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2071 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 18 of 104

Embodiment, Dependence, and God

Embodiment, Dependence, and God
  • Kevin Timpe
  • Published online:
    15 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • The significance of our physical bodies is an important topic in contemporary philosophy and theology. Reflection on the body often assumes, even if only implicitly, idealizations that obscure important facts about what it means for humans to be 'enfleshed.' This Element explores a number of ways that reflection on bodies in their concrete particularities is important. It begins with a consideration of why certain forms of idealization are philosophically problematic. It then explores how a number of features of bodies can reveal important truths about human nature, embodiment, and dependence. Careful reflection on the body raises important questions related to community and interdependence. The Element concludes by exploring the ethical demands we face given human embodiment. Among other results, this Element exposes the reader to a wide diversity of human embodiment and the nature of human dependence, encouraging meaningful theological reflection on aspects of the human condition.
Religious Trauma

Religious Trauma
  • Michelle Panchuk
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • When religion is the site of abuse and trauma, it can deeply impact a person's ability to relate to God and engage in spiritual practice. As such, religious trauma is ripe for philosophical exploration. Section 1 of this Element provides a brief history of the concept of psychological trauma, contemporary accounts of its neurobiological basis, and its impact on human agency. Section 2 sketches a model of religious trauma through the first-person narratives of survivors and emerging psychological data. Section 3 explores the social epistemology of religious trauma, focusing on how failures of knowledge create space for religious abuse and the insights of survivors may help communities guard against it. The last two sections consider three perennial topics in philosophy of religion from the perspective of religious trauma: the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and religious experience.
Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music

Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music
  • Practice-Based Research
  • Toby Martin, Seyed MohammadReza Beladi, Đăng Lan
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.
The Problem of Divine Personality

The Problem of Divine Personality
  • Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • The main question of this Element is whether God has a personality. The authors show what the question means, why it matters, and that good sense can be made of an affirmative answer to it. A God with personality - complete with particular, sometimes peculiar, and even seemingly unexplainable druthers - is not at war with maximal perfection, nor is the idea irredeemably anthropomorphic. And the hypothesis of divine personality is fruitful, with substantive consequences that span philosophical theology. But problems arise here too, and new perspectives on inquiry itself. Our cosmos is blessed with weirdness aplenty. To come to know it is nothing less than to encounter a strange and untamed God.
Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence
  • Neil Sinhababu
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The idea of the eternal recurrence is that we will live the exact same lives again an infinite number of times. Nietzsche appreciates that this would multiply the value of a single life by infinity, justifying intense emotional responses. His unpublished notes provide a cosmological argument for the eternal recurrence that anticipates Poincaré's recurrence theorem. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes its hero discovering this idea and struggling to accept the recurrence of all bad things. He eventually comes to love the eternal recurrence because it will bring back all the joys of his life, and teaches this idea to others.
Heidegger and Kierkegaard

Heidegger and Kierkegaard
  • George Pattison
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The work examines the presence and significance of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's work. After setting out the context of Heidegger's reception of the Danish thinker and examining his likely knowledge of his writings, the work first examines key Kierkegaardian concepts that are explicitly present in Being and Time, including existence, 'idle talk' (Gerede), anxiety, the moment of vision, repetition, and the existential significance of death. It is seen that Heidegger regarded Kierkegaard as an essentially religious writer whose work was only indirectly relevant to Heidegger's own project of fundamental ontology. Subsequently, the work considers the place of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's writings from the 1930s onwards, concluding with consideration of the paper Heidegger submitted for the 1963 Paris UNESCO conference marking the 150th anniversary of Kierkegaard's thought.
Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change

Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change
  • Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Nina Hall
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Non-governmental and civil society organizations have long been recognized as crucial players in climate politics. Today, thanks to the internet, social media, satellite, and more, climate activists are pioneering new organizational forms and strategies. Organizations like Fridays for Future, 350.org, and GetUp! have used social media and other digital platforms to mobilize millions of people. Many NGOs use digital tools to collect and analyze 'big data' on environmental factors, and to investigate and prosecute environmental crimes. Although the rise of digitally based advocacy organizations is well documented, we know less about how digital technologies are used in different aspects of climate activism, and with what effects. On this basis, we ask: how do NGOs use digital technology to campaign for climate action? What are the benefits and downsides of using technology to push for political change? To what extent does technology influence the goals activists strive for and their strategies.
Public Contracting for Social Outcomes

Public Contracting for Social Outcomes
  • Clare J. FitzGerald, J. Ruairi Macdonald
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
    • Element
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  • Governments all over the world have transitioned away from directly providing public services to contracting and collaborating with cross-sectoral networks to deliver services on their behalf. Governments have thus pursued an array of policy instruments to improve interorganizational progress towards policy goals. In recent years, outcomes-based contracting has emerged as a compelling solution to service quality shortcomings and collective action challenges. Informed by public policy, public administration, and public procurement scholarship, this Element details the evolution of social outcomes in public contracting, exploring the relationship between how outcomes are specified and managed and how well such instruments deliver against policy goals. It comments on the possible drawbacks of contracting for social outcomes, highlighting how governments may use outcomes as an excuse to avoid actively managing contracts or to sidestep their accountability as outlined in public law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon

