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This Element is a philosophical history of Social Darwinism. It begins by discussing the meaning of the term, moving then to its origins, paying particular attention to whether it is Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer who is the true father of the idea. It gives an exposition of early thinking on the subject, covering Darwin and Spencer themselves and then on to Social Darwinism as found in American thought, with special emphasis on Andrew Carnegie, and Germany with special emphasis on Friedrich von Bernhardi. Attention is also paid to outliers, notably the Englishman Alfred Russel Wallace, the Russian Peter Kropotkin, and the German Friedrich Nietzsche. From here we move into the twentieth century looking at Adolf Hitler - hardly a regular Social Darwinian given he did not believe in evolution - and in the Anglophone world, Julian Huxley and Edward O. Wilson, who reflected the concerns of their society.
This Element provides a concise review of the existing literature on content, antecedents and consequences of economic news coverage. It tests and refines prominent assumptions and hypotheses in this area. Relying on communication science theories such as framing, news values and media dependency theories, we first outline and explain how media cover the economy. Additionally, it demonstrates that coverage has a fundamental impact above and beyond the state of the economy, both on economic perceptions and political attitudes of citizens, as well as on political decision makers and media reputation of a wide variety of organizations.
This Element provides an introduction to the hiddenness argument, as presented by John Schellenberg, and its up-to-date discussion in a comprehensible way. It concludes with a brief assessment of where things stand, from the author's point of view, and why divine hiddenness should not reduce a reflective theist's confidence in theism.
This study examines a network of writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), which recounts Prince's experiences as an enslaved person in the West Indies and the events that brought her to seek assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society in London. It focuses on the three writers who produced the text - Mary Prince, Thomas Pringle, and Susanna Moodie - with glances at their pro-slavery opponent, James MacQueen, and their literary friends and relatives. The History connects the Black Atlantic, a diasporic formation created through the colonial trade in enslaved people, with the Anglophone Atlantic, created through British migration and colonial settlement. It also challenges Romantic ideals of authorship as an autonomous creative act and the literary text as an aesthetically unified entity. Collaborating with Prince on the History's publication impacted Moodie's and Pringle's attitudes towards slavery and shaped their own accounts of migration and settlement.
The main body of this Element, about Kant's theory of conscience, is divided into two sections. The first focuses on exegesis of Kant's ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that, although many of Kant's claims about conscience are prima facie inconsistent, a close examination of context generally can dissolve apparent contradictions. The second section of the Element focuses on philosophical issues in Kantian ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that many positions traditionally associated with Kantian ethics, including the denial of moral luck, the nonaccidental rightness condition, and the guise of the objectively good, are at variance with Kant's ethics.
This Element develops an analytical framework for understanding the role of ideas in political life and communication. Power in Ideas argues that the empirical study of ideas should combine interpretive approaches to derive meaning and understand influence with quantitative analysis to help determine the reach, spread, and impact of ideas. This Element illustrates this approach through three case studies: the idea of reparations in Ta-Nehisi Coates's “The Case for Reparations,” the idea of free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook policy speech at Georgetown University, and the idea of universal basic income in Andrew Yang's “Freedom Dividend.” Power in Ideas traces the landscapes and spheres within which these ideas emerged and were articulated, the ways they were encoded in discourse, the fields they traveled across, and how they became powerful.
Musical community is a notion commonly evoked in situations of intensive collective activity and fervent negotiation of identities. Passion Square shows, the daily singing of Chinese pop classics in parks and on street corners in the city of Wuhan, have an ambivalent relationship with these ideas. They inspire modest outward signs of engagement and are guided by apparently individualistic concerns; singers are primarily motivated by making a living through the relationships they build with patrons, and reflection on group belonging is of lesser concern. How do these orientations help complicate the foundations of typical musical community discourses? This Element addresses community as a quality rather than as an entity to which people belong, exploring its ebbs and flows as associations between people, other bodies and the wider street music environment intersect with its various theoretical implications. A de-idealised picture of musical community better acknowledges the complexities of everyday musical experiences.
Along with twentieth-century developments in playing techniques, technologies, and concepts of musical sound, the notations employed by composers have also changed. Composers of what Umberto Eco calls 'open works' often employ intentionally ambiguous music notations. These open notations ask the performer to play a radical and active role in co-creating the musical work. Scores that feature open notations have been part of the Western classical music landscape since the mid-twentieth century, and continue to have a vibrant community of practitioners today. In this Element, Tristan McKay considers intersections of ambiguity, authority, and identity in works with open notations. He develops a semiotic approach to open notation analysis and puts it into practice with in-depth analyses of openly notated works by Earle Brown, Will Redman, and Leah Asher.
This Element documents the diversity and dissensus of scholarship on the political resource curse, diagnoses its sources, and directs scholarly attention towards what the authors believe will be more fruitful avenues of future research. In the scholarship to date, there is substantial regional heterogeneity and substantial evidence denying the existence of a political resource curse. This dissensus is located in theory, measure, and research design, especially regarding measurement error and endogenous selection. The work then turns to strategies for reconnecting research on resource politics to the broader literature on democratic development. Finally, the results of the authors' own research is presented, showing that a set of historically contingent events in the Middle East and North Africa are at the root of what has been mistaken for a global political resource curse.
Local newspapers can hold back the rising tide of political division in America by turning away from the partisan battles in Washington and focusing their opinion page on local issues. When a local newspaper in California dropped national politics from its opinion page, the resulting space filled with local writers and issues. We use a pre-registered analysis plan to show that after this quasi-experiment, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change. While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores national politics could help local newspapers push back against political polarization.
