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In today's societies, political and economic issues are closely intertwined, and political philosophy has turned more and more to economic issues. This Element introduces some key questions of economic philosophy: How to think about the relation between political and economic power? Can markets be 'tamed'? Which values are embedded in the economy and how do those relate to political values? It answers these questions by considering arguments from three theoretical perspectives – liberal egalitarian approaches, neorepublicanism, and critical theory or socialist thought – explaining their different background assumptions but also shared grounds. To illustrate these topics, it zooms in on the future of work: How could work be made more just, democratic, and sustainable? In the conclusion, some implications for research strategies in economic philosophy are explored.
Political meritocrats believe political power should be allocated according to virtue and competence. It is an old idea, going back at least to Plato. But what is old is new again, as several political philosophers have recently proposed and defended novel articulations of this ancient idea. The purpose of this short monograph is to offer a critical overview of this literature. I cover three schools of thought. I first look at epistocracy, a form of government identical to modern liberal democracies, except voting power is allocated to citizens according to competence. I then turn to Confucian meritocracy, where more blatantly nondemocratic forms of political meritocracy are defended. I finally look at democratic meritocracy, which is the idea that elections either do or could (if they were appropriately reformed) select virtuous and competent leaders. I end by offering reasons to think the entire enterprise of political meritocracy rests on a mistake.
This Element introduces the study of forensic linguistics, particularly in southern Africa, but also in Africa more generally. In the past six decades, there has been clear evidence that the discipline of forensic linguistics is, or was, unknown to general linguists, legal linguists, and applied linguists on the African continent. Now, however, the situation is rapidly changing, with forensic linguistics studies gaining momentum in various parts of Africa. In this Element the authors introduce the topic, define the discipline, address the language of record issue in southern Africa, as well as critically debate the state of court interpreting and translation of documentation into African languages, address police interviewing techniques, while also looking at possible future developments in the discipline of forensic linguistics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element provides a historical overview of the sources and key scholarship related to literate workers in early Christianity. It argues that literate workers were indispensable for the creation, production, maintenance, interpretation, and preservation of ancient Christian thought, theology, and literature. This Element centres the embodiment and lived experience of literate workers-as much as is able to be retrieved from our extant Christian sources. Who were they? What did they look like? What was their relationship with named authors? What kinds of aspirations and career trajectories did they have? The aim of this project is to help researchers reconfigure their perspectives on ancient works, that such documents not only represent the genius of named authors but also of (enslaved) literate workers as well.
This Element examines clientelism and its impact on democratic institutions and markets, emphasizing that, alongside electoral competition, politics hosts two additional arenas: one where political actors seek campaign resources and active supporters, and another where socioeconomic actors pursue access to state-distributed resources. Clientelism emerges from reciprocal exchanges between these actors. Political parties use clientelism to incentivize collective action and organize campaigns. Playing this 'clientelist game', no party can reduce clientelistic practices without risking electoral defeat or internal fragmentation. Clientelism weakens the provision of public goods and skews policymaking to benefit clients over general welfare. Eventually, it generates an economic 'tragedy of the commons', as state resources are overexploited and the economy suffers, while formal institutions often fail to constrain it. Even in advanced democracies like the United States, political competition is not only electoral, targeting voters, but structurally clientelist. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Historically, infant–parent synchrony has been measured using methods that provide a global assessment of interpersonal synchrony, representing the quality of dyadic interactions. These approaches have illuminated much about synchrony as a broad construct but lack granular details on the temporal dynamics of these interactions. This Element introduces technologically advanced methods for assessing brain and behavior that can offer detailed insights into the dynamic temporal structure of infant–parent social exchanges. These advancements will significantly enhance our understanding of the bidirectional processes that underpin early emerging dyadic exchanges and how these vary across time and context.
