This chapter introduces the project of the book: an examination of a selection of funerary hymns collected in the so-called “Roman Edition” of the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, assembled under the auspices of Pope Clement XI, and known as the necrosima. The chapter accordingly seeks to locate the work ahead against a number of different backdrops: the life, work, and study of Ephrem the Syrian; the transmission, celebration, and eventual neglect of the necrosima; and the value of attending both to ritual sources and to works of uncertain attribution. The concluding section also outlines the remaining chapters and the plan for the book itself.

This chapter emphasises the ways in which chivalric poetry remained in dialogue with the everyday culture of the piazza as well as of élite court circles, crossing boundaries between high and low culture, publication in oral performance, writing and print, blending aspects of medieval and Renaissance worlds. Discussion focuses on the evolution of themes and techniques across the three major writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, exploring how their works continue to interact with the oral culture of the canterini. Although each of their three poems constitutes a distinct response, analysis reveals an underlying and continuous relationship with the popular and oral traditions of performed poetry that helped to shape authors’ presentations of their own poems and of the art of poetry itself.

Fictional discourse is, primarily, discourse that is used to produce literary fictions; but there is also the ‘metafictional’ discourse used to talk about fictions, i.e., to report their contents or other features. On a traditional view articulated by Searle, primary fictional discourse doesn’t have any specific semantics; sentences there just have the semantics that they would have in their standard uses. Fiction-makers convey their fictions by pretending to use sentences in their standard ways without doing so, and without giving them a specific, dedicated representational point with a semantics of its own. This Mere Pretense view is less popular nowadays than it used to be. A question the now more popular alternative Dedicated Representation view raises is: What is the contribution of intuitively empty names to such a dedicated semantics? Many supporters of the traditional Mere Pretense view, including Searle, argue that, in the metafictional uses to which they grant a semantics, apparently empty names are not in fact empty; rather, they each refer to some more or less exotic entity. Some of those who grant a dedicated semantics to primary fictional discourse, like Salmon and others, extend this realist view to it. This chapter aims to uphold considerations that have already been raised by irrealists against these proposals, by highlighting their counterintuitive features and explaining in our theoretical setting why they are bad.

Among the most difficult challenges facing the European Union (EU) is the development of a European identity. The countries and regional groups of Europe have long histories and traditions, and have had numerous wars against one another over the centuries. European identity must overcome traditional rivalries. In addition, European identity must encompass the tens of millions of immigrants who have arrived in Europe since the Second World War, and who tend to be dissimilar from the host society population in terms of religion, language, culture, and other important characteristics. But Europe has an aging and declining population and needs immigrant labor. Despite challenges, as reflected by the Eurobarometer and other indicators, European identity is becoming more salient, especially among the young.

This chapter frames the debate between those who think that Kant’s philosophy of Right is in some way independent from his moral philosophy and those who do not in two ways. First, the chapter argues that Kant recognizes only two forms of practical reason, namely the pure practical reason of morality and the empirical practical reason of prudential self-love, and that if his philosophy of Right is not to be a version of Hobbesian prudence, it can only be a part of morality – namely, the coercively enforceable part. It argues further that the moral foundation of Kant’s philosophy of Right is the innate right to freedom, itself the correlative of our obligation always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, since humanity is equivalent to the ability of each to set his or her own ends, that is, freedom. In the second part of the chapter, it is argued that the duties of individuals and rulers alike to both institute and maintain the civil condition, namely the state, make sense only as moral and indeed ethical duties, although not duties of virtue to promote self-perfection and the happiness of others.

This chapter starts with a discussion on models informing probability versus the case where probability is inherent in the model. The chapter also goes into detail to argue why a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bohmian economics, can be useful in finance. We provide for an example of how such mechanics can be applied to daily returns on commodity prices. We also briefly look into the potential connection between Bohmian mechanics and a macroscopic fluid system.

Corruption became a problem in Hong Kong as the colonial state extended its reach over a bustling entrepôt economy. Shifting boundaries separating the public and the private marked traditional norms of gift-giving and reciprocity as problematic. In the second half of the twentieth century, British officials saw corruption as a “Chinese” problem. This culturalist thesis was disembedded: It discounted the racialized hierarchy of colonial governance and overlooked the embeddedness of corruption within its power structure. Yet the cultural thesis was a visible ideological support that justified the rule of difference. This racialized structure was momentarily upended in 1973, when Peter Godber, a senior British police officer, fled Hong Kong while under investigation for taking bribes. The scandal led to the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), an independent unit that supposedly stood outside of the racialized organization of the police. Through a reading of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s declassified correspondence, this chapter argues that, while the ICAC was an independent unit that tackled corruption, it remained embedded within the broader racialized structure that defined colonialism. Though misleading and sociologically naïve, the culturalist thesis of corruption can be and is often ideologized to justify colonial domination.

How much do we care when no one is looking? A patient with critical injury and vulnerable to bias—as an uninsured Person of Color experiencing homelessness and social isolation, with a history of mental illness and drug use— experiences barriers to receiving necessary treatment and standard care. When a patient is unable to ask for help, and has no family member or friend to help, what standard of care can they hope to receive? Can the quality of care provided to unrepresented patients represent a hospital’s culture of care? The writer wonders whether to “stay in my lane” and focus only on the ethical question prompting consultation, or if the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence justify speaking up about substandard care. To mitigate the risk of acting as the “ethics police” by engaging in micromanagement of patient care, the writer describes efforts to expand ethics’ scope to change systemic and cultural attitudes by establishing preventative measures to identify and combat bias and preemptive judgments of futility.