The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon
  • An Ethiopian Intellectual in Early Modern Rome
  • Matteo Salvadore, James De Lorenzi, Deresse Ayenachew Woldetsadik
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element examines the life and legacy of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian intellectual Täsfa Ṣeyon. It reconstructs his formative years in the Horn of Africa and his diasporic life in the Holy Land and Italian peninsula, where he emerged as a prominent intermediary figure at Santo Stefano degli Abissini, an Ethiopian monastery within the Vatican. He became a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent advisor to European humanist scholars and Tridentine Church authorities concerned with the emerging field of philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. The Element reconstructs his wide-ranging contacts with the Roman Curia and emerging orientalist academy, and then scrutinizes his editio princeps of the Ge'ez Gospels. A final section traces his modern influence, erasure, and rediscovery by later generations of European, Ethiopian, and Eritrean intellectuals.
Defence Economics and Innovation

Defence Economics and Innovation
  • Gustavo Fornari Dall'Agnol
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element presents an analytical model for assessing the success or failure of innovative large-scale defence projects. To achieve this goal, it constructs a theoretical model based on a three-angle analysis: the International System, the innovative potential, and the domestic political arena. Each angle of analysis generates an independent variable, namely: level of threat, technological feasibility, and political consensus. It is held that technological feasibility and political consensus are necessary and conjointly sufficient conditions to explain the success or failure of large-scale defence projects. The success of the innovative defence projects is strongly and positively related to the level of external threat. The initial hypothesis is tested by scrutinizing three specific projects in the United States (Future Combat Systems, The B-2 Stealth Bomber and the F-35). The conclusion is that the model is sound and might be generalized to analyse the prospects of success or failure of other large-scale defence projects.
Democracy in Trouble

Democracy in Trouble
  • Democratic Resilience and Breakdown from 1900 to 2022
  • Myles Williamson, Christopher Akor, Amanda B. Edgell
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element investigates the process of executive aggrandizement to identify factors associated with democratic resilience. We focus on five democracies that showed resilience in the face of incumbent-led autocratization. To understand how these cases survived, we pair them with similar cases where incumbents successfully dismantled democracy from within. Through structured focused comparisons, our inductive exercise provides insights into how the process of executive aggrandizement unfolds. The case narratives reveal similar patterns, with incumbents often targeting the media, civil society, and judiciary and using shared tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Where democracies survived, anti-democratic incumbents made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, which ultimately cost them their positions and allowed democracy to rebound. Where democracy broke down, incumbents were largely able to avoid or mitigate such errors, often through ethnopopulist appeals.
Global Ships

Global Ships
  • Seafaring, Shipwrecks, and Boatbuilding in the Global Middle Ages
  • Amanda Respess
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Global Ships examines the major seafaring traditions and technologies that engendered long-distance connections across the world's oceans during the Global Middle Ages. Between the years 500–1500 CE, maritime trade networks spanning the seas globalized commodities, religions, and trade diasporas in an increasingly mobile world. Focusing on shipbuilding traditions, nautical cultures, sailing itineraries, and examples of recovered shipwrecks and cargoes from around the world, Global Ships provides an expert overview of the major vessels that sailed the seas in the Global Middle Ages. A concise interpretive guide to global maritime technologies and cultures for researchers, teachers, and students, Global Ships highlights essential historical context, technological case studies, and logics of seafaring around the world before the modern age.
The Phonetics of Taiwanese

The Phonetics of Taiwanese
  • Janice Fon, Hui-lu Khoo
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • Taiwanese, formerly the lingua franca of Taiwan and currently the second largest language on the island, is genealogically related to Min from the Sino-Tibetan family. Throughout history, it has been influenced by many languages, but only Mandarin has exerted heavy influences on its phonological system. This Element provides an overview of the sound inventory in mainstream Taiwanese, and details its major dialectal differences. In addition, the Element introduces speech materials that could be used for studying the phonetics of Taiwanese, including datasets from both read and spontaneous speech. Based on the data, this Element provides an analysis of Taiwanese phonetics, covering phenomena in consonants, vowels, tones, syllables, and prosody. Some of the results are in line with previous studies, while others imply potential new directions in which the language might be analyzed and might evolve. The Element ends with suggestions for future research lines for the phonetics of the language.
The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820

The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820
  • Emma McEvoy
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Music plays an essential role in Gothic in the years 1789–1820, but it signifies very differently at the end of the period compared with the beginning. In the 1790s, the music of Gothic novels and plays is not Gothic music; it is celebratory, calming or transcendent rather than scary. By 1820, the music of Gothic is more likely to provoke shock, discomfort and unease. Melodrama brings about this change. Its ascendancy had long-lasting effects on the music of the Gothic more generally – in fiction and poetry, on the stage and the screen. The book considers work by writers including Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Eliza Fenwick, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Boaden in conjunction with music by composers such as Michael Kelly, Stephen Storace and Samuel Arnold. Audio files of the music accompany the book.
Reduction and Unification in Natural Language Ontology

