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This Element is an examination of the philosophical themes presented in Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Topics include happiness, the voluntary and choice, the doctrine of the mean, particular virtues of character and temperamental means, virtues of thought, akrasia, pleasure, friendship, and luck. Special attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of virtues of character and thought and their relation to happiness, the reason why Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist. The virtues of character have not received the attention they deserve in most discussions of the relationship between the two treatises.
The very idea of mental illness is contested. Given its differences from physical illnesses, is it right to count it, and particular mental illnesses, as genuinely medical as opposed to moral matters? One debate concerns its value-ladenness, which has been used by anti-psychiatrists to argue that it does not exist. Recent attempts to define mental illness divide both on the presence of values and on their consequences. Philosophers and psychiatrists have explored the nature of the general kinds that mental illnesses might comprise, influenced by psychiatric taxonomies such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases, and the rise of a rival biological 'meta-taxonomy': the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The assumption that the concept of mental illness has a culturally invariant core has also been questioned. This Element serves as a guide to these contested debates.
Prioritarianism holds that improvements in someone's life (gains in well-being) are morally more valuable, the worse off the person would otherwise be. The doctrine is impartial, holding that a gain in one person's life counts exactly the same as an identical gain in the life of anyone equally well off. If we have some duty of beneficence to make the world better, prioritarianism specifies the content of the duty. Unlike the utilitarian, the prioritarian holds that we should not only seek to increase human well-being, but also distribute it fairly across persons, by tilting in favor of the worse off. A variant version adds that we should also give priority to the morally deserving – to saints over scoundrels. The view is a standard for right choice of individual actions and public policies, offering a distinctive alternative to utilitarianism (maximize total well-being), sufficiency (make everyone's condition good enough) and egalitarianism (make everyone's condition the same).
Quantitative social scientists use survival analysis to understand the forces that determine the duration of events. This Element provides a guideline to new techniques and models in survival analysis, particularly in three areas: non-proportional covariate effects, competing risks, and multi-state models. It also revisits models for repeated events. The Element promotes multi-state models as a unified framework for survival analysis and highlights the role of general transition probabilities as key quantities of interest that complement traditional hazard analysis. These quantities focus on the long term probabilities that units will occupy particular states conditional on their current state, and they are central in the design and implementation of policy interventions.
Neoclassical and Romantic verse cultures are often assumed to sit in an oppositional relationship to one another, with the latter amounting to a hostile reaction against the former. But there are in fact a good deal of continuities between the two movements, ones that strike at the heart of the evolution of verse forms in the period. This Element proposes that the mid-eighteenth-century poet Mark Akenside, and his hugely influential Pleasures of Imagination, represent a case study in the deep connections between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Akenside's poem offers a vital illustration of how verse was a rival to philosophy in the period, offering a new perspective on philosophic problems of appearance, or how the world 'seems to be'. What results from this is a poetic form of knowing: one that foregrounds feeling over fact, that connects Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and that Akenside called the imagination's 'pleasures'.
Fossil crinoids are exceptionally suited to deep-time studies of community paleoecology and niche partitioning. By merging ecomorphological trait and phylogenetic data, this Element summarizes niche occupation and community paleoecology of crinoids from the Bromide fauna of Oklahoma (Sandbian, Upper Ordovician). Patterns of community structure and niche evolution are evaluated over a ~5 million-year period through comparison with the Brechin Lagerstätte (Katian, Upper Ordovician). The authors establish filtration fan density, food size selectivity, and body size as major axes defining niche differentiation, and niche occupation is strongly controlled by phylogeny. Ecological strategies were relatively static over the study interval at high taxonomic scales, but niche differentiation and specialization increased in most subclades. Changes in disparity and species richness indicate the transition between the early-middle Paleozoic Crinoid Evolutionary Faunas was already underway by the Katian due to ecological drivers and was not triggered by the Late Ordovician mass extinction.
There is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the 'curse of bigness.' But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools.
