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Symbols are everywhere in politics. Yet, they tended to be overlooked in the study of public policy. This book shows how they play an important role in the policy process, in shaping citizens' representations thanks to their ability to combine meanings and to stimulate emotional reactions. We use crisis management as a lens through which we analyse this symbolic dimension, and we focus on two case studies (governmental responses to the Covid-19 crisis in Europe in 2020 and to terrorist attacks in France in 2015). We show how the symbolic enables leaders to claim legitimacy for themselves and their decisions, and foster feelings of reassurance, solidarity and belonging. All politicians use the symbolic, whether consciously or otherwise, but what they choose to do varies and is affected by timing, the existence of national repertoires of symbolic actions and the personas of leaders.
There has been much scholarly attention for the radical right, especially in political science. Unfortunately, this research pays less attention to the discourse of the radical right, a topic especially studied by scholars in discourse studies. Especially lacking in this research in various disciplines is a theoretically based analysis of ideology. This Element first summarizes the authors theory of ideology and extends it with a new element needed to account for the ideological clusters of political parties. Then a systematic analysis is presented of the discourses and ideologies of radical right parties in Chile, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden. From a comparative perspective it is concluded that radical right discourse and ideologies adapt to the economic, cultural, sociopolitical and historical contexts of each country.
This Element introduces Afro-Brazilian religions and underscores the necessity for an expanded methodological framework to encompass these traditions in the philosophy of religion. It emphasizes the importance of incorporating overlooked sources like mythic narratives and ethnographies while acknowledging the pivotal role of material culture in cognitive processes. Furthermore, it advocates for adopting an embodiment paradigm to facilitate the development of a philosophy of religious practice. The Element illustrates this approach by examining phenomena often neglected in philosophical discussions on religion, such as sacrifice and spirit possession, and delves into the ontological commitments and implications of these practices. It also stresses the significance of employing thick descriptions and embracing interdisciplinary dialogue to cultivate a globally inclusive philosophy of religion, capable of engaging with phenomena frequently sidelined within the mainstream.
What are we? What owns our thoughts and experiences? Are we anything at all? After an introduction, Section 2 assesses a 'no-bearer' theory of experience, and the 'no-self' contention that self-representations are about no real entity, before introducing a positive hypothesis about the objects of our self-representations: the 'animalist' claim that we are biological organisms. Section 3 discusses the classic challenge to animalism that brain transplantation is something we could survive but no animal could survive. This challenge introduces positive alternatives to animalism, as well as animalist responses, including one which questions the assumption that psychology is irrelevant to organism persistence. Section 4 surveys a 'thinking parts' problem and conjoined twinning and commisurotomy, also considered problematic for animalism. The interpretation of these cases revisits questions about bearers of experience, objects of self-representation, and the relation of biology and psychology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element intends to contribute to the debate between Islam and science. It focuses on one of the most challenging issues in the modern discussion on the reconciliation of religious and scientific claims about the world, which is to think about divine causality without undermining the rigor and efficacy of the scientific method. First, the Element examines major Islamic accounts of causality. Then, it provides a brief overview of contemporary debates on the issue and identifies both scientific and theological challenges. It argues that any proposed Islamic account of causality for the task of reconciliation should be able to preserve scientific rigor without imposing a priori limits on scientific research, account for miracles without turning them into science-stoppers or metaphors, secure divine and creaturely freedom, and establish a strong sense of divine presence in the world. Following sections discuss strengths and weaknesses of each account in addressing these challenges.
This Element explores the connection between God and happiness, with happiness understood as a life of well-being or flourishing that goes well for the one living it. It provides a historical and contemporary survey of philosophical questions, theories, and debates about happiness, and it asks how they should be answered and evaluated from a theistic perspective. The central topics it covers are the nature of happiness (what is it?), the content of happiness (what are the constituents of a happy life?), the structure of happiness (is there a hierarchy of goods?), and the possibility of happiness (can we be happy?). It argues that God's existence has significant, positive, and desirable implications for human happiness.
This Element endeavors to enrich and broaden Southeast Asian research by exploring the intricate interplay between social media and politics. Employing an interdisciplinary approach and grounded in extensive longitudinal research, the study uncovers nuanced political implications, highlighting the platform's dual role in both fostering grassroots activism and enabling autocratic practices of algorithmic politics, notably in electoral politics. It underscores social media's alignment with communicative capitalism, where algorithmic marketing culture overshadows public discourse, and perpetuates affective binary mobilization that benefits both progressive and regressive grassroots activism. It can facilitate oppositional forces but is susceptible to authoritarian capture. The rise of algorithmic politics also exacerbates polarization through algorithmic enclaves and escalates disinformation, furthering autocraticizing trends. Beyond Southeast Asia, the Element provides analytical and conceptual frameworks to comprehend the mutual algorithmic/political dynamics amidst the contestation between progressive forces and the autocratic shaping of technological platforms.
