Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Cambridge Elements
  4. Published Elements

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2232 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 10 of 112

Morality and the Gods

Morality and the Gods
  • Benjamin Grant Purzycki
  • Published online:
    11 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025
  • The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. This Element probes how the social sciences have addressed this relationship by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. Sections 1 and 2 examine the historical roots of cross-cultural inquiry and Section 3 addresses the empirical tools developed to address cross-cultural patterns statistically. Sections 4-6 address how the contemporary evolutionary social sciences have been addressing the role religious cognition, behaviour, and beliefs play on moral conduct. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, this Element shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. It argues that the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.
Linguistic Synesthesia

Linguistic Synesthesia
  • A Meta-analysis
  • Bodo Winter, Francesca Strik-Lievers
  • Published online:
    11 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Linguistic synesthesias combine different senses, as in English smooth melody (touch→sound). For nearly a century, researchers have gathered data that has been interpreted as supporting the notion of a hierarchical ordering of the senses. According to this proposal, expressions map the presumed-to-be 'lower' senses of touch, taste, and smell onto the presumed-to-be 'higher' senses of sound and sight. Here, this proposal is tested in the first-ever meta-analysis of linguistic synesthesias, combining thirty-eight datasets from fourteen different languages. The authors demonstrate that clear patterns emerge from the data, but many such patterns are inconsistent with the notion of a linear hierarchical order or a simple lower/higher divide of the senses. This calls for a shift in what theories are considered to be viable for explaining asymmetries between the senses in linguistic synesthesia.
Beyond Traditional Conceptions of Policing and Crime Control

Beyond Traditional Conceptions of Policing and Crime Control
  • New Metrics to Evaluate Police Performance and Improve Police Legitimacy
  • Dennis P. Rosenbaum
  • Published online:
    10 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Today, policing in the United States is facing a crisis of legitimacy and calls for reform. This Element examines this crisis and describes the adverse effects of problematic police behavior on community members, police officers, and public safety. A critical analysis of past reform efforts is offered, including why they have had limited success in changing police operations, police culture, or styles of policing. The central thesis of this Element is that most police reforms have failed because we continue to use the wrong metrics to evaluate police performance. Cities have yet to systematically measure what matters to the public, namely how people are treated by the police. Hence, this Element proposes a new system of accountability using data from body-worn cameras and contact surveys to measure and incentivize procedural justice. Translating evidence into real organizational change should improve street-level policing, enhance police legitimacy, and improve public safety.
The Organism

The Organism
  • Jan Baedke
  • Published online:
    10 June 2025
    Print publication:
    24 July 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • Organisms are central for biology. However, conceptualizing the unit of the organism is not easy. This Element discusses challenges to base biological reasoning and practice on the concept of organism. After many decades dominated by the paradigm of the gene, the organism is making a comeback in the bio- and biomedical sciences. It is again recognized as a causally efficacious, autonomous, and active unit that transcends the properties of genes and affects its own development and evolution – especially in fields like epigenetics, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology. This Element investigates these developments from a perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science. It focuses on conceptual, biotheoretical, and historical dimensions, as well as sociopolitical and anthropological aspects of today's 'return of the organism.' In particular, it discusses solutions for challenges of organism-centered biosciences in the 21st century. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Factional Politics in the Liberal Democratic Party

Factional Politics in the Liberal Democratic Party
  • Explaining Change and Continuity in Japan's Economic Statecraft
  • Michael J. Gigante, Ming Wan
  • Published online:
    10 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • What explains change and continuity in Japan's economic statecraft? This Element examines the interplay between factional dynamics in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japan's foreign policy through two cases: Japan's unprecedented decision to impose severe sanctions on Russia following its 2022 Ukraine invasion, and its decades-long ASEAN strategy amid political uncertainty and great power competition. The authors find that factional balance or the outsized influence of a large faction facilitates abrupt political-economic shifts, sustained until a similar dynamic triggers correction. Unlike most systems, Japan's intra-party politics do not lead to full leadership turnover, enabling factions to influence policy while empowering non-leadership members to drive change. This dual role strengthens barriers to change, embedding political inertia. Using factional membership data from 1961 to 2024, they argue that factions are a more systematic unit of analysis than political entrepreneurs in understanding the relationship between Japan's domestic politics and foreign policy decisions.
Emotional Self-Knowledge

