy), can really be considered valid or legitimate. Specifically, the following questions are addressed: First, does it make sense to examine the issue of the evaluation of international legitimacy (established or changing)? Second, if indeed it makes sense, what are the criteria that can be used to evaluate the validity of a claim or belief of international legitimacy? Third, what are the relevance and the modalities of application of this normative approach to international legitimacy (established or changing) across various periods and cultures?

Political legitimacy entails a process of evaluation and eventually of judgment concerning whether or not, and to what extent, the exercise of political power (institutions, leadership, policies, and results) meets the conditions required by legitimacy. Despite the importance of the contribution of law to legitimacy, legitimacy cannot be purely and simply identified with and reduced to law. This is, in part, the case because law functions as an expression and vector of two other components of political legitimacy: values and consent. As such, this chapter is organized into three parts. First, I examine the meaning of values and consent and of their relationship in general. Second, I refer to the challenges that can be associated with values and consent. Third, I show how values and consent, provided that they are not the captives of these challenges, can operate as sources and criteria of evaluation and judgment of political legitimacy.

This chapter concentrates on the conditions of access to and the nature of membership in the international system as established by international law—specifically, three issues. The first issue is the type of society that is presented as a legitimate collective member of the international order. One of the first steps that international law takes to determine legitimacy at the international level is to identify the criteria necessary for a collective actor to be viewed as a full-fledged legitimate member of the international community. The second issue is that after World War II and the creation of the United Nations (UN), access to international membership in the international order moved toward a form of universality that has been relatively pluralistic. The third issue is that despite this movement toward a pluralistic universality, there are limits to the universality and pluralism of international membership in the international system as defined by international law.

Managing the mechanical ventilator in critical illness is far from formulaic. Criteria of intubation are rarely contemplated when a patient is struggling to maintain a patent airway. Once the airway is secured, adjustments in ventilator settings and modes are continuously made, and there is a fair amount of trial and error. Weaning from the ventilator is not standardized (and probably never will be), and protocols (if there are any) are based on consultant preferences and mostly experience. The consensus statement of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine on mechanical ventilation (MV) in acute brain injury has clearly shown that evidence for certain approaches was either insufficient or lacking and that a substantial amount of research is needed to demonstrate the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of different management approaches in this category of patients.

This chapter reviews considerations in each intervention during the patient’s clinical trajectory of ventilation in the neurosciences ICU. The reader will find that early intubation and mechanical ventilation are initiated because patients cannot protect their airways or have insufficient respiratory drive to maintain oxygenation and normocarbia.

The philosophy of science suggests that, on a fundamental level, a scientific theory is only a good theory to the extent that it fulfils a set of basic criteria of adequacy. The study of the predictive mind thus should benefit from an examination and evaluation of the extent to which theories of prediction adhere to these ground rules. There are six reasonable criteria further elucidated in this chapter that are useful to assess the merit of a theory. These criteria are far from perfect benchmarks but, considered as a whole, provide a useful guideline to evaluate theories of prediction. Six criteria are applied to theories of prediction in the remainder of the book. These are: parsimony and simplicity, theoretical precision and mechanistic specificity, testability and predictive power, falsifiability, test of time, and utility. The credibility of a scientific theory is also intrinsically connected to the credibility of the experimental evidence supporting it. This book uses three criteria that provide good benchmarks: the reliability, generalizability, and the validity of the experimental evidence that has been collected.

The chapter gives a broadly chronological account of the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’. The discussion raises questions about the meaning of the term ‘historical Jesus’, the extent to which the ‘quest’ can be divided into self-contained periods of study, and about the purpose of such study, especially when it is approached with different methodologies and presuppositions. Such disputation, it is argued, should encourage an attitude of modesty among scholars involved in the ‘quest.’

Most of the remedies discussed in this book are personal remedies (apart from the proprietary consequences of rescission). Personal remedies, as the name suggests, are directed at the person of the defendant. The defendant must comply with the court order. By contrast, proprietary remedies are directed at property to which the defendant holds title, not to the person.

Proprietary remedies are difficult to allocate on a functional basis. We have not attempted to do so, as the rationales behind the imposition of proprietary remedies vary, and the criteria for their award are uncertain and contested.