This Element addresses the challenges and opportunities that arise in the study of sound systems of understudied languages within the context of language documentation, an expanding field that seeks to develop records of the world's languages and their patterns of use in their broader cultural and social context. The topics covered in this Element focus on different elements of language documentation and their relationship to phonological analysis, including lexicography, documentary corpora, music and the verbal arts, as well as grammar writing. For each of these areas, the authors examine methodological and theoretical implications for phonology. With growing concern in the field of language documentation and linguistics more generally for the distribution and implementation of the products of research and its impact for Indigenous language communities, this Element also discusses how phonological documentation may contribute to the development of resources for language communities.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an educational approach that combines the teaching of subject content with language learning. Originally developed in Europe, CLIL has since been adopted across diverse educational and geographical contexts. This Element offers a comprehensive overview of CLIL, tracing its origins and global development. It examines the theoretical foundations of the approach, as well as key implementation strategies and their impact on language acquisition, content understanding, learner motivation, and attitudes. Special attention is given to how CLIL addresses diversity in the classroom. The text also explores innovative pedagogical practices, such as translanguaging and multimodality, that promote deeper learning and student engagement. It concludes with a discussion on assessment and teacher education within CLIL contexts and outlines the steps needed for its continued growth. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Recent years have seen new systematic interest in Hegel's philosophical conception of the physical universe. It has become clear that Hegel's account of nature is revealing both on its own as well as by providing a non-naturalist understanding of the place of mind in nature. This Element focuses on the very foundations and method of Hegel's philosophy of nature, relating them to Newtonian and to modern physics. The volume also sheds light on Hegel's global account of the physical universe as a material space-time system and on his ecological conception of the Earth as a habitable planet populated by organic life. By drawing connections to relativity theory and earth systems science it is shown that Hegel's conception of nature is very much philosophically alive and can complement scientific accounts of nature in illuminating ways.
This Element engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'? It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings of cosmological order. Teachers will find rich contextual frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and justice are environmentally constructed. Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Each discussion features student centred 'Explorations'. These play-specific classroom activities can also be adapted across Shakespeare's corpus and tailored for both secondary and university-level students. These exercises encourage non-linear critical and creative thinking, inviting students to contemplate big ideas and generate new perspectives about the shared points of contact between Shakespeare's world and their own.
While much research has addressed the regressive anti-vax protests, this Element focuses on campaigns by progressive social movements to promote the development of vaccines for Covid-19 and ensure their equal access on a global level. Over the course of the pandemic, health and care have become central claims, mobilising health workers and patients as well as citizens in general. Together with various local and national social movement organizations which converged on health rights, through the use of care and cure as bridging frames, transnational campaigns addressing patents on vaccines also unfolded. This Element analyses these transnational campaigns, with particular attention to their organisational models, repertoires of action and collective framing. It assesses their outcomes by considering the complex sets of opportunities and constraints that the Covid-19 pandemic presented for progressive social movements that fight for access to medicines and cures at a global level.
This Element is concerned with narrative as a mode of knowing. It draws attention to the epistemic value of historical narrative qua narrative. This it does not only in an abstract sense, but also with the help of recent works of history. Special attention is given to narrative sentences and narrative theses. A narrative thesis redescribes the actions and events the historian is concerned with and allows for the temporal whole or unity we associate with narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end. A thesis, it is argued, is indispensable and qualifies the work of historians as narrative. The concern with narrative has not lost any of its relevance, for the simple reason that it informs us about history as an academic discipline and the knowledge it produces. For as long as historians decide what events are important in their past and for what reason, they will rely on narrative.
Religion plays an important role in what and how we eat. Indeed, food is a critical component of religion-as well as a reflection of the other components that make religion unique. This fact is what necessitates greater attention towards food as a lens for understanding psychological phenomenon both within the psychology of religion and the social scientific community at large. Utilizing theories and exemplars from multiple disciplines, the authors discuss how food relates to four dimensions of religion – beliefs (Section 2), values (Section 3), practices (Section 4), and community (Section 5). Throughout the Element and in a concluding section, the authors provide exciting directions for future research. In addition to providing a review of our current understanding of the role of food and religion, this work ultimately seeks to inspire researchers and students to investigate the role of food in religious life.
Expanding the boundaries of the 'moral turn' in criminology to the realm of punishment administration, this Element proposes reconceptualizing parole through a moral lens. Drawing from a mixed-method study of parole hearings for homicide cases in Israel, the author argues that during parole hearings, parole actors (Attorney General representatives, secondary victims, parole applicants, and parole board members) conduct complex forms of moral labor, specifically retributive-oriented. This moral labor goes beyond rehabilitation and risk assessment to 'do late justice.' In doing such moral labor, parole actors negotiate the moral meaning of crime, character, and deserved punishment with the passage of time. In conclusion, as demonstrated by the current study, Criminologists should engage to a greater extent with the moral meaning of punishment administration, and retributive theorists should aim to better understand the lived experiences of punishment.
