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2523 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 13 of 127

The Psychology of Mysticism

The Psychology of Mysticism
  • Zhuo Job Chen
  • Published online:
    27 January 2026
    Print publication:
    26 February 2026
  • Mysticism refers to extraordinary experiences that transcend perceived reality and transform the individual. Section 1 introduces key features such as noetic and ineffable qualities, alongside psychological typologies and a fourfold hierarchy of mystical forms. Section 2 explores monistic mysticism, where self and ultimate reality merge in oneness and ego-dissolution, illustrated through perennial philosophy and its critiques. Section 3 examines nondualistic mysticism, in which the self remains distinct yet is absorbed into a transcendent order, exemplified in world religions where ego yields to the divine. Section 4 discusses dualistic mysticism, where the self encounters a separate nonhuman reality, often expressed through shamanism, spiritist visions, and psychedelic states. Section 5 presents pluralistic mysticism, emphasizing multiple dimensions of self and reality, integrating embodied and spiritual aspects, and drawing on nonphysicalism and parapsychology. Section 6 synthesizes these perspectives, stressing that transcendent realities require self-transformation and that mystical insights can inform daily life across culture.
Byzantine Law

Byzantine Law
  • The Law of the Eastern Roman Empire
  • Daphne Penna
  • Published online:
    26 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • The purpose of this Element is to introduce the study of later Roman law (Byzantine law) to a wider academic audience. Currently a great deal of specialized knowledge is necessary to approach the field of Byzantine law. This Element works to break down the barriers to this fascinating subject by providing a brief, clear introduction to the topic. It makes a scholarly contribution by placing Byzantine law in a broader perspective and by reconsidering some of the aspects of the study of Byzantine law. The Element places Byzantine law outside of the box by comparing, for example, Byzantine law to the European legal tradition and highlighting the role that Byzantine law can have in unravelling the common legal past of Europe. It gives also information on the status of Byzantine legal studies and makes suggestions on how to study Byzantine law and why.
Classical and Quantum Phase Space Mechanics

Classical and Quantum Phase Space Mechanics
  • Karim Pierre Yves Thébault
  • Published online:
    26 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • This Element explores the formal and conceptual foundations of phase space formulations of classical and quantum mechanics. It provides an overview of the core mathematical and physical content of Hamiltonian mechanics, stochastic phase space mechanics, contact Hamiltonian mechanics, and open and closed quantum mechanics on phase space. The formal material is unified via three interpretative themes relating to structured possibility spaces, Liouville's theorem and its failure, and the classical and quantum notions of open and closed systems. This Element book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the philosophy and foundations of physics with an interest in the conceptual foundations of physical theory.
Online Teacher Education and Interactive Technologies

Online Teacher Education and Interactive Technologies
  • Seyum Getenet, Eseta Tualaulelei
  • Published online:
    26 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • This Element focuses on the role of interactive technologies in enhancing pre-service teachers' engagement with learning in online environments. It begins with a brief overview of the current state of teacher education, focusing on online teaching. This is followed by analysing the concept of engagement, underscoring its importance for pre-service teachers studying online. The Element explores various dimensions of engagement – cognitive, behavioural, affective, and other – and how interactive technologies can enhance these dimensions in online learning. A key feature of this Element is its exploration of key challenges that teacher educators and pre-service teachers encounter when using interactive technologies with practical recommendations for addressing them. The concluding section shifts the focus to the future, offering recommendations for how teacher education can use interactive technologies to 'grow' teacher educators who can engage their students. Throughout the Element, practical examples complement theoretical discussions to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
The Behavioral Ecology of Food

The Behavioral Ecology of Food
  • Bridging the Archaeological and the Contemporary
  • Elic M. Weitzel, Natalie D. Munro
  • Published online:
    23 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • Due to the multi-faceted nature of food – as sustenance, symbol, and commodity – diverse theoretical perspectives have been used to study it in archaeology. One of the more influential and versatile of these approaches is behavioral ecology: the study of behavioral adaptation to local environments. Behavioral ecology provides a powerful body of theory for understanding human decision-making in both the past and present. This Element reviews what behavioral ecology is, how it has been used by archaeologists to study decision-making concerning food and subsistence, how it articulates with other ecological approaches, and how it can help us to better understand sustainability in our contemporary world. The use of behavioral ecology to bridge the archaeological and the contemporary can not only explain the roots of important behavioral processes, but provide potential policy solutions to promote a more sustainable society today.
How the Brady Plan Delivered on Debt Relief

