The chapter describes the basic terminology used in the book, the composition of the Earth system and the principles of climate dynamics. It details the main components of the Earth system (atmosphere, ocean, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and solid Earth) and processes relevant to understanding climate dynamics. The concepts of climate, climate variability and climate change are discussed in the context of Quaternary climate dynamics. The global cycles of energy, water and carbon and their importance for climate evolution and variability are presented. The chapter introduces the mechanisms behind different types of radiative forcing, climate feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The difference between equilibrium and transient climate responses to different climate forcings is specified. The frameworks of stability and instability are introduced and discussed in application to climate. The relationship between the stochasticity of the Earth system and the predictability of climate change is presented.

This concluding chapter first summarizes the main findings of this book, based on which it discusses the continuities and discontinuities in the transformation of labour precarity before and after 1949 and in the Mao era and after. It then engages with the paradoxes and debates introduced in Chapter 1 and discusses this book’s implications for labour movements and policy. Next, this chapter compares labour precarity in China with that in socialist and transitional economies and in traditional advanced capitalist economies after the Second World War to depict global trends in this regard. This chapter concludes by revealing the limitations of this book, and putting forward speculations for future changes in labour precarity and suggestions for future research about precarious labour in China.

This chapter argues that Augustine adopts a second-person perspective, which “is characterized by dialogical speech, shared awareness of shared focus with the second person, and an orientation to love that other person.” This perspective shapes his understanding of the moral life; it gives pride of place to second-person relations, whether in the virtuous love of God and neighbor or in the disordered friendship without which Augustine tells us he would not have stolen the pears. Examining three virtues – humility, mercy, and charity – the chapter shows how each of them can be understood only in terms of proper relatedness to some other person. Since these virtues are prominent in the Confessions but altogether absent from the Nicomachean Ethics, a close look at them reveals the considerable differences between an Augustinian and an Aristotelian approach to the virtues. It also sheds light on how to read Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’ considerable inheritance from Augustine goes largely ignored by scholars focusing on Aquinas’s Aristotelianism. Attention to Augustine is accordingly crucial for a more balanced understanding of Aquinas; it also holds promise for future work in virtue ethics.

I demonstrate the analytical value of socially and historically embedding corruption through a case study of corruption in the Cambodian land market. I proceed by taking three types of corruption commonly associated with the formal process of land registration by scholars and civil society groups – the violation of regulations and procedures (a corruption of the rules), patronage practices (a corruption of politics), and rent-seeking (a corruption of bureaucracy) – and embed these practices in the processes and situations in which they take shape. I then discuss the difference embedding makes compared to a utilitarian account of corruption (the one that scholars and civil society groups writing about the case tend to deploy). Embedding changes how we understand corruption: We see corruption as an emergent practice as opposed to being a universal one. We see that, in Cambodia, corruption is systemic as opposed to being isolated to certain individuals or agencies. We see that corruption can be a way of building bureaucratic capacity as opposed to being purely self-interested and anti-organizational.

This chapter sets the scene in urban Penang at the time of research through a consideration of public discourses about marriage and gender relations. It examines newspaper accounts, public events, debates, exhibitions and theatrical productions in Penang’s capital, George Town. Alongside interviews with lawyers, these public discourses show how discussions about what are perceived by many as ‘dysfunctional relations’, including child marriage, polygamy, the conversion of minors to Islam, divorce and LGBTQ rights, have the capacity to expand and take on a life of their own at moments of national tension. The chapter illuminates the dense connections between kinship, gender, ethnicity, religion and law. Stories about child marriage at different political moments – to take one example – condense ethical and political concerns and contestations in times of radical change.

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of Hebrew-Yiddish self-translation, and offers it as a central practice in the formation of modern Jewish literature. Self-translation, that is the writing and rewriting of the same work time and again in different languages by the same author, was crucial to the very ability to write modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, self-translation was the practice that allowed Hebrew and Yiddish to grow as robust literary languages. To exemplify this, the chapter discusses a case study; in a close reading of a self-translated work, a novella by Zalman Shneour (1886–1959), this chapter offers a demonstration not only of the history and national settings of self-translation, but also of the unique poetics of self-translation. The novella, A Death (1905–1923), is a prime example of self-translation practices and poetics, a poetics that privileges openness, counterfactuals, instability and indecisiveness. In the ongoing and prolonged writing and rewriting of this novella, I offer that Shneour works as both practitioner and philosopher of self-translation, thematizing in the work of art its modes of composition.

