This chapter in introduces the basic elements of Ramsey Theory, including the Erdős–Szekeres Theorem, Erdős’ lower bound on Ramsey numbers via random graphs, and the recent approach to Ramsey theory via pseudorandom graphs. We cover the topics of graph Ramsey theory, including Shannon capacity, Ramsey numbers for bounded-degree graphs, multicolor Ramsey numbers, canonical Ramsey theory, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture.

After presenting motivating examples, cyclotomic extensions, the relation between the conductor of Galois representations and the level of the corresponding automorphic forms, and the Grothendieck–Ogg–Shafarevich formula, we sketch the fact that fundamental properties of the main objects of the book, lower and upper ramification groups, show sharp contrasts. The structure of the book together with the content of each chapter are explained. Required backgrounds are also listed.

The story of Brexit in Scotland was about whether – and, if so, how – Scotland’s vote to Remain in the EU was to be acknowledged. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, was it to be through the exercise of voice – a role for Scotland’s representatives in influencing the form of EU withdrawal and its domestic implications or through exit, by triggering a second independence referendum? In the end it was neither. The UK-wide majority to Leave the EU prevailed, with no concessions to the Scottish government’s preferred form of Brexit and no second independence referendum. This result exposed radically conflicting visions of the nature of the UK’s territorial constitution – a Union State based on Scottish popular sovereignty, or a Unitary State based on the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. A Brexit premised on the restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty and the desire to ‘take back control’ laid bare the subaltern nature of the Union-State account and the fragility of Scotland’s constitutional protections within the Union. Devolution in Scotland has been left diminished and the pathway towards independence mired in uncertainty.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Romania, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in India (Eastern traditions), beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

I offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

The Introduction sets the stage for the project. It situates the idea of the book in the scholarly landscape, by explicating the main directions of the present account and how it relates to other accounts. It briefly introduces some of the central positions appearing in the text (e.g., ‘normativism,’ ‘eliminativism,’ ‘(non)revisionism’), presents the methodological commitments of the work, and gives summaries of the chapters.

This chapter analyzes Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), arguing that the Supreme Court’s rulings – that free persons of African descent were not constitutional “citizens” and that the Missouri Compromise violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause – were grievous interpretive errors. It examines Chief Justice Taney’s majority opinion, which denied Dred Scott’s citizenship based on a flawed historical claim and invalidated Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in territories by inventing “substantive due process,” asserting a fundamental right to slave property. The chapter contends that these holdings misread the Constitution’s text, structure, and history, as Justice Curtis’s dissent demonstrated, showing free African Americans were citizens in 1787 and Congress had long regulated territorial slavery. It argues the Constitution was not inherently proslavery and it defends the Founders against the Court’s calumny that they intended to exclude African Americans from the principles of the Declaration and the benefits of the Constitution. It argues the Dred Scott Court misused originalism, improperly projecting the ideological views of Chief Justice Taney’s intellectual milieu back onto the Founders. The case sets the stage for exploring Lincoln’s response and underscores the limits of judicial review in a constitutional democracy.

This chapter analyses how attitudes towards Brexit and expectations and evaluations of its consequences have changed since the 2016 referendum. It begins by charting how people have responded when asked by pollsters how they would vote if there were another referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. It then examines how expectations and evaluations of the consequences of Brexit have evolved in respect of the three issues that were central to the choices voters made in 2016 – the economy, immigration and Britain’s sovereignty. It then further assesses how far these evaluations enable us to understand how support for Brexit has evolved over the last decade. The chapter concludes by assessing whether the 2016 referendum provided what is likely to prove a decisive and enduring outcome, thereby settling the debate about Britain’s relationship with the EU.

The ‘Remain’ reaction to the 2016 referendum vote to ‘Leave’ was extraordinary, particularly in the wealthier parts of London and in university towns: consternation, grief, anger, alarm. Even today, I get dropping into my inbox every month articles by British and overseas academics purporting to analyse and provide insights into the referendum and its consequences. Among other things, these remind me of my own naïvety. After the referendum had produced a clear outcome, I expected that, both in Britain and in Europe, those in charge of our political affairs would respect the judgement of the electorate, accept the new reality and make it work. The United Kingdom, I thought, could not be treated as cavalierly as France, Greece and the Netherlands (where referendum votes were bypassed) or Ireland (told to vote again and vote differently).