The chapter discusses concepts in plasticity that go beyond memory. Several examples are discussed starting with the complexity of dendritic structure in biological neurons, nonlinear summation of signals from synapses by neurons and the vast range of plasticity that has been discovered in biological brain circuits. Learning and memory are commonly assigned to synapses; however, non-synaptic changes are important to consider for neuromorphic hardware and algorithms. The distinction between bioinspired and bio-realistic designs of hardware for AI is discussed. While synaptic connections can undergo both functional and structural plasticity, emulating such concepts in neuromorphic computing will require adaptive algorithms and semiconductors that can be dynamically reprogrammed. The necessity for close collaboration between neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering community is highlighted. Methods to implement lifelong learning in algorithms and hardware are discussed. Gaps in the field and directions for future research and development are discussed. The prospects for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing with disruptive brain-inspired algorithms and emerging semiconductors are discussed.

This chapter traces musical dialogues between Clara and Robert Schumann – conversations that are ripe with hermeneutic implications. It situates these references on a continuum: from indisputable quotations with clear links to external stimulants, through allusions to works by other composers that are distanced from their sources, to more ambiguous examples that are implied though not openly stated. The chapter shows how dialogues could move in both directions between Clara and Robert, as well as how they each conversed with the music of their contemporaries and predecessors. Collectively, the examples discussed demonstrate the vitality of conversations – both personal and creative – to the music of the Schumanns and their wider circle.

The third chapter of Invisible Fatherland reconstructs and analyzes the symbolic decisions of the Weimar National Assembly, including the adoption of the name Reich, the compromise over the national flag and colors, and fundamentally the revision of the state’s honorary practices. The chapter shows that the flag compromise emerged from both heated debates about the imperial past and impassioned protest against the Treaty of Versailles. The revised honorary practices, on the other hand, aimed to promote equality and inclusion by removing official traditions that had excluded workers and other marginalized groups from state recognition. The chapter argues that the assembly’s symbolic choices represented works of compromise that balanced national heritage and modern state design. These constitutional decisions set the stage for the creation of a cohesive and modern republican style under the Federal Art Custodian.

Chapter 1 focuses on Afro-Porteños’ visual representations as domestic servants. The corpus of images under analysis is from the end of the colonial period to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Examining this iconographic motif is relevant because many of the ideas and conventions associated to the image of Afro-descendants in Argentina were and are formulated according to this tradition. The stigma of servitude associated to their enslaved past was constant in the assignment of this labor role and therefore became a stereotype, as Afro-Porteños themselves demonstrated in their periodicals in the late nineteenth century. Stereotyping’s after-effects can be seen to the present. One might think that, in today’s world, representations such as those analyzed in this chapter no longer exist. However, the representation of African descendants as servants has been used for centuries and has become widely naturalized.

The chapter begins with physics and mathematical description of the nonlinear dynamics seen in biological neurons and their adaptation into neuromorphic hardware. Various abstractions of the Hodgkin–Huxley model of squid neuron have been studied in neuromorphic computing. Filamentary threshold switches that can act as neurons are discussed. The combination of ionic and electronic relaxation pathways offers unique abilities to design low-power artificial neurons. Ferroelectric, insulator–metal transition, 2D materials, and organic semiconductor-based neurons are discussed wherein modulation of long-range transport and/or bound charge displacement are utilized for neuron function. Besides electron transport, light and spin state can also be effectively utilized to create photonic and spintronic neurons respectively. The chapter should provide the reader a comprehensive insight into design of artificial neurons that can generate action potentials, spanning various classes of inorganic and organic semiconductors, and different stimuli for input and readout of signals such as voltage, light, spin current, and ionic currents.

This chapter concentrates on ways in which poetry established relationships with spirituality, both in conventionally ‘literary’ production and in verse works written for devotional purposes, which have often been accorded lesser aesthetic value in literary scholarship. It argues instead that there is significant common ground between verse hagiography and hagiographic passages in non-devotional poetry, especially when their shared affective strategies and invitations for reader engagement are considered. The chapter focuses on the figure of Clare of Assisi, reviewing how she is represented poetically in clerically oriented works including a Latin verse hagiography, a vernacular lauda for sung performance and in her canonisation papers, and also in key passages from Dante’s Paradiso.

This chapter develops a synthetic framework for understanding jurisdictional arbitrage – a practice as old as taxation itself, yet still lacking a unified theory. While classical arbitrage exploits price differentials, jurisdictional arbitrage exploits mismatches between legal and regulatory systems across sovereign states. Drawing on foundational works by Fleischer, Riles, Partnoy, Pistor, and O’Hara and Ribstein, the chapter distinguishes five key forms of arbitrage: financial, tax, regulatory, reporting/liability, and jurisdictional. Jurisdictional arbitrage, in particular, arises from fragmented sovereignty and the spatial dissociation of legal and economic activities. Unlike domestic regulatory arbitrage, it operates across borders to create dual pricing regimes – what Partnoy calls the ‘law of two prices’. Legal coding, in Pistor’s terms, transforms assets into capital, reinforcing disparities. Sophisticated corporate structures – especially those of MNCs – strategically arbitrage these regimes through complex transactions, legal wrappers, and intangible assets. Jurisdictional arbitrage thus emerges not as market distortion, but as a core mechanism of corporate strategy and power. By integrating insights from law, economics, and political economy, this chapter repositions arbitrage from a marginal tactic to a systemic institutional practice central to contemporary capitalism.