We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Disavowing Disability examines the role that disability, both as a concept and an experience, played in seventeenth-century debates about salvation and religious practice. Exploring how the use and definition of the term 'disability' functioned to allocate agency and culpability, this study argues that the post-Restoration imperative to capacitate 'all men'—not just the 'elect'—entailed a conceptual circumscription of disability, one premised on a normative imputation of capability. The work of Richard Baxter, sometimes considered a harbinger of 'modernity' and one of the most influential divines of the Long Eighteenth Century, elucidates this multifarious process of enabling. In constructing an ideology of ability that imposed moral self-determination, Baxter encountered a germinal form of the 'problem' of disability in liberal theory. While a strategy of 'inclusionism' served to assimilate most manifestations of alterity, melancholy presented an intractability that frustrated the logic of rehabilitation in fatal ways. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The holistic thesis developed by Pierre Duhem challenges the idea that our evidence can conclusively falsify a theory. Given that no scientific theory is tested in isolation, a negative experiment can always be attributed to components other than the theory we test – to the auxiliary hypotheses and background assumptions. How do scientists decide whether the experimental result undermines the theory or points at an error in the underlying assumptions? Duhem argues that we cannot offer a rule that directs when the scientist should employ a radical or conservative strategy in light of a negative result, and ultimately they will appeal to their intuition. More recently philosophers have offered a number of strategies of how to locate error and justify the abandonment of a theory or an auxiliary hypothesis. This Element analyses Duhem's response to holism and subsequent accounts of how the problem can be resolved.
Macroevolutionary inference has historically been treated as a two-step process, involving the inference of a tree, and then inference of a macroevolutionary model using that tree. Newer models blend the two steps. These methods make more complete use of fossils than the previous generation of Bayesian phylogenetic models. They also involve many more parameters than prior models, including parameters about which empiricists may have little intuition. In this Element, we set forth a framework for fitting complex, hierarchical models. The authors ultimately fit and use a joint tree and diversification model to estimate a dated phylogeny of the Cincta (Echinodermata), a morphologically distinct group of Cambrian echinoderms that lack the fivefold radial symmetrycharacteristic of extant members of the phylum. Although the phylogeny of cinctans remains poorly supported in places, this Element shows how models of character change and diversification contribute to understanding patterns of phylogenetic relatedness and testing macroevolutionary hypotheses.
This Element presents a concise and accessible view of the central arguments of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Starting from the difficulties found in historical and current debates, drawing on the background of Russell's philosophy, and grounded in the ladder structure expressed in the numbering system of the book, this Element presents the central arguments of the Tractatus in three lines of thought. The first concerns the role of the so-called 'ontology' and its relationship to the method of the Tractatus and its logical symbolism, which displays the formal essence of language and world. The second deals with the symbolic unity of language and its role in the 'ladder structure' and explains how and why the book is not self-defeating. The third elucidates Wittgenstein's claim to have solved in essentials all philosophical problems, whose very formulation, he says, rests on misunderstandings.
The accumulated collections of Native American material culture in museums in Britain are vast, and of critical cultural importance. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous American visitors to UK museum displays and collections between 2017 and 2019, this Element highlights the most significant inadequacies of contemporary engagement with Native American visitors and communities, identifying fundamental problems rooted in the ethos of collection management and display. It then explores why two critical crises, one of representation and one of expertise, are together exacerbating these problems, and the damage to relationships and reputation which can result when these crises collide with Indigenous demands for greater agency in museum processes. The final section applies these lessons directly, developing an adaptable policy document, to assist museum staff in effectively and respectfully managing their relationships with Indigenous communities and collections.
Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases (or pathological conditions) that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories.