How the Brady Plan Delivered on Debt Relief
  • Lessons and Implications
  • Neil Shenai, Marijn A. Bolhuis
  • Published online:
    23 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • In March 1989, US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady introduced a plan enabling distressed sovereigns to restructure unsustainable debts through 'Brady bonds.' Today, growing debt vulnerabilities have prompted calls for a modern Brady Plan to facilitate sovereign debt restructurings. This Element examines the macroeconomic impact of the original Brady Plan by comparing outcomes for ten Brady countries against forty other emerging markets and developing economies. It finds that following the first Brady-led restructuring in 1990, participating countries saw reductions in public and external debt burdens, alongside output and productivity growth anchored by strong economic reforms. The analysis reveals the existence of a 'Brady multiplier,' where declines in overall debt burdens exceeded initial face-value reductions. While similar mechanisms could again deliver substantial debt stock reductions during acute solvency crises, Brady-style solutions alone would not address current challenges related to creditor coordination, domestic reform barriers, and the rise of domestic debt, among others.
Quotidian Beckett

Quotidian Beckett
  • Art of Everyday Life
  • Patrick Bixby
  • Published online:
    20 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • Samuel Beckett was a writer of the everyday. Despite his association with the literary avant-garde and his commitment to an increasingly austere aesthetic, his writing betrays an enduring preoccupation with the quotidian rhythms of modern life, including the experiences of boredom, routine, habit, and consumption. Quotidian Beckett: Art of Everyday Life explores the writer's evolving response to this realm of experience, which philosophers and sociologists have paradoxically described as both everywhere and nowhere, obvious and enigmatic. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's influential theories of everyday life, the Element demonstrates how Beckett's writing, by producing forms that resist transparency and closure, invites us to see the mundane in unfamiliar, unsettling, and politically charged ways. In this regard, his artistic achievement lies in rendering the elusiveness of the quotidian with a vividness that other modes of discourse seldom achieve.
Managing Public Sector Contracts

Managing Public Sector Contracts
  • Market Frictions and Human Resources Solutions
  • Matthew Potoski, Ole Helby Petersen, Lena Brogaard, Trevor Brown
  • Published online:
    20 January 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • This Element presents a framework for analyzing the complexities of contracting, how these vary across circumstances, the ways contract managers can address challenges, and the skills of contract managers. The framework is grounded on central concepts. Market frictions are underlying imperfections that cause common contracting problems; contract management activities are the tasks and procedures that contract managers perform to prepare and execute the purchase; and skills are the ability to perform contract management activities that identify and mitigate frictions. These concepts are interdependent – market frictions can influence the efficacy of contract management activities, activities may reduce or increase the presence of frictions, and skills may influence both the choice and effectiveness of activities in addressing contracting challenges. Omitting any of these components is likely to result in misleading accounts of the root causes and potential solutions to contracting challenges.
Informal Digital Learning of English

Informal Digital Learning of English
  • Ju Seong Lee
  • Published online:
    20 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • As globalization spreads, English has become a lingua franca. Emerging technologies (e.g., Artificial Intelligence) now make learning English more accessible, affordable, and tailored to each learner. Social media and digital platforms immerse users in English, offering interactive, personalized, and engaging experiences that fuel Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE). Research spanning more than ten regions has found that IDLE brings a wide range of benefits, including greater motivation, higher academic achievement, and stronger speaking skills. Today, IDLE is being woven into schools and local communities through partnerships among teachers, NGOs, and industry leaders. This volume seeks to (a) showcase the latest research on IDLE, (b) highlight examples of IDLE in educational and community settings, and (c) chart future pathways for practice, research, and collaboration.
Language, Gender and Biopolitics

Language, Gender and Biopolitics
  • Meaning-Making and Intersex Variations in Healthcare
  • Brian W. King
  • Published online:
    19 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • This Element examines language, power and intersex variations within clinician accounts in Hong Kong, examining how they communicate about intersex traits to patients and their families. Employing interactional sociolinguistics, the research analyses clinician interviews as dynamic social interactions, focusing on how communicative stances are negotiated and social practices are enacted. The Element probes the influence of biopower on clinicians' stances (encompassing gender, sexual difference, racialization and ableism) and explores the possibilities of emancipation from these biopolitical constraints. Findings highlight the tension between medical structuring forces and the formation of intersex subjects and bodies, impacting their autonomy and livability. Gender is relevant as both a power system and a lived reality, critical for understanding the bioregulation of innate sex characteristics and advancing broader implications for gender and language studies and healthcare communication. This research challenges gender-sceptical discourses and highlights the transformative potential of gender frameworks in medical and social contexts.
A Theology of Becoming

