This chapter examines Tuesday’s meditation, which consists of six extended text sections divided into two parts. The first addresses the Flight into Egypt, the Return from Egypt, and the search for the Christ Child in Jerusalem; the second focuses on Christ’s Baptism and the temptations he faced in the desert, centring on the poverty of his youth and his revelation as Saviour. These three journeys structure the reader-viewer’s own meditative search, enacted through reading and turning the folios as she repeatedly seeks and finds Christ on the manuscript page. The pictorial program sustains this active search by juxtaposing Christ’s majesty with his humility through visual analogies and repetition.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

Chapter 6 traces the common elements of three field sites and research themes: Cuban espiritismo, Brazilian Umbanda, and Chilean ufology, to understand how cosmology is fractured, incomplete, emergent, and, in some cases, without an exterior referent. In Cuba and Brazil, not-knowing becomes a facet of a cosmology that is not entirely forthcoming, or of a cosmos of spirits that are simply unknowable in their essences, despite their overt appearances in cultural “clothes.” Unknowing here excites the cosmogonic, or world-producing impulse, very often through materials and objects. In ufology, instances of the “absurd” – where no sense can be made of visual perceptions or experiences – are attributed to the deceitful characteristics of their alien perpetrators who remain in a continuous conceptual dark. If in the first two cases it is the body and its cosmos which are negated as sources of knowledge, whereas in the third it is physical reality itself.

This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the intentionality of desires. It argues that desires are complex intentional states that entail both axiological and conative characters in relations of founding. By explicating the intentionality of desires, the chapter demonstrates that desires are similar to emotions as well as volitions but also differ crucially from both. Whereas emotion can lack conative components, desires always posit some goals or other, and strive for their posited goals. Unlike full-fledged volitions, however, desires entail deeply affective axiological components. The first section of the chapter provides the basic conceptual tools that are needed for a phenomenological analyses of the intentionality of desires. The second section distinguishes intentional desires from pre-intentional drives, affections, and feelings. It thereby clarifies the type of object-directedness that is characteristic of desire. The third section then explicates the axiological and conative constituents of desires in the interest of distinguishing desires from both emotions and volitions. The final section throws light on the temporality of desires. It argues that the intentionality of desires provides them with a specific “temporal shape” and makes them future-orientated. At the same time, this gives them a strong interest in realities and prospects of realization.

This chapter describes how to fit data to a distribution or a model, how to classify using data, and the issues of uncertainty and credibility.

This chapter examines how astrophysics generates reliable knowledge despite severe epistemic constraints by applying sophisticated strategies of data processing. Focusing on the Event Horizon Telescope’s first black hole image, it highlights the indispensable interplay between modelling, instrumentation, and data reduction. Using Patrick Suppes’ concept of data models, the analysis shows how theory-laden but systematically constrained procedures bridge the gap between raw observations and theoretical claims. Rather than simple confirmation of predictions, astrophysical reasoning depends on robustness across multiple modelling strategies. The case illustrates not only the methodological richness of astrophysics but also the value of the concept of data models for the understanding of data-intensive scientific disciplines.

This comprehensive yet accessible guide to enterprise risk management (ERM) for financial institutions contains all the tools needed to build and maintain an ERM framework. It discusses the internal and external contexts within which risk management must be carried out, and it covers a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques that can be used to identify, model and measure risks. This third edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect new regulations and legislation. It includes additional detail on machine learning, a new section on vine copulas and significantly expanded information on sustainability. A range of new case studies includes Theranos and FTX.

Suitable as a course book or for self-study, this book forms part of the core reading for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ examination in ERM.

This chapter describes the main stakeholders of financial institutions.

Decisions by international organizations typically neglect the interests of non-human animals. The chapter investigates whether and how animal interests can and should be brought to bear in the decision-making of IOs. It works through cognate concepts ranging from animal citizenship over animal representation to animal consideration and animal deliberation. The physical limits of human-animal communication foreclose responsiveness and accountability to the animals themselves. The chapter therefore prefers the term animal ‘consideration’ rather than animal ‘representation’. After this groundwork, the chapter briefly canvasses some proposals for bringing animal interests to bear in in democratic political processes. With due modifications, some schemes could be applied to the work of international organizations. These range from animal ombudspersons, strengthening the voice of pro-animal CSOs through compulsory notice-and-comment procedures and extended speaking rights in the organizations, mandatory animal welfare impact assessment, and more. All attempts for upstepping the existing rudimentary schemes in the direction of a better and stronger consideration of animal interests in human politics will require deep cultural and social change, to a large extent beyond the purview of the law.

This chapter discusses how AI bots help negotiate some of the intense emotions and sense of vulnerability that come with grief. It considers both the promise and peril of AI-powered grief work, as well as how this technology is already sculpting our emotional life more generally. The chapter argues that AI ‘griefbots’ may, for some, be a useful resource for negotiating their grief. First, emotions and absence experiences in everyday life are discussed. Then the chapter examines how AI bots are increasingly used to address these experiences, before turning to a consideration of AI in prolonged grief disorder. The chapter offers a possible application of AI griefbots in narrative-based interventions to prolonged grief disorder, and concludes by raising some worries in need of further consideration.

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

This chapter describes the main types of financial institutions analysed in the book.

Throughout their history, philosophy and astronomy have been closely linked. Astronomy and cosmology inhabit novel epistemic spaces, and have novel epistemic aims, relative to more standard sciences. As the philosophy of astronomy emerges as an independent subdiscipline, the special nature of explanation and prediction within astronomy requires further examination and articulation. Unlike conventional experimental sciences, astronomy typically deals with entities and systems that are outside the reach of human intervention. Furthermore, astronomy and cosmology are historical sciences. This chapter evaluates the epistemology of astronomy by focusing on the canons of explanation, prediction, and theoretical success that are particular to astronomy. Demonstrations of the successes and shortcomings of philosophical models of explanation and prediction are given with respect to the eighteenth-century discovery of stellar aberration and the more recent conjectures of dark matter and dark energy.

This chapter examines Monday, the first day of meditation, which presents the text’s precepts and goals. Centered on Mary’s childhood and the events of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Presentation at the Temple, the text and image program invites the reader-viewer to reflect on the notion of conceiving Christ both physically, in the Virgin’s body as part of the divine plan, and mentally, as a truth to be recognized and internalized by the fourteenth-century nun. The Meditations on the Life of Christ stages Mary as a particularly apt exemplum for the female reader: a model contemplative who strives to keep Christ always with her by conceiving him in her soul, seeing glory in his abasement, and striving to transcend the temporal in pursuit of spiritual understanding.