Reduction and Unification in Natural Language Ontology
  • Kristina Liefke
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Semantic theories for natural language assume many different kinds of objects, including (among many others) individuals, properties, events, degrees, and kinds. Formal type-theoretic semantics tames this 'zoo' of objects by assuming only a small number of ontologically primitive categories and by obtaining the objects of all other categories through constructions out of these primitives. This Element surveys arguments for this reduction of semantic categories. It compares the ontological commitments of different such reductions and establishes relations between competing foundational semantic ontologies. In doing so, it yields insights into the requirements on minimal semantic ontologies for natural language and the challenges for semantic ontology engineering.
Heidegger on Religion

Heidegger on Religion
  • Benjamin D. Crowe
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Throughout his career, Heidegger explored the religious sides of life in ways that had far-reaching impacts on the thought of his contemporaries and successors. This Element examines three important stops along Heidegger's ways of thinking about religion as the risky performance of life in new spaces of possibility. Section 1 examines Heidegger's 1920–1921 lectures on Paul, while Section 2 turns to the darker period of the late 1930s, exploring how Heidegger reconfigures religion in the context of his “new inception” of thought beyond metaphysics. Finally, Section 3 takes up Heidegger's challenging discussions of the divine in several postwar addresses and essays. In each case, Heidegger argues that we must suspend, bracket, or rescind from our tendencies to order, classify, define, and explain things in order to carry out a venture into a situation of indeterminacy and thereby recast religion in a new light.
Angels and Monotheism

Angels and Monotheism
  • Michael D. Hurley
  • Published online:
    10 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • While angels have played a decisive role in all the world's major religions and continue to loom large in the popular religious and creative imagination, modern theology has tended to ignore or trivialize them. The comparatively few scholarly works on angels over the last century have typically interpreted them as mere symbols and metaphors: they are said to offer glimpses not of the divine order, but of human desires, anxieties, and ideologies. Angelology has collapsed into anthropology. By contrast, this polemical book argues for the indispensable importance of studying angels as divinely created beings, for theology at large, and for understanding the defining doctrine of monotheistic religions in particular. Additionally, the book contends that the spirit of modern science did not originate with the so-called Scientific Revolution but was actually inspired centuries earlier by the angelological lucubrations of medieval scholastics.
Machine Learning for Archaeological Applications in R

Machine Learning for Archaeological Applications in R
  • Denisse L. Argote, Pedro A. López-­García, Manuel A. Torres-­García, Michael C. Thrun
  • Published online:
    10 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element highlights the employment within archaeology of classification methods developed in the field of chemometrics, artificial intelligence, and Bayesian statistics. These run in both high- and low-dimensional environments and often have better results than traditional methods. Instead of a theoretical approach, it provides examples of how to apply these methods to real data using lithic and ceramic archaeological materials as case studies. A detailed explanation of how to process data in R (The R Project for Statistical Computing), as well as the respective code, are also provided in this Element.
Policy Entrepreneurs, Crises, and Policy Change

Policy Entrepreneurs, Crises, and Policy Change
  • Evangelia Petridou, Jörgen Sparf, Nikolaos Zahariadis, Thomas Birkland
  • Published online:
    10 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
    • Element
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  • Increasingly, policymaking takes place while extraordinary events threaten fundamental societal values. During turbulent times, policy entrepreneurs emerge as pivotal figures. They are energetic actors who pursue dynamic change in public policy and, whereas we know much about how they promote innovation and change in normal policymaking, we know less about how they behave in crises, and even less about how different crises influence policy entrepreneurial action. This Element focuses on interaction between policy entrepreneurs and crises. It analyzes policy entrepreneurial action in six case studies – three fast-burning and three creeping crises – to ascertain policy entrepreneurs' strategies and effectiveness during extraordinary events. It proposes crisis policy entrepreneurial strategies, a framework to understand outcomes based on policy entrepreneurial action and type of crisis and suggests avenues for further research on policy entrepreneurs and crises, including implications for crisis managers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Slime Mould and Philosophy

Slime Mould and Philosophy
  • Matthew Sims
  • Published online:
    10 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Physarum polycephalum, also known more colloquially as 'the blob', 'acellular slime mould', or just 'slime mould', is a unicellular multinucleate protist that has continued to attract the interest of biologists over the past century because of its complex life cycle, unique physiology, morphology, and behaviour. More recently, attention has shifted to Physarum as a model organism for investigating putative cognitive capacities such as decision making, learning, and memory in organisms without nervous systems. The aim of this Element is to illustrate how Physarum can be used as a valuable tool for approaching various topics in the philosophy of biology. Physarum and its behaviour not only pose a challenge to some of the received views of biological processes but also, I shall argue, provide an opportunity to clarify and appropriately sharpen the concepts underlying such received views.

Page 18 of 104