A Theology of Becoming
  • Body, Blood, Birth, and Sacrament
  • Tina Beattie
  • Published online:
    19 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • Modern theological approaches to birth have been filtered through an androcentric lens, focusing more on ethical questions of contraception and abortion than on the significance of birth for what it means to be human. In the Catholic tradition, this has been influenced by doctrines and traditions surrounding Mary's virginal conception of Christ and painless birth. This Element considers the challenges posed by maternal life to ideas and theories about pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a woman and her newborn child. Reflecting on her maternal experiences through the lenses of feminist theory and Marian theology, the author sketches the contours of an incarnational theology that endows the birthing body with sacramental significance. She concludes by asking what it would mean for theological anthropology to adopt this as the normative model of the person reborn through baptism into the body of the maternal Church.
Islam and Modern Cosmology

Islam and Modern Cosmology
  • Enis Doko
  • Published online:
    19 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • Islam and Modern Cosmology examines how contemporary cosmological theories intersect with Islamic theology, exploring how modern science and Islamic thought can be brought into meaningful dialogue. It begins with a concise overview of modern cosmology, followed by an exploration of the Qur'an's cosmological perspectives and the philosophical models of creation proposed by Muslim thinkers, comparing these ideas with current scientific understandings. The discussion then considers the fine-tuning argument for God's existence and addresses the multiverse hypothesis, proposing that, under certain reasonable assumptions, the Islamic conception of God suggests the possibility of multiple universes. Finally, from a Muslim – specifically Sufi – perspective, it reflects on the problem of the significance of human life within this vast cosmos.
Nietzsche on Suffering

Nietzsche on Suffering
  • Christopher Janaway
  • Published online:
    17 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 March 2026
  • Suffering is a theme throughout Nietzsche's writings. His views are often controversial and challenging. He explores ways of understanding suffering not as an 'objection to life', but as something that can enhance life. This Element examines Nietzsche's views on suffering from different angles: his early claim that the representation of suffering in the art form of tragedy enabled the ancient Greeks to affirm life, his analysis of cruelty as an expression of will to power, and his critique of 'the morality of compassion' which he claims would impoverish life by removing its suffering. Nietzsche views suffering as necessary for psychological growth and great human achievement. It is neither good nor bad in itself, and its value depends on who suffers and in what context. Although Nietzsche's rhetoric sometimes glorifies suffering and cruelty irresponsibly, his work advances our understanding of suffering by viewing it through different perspectives and affective attitudes.
Taxation and Governance in Contemporary China

Taxation and Governance in Contemporary China
  • Xiaobo Lü, Changdong Zhang
  • Published online:
    14 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
  • In contrast to the drastic shifts in China's political landscape and society since 2012, taxation may appear as a comparatively mundane topic receiving limited attention. However, the relative stability in China's taxation system underscores its delicate role in maintaining a balance in state–society relations. The Element embarks on an exploration of China's intricate taxation system in the contemporary era, illuminating its origins and the profound reverberations on state–society relations. It shows that China's reliance on indirect taxation stems from the legacies of transitioning from a planned economy to a market-driven one as well as elaborate fiscal bargaining between the central and local governments. This strategy inadvertently heightens Chinese citizens' sensitivity to direct taxation and engenders the tragedy of the commons, leading to rising government debts and collusion by local governments and businesses that results in land expropriation, labor disputes, and environmental degradation.
A Chinese Discourse of Heritage

A Chinese Discourse of Heritage
  • Song Hou
  • Published online:
    14 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • This Element presents an alternative approach to critical heritage studies by attending to forgotten or transformed cultural, historical ideas of heritage. It focuses on the Chinese term guji (古迹 ancient traces or vestiges), perceived today as the same as the modern concept of cultural heritage. After a macroanalysis of how guji is understood differently in contemporary and historical China, it comes to cultural-historical discourse analysis of guji recorded in the local gazetteers of Quzhou from the 1500s to the 1920s, revealing its way of categorization as boundary negotiation, and cultural modes of meaning-making and remembering, either with or without physical remains or a verifiable site. After a holistic view of this Chinese discourse as reflected in a particular guji, it concludes with a philosophical lens to highlight the alternative existence of heritage in the word guji and the uses of heritage as the uses of language.
FinTech Regulation in the United States