In this Element, we investigate how economic geography, the distribution of subnational economic endowments within a nation, shapes long-run patterns of inequality through its impact on the development of fiscal capacity. We present an argument that links economic geography to capacity through different types of industrialization processes. We show how early industrializers shape spatial distributions domestically by investing in productivity across their nations, and externally by reinforcing spatial polarization among late industrializers. We also show how differences in economic geography impact the process of capacity building, setting the stage for the modern politics of redistribution discussed in Volume II. We support this argument with descriptive data, case studies, and cross-national analyses.
One is often said to be reasoning well when they are reasoning logically. Many attempts to say what logical reasoning is have been proposed, but one commonly proposed system is first-order classical logic. This Element will examine the basics of first-order classical logic and discuss some surrounding philosophical issues. The first half of the Element develops a language for the system, as well as a proof theory and model theory. The authors provide theorems about the system they developed, such as unique readability and the Lindenbaum lemma. They also discuss the meta-theory for the system, and provide several results there, including proving soundness and completeness theorems. The second half of the Element compares first-order classical logic to other systems: classical higher order logic, intuitionistic logic, and several paraconsistent logics which reject the law of ex falso quodlibet.
Recent interest in the evolution of the social contract is extended by providing a throughly naturalistic, evolutionary account of the biological underpinnings of a social contract theory of morality. This social contract theory of morality (contractevolism) provides an evolutionary justification of the primacy of a moral principle of maximisation of the opportunities for evolutionary reproductive success (ERS), where maximising opportunities does not entail an obligation on individuals to choose to maximise their ERS. From that primary principle, the moral principles of inclusion, individual sovereignty (liberty) and equality can be derived. The implications of these principles, within contractevolism, are explored through an examination of patriarchy, individual sovereignty and copulatory choices, and overpopulation and extinction. Contractevolism is grounded in evolutionary dynamics that resulted in humans and human societies. The most important behavioural consequences of evolution to contractevolism are reciprocity, cooperation, empathy, and the most important cognitive consequences are reason and behavioural modification.
This Element argues that Ireland did not experience a disenchanted modernity, nor a decline in magic. It suggests that beliefs, practices and traditions concerning witchcraft and magic developed and adapted to modernity to retain cultural currency until the end of the twentieth century. This analysis provides the backdrop for the first systematic exploration of how historic Irish trials of witches and cunning-folk were represented by historians, antiquarians, journalists, dramatists, poets, and novelists in Ireland between the late eighteenth and late twentieth century. It is demonstrated that this work created an accepted narrative of Irish witchcraft and magic which glossed over, ignored, or obscured the depth of belief in witchcraft, both in the past and in contemporary society. Collectively, their work gendered Irish witchcraft, created a myth of a disenchanted, modern Ireland, and reinforced competing views of Irishness and Irish identity. These long-held stereotypes were only challenged in the late twentieth-century.
This Element aims to explore how the relation between societal organisation and legal orders – the question of materiality – has been investigated in philosophy of law. The starting point of the Element is that such relation has often been left invisible or thematised in poor and reductive terms. After having explained the main reasons behind this neglect, the Element provides an overview of the three main approaches to legal philosophy whose contributions, though not always effective, can still provide some insights for a contemporary analysis of legal orders' materiality: materialism, legal institutionalism, and the new materialism. The last section of the Element suggests looking for a footing for the study of materiality in two fields: the metaphysics of relations and the political economy of legal orders.
This Element examines progress in research and practice in forensic authorship analysis. It describes the existing research base and examines what makes an authorship analysis more or less reliable. Further to this, the author describes the recent history of forensic science and the scientific revolution brought about by the invention of DNA evidence. They chart the rise of three major changes in forensic science – the recognition of contextual bias in analysts, the need for validation studies and shift in logic of providing identification evidence. This Element addresses the idea of progress in forensic authorship analysis in terms of these three issues with regard to new knowledge about the nature of authorship and methods in stylistics and stylometry. The author proposes that the focus needs to shift to validation of protocols for approaching case questions, rather than on validation of systems or general approaches. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element examines the concept of reflective practice in language teaching. It includes a brief description of what reflective practice is and how it is operationalized by two of its main protagonists, John Dewey and Donald Schön, as well as some of the limitations of their conceptions. This is used as an introduction to how the author further developed their conceptions when operationalizing reflective practice for language teachers through a five-stage framework for reflecting on practice for language teachers. The author then presents an in-depth case study of the reflections of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher working in Costa Rica as he moved through the five stages of the framework for reflecting on practice. The author then goes on to outline and discuss how reflective practice may be moved forward and calls attention to the importance of emotions in the process of reflection for language teachers.