The accumulation of empirical evidence that has been collected in multiple contexts, places, and times requires a more comprehensive understanding of empirical research than is typically required for interpreting the findings from individual studies. We advance a novel conceptual framework where causal mechanisms are central to characterizing social phenomena that transcend context, place, or time. We distinguish various concepts of external validity, all of which characterize the relationship between the effects produced by mechanisms in different settings. Approaches to evidence accumulation require careful consideration of cross-study features, including theoretical considerations that link constituent studies and measurement considerations about how phenomena are quantifed. Our main theoretical contribution is developing uniting principles that constitute the qualitative and quantitative assumptions that form the basis for a quantitative relationship between constituent studies. We then apply our framework to three approaches to studying general social phenomena: meta-analysis, replication, and extrapolation.
This Element offers a critical analysis of the history of Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 1 and the composer's rise to public acclaim, not through the study of the work itself but through intriguing and captivating narratives that surround this quartet and their socio-cultural-political context, which led Carter to become one of the most dominant voices in the post-1945 American music scene. Carter's road to success was meticulously paved by powerful institutions and individuals, including critics, scholars, festival and radio programming directors, and the US government, for whom, in the context of the Cold War, Carter was chosen to represent an exemplary American triumphant story. The author argues that it is not the quartet itself that contributed to Carter's reception and legacy, but the inextricable narratives that we associate with this work.
This inductive examination of the topics in the public administration literature using computational social science and corpus linguistics (17 journals, N=12,760 articles, 1991–2019) reveals a new landscape of public administration topics, changes in topics over time and their distribution: Topic modelling of the stock of the whole corpus identifies 50 topics: the top ten topics included health care, federal government, performance management, environmental regulation, HRM and networks and accounted for just over a third of scholarship between 1991–2019. Focal topics identified in individual journals identified similarities with popular topics in the whole corpus – networks, health care, HRM – and less frequently examined topics including gender and diversity and partnerships. Analysis of topics over time shows a substantial flow in topics moving from a country and practice focus in the early stages of our study period to concepts such as governance, networks and citizens in the late stages (2015–2019).
For over a generation, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe delegitimized the abolition of private property in the means of production and the practice of central planning as an effective way to achieve the ends of socialism. However, the aspiration of achieving the ends of socialism remains to this day. This Element provides a narrative of a century-long debate that was initiated by Ludwig von Mises in 1920. In so doing, it tells the history of the problem of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth and its continuing relevance for developments in economics, political economy, and social philosophy.
The story we often tell about artists is fiction. We tend to imagine the starving artists toiling alone in their studio when, in fact, creativity and imagination are often relational and communal. Through interviews with artistic collectives and first-hand experience building large scale installations in public spaces and at art events like Burning Man, Choi-Fitzpatrick and Hoople take the reader behind the scenes of a rather different art world. Connective Creativity leverages these experiences to reveal what artists can teach us about collaboration and teamwork and focuses in particular on the importance of embracing playfulness, cultivating a bias for action, and nurturing a shared identity. This Element concludes with an invitation to apply lessons from the arts to promote connective creativity across all our endeavors, especially to the puzzle of how we can foster more connective creativity with other minds, including other artificial actors.
Redefined transformative learning refers to learning that implies a change in the learner's identity, which includes cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions and is something all teachers, in this case migrant teachers, experience and negotiate when meeting a new educational context. “Who am I as a teacher in a new country?” migrant teachers ask themselves. To understand oneself as a teacher, one must identify and coordinate the past and present with a future direction, which causes migrant teachers to talk about a transformed professional identity with additional skills. This Element concerns migrant teachers' transformation, how they redefine their professional identity, and how to support this in teacher education.
Hypertranslation refers to a vast and virtual field of mobile relations comprising the interplay of signs across languages, modes, and media. In hypertranslation, the notions of source/target, directionality, and authenticity are set in perpetual flow and flux, resulting in a many-to-many interactive dynamic. Using illustrations drawn from a wide range of literary and artistic experiments, this Element proposes hypertranslation as a theoretical lens on the heterogeneous, remediational, extrapolative, and networked nature of cultural and knowledge production, particularly in cyberspace. It considers how developments in artificial intelligence have led to an expansion in intersemiotic potentialities and the liquidation of imagined boundaries. Exploring the translational aspects of our altered semiotic ecology, where the production, circulation, consumption, and recycling of memes extend beyond human intellect and creativity, this Element positions hypertranslation as a fundamental condition of contemporary posthuman communication in Web 5.0 and beyond.
