Robert and Clara Schumann’s life and work converged at the piano. They witnessed and influenced the enormous evolution of piano manufacturing in their various roles as composer, music critic, virtuoso, and teacher. Their creative work demonstrates how advances in instrument-making are a result of craftsmanship coupled with artistic demands. What can modern pianists and listeners learn from the Schumanns’ involvement with the piano? Their activities – improvising, practising, teaching, performing, and composing – were intricately interwoven. Their explorations of pianistic possibilities were always supported by inborn curiosity and artistic aspirations. Stepping back in history and experimenting with historic pianos or replicas renders one sensitive to the interrelation between the art of composition and the instrument. For the modern-day performer, knowledge of historical piano manufacturing is indispensable and can lead to fresh ways of interpreting the Schumanns’ music.

This chapter explores a largely overlooked dimension of jurisdictional arbitrage: the manipulation of corporate reporting and disclosure practices at the subsidiary level. While much of the literature focuses on multinational corporations (MNCs) as unified entities, this chapter demonstrates that opacity is often engineered through the dispersed structure of CCMCEs. Drawing on data from the CORPLINK project, it analyses how MNCs exploit jurisdictional inconsistencies in disclosure rules to limit financial transparency, particularly in OFCs. Key strategies include the use of exempted companies, off-balance-sheet entities, disappearing or floating subsidiaries, and shell companies mimicking dormancy. These techniques allow firms to circumvent consolidated reporting obligations, distort public and regulatory perceptions, and obscure the allocation of revenues and profits. Comparative data on independent versus integrated energy firms further illustrates how these practices are unequally distributed and systematically deployed. The chapter calls attention to the inadequacy of current regulatory frameworks and urges international action to standardize disclosure quality and reduce informational blind spots. By revealing how MNCs ‘tell without telling’, the chapter advances our understanding of corporate opacity as a strategic, institutionalized practice deeply embedded in global corporate structuring.

Andrews ” Reath offers a new interpretation of the doctrine, set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason, that the moral law is given to us as a “fact of reason.” Reath proposes that we understand this doctrine through the idea that what is given in this fact is the reality of a basic rational power. He argues that Kant accepts a generally ‘Aristotelian’ conception of a rational power, so that pure practical reason is a rational power with its own formal end and its own formal principle, which we know to be the moral law. Exercises of this power are (in some sense) guided by a subject’s consciousness of its formal principle, and therein lies its spontaneity and self-activity.

Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.

The chapter introduces the intellectual programme for the volume as a whole. The opening analysis explores the category of ‘poetry’ as a form of cultural production pertinent to each of the single topics addressed in the individual chapters, emphasising a consistent concern with questions not only of literary form but also of materiality, performance and transmission, conceptions of authorship, cultural context and more. A second section turns to locating how poetry was discussed during the centuries 1200-1600, beginning with how poets and commentators conceptualised the craft of making poetry itself. This is followed by a review of places where poetry could be found, in its written form and also in performance and discussion around the peninsula. Finally, the chapter discusses how Italian intellectuals and theorists investigated definitions of poetry and its cultural importance, and constructed their own histories of poetry from the viewpoint of their own times.

States are increasingly thought to have a duty to enable convicted persons’ rehabilitation, with some seeing this duty as grounded in convicted persons’ right to rehabilitation. This rights-based argument for rehabilitation emerged alongside the increase in rights litigation for carceral populations within the United States in the 1970s, and the contemporaneous development of the idea of imprisoned persons as “Rechtsburgers” or rights bearers in Europe.

Admittedly, legal recognition of a right to rehabilitation is not universal. Many countries present rehabilitation as a “guiding concept” rather than a right that can be enforced against the state. The United States had also considered it necessary to re-emphasise the importance its criminal justice system attaches to the goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation, following their ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – which highlights the need for rehabilitative treatment within prison settings in Article 10 ICCPR.

Suicide is not simply a typology of violence. All forms of violence are interrelated, and preventative action should tackle the common antecedents to all. Understanding what these are, and how they differ between regions and cultures, is key to developing effective violence prevention strategies that extend beyond suicide. In this chapter we discuss the relationship between suicide and other forms of violence including analysis of data from the World Health Organization. We then consider factors influencing volume and direction of violence including gender, poverty, drug and alcohol misuse, adverse childhood experiences, war, and natural disasters. Before finally moving on to preventative action that considers all forms of violence under the same framework. Throughout the chapter real-world examples will be given for important concepts with particular reference to self-immolation in South Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean Region as it is the authors’ area of research expertise.

This chapter focuses on a group of Christian elites both well represented in the necrosima and unique to Syriac Christianity: the so-called Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. These communities of male and female ascetics assumed responsibility for the practical and liturgical functioning of the churches, including, most prominently, the task of chanting psalms and hymns at ecclesiastical gatherings, including funerary processions. The necrosima contains a number of madrāshê designated for the burial of male Covenanters – as well as, this chapter suggests, one addressing the death of their female counterparts. The hymns provide readers with an intimate glimpse at the grief and anxiety that attended these community’s loss of one of their members, as well as insight into the strategies by which the bereaved sought to maintain ties “across the threshold.” This chapter accordingly examines the ways in which expectations of mutual prayer – by the bereaved on behalf of the dead, and by the dead on behalf of their surviving brothers and sisters – could serve to construct visions of continuity and hopes for eventual reunion.

This chapter discusses the relation between ‘Morals’ (Sitten, Moral) and ‘Right’ (Recht) in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Two questions should be distinguished: (1) Are Kantian Morals necessary for Kantian Right in the sense that the latter presupposes Kant’s specific account of morality? (2) Is Kant’s account of Morals sufficient to justify his conception of Right, in the sense that the fundamental principles of Right can be derived from, or normatively justified by, the Categorical Imperative (or some other element of Kantian Morals) without additional normative principles? With respect to the first question, it is argued that Kantian Right presupposes a central aspect of Kantian Morals: the idea of moral universality, where moral rights and duties are the same for all. This idea must be distinguished from the Categorical Imperative introduced in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. Concerning the second question, it is argued that only when applied to individual juridical (coercible) rights does the idea of moral universality result in a Kantian conception of Right. Thus, Kant’s conception of Morals alone is not sufficient to derive juridical rights and duties.