In discrete choice models the relationships between the independent variables and the choice probabilities are nonlinear, depending on both the value of the particular independent variable being interpreted and the values of the other independent variables. Thus, interpreting the magnitude of the effects (the “substantive effects”) of the independent variables on choice behavior requires the use of additional interpretative techniques. Three common techniques for interpretation are described here: first differences, marginal effects and elasticities, and odds ratios. Concepts related to these techniques are also discussed, as well as methods to account for estimation uncertainty. Interpretation of binary logits, ordered logits, multinomial and conditional logits, and mixed discrete choice models such as mixed multinomial logits and random effects logits for panel data are covered in detail. The techniques discussed here are general, and can be applied to other models with discrete dependent variables which are not specifically described here.
Over the past three decades, the population of international students throughout the world has steadily increased. Although university students choose to study in locations other than their home country for a variety of reasons, including professional development and disciplinary training, nearly all education abroad programs have intercultural learning as a central goal. In this Element, perspectives derived from cross-cultural psychological research are applied to an investigation of the effectiveness of study abroad as a mechanism for intercultural learning. Effectiveness is broadly defined and includes not only overall favorable program outcomes, such as gains in intercultural skills, knowledge, attitudes, and awareness, but also a recognition that study abroad experiences and outcomes may vary depending upon participants' diverse and intersectional identities. Best practices for facilitating intercultural learning through study abroad are identified and strategies are outlined for addressing the methodological challenges of research in this area.
The practices of visual artists can never be decontextualised from language. Firstly, artists are constantly in dialogue with their peers, dealers, critics, and audiences about their creative activities and these interactions impact on the work they produce. Secondly, artists' conceptualisations of what artistic practice encompasses are always shaped by wider social discourses. These discourses, however, and their manifestation in the language of everyday life are subject to continual change, and potentially reshape the way that artists conceptualise their practices. Using a 235,000-word diachronic corpus developed from artists' interviews and statements, this Element investigates shifts in artists' use of language to conceptualise their art practice from 1950 to 2019. It then compares these shifts to see if they align with changes in the wider English lexicon and whether there might be a relationship between everyday language change and the aesthetic and conceptual developments that take place in the art world.
Tax policies are informed by principles developed in the tax theory and policy literature. This Element surveys the policy lessons that emerge from optimal tax analysis since the 1970s. This Element begins with the evolution of tax policy principles from the comprehensive income approach to the expenditure tax approach to normative tax analysis based on social welfare maximization and recounts key results from the optimal income tax analysis inspired by Mirrlees and extended by Diamond to the extensive margin approach. This Element also emphasizes analytical techniques that yield empirically relevant concepts and show the equity-efficiency trade-off at the heart of tax policy. We also extend the analysis to recent literature incorporating involuntary unemployment, and policies like welfare and unemployment insurance.
The idea that physical death may not mark the end of an individual's existence has long been a source of fascination. It is perhaps unsurprising that we are apt to wonder what it is that happens to us when we die. Is death the end of me and all the experiences that count as mine? Or might I exist, and indeed have experiences, beyond the time of my death? And yet, deep metaphysical puzzles arise at the very suggestion that persons might continue to exist following physical death. Indeed, whether, and how, one can exist post-mortem will depend in no small part on what sorts of things we are and on what it takes for things like us to persist across temporal durations and other changes. These topics and their application to the growing collection of materialist accounts of resurrection are the focus of this Element.
Suffering and evil in the world provide the basis for the most difficult challenge to monotheistic belief. This Element discusses how the three great monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – respond to the problem of suffering and evil. Different versions of the problem, types of answers, and recurring themes in philosophical and religious sources are analyzed. Objections to the enterprise of theodicy are also discussed as are additional objections to the monotheistic God more broadly. This treatment culminates in a recommendation for how monotheism can best respond to the most serious formulation of the problem, the argument from gratuitous evil.