It should be noted at the outset that this chapter does not purport to provide an exhaustive account of proprietary remedies. It is presumed that the reader already has a knowledge of trust law and the principles governing the creation of trusts and equitable liens. What follows is an overview from a remedies perspective.

The availability of proprietary remedies in common law is limited. Even where the defendant has committed a proprietary tort, the common law tends to award damages as a remedy. There is no rei vindicatio, or ability of a plaintiff to demand the return of property from a defendant, at common law. Consequently, the proprietary remedies we discuss in this chapter are equitable in origin.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

This chapter focuses on the variety of different EEG patterns that can be seen after hypoxic ischemic brain injury, which often produces some of the most severe encephalopathies. Common post–cardiac arrest findings include discontinuity, burst suppression, background voltage attenuation and suppression, lack of EEG reactivity, seizures, myoclonus, and status epilepticus. The prognostic significance of these findings is discussed. Finally, the topic of using EEG as a confirmatory tool in brain death protocols is introduced.

Screening is an important preventive public health activity. This chapter:

• provides examples of effective screening programmes;

• considers what criteria are needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a programme;

• describes how screening tests can be used to guide action; and

• describes how screening programmes can be evaluated.

Chapter 2 examines criteria that people use when forming perceptions of how they and others have been treated is fair or unfair. One of the important criteria that people use is whether they were given sufficient opportunities to voice their opinions about important issues at stake. It is crucial that voiced opinions are given due consideration. Being treated in a polite and respectful manner by people, and especially people of power, is also among the core criteria for evaluating procedural fairness. Generally being treated in a fair and just manner by competent and professional authorities is also among the important criteria of perceived procedural fairness. Taken together, perceived procedural fairness boils down to feeling to be a full-fledged member of your community and society and, ideally, the entire world.

The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

To demonstrate the centrality of politics in Cavell’s philosophy, this chapter examines Cavell’s treatment of the foundational political theory concept of the social contract. Cavell’s analysis of the social contract appears near the beginning of his magnum opus The Claim of Reason in the context of his interpretation of philosophical criteria. He draws an analogy between our certainty in the validity of criteria when making an epistemological judgment and our obligation to obey the laws of our community. This surprising connection raises two important questions: Where does my capacity as a member of a community to speak on behalf of the community come from? And, how can I as a citizen be party to an agreement that I have no recollection of making? Classical approaches treat the social contract as the answer to an epistemological problem: How do I know what my obligations to the state are? This framing sets up the social contract as a false choice between obedience and rebellion. Cavell argues that the epistemological approach to the social contract generates this ambivalence.

The question with which this chapter grapples is the following: What kind of a concept is coherence and what is its content? The chapter begins by a general introduction on concepts. Three different concept types are identified: criterial concepts, natural-kind concepts, and interpretative concepts. As coherence is clearly not a natural-kind concept, the chapter analyses coherence as a potential candidate concept of the criterial kind. It identifies three elements often associated with, and deemed necessary for, the existence of coherence in a legal setting, namely: consistency, correctness, and comprehensiveness. Incidentally, these are also key concerns regarding the existing ISDS regime as expressed by state delegations and scholars. The section ultimately concludes that none of the three elements is necessary for coherence to exist in non-ideal practical situations. Based on this examination, the chapter then shifts perspectives and characterises coherence as a concept of the interpretative kind. In so doing, the chapter makes a preliminary case for the existence of a dual, substantive and methodological, dimension of the interpretative concept of coherence

The right to claim contribution in competition law is ensured by EU law but its exercise takes place under national laws. This Chapter investigates English, German, French and Polish rules on contribution and their application in the competition law context. On the one hand, the assessment is pragmatic. It analyses questions that are likely to appear when pursuing contribution claims. Does a right to claim contribution exist in a given legal order? On what basis and in which form can contribution be claimed? Against whom can contribution be claimed? What legal test must be met to receive contribution? What is the criterion for allocating liability between antitrust infringers? The analysis shows that the allocation of liability can be debated, as there are several possible methods of dividing liability: relative fault, causation, illicit gains, values of sales, market shares and pro capita. At the same time, the Chapter reflects on whether the requirements and modifications stemming from EU competition law require the adoption of a competition law-specific approach to contribution and makes proposals on how rules on contribution can be improved.