This Element examines the complex intersections between minority religions, legal protections and restrictions, and the role of courts in securing, or inhibiting, religious freedom. It considers the legal status of minority religions in selected countries from a comparative perspective, using sociology of law theories to explain how legal systems treat such religious groups. Relevant actions of the European Court of Human Rights are examined as is how minority religions are dealt with in selected societies where authoritarian or theocratic systems of governance prevail. The Element then examines how interactions with law and the courts have led to changes, or 'deformations,' in selected well-known and controversial new and other minority religions. The Element concludes by observing how courts in Europe and North America have used cases involving minority faiths to promote their own agendas and authority, as well as accomplish other important considerations, including religious freedom.
The language of law includes normative or prescriptive terms such as 'obligation' and 'permission'. How do we explain the meaning of prescriptive legal language? This has long been regarded as a problem for positivists, since at first glance their view suggests we can derive an ought – a legal obligation or right or permission – from descriptive social facts alone. This Element outlines what we should want from a semantics of prescriptive legal language, critically evaluates four leading semantic accounts, and argues that legal prescriptivity is not, in the end, a problem for positivists.
With the majority of the global population living in cities, urbanisation and climate crisis have become urgent planetary issues. This Element examines 'urban eco-performance', exploring how theatre and performance intersect with urbanisation and ecological crises to reimagine equitable urban futures. Through rigorous ecodramaturgical analyses, this Element critiques the colonial and capitalist systems shaping cities and highlights performance's role in addressing climate justice. Performances from Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, UK and USA, as well as Indigenous performances, are brought together for the first time to examine how they challenge the human/nature divide, revealing cities as vibrant ecological spaces. These performances foreground underrepresented voices and reframe cities as 'bio-urban' spaces. This Element integrates decolonial and intersectional ecological frameworks over three thematic sections: Living Cities, Petro-Cities and Urban Futures Against the Apocalypse. It argues for justice for marginalised communities while envisioning cities as interconnected ecosystems that can foster collective action and ecological resilience.
This Element is the first scholarly study of the theatre of Lauren Gunderson (b. 1982), one of the most produced US playwrights and a self-declared feminist playwright. Her feminist claims and theatrical interventions are assessed through four key strands of her theatre making: parodies of Shakespeare's canon; women-centred revisions to history; women and illness; and 'entertaining' feminism through popular theatre forms. Moving between the mainstream and the experimental, her theatre ranges from realism and quasi well-made plays to the experimental in a postmodern/Brechtian fashion, inviting consideration of the form(s) deployed for staging feminism in the twenty-first century. The Element discusses how Gunderson adapts the legacies of second-wave feminist theatre in the US to provide accessible experimental theatre and how she adopts popular genres in the interest of popular feminisms, giving way to an 'in-between' feminist practice: a feminist-theatre pathway that lies somewhere 'in between' the second-wave past and new directions.
This Element discusses the idea of creation ex nihilo as an expression of monotheistic belief mainly with reference to Jewish and Christian traditions. It outlines the philosophical and theological discussion about monotheism and creation, considering key historical figures such as Philo, Irenaeus, Augustine, and Aquinas as well as contemporary thinkers. It reviews key topics such as divine sovereignty, the goodness of creation, pantheism, process, and feminist thinking on creation. It argues for creation ex nihilo over other models. In particular, it examines the notion of 'creaturehood' as an overlooked and under-developed dimension in contemporary debates about the relationship between created humanity and the one God. The doctrine of creation does not just address the question of origins, it also serves to affirm the finite or immanent aspects of life.
African American religions include faith orientations that incorporate and deviate from Afro-Protestantism. Yet, contemporary scholarship in religious studies is always bolstered by any supplementary work that examines the plethora of 'extrachurch' orientations that Black communities adopt in their varied pursuits of truth, transcendence, and ultimacy. In this vein, it is necessary to recognize the emergence of powerful alternative religious movements that provided spiritual and theological sustenance for the expression of Black faith. This Element offers an historical overview of four of these traditions: Conjure and Spiritualism, the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and African American varieties of New Thought. It explores the social and cultural factors in American society and American race relations that bolstered their emergence and considers the impact such movements had and continue to have on ideas about Black selfhood, Black religious authority, and the sacrality of Black bodies.