This study interrogates the theoretical and empirical validities of two dominant theories about Chinese state in the post-Mao period. The authors argue that the meritocratic view has under-theorized the innate contradiction between officials' personal competence and political loyalty. In order to survive political struggles, political leaders need to rely on patronage networks to recruit followers and solidify trust, often at the expense of official competence. The popular view also misrepresents China's cadre assessment system in several important ways. The authors supplement this theoretical and anecdotal evidence with a systematic study of provincial level officials between 1978 and 2020. Contrary to the meritocratic view, leaders' economic performance does not increase their promotion chances. Work ties with central leaders, on the other hand, have provided provincial officials with advantage in promotion. This study contributes to general theories of autocratic state and inform the debate about autocratic growth in the political economy literature.
This Element argues that Heidegger's concept of science has two core features. Heidegger critiques a security-oriented concept of science, which he associates with the dominance of physics in modern science and metaphysics and with a progressive resistance among philosophers and scientists to ontological questioning. Meanwhile, Heidegger advances an access-oriented concept of science, on which science is essentially founded on ontological disclosures but also constantly open to the possibility of new revolutionary disclosures. This Element discusses how these commitments develop in Heidegger's early and later thinking, and argues that they inform his views on the history of Western metaphysics and on the possibilities for human flourishing that modernity, and modern science specifically, affords. The Element also discusses Heidegger's dialogue with Werner Heisenberg about quantum physics; and throughout, it highlights points of contact and divergence between Heidegger and other philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Helen Longino.
This Element introduces a young field, the 'philosophy of mathematical practice'. We first offer a general characterisation of the approach to the philosophy of mathematics that takes mathematical practice seriously and contrast it with 'mathematical philosophy'. The latter is traced back to Bertrand Russell and the orientation referred to as 'scientific philosophy' that was active between 1850 and 1930. To give a better sense of the field, the Element further contains two examples of topics studied, that of mathematical structuralism and visual thinking in mathematics. These are in part presented from a methodological point of view, focussing on mathematics as an activity and questions related to how mathematics develops. In addition, the Element contains several examples from mathematics, both historical and contemporary , to illustrate and support the philosophical points.
What connects the phenomenon of music as an art with the belief in one indivisible God? What has music, a non-linguistic medium, to say about the personal, loving, communicative God of Scripture and the Prophets, or the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcendent God of the Philosophers and can it bring these 'concepts of God' together? To answer these questions, this book takes divine Creation as its starting point, that the God of monotheism must be the Creator of all that is. It thus argues that anything which instantiates and facilitates communication within the created realm has been enabled to do so by a God who communicates with His Creation, and who wishes that His Creation be communicative. Indeed, it will argue that the communication allowed by music, and aesthetic experience in general, is the very raison d'être of Abrahamic monotheism and might thus allow an opportunity for dialogue between monotheistic faiths.
This Element provides a fresh approach to the representation and experience of the French Disease, by reassessing a wide range of textual and visual sources through the lens of contemporary medical ideas. It analyses how knowledge about the Great Pox was transmitted to a literate and also a wider public through performance and the circulation of popular prints. Chronicles, satirical and moralistic poems and plays about prostitutes, along with autobiographical accounts, described symptoms and the experience of patients, reflecting how non-medical men and women understood the nature of this terrible new disease and its profound physical and psychological impact. The second major theme is how the French Disease was represented visually. Woodcuts and broadsheets showing the moral and physical decline of courtesans are analysed together with graphic medical illustrations of symptoms and their treatment together with images of the diseased body of St Job, patron saint of the French Disease.
How do we know what is possible or impossible, what is inevitable or unattainable, or what would happen under which circumstances? Since modal facts seem distinctively mysterious and difficult to know, the epistemology of modality has historically been fraught with uncertainty and disagreement. The recent literature has been dominated by rationalist approaches that emphasise a priori reasoning (sometimes including direct intuition of possibility). Only recently have alternative approaches emerged which recognize a broader range of sources of modal knowledge. Yet even emerging non-rationalist views have tended to assign scientific investigation at best a supporting role. Our project in this book is to develop and defend a new approach to the epistemology of modal facts which assigns a central role to scientific investigation. According to modal naturalism, science (construed broadly) is our primary source of evidence concerning the modal facts.