Chapter 1 considers how Emerson uses the essay form to present his ideas as experiments or trials, to preserve a sense of spontaneity or casualness (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics”) and to dramatize what he calls the “contrary tendencies” in his philosophy (“I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies”). While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. Emerson’s description of a poem in “The Poet” applies equally to his own essays: each is a living thing, like “a plant or an animal,” each has “an architecture of its own.” The discussion focuses on the moods of “History” and “Experience,” guided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of the essay as a carpet, or an arena for thought.

In this chapter, I discuss textual uses of fictive discourse: How should we think of the utterances that convey fictions? MacDonald (1954) and Searle (1975) argue that they are mere pretense – the simulation of acts like assertions or questions. They don’t constitute sui generis, dedicated representational practices of a specific kind, fictionalizing, on a par with assertions or questions. This was the standard view in analytic philosophy from Frege until the 1990s, and was casually endorsed by Austin, Kripke, van Inwagen, and many others. Walton (1990) and others made decisive objections to this view, predicated on its lack of explanatory power, which will be developed here. Walton himself also rejects views of the kind that MacDonald and Searle question, which take fictionalizing to be a sui generis speech act. Currie (1990) articulated one such account in a Gricean psychologistic framework, while García-Carpintero (2013a), Abell (2020), and others have argued for social, Austinian accounts. I earlier classified speech acts of fictionalizing as directives; while other authors classify them as declarations, like ejecting players, naming ships, or sentencing offenders. I’ll question the declaration view, but I’ll argue for another alternative to the directive account, which treats fictionalizings as a variety of constative act.

The chapter outlines the primary methods used in empirical paleoclimatology, beginning with an overview of key paleoclimate proxies (stable oxygen and carbon isotopes, atmospheric composition, ice-rafted debris, aeolian dust and pollen) and the past environmental conditions they help reconstruct. The applicability and potential limitations of different proxies are discussed. It then describes the main paleoclimate archives, such as marine sediments and ice cores, speleothems, tree rings and others, in relation to paleoclimate proxies. The main dating techniques used in Quaternary paleoclimatology, such as the radiocarbon method, paleomagnetism and orbital tuning, are briefly examined. Several important paleoclimatological stacked records are presented, such as the Lisiecki-Raymo benthic stack. Finally, the main applications of paleoclimate proxies for reconstructing paleoenvironments and understanding past climate change and data-model comparison are reviewed.

This chapter applies the volume’s interactive and holistic approach to the development and analysis of the regulation of remote work. The discussion underscores how employment contracts themselves combine locational elements, of direct significance for remote work, with specifications of the temporal extension of the work contract and its full time or part time nature. Moreover, as the chapter shows, the combinatory constellation of employment situations that results is itself then subject to regulation in ways that the regulatory institutions often frame interactively, using concepts rooted in one type of employment condition to deal with another condition – for example combining features of the contract’s time commitment with its locational definition. The chapter also discusses the importance of the subsidiarity principle for channeling the multilevel and interactive component of remote work’s regulation. These points are then used to address issues of fundamental rights for workers and more specifically, of labor rights under new and evolving employment conditions.

This chapter surveys recordings of the Schumanns’ music released since their bicentenaries (Clara’s in 2019, Robert’s in 2010) vis-à-vis trends in their reception history. The albums discussed represent a cross-section of styles and approaches, with several performers being long-standing champions of Clara’s music. Their strategies range from reappraising the relationship between Clara’s and Robert’s creativity, to reviving the ethos of nineteenth-century practices, namely mixed-genre programmes, and reimagining their music through improvisations, transcriptions, and contemporary commissions. Collectively, they recapture something of the Schumanns’ own context while offering varied ways of programming their music in the twenty-first century.