Historians of the early modern witch-hunt often begin histories of their field with the theories propounded by Margaret Murray and Montague Summers in the 1920s. They overlook the lasting impact of nineteenth-century scholarship, in particular the contributions by two American historians, Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) and George Lincoln Burr (1857–1938). Study of their work and scholarly personae contributes to our understanding of the deeply embedded popular understanding of the witch-hunt as representing an irrational past in opposition to an enlightened present. Yet the men's relationship with each other, and with witchcraft sceptics – the heroes of their studies – also demonstrates how their writings were part of a larger war against 'unreason'. This Element thus lays bare the ways scholarly masculinity helped shape witchcraft historiography, a field of study often seen as dominated by feminist scholarship. Such meditation on past practice may foster reflection on contemporary models of history writing.
Capitalist private property in land and buildings – real estate – is the ground of modern cities, materially, politically, and economically. It is foundational to their development and core to much theoretical work on the urban environment. It is also a central, pressing matter of political contestation in contemporary cities. Yet it remains largely without a history. This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of (dis)possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels. This combination of territorial embeddedness with more wide-ranging institutional relationships charts a route to an urban history that allows the city to speak as a global agent and artefact without dispensing with the role of states and local circumstance.
Boards of directors are at the apex of organisational decision-making and so are central in ensuring effective corporate governance. But boards are under increasing scrutiny due to the continuing prevalence of scandals and failures. Boards have been viewed as set up to fail because the demands placed upon them cannot effectively be delivered. In this Element, I examine this tension and look at the board as a working group, one which has an input, a process and an output. Through looking at the board as a group, the dynamics of how boards, and the potential for effective and ineffective operation, are highlighted. I conclude with outlining how the future of board dynamics may evolve.
This Element discusses the ancient statues once set up in Byzantine Constantinople, with a special focus on their popular reception. From its foundation by Constantine the Great in 324, Constantinople housed a great number of statues which stood in the city on streets and public places, or were kept in several collections and in the Hippodrome. Almost all of them, except a number of newly made statues of reigning emperors, were ancient objects which had been brought to the city from other places. Many of these statues were later identified with persons other than those they actually represented, or received an allegorical (sometimes even an apocalyptical) interpretation. When the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade conquered the city in 1204, almost all of the statues of Constantinople were destroyed or looted.
In this Element, we examine how organizational researchers have published articles contributing to organization theory in high quality organizational journals, and we examine how healthcare researchers have drawn on organization theory in healthcare management journals. We have two main aims in writing this Element. The first is to motivate scholars working in the field of general organizational and management studies to increasingly use healthcare settings as an empirical context for their work in theory development. Our second aim is to encourage healthcare researchers to increase their use of organizational theory to advance knowledge about the provision of healthcare services. Our investigations revealed a growing number of organizational studies situated in healthcare. We also found a disappointing level of connection between research published in organization journals and research published in healthcare journals. We provide explanations for this division, and encourage more crossdisciplinary work in the future.
Most historians and social scientists treat cities as mere settings. In fact, urban places shape our experience. There, daily life has a faster, artificial rhythm and, for good and ill, people and agencies affect each other through externalities (uncompensated effects) whose impact is inherently geographical. In economic terms, urban concentration enables efficiency and promotes innovation while raising the costs of land, housing, and labour. Socially, it can alienate or provide anonymity, while fostering new forms of community. It creates congestion and pollution, posing challenges for governance. Some effects extend beyond urban borders, creating cultural change. The character of cities varies by country and world region, but it has generic qualities, a claim best tested by comparing places that are most different. These qualities intertwine, creating built environments that endure. To fully comprehend such path dependency, we need to develop a synthetic vision that is historically and geographically informed.
This Element provides an accessible introduction to the contemporary philosophy of causation. It introduces the reader to central concepts and distinctions (type vs token causation, probabilistic vs deterministic causation, difference-making, interventions, overdetermination, pre-emption) and to key tools (structural equations, graphs, probabilistic causal models) drawn upon in the contemporary debate. The aim is to fuel the reader's interest in causation, and to equip them with the resources to contribute to the debate themselves. The discussion is historically informed and outward-looking. 'Historically informed' in that concise accounts of key historical contributions to the understanding of causation set the stage for an examination of the latest research. 'Outward looking' in that illustrations are provided of how the philosophy of causation relates to issues in the sciences, law, and elsewhere. The aim is to show why the study of causation is of critical importance, besides being fascinating in its own right.