Emotional Self-Knowledge
  • How Affective Skills Reveal Our Values, Goals, Cares, and Concerns
  • Matt Stichter, Ellen Fridland
  • Published online:
    09 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Knowledge of our emotional and bodily states helps us to further know our goals, values, interests, cares, and concerns. The authors first lay out a puzzle as to why bodily and emotional self-knowledge is strongly associated with good mental health and well-being. They solve this puzzle by mapping out connections between bodily states, emotional states, and our goals with an account of emotions as embodied appraisals. Emotions being embodied implies that self-knowledge of our bodily states aids in acquiring knowledge of our emotional states. Emotions as appraisals means that situations are appraised relative to our goals, such that self-knowledge of emotional states aids in acquiring knowledge of our goals, which are not always transparent to us. While emotional self-knowledge can be difficult to acquire, through skilled practice we can improve awareness and knowledge of our emotional and bodily states.
Underdetermination and Theoretical Virtues

Underdetermination and Theoretical Virtues
  • Dana Tulodziecki
  • Published online:
    09 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • This Element advances a novel view – the Epistemic Labour View – about the role, limits, and potential of the theoretical virtues as the arbiters of various versions of underdetermination. A central focus is to go beyond the often abstract discussions in this area and to show how the theoretical virtues can illuminate and resolve issues surrounding actual cases of underdetermination found in scientific practice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Rebel Governance in the Age of Climate Change

Rebel Governance in the Age of Climate Change
  • Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Leonardo Gentil-Fernandes, Elisabeth Gilmore, Reyko Huang, Danielle F. Jung, Cyanne E. Loyle
  • Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • In many areas experiencing severe impacts from climate change, it is not the state, but rather rebel groups who wield authority over populations. Rebels are often engaged in responding and adapting to the risks and impacts of climate change as part of their local governance efforts; however, a systematic consideration of the activities and implications has been lacking. This Element looks at a set of behaviors we call 'rebel environmental governance' (REG+). This refers to rebel actions aimed at protecting or managing the natural environment to affect civilian welfare amidst increasing pressures of climate change. A framework is advanced for understanding why rebels engage in environmental governance and the implications for security and climate governance. The Element brings rebel organizations into the conversation on climate change, highlighting their role in areas where state power is contested, weak, or absent. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
History and Hermeneutics

History and Hermeneutics
  • Paul Fairfield
  • Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Philosophical hermeneutics has shed a good deal of light both upon the methodological underpinnings of the humanities and social sciences generally and in particular upon some fundamental issues in the philosophy of history and history proper. The aim in this Element is to analyze those of its arguments that bear directly upon the latter fields. The principal topics taken up are Dilthey's distinction between understanding and explanation, the accent on meaning and experience, and the sense in which we may be said to belong to history. Heidegger's account of historicity and being-in-the-world, Gadamer's conceptions of historical understanding and belonging, and Ricoeur's view of historians as storytellers also come in for analysis. Other themes include the sense in which we may speak of a dialogue with the past, the notion of historical truth, and the problem of constructivism.
Life History and Child Development

Life History and Child Development
  • Lei Chang, Hui Jing Lu
  • Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
  • The biological life history (LH) theory has been increasingly utilized in psychology, especially in developmental psychology. However, there has not been a comprehensive text on the topic thatalso addresses applications in psychology. This Element fills this void. Organized into five sections, it initially delineates and explains the species-general concepts and principles forming LH theory, emphasizing that, although derived from observations between species, they can be used to explain individual differences within human populations. Grounded in the assumption of phenotypic plasticity, subsequent LH research conducted in psychology covers a wide range of cognitive and social behavioral domains. This body of LH research is discussed next. The Element concludes by presenting four broad recommendations, which, comprising one-quarter of the total content, provide specific directions for future LH research in psychology.
Metaontology