In the modern marine environment, barium isotope (δ138Ba) variations are primarily driven by barite cycling—barite incorporates 'light' Ba isotopes from solution, rendering the residual Ba reservoir enriched in 'heavy' Ba isotopes by a complementary amount. Since the processes of barite precipitation and dissolution are vertically segregated and spatially heterogeneous, barite cycling drives systematic variations in the barium isotope composition of seawater and sediments. This Element examines these variations; evaluates their global, regional, local, and geological controls; and, explores how δ138Ba can be exploited to constrain the origin of enigmatic sedimentary sulfates and to study marine biogeochemistry over Earth's history.
This Element examines visual perception in the context of activities that involve moving about in complex, dynamic environments. A central theme is that the ability of humans and other animals to perceive their surroundings based on vision is profoundly shaped by the need to adaptively regulate locomotion to variations in the environment. As such, important new insights into what and how we perceive can be gleaned by investigating the connection between vision and the control of locomotion. I present an integrated summary of decades of research on the perception of self-motion and object motion based on optic flow, the perception of spatial layout and affordances, and the control strategies for guiding locomotion based on visual information. I also explore important theoretical issues and debates, including the question of whether visual control relies on internal models.
This Element looks critically at migration scenarios proposed for the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. After presenting some historical background to the development of migration studies, including types and definitions of migration as well as some of its possible material correlates, I consider how we go about studying human mobility and issues regarding 'ethnicity'. There follows a detailed and critical examination of the history of research related to migration and ethnicity in the southern Levant at the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC), considering both migrationist and anti-migrationist views. I then present and critique recent studies on climatic and related issues, as well as the current state of evidence from palaeogenetics and strontium isotope analyses. The conclusion attempts to look anew at this enigmatic period of transformation and social change, of mobility and connectivity, alongside the hybridised practices of social actors.
The authors provide a broad overview of economic aspects of commodity taxation, focussing in particular on theory and on policy applications in OECD countries. Some major papers in public economics have discussed whether these taxes should be levied at a uniform rate, or whether different commodities should be taxed differently, for reasons of either equity or efficiency. The authors begin with this question, and then discuss further issues, including the economic incidence of commodity taxes, the properties of the VAT, the taxation of financial services, the international aspects of commodity taxation, and environmental and health policy aspects.
This Element surveys the place of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's overall philosophical project and describes and analyzes the main arguments of the work. It also surveys the developments in Kant's thought that led to the first critique, and provides an account of the genesis of the book during the 'silent decade' of its composition in the 1770s based on Kant's handwritten notes from the period.
There is presently a debate between Subjectivists and Objectivists about moral wrongness. Subjectivism is the view that the moral status of our actions, whether they are morally wrong or not, is grounded in our subjective circumstances – either our beliefs about, or our evidence concerning, the world around us. Objectivism, on the other hand, is the view that the moral status of our actions is grounded in our objective circumstances – all those facts other than those which comprise our subjective circumstances. A third view, Ecumenism, has it that the moral status of our actions is grounded both in our subjective and our objective circumstances. After outlining and evaluating the various arguments both against Subjectivism and against Objectivism, this Element offers a tentative defense of Objectivism about moral wrongness.
The governance of emerging technologies does not follow a single governance paradigm because of complex interactions between government, industry, and civil actors. In this Element, we will argue that for emerging technologies, governance is a 'convergent paradigm'. We introduce governance issues associated with emerging technologies generally before turning to the specifics of nanotechnology. We then approach governance theory and practice by considering different perspectives on governance by their different orientations with respect to object and process. Finally, we construct a matrix of object and process oriented governance activities observed in the case of nanotechnology in the United States.
Harmonious relationships between groups are critical for democracy, and intergroup contact presents an appealing way to encourage this harmony. However, what kinds of contact work best? Ethan Busby reviews existing studies of contact, propose a framework for studying the political consequences of contact, and discusses four experiments following these recommendations. These studies focus on equal status contact and rely on different samples and contexts. Busby finds that equal-status does not promote more political support for racial and ethnic outgroups and can reduce outgroup support. The Element is concluded by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of contact generally.
Diverse and abundant lipid biomarker assemblages have been reported from a variety of Proterozoic marine environments from the careful analysis of well-preserved rocks and oils. These molecular biosignatures have provided unique insights into the communities and the environmental conditions which characterized the Proterozoic marine biosphere. We summarize some of the major temporal patterns evident in Proterozoic lipid biomarkers found to date, whilst emphasizing the scale of local heterogeneity found within Neoproterozoic oceans from region to region, and their relationship with the evolving ecological, climatic and ocean/atmospheric redox conditions. Short commentaries on a selection of papers published from the last 15 years of biomarker literature are given. The focus here is on key studies, highlighted for further reading, which have helped to better constrain the timing of the ecological expansion of eukaryotes in Proterozoic oceans or which have impacted on our knowledge of the biological sources of Proterozoic biomarkers.
Accountability is a staple of Public Administration scholarship, but scholars have been unsuccessful at developing a predictive model of accountable behavior. Large swaths of research about accountability still focuses on scarcely read annual reports as video footage of police encounters are watched and discussed by citizens regularly. In this Element, we seek to further a predictive model of accountability by understanding the norms and expectations associated with the implementation of Body-Worn Cameras. Specifically, this research examines when police departments release, or do not release, footage to the public and the expectations civilians have about the release of that footage. Indirectly, the norms and expectations associated with this technology have broad implications for societal values and the relationship between civilians and law enforcement. Our findings suggest the relationship between law enforcement and civilians is central to the implementation of this policy, and more broadly, accountability.