In spite of what appears to be the increasingly negative tone of media coverage, this Element suggests that the prevalence of positive news is likely to increase, for three reasons: (1) valence-based asymmetries vary over time, (2) valence-based asymmetries vary across individuals, and (3) technology facilitates diverse news platforms catering to diverse preferences. Each of these claims is examined in detail here, based on analyses of prior and/or novel data on media content, psychophysiological responses, and survey-based experiments. Results are considered as they relate to our understanding of media gatekeeping, political communication, and political psychology, and also as actionable findings for producers of media content, communications platforms, and media consumers.
I can't breathe … a haunting phrase moaned at the intersection of past and present, serving as an audible supplement to the visual evidence to yet another collision of race and policing. This phrase reflects the current state of police-community relations in the United States. But, what lies on the other side of now? This Element examines this salient question in the context of excessive use of force and through the lenses of race, policing and public governance. We draw upon extant research and scholarship on representative bureaucracy, public engagement in the co-creation of public polices and the co-production of public services, and the emerging findings from studies in network science, coupled with insights from elite interviews, to offer implications for future research, the profession of policing, the public policymaking process, public management, and post-secondary institutions.
When Brenton Tarrant live-streamed his massacre of fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, he was but one in a series of lone-acting white men committing violent crime to further the radical white nationalist aim to save the white race from extinction and establish a white ethnostate. From where did white nationalists get the notion of an ongoing white genocide? Why should 'resistance' against a perceived invasion of 'white' territory be launched by individual 'lone wolves' massacring noncombatants they have no prior relation to? How could slaughtering children be construed as a heroic act that a perpetrator wants to broadcast to the world? Based on a unique collection of interviews with lone wolves, their victims, and their supporters, and a close reading of lone wolf, fascist, and radical nationalist material and communication, this Element provides solid answers to these and adjacent questions of importance.
A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.
The field of grand strategy is exceptionally American-centric theoretically, methodologically and empirically. Indeed, many scholars treat the United States as a unique case, and thus incomparable. This Element addresses the shortcomings of this approach by developing a novel framework for the purpose of systematic comparison, both within and among different countries. Using the United States as a benchmark, three dimensions are considered in which grand strategy can be compared: first, attributes of the major types commonly discussed in the literature; second, similarities and differences in the implementation of grand strategies over time, using US strategic relations with contemporary Russia as an example; and finally, across space, properties of the grand strategies that are interactively employed by other major powers in relation to the United States in the Indo-Pacific. The Element can be used by scholars and students alike to expand analysis beyond the confines that currently dominate the field.
This Element examines just how much the public knows about some of America's most stigmatized social groups, who comprise 40.3% of the population, and evaluates whether misinformation matters for shaping policy attitudes and candidate support. The authors design and field an original survey containing large national samples of Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, and White Americans, and include measures of misinformation designed to assess the amount of factual information that individuals possess about these groups. They find that Republicans, Whites, the most racially resentful, and consumers of conservative news outlets are the most likely to be misinformed about socially marginalized groups. Their analysis also indicates that misinformation predicts hostile policy support on racialized issues; it is also positively correlated with support for Trump. They then conducted three studies aimed at correcting misinformation. Their research speaks to the prospects of a well-functioning democracy, and its ramifications on the most marginalized.
Written for an audience of students, general readers, and economists alike, this Element is a primer on the field of the economics of conflict and peace. It offers a reasonably comprehensive, systematic, and detailed overview - even if in broad strokes - of the field's orthodox and heterodox history of thought and current theories and evidence. The authors view this Element as a baseline account on which to build a future, separate and more fully developed, work on the economics of peace, economic growth, and human development. Altogether, the Element contextualizes the field of conflict and peace economics, outlines its history of thought, highlights examples of current theoretical and empirical scholarship in the field, and maps trajectories for further research.