FinTech Regulation in the United States
  • Past, Present, and Future
  • Jill Grennan
  • Published online:
    12 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
  • This Element provides an overview of FinTech branches and analyzes the associated institutional forces and economic incentives, offering new insights for optimal regulation. First, it establishes a fundamental tension between addressing existing financial inefficiencies and introducing new economic distortions. Second, it demonstrates that today's innovators have evolved from pursuing incremental change through conventional Fin-Tech applications to AI × crypto as the fastest-growing segment. The convergence of previously siloed areas is creating an open-source infrastructure that reduces entry costs and enables more radical innovation, further amplifying change. Yet this transformation introduces legal uncertainty and risks related to liability, cybercrime, taxation, and adjudication. Through case studies across domains, the Element shows that familiar economic tradeoffs persist, suggesting opportunities for boundary-spanning regulation. It offers regulatory solutions, including RegTech frameworks, compliance-incentivizing mechanisms, collaborative governance models, proactive enforcement of mischaracterizations, and alternative legal analogies for AI × crypto.
Outdoor Singing in Modern Britain

Outdoor Singing in Modern Britain
  • A Sensory and Emotional History
  • Abbi Flint, Clare Hickman
  • Published online:
    12 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
    • Element
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  • This Element brings together historical sources and contemporary experiences to explore the interplay between singing, sociality, body, and meaning in the English landscape over the past century. It explores the connections between air and song and between singing and movement, through the context of the early twentieth century open-air recreation movement. This is supplemented by recent literature on singing and wellbeing, and the experiences of a contemporary walking choir captured via interviews in the field. The authors argue that outdoor singing has been part of co-constructed soundscapes of the modern English leisure landscape, and ask what this meant for those who participated in collective open-air singing and rambling. They explore how open-air singing connected with conceptions of the countryside, with a sense of fellow-feeling, and how this might have both reified and challenged normative ways of being in landscapes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Origen on Demonic Executioners and the Problem of Evil

Origen on Demonic Executioners and the Problem of Evil
  • Ky Heinze
  • Published online:
    09 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
  • Origen believed that God's providence makes good use of everything, including the actions of wicked demons, which serve to discipline sinners and test the righteous. This Element, which focuses on the disciplinary function of demons, will show that Origen's position was the synthesis and development of a long Jewish and early Christian tradition — a fact not recognized in most scholarship. Disciplinary demons were an important part of Origen's theodicy. According to him, the suffering sinners experience is not the direct action of supposed divine anger, but the wicked attack of demons that is directed (but not caused) by God. Origen's belief that even rebel demons do not escape from fulfilling the divine purpose avoids dualism. This contradicts the frequently expressed view that early Christian intellectuals (particularly Origen) overemphasized Satan's autonomy and endangered the supremacy of God.
Linguistic Representations of Women in Old English Prose

Linguistic Representations of Women in Old English Prose
  • A Corpus-Based Phraseological Study
  • Anna Cichosz, Tomasz Dobrogoszcz
  • Published online:
    08 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
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  • This Element traces the origins and earliest manifestations of gender bias in the English language. The analysis is based on a corpus of Old English prose texts, written between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The results are interpreted in the historical, cultural and literary context of Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe. The investigation shows a significant difference in the way women and men are presented in Old English texts, with the former clearly associated with family life, portrayed in the context of their physical appearance, marriage and childbearing, rarely involved in meaningful activities and presented as possessions of their male relatives. Situating the linguistic representations of women in the context of Christianity, the Element demonstrates that late Old English can be seen as a vehicle of language bias that will establish male domination for centuries to come. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Design Strategies in Public Services

Design Strategies in Public Services
  • Maria Cucciniello, Greta Nasi, Gregory Porumbescu, Rosanna Tarricone
  • Published online:
    08 January 2026
    Print publication:
    05 February 2026
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  • This Element explores the transformative impact of integrating service design principles into public management and administration, championing a user-centred approach and co-design methodology. By reviewing existing literature, the authors define the scope and applications of service design within public administration and present three empirical studies to evaluate its implementation in public services. These studies reveal a trend towards embracing co-design and digital technologies, advancing a citizen-centred strategy for public service design. This approach prioritizes value creation and responsiveness, highlighting the importance of involving users and providers in the development of services that meet changing needs and promote inclusion. Combining theoretical insights with practical solutions, the Element offers a comprehensive framework for public management research. It highlights the need for ongoing engagement and integration of user experiences, presenting an effective strategy to navigate the complexities of public service design. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Page 13 of 127