(1) the first introduction is a brief survey of the Song dynasty, the sources to study this period, and the structure, themes, and oraganization of the volume

This chapter narrows in scope to focus on a single individual who hauled the suppression of ‘piracy’ beyond the frontier of British imperial expansion and stretched the term to its discursive limits by mid-century. In establishing his dynasty, James Brooke became a paragon and pariah of empire, consciously trying to embody its noblest virtues from the rivers of northwest Borneo. However, the rajah’s relationship to England was always estranged—he sought the empire’s backing, its sea power, and its status; but it was his estrangement that made Brooke a vexed icon of imperial culture. His campaigns against Sarawak’s neighbouring river-systems earned him both fame and infamy by the early 1850s. In seeking to treat pirates ‘like gentlemen’—subjecting them to violence rather than the rule of law—Brooke’s legacy sits uncomfortably within Britain’s imperial annals. Having observed the discourse of piracy’s spread across Indian, Arabian, and Malay maritime spaces, it was his confrontation with the so-called ‘humanity mongers’ that swelled the wave of antipiracy to its mid-century height, forcing it finally to break and recede into British waters.

Chapter 2 further articulates the normativist view, but its central task is to demonstrate its effectiveness; that is, to illustrate the eliminativist aspect of normativism by showing how normativists dissolve three central problems in the philosophy of mathematics. It first deals with the problem of the specialness of mathematical propositions, traditionally considered necessarily true. Then it tackles the so-called Benacerraf dilemma, the (supposed) difficulty of knowing mathematical truths – but before that, it clarifies the notion of a pseudo-problem as understood by Wittgenstein. In the last sections, the chapter dissolves a third problem, the traditional ontological question ‘do mathematical objects exist?’ More concretely, it tackles three incarnations of realism: traditional platonism, Fregean logicist realism, and the species of realism due to Quine and defended on the basis of indispensability considerations.

After the Jurchen conquest of northern China in 1127, Lin’an became the capital of the Southern Song. This period marked a pivotal transition in urban history: commercialization expanded beyond city walls, water management became essential for urban operations, and religion became more integrated into urban life. Businesses relocated from the old capital, while new resources from South China enriched city life. The exchange of goods and movement across the city blended suburban commerce and natural landscapes with city life. Commercial development and the public space offered by West Lake encouraged intense interactions in markets, teahouses, and gardens. Using capital journals, fiction, biji, and gazetteer maps, this chapter explores Lin’an’s environment, layout, commercial development, water management, and secular and religious life. The city’s blend of natural beauty and rapid commercial development marked a significant transition in Chinese urban history. The Southern Song’s influence elevated Hangzhou from a regional hub to a national political, religious, and aesthetic center, with impacts resonating across East Asia and beyond.

This chapter examines “opportunistic” uses of “natural” objects and structures in data-rich science and explores what these imply for scientists’ trust in the work of other researchers. It argues that a discipline’s objects of inquiry are not only topics of research but may also function as resources for its conduct. These objects and their relations can be resources for intersubjective coordination that become available through their mediation and materialization. Drawing on two cases from astronomy, this chapter demonstrates how researchers resort to what sociologist Melvin Pollner called “mundane reasoning”: practices for resolving disjunctive experiences that assume a shared public and objective world. Recognized for their task-specific affordances, disciplinary objects become resources for data analyses. There is a trade-off between epistemic uses of stable material objects and the placement of trust. In astronomical research, the sky is not only an ordering device for assessing and using data of various origin – it is also a resource for the partial relief from trust in data makers.

While ownership of private goods enables an actor to exclude others’ ownership, public goods are available to others. Because of this, there is a social dilemma associated with public goods: why would a person contribute to a public good if they can use it even if they don’t contribute? The traditional response is that some cost must be added to not paying so that the public good such as community parks could be created and maintained. This response was a clear outcome of early economic theories. However, empirical anomalies emerged that did not support these earlier theories. Cooperation among theorists enabled the development of new theories of how social characteristics of group members could intervene and solve some social dilemmas.