Metaontology
  • Kris McDaniel
  • Published online:
    06 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Metaontology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on questions that naturally arise when doing ontology. This Element offers the reader (some of) the elements of metaontology by way of an opinionated overview of (some of) its central arguments and positions. The first section of this Element focuses on whether there are nonexistent objects. It discusses historical figures such as Suarez, Brentano, Twardowski, and Meinong, as well as contemporary figures such as Lewis, van Inwagen, Thomasson, and Zalta. The second section focuses on whether ontological questions are trivial to answer and whether ontological debates are merely verbal debates. Can there be different concepts of existence or different meanings of 'exists' or other ontological expressions? If ontological questions are nontrivial, are they nontrivial only if a substantive metaphysical view is true? Even if there aren't different senses of 'exist,' might there be different modes of being or ways to exist?
Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs, and Quicksands

Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs, and Quicksands
  • Gendered Party Leadership in Parliamentary Systems
  • Andrea S. Aldrich, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
  • Published online:
    05 June 2025
    Print publication:
    19 June 2025
  • Using novel leadership data from eleven developed parliamentary democracies between 1980 and 2020, this Element asks how gender conditions party leaders' candidacy, selection, and survival. It examines the life cycle of party leadership careers of 276 leaders with a focus on three categories of variables: performance indicators, (s)election details, and inclusiveness of political culture. It tests the existing theories of glass ceilings and glass cliffs on how certain conditions make it more likely that women run for and are selected as party leaders. The Element also offers an original quicksand theory on leaders' survival in office that, for women, leadership is akin to being caught in quicksand. Several factors agitate the quicksand and make them sink faster. The authors data shows support for the glass ceiling and quicksand theories. Yet, they find mixed support for the glass-cliff theory. The Element offers unique insights into women's experience with party leadership.
Towards More Inclusive Varieties of Capitalism

Towards More Inclusive Varieties of Capitalism
  • Simon Collinson
  • Published online:
    30 May 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
  • Rising inequality in advanced economies is a global challenge and a major factor behind the current wave of geo-political disruption. It has been driven by a polarisation between regions which are creating wealth and benefitting from wealth creation, and those left behind. This justifies a wholesale reinvention of these capitalist systems. Focusing on the UK example, this Element presents evidence of systemic failure, with low productivity alongside higher levels of deprivation in city-regions outside of London. Comparisons show that this is a challenge for other advanced economies. Long term underinvestment in regions has reached a tipping point a centralised governments channels public resources into London, rather than 'levelling-up'. This Element proposes several 'intelligent interventions,' emphasising the need for stronger and more inclusive regional innovation systems, built on a deeper understanding of sustainable local growth pathways. Although based primarily on the UK experience, these policies are relevant beyond the UK context.
Automobility and the Anthropocene

Automobility and the Anthropocene
  • The Car as Post-Human
  • Gordon M. Sayre
  • Published online:
    30 May 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
  • The automobile has transformed Earth's habitats and humans' habits since the 1890s, when it, this Element argues, began the Anthropocene. Climate change now motivates efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, of which cars and trucks account for at least 10 percent. Shifting to electric vehicles is not enough; one needs to better understand the power cars hold over humans. Environmental humanities scholars examine human/machine hybrids but have ignored the most obvious example. Humans driving cars are social agents constituting a civil society of automobility in roadscape environments. This Element traces the evolution of cars from horsecars, carriages, and bicycles, and the influence of Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan on labor standards and consumer behaviors. As the car industry pushes high-tech autonomous or self-driving vehicles, it relies on futuristic fantasies and false promises. The ills of automobility cannot be solved with new products that only intensify human dependence upon cars.
Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England

Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England
  • Richard Sowerby
  • Published online:
    29 May 2025
    Print publication:
    29 May 2025
  • When men and women in early medieval England thought about the world around them, they did so in ways that often strike us as strange. In their surviving writings, we are confronted continually with unfamiliar ideas – about the creatures and beings which populated the world, about the forces and phenomena which shaped it, and about the ways in which human beings might enact change upon it through ritual, magic, and prayer. Although unfamiliar, these ideas give us important indications of how early medieval English thinkers characterized and categorized their surroundings and their experiences. Of substantial interest to many of them was the question of how they might distinguish correctly between what was 'natural' in the world, and what was not. This Element examines what that distinction meant to the inhabitants of early medieval England, and under what circumstances they felt compelled to explore it.
Management of Moderate or Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Management of Moderate or Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
  • Saeed Kayhanian, Erta Beqiri, Ari Ercole, Adel Helmy
  • Published online:
    29 May 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025
  • The management of patients with moderate and severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) is centred on the intensive care management to limit the extent of secondary injury to the brain, following the primary trauma. This management aims to optimise the homeostatic environment of the brain after injury and can be guided by multi-modality monitoring, including intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring. This management often follows a tiered approach to introducing more aggressive interventions to correct physiology, based on evidence for ongoing secondary injury, such as raised ICP. The balance between risk and benefit for these interventions for individual patients is difficult, particularly in the absence of high quality randomised trials for many interventions in this area. In this Element, the authors outline both the approach to intensive care management of moderate and severe TBI, as well as the evidence base available for the interventions discussed.
Heidegger on Transcendence

Heidegger on Transcendence
  • Chad Engelland
  • Published online:
    28 May 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025
  • Heidegger on Transcendence maps the deep ambivalences that attend Heidegger's lasting commitment to the transcendental tradition, construed here broadly to include not only phenomenological but also modern, medieval, and ancient predecessors. It defends Heidegger's commitment by explicating the essential function of the transcendental within his path of thinking and by contextualizing his later comments on transcending the limits of the subject still inherent in the metaphysical language heretofore available to transcendental thought.
Climate Change on Trial

Climate Change on Trial
  • Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action
  • César Rodríguez-Garavito
  • Published online:
    27 May 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • This Element tells the twenty-year socio-legal story of human rights-based climate change litigation. Based on an original database of the totality of rights-based climate change (RCC) lawsuits around the world as well as interviews with leading actors and participant observation in the field, the Element explains the rise and global diffusion of RCC litigation. It combines insights from global governance, international law, climate policy, human rights, and legal mobilization theory in order to offer a socio-legal account of the actors, strategies, and norms that have emerged at the intersection of human rights and climate governance. By proposing a broad understanding of the impacts of legal mobilization that includes direct and indirect, material and symbolic effects, it documents the contributions and shortcomings of human rights litigation in addressing the climate emergency. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Institutional Acceleration

Institutional Acceleration
  • The Consequences of Technological Change in a Digital Economy
  • Darcy W. E. Allen, Chris Berg, Jason Potts
  • Published online:
    26 May 2025
    Print publication:
    29 May 2025
  • This Element develops a theory of institutional acceleration to explain the transformation to a digital economy through a cluster of frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing, cryptography, and low-earth orbit infrastructure. Unlike previous technological revolutions, these technologies transform not how we organise things, but how we coordinate economic activity. The authors' supertransition thesis explains why these digital technologies shouldn't be understood in isolation, but rather should be understood in how they combine to create new institutional possibilities, leading to more open, complex, and global economic systems. Drawing on evolutionary economics and institutional theory, this Element shows how this evolutionary process is reshaping our institutional economic architecture. Ultimately, institutional acceleration drives greater computation and knowledge into our economic systems.
Divine Motivation and Humanity

Divine Motivation and Humanity
  • Jordan Wessling, Ross Parker
  • Published online:
    26 May 2025
    Print publication:
    19 June 2025
  • Theists maintain that God created the world and acts within it. However, opinions divide regarding the motives that rest behind and systematically structure God's actions ad extra, especially those actions pertaining to humanity. The major paradigms differ as to whether God is principally motivated (i) by the goal of glorifying Himself, or (ii) by the demands of His own holiness, or (iii) in perfect conformity to moral norms, or (iv) by perfect love. The challenge of providing a theoretical framework for understanding God's fundamental motives vis-à-vis creation constitutes the problem of divine motivation. This Element addresses this problem from a Christian perspective. It assesses leading divine motivational frameworks concerning God's engagement with humanity, and it defends one framework in particular: the Agapist Framework. According to this preferred framework, God's actions toward humans are fundamentally motivated by God's perfect love.

Page 10 of 112