This paper revisits the usual narrative of Dāʾūd al-Qayṣarī's life, bringing to light evidence of his stay in Ilkhanid Tabriz. Recent studies mention a connection with Ilkhanid Iran, where he would have met his master ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, but present no substantiated details as to when and where this happened and how these events fit in his life. A document held at the Bodleian, corroborated by evidence from other manuscripts, shows that the common narrative of Qayṣarī's life (in which links with Iran are almost entirely absent) is untenable, and presents evidence of Qayṣarī's presence in Ilkhanid Tabriz. These new elements invite us to revise our perception of Qayṣarī's oeuvre, in particular the idea that it was written under the auspices of the nascent Ottoman power, and further investigate the intellectual scene in Tabriz in the last years of the reign of Abu Saʿīd and of his vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn.

Pundits and academics alike are increasingly concerned about the health of democracy worldwide. Much of this concern is tied to the rise of populism, a global phenomenon presenting challenges to both long-established and relatively young democracies. Political science has been at the forefront of this debate, and thanks to a growing—but not universal—consensus on the ideational definition of populism, our understanding of the subject has deepened considerably. This symposium maps key debates on the complex and often ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. In this concluding piece, we build on the arguments presented throughout the symposium and related academic discussions to outline two paths for future research on the populism and democracy nexus: a top-down and a bottom-up perspective.

Since the discovery of the TÜRKMEN-KARAHÖYÜK 1 inscription in 2019, Iron Age Anatolian scholarship has been energised by the appearance of a hitherto unknown kingdom in the Konya Plain ruled by ‘Great King Hartapu’. While the historical context of Hartapu’s inscriptions have undergone dramatic reassessment in light of the new text as well as the archaeology of the associated site Türkmen-Karahöyük, little attention has been paid to the conditions that would have contributed to the rise of this kingdom in the first place. Although archaeological data remains scarce for south-cen- tral Anatolia during the early first millennium BCE, this article proposes several factors that likely played a role in the emergence of the kingdom: cultural and economic interaction with the Neo-Assyrian Empire, similar relations with Phrygia, emulative competition with its Tabalian peer polities and a propitious ecological setting at a time of significant environmental transformations. Interspersed with these arguments are reflections and anecdotes about Hartapu, and especially the way we represent Hartapu visually, that evoke how the effort we have spent on understanding political dynamics in Hartapu’s kingdom has been disproportionately imbalanced toward Hartapu himself, with insufficient consideration having been given to longer term, structural forces. Such reflections lead us to reconsider the potentially disproportionately impactful effect of Hartapu’s monuments in antiquity, and the extent to which Hartapu’s kingdom in fact consisted of his own self-imaging.

We present a construction of left braces of right nilpotency class at most two based on suitable actions of an abelian group on itself with an invariance condition. This construction allows us to recover the construction of a free right nilpotent one-generated left brace of class two.

This article reflects on my subjective position in relation to the ways in which time passes in two recent works, Dead Time (2019) and Towards a slowing of the past (2023). I consider how each of these pieces relates to my interest in musical time and demonstrate how the inclusion of pre-recorded materials has allowed me to explore aspects of memory and repetition in new ways. A Deleuzian model of difference and repetition is considered and used to illustrate how becoming might be observed in the mind and body of the perceiver as much as in the materials themselves. I reflect on the complex relationship between the virtual and the real by examining differences in perception between performed events and pre-recorded versions of those same events that are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. I discuss the ways in which sampled material integrated within the performances of these works might evoke different temporal states, such as metaxis, in which we are simultaneously engaged with aspects of pastness and presentness.

In recent years, the Japanese public has hailed a new national hero, the late Lieutenant General Higuchi Kiichirō. Unlike other notable military figures of his era, Higuchi’s heroism is unconventional, if not unique. Despite playing a leading role in the defence of Hokkaido against the Soviet Red Army in 1945, it is humanitarian efforts that have cemented Higuchi’s lasting legacy in public memory. Presently, a plethora of publications, TV documentaries, a museum, and monuments praise his actions during the ‘Otpor Incident’, in which he is said to have saved up to 20,000 Jewish refugees stranded in the winter of 1938 along the Soviet-Manchukuo border. This article questions the authenticity of Higuchi’s acclaimed rescue efforts, highlighting discrepancies that cast doubt on the entire narrative. It suggests the possibility of the ‘Otpor Incident’ being a complete fabrication or, at best, an extremely exaggerated account of a minor event, aimed at enhancing post-war personal and national reputations. Critically, this piece contends that Higuchi’s current recognition is part of a strategic move by nationalist groups in Japan to use Holocaust narratives to divert attention from Japan’s history of wartime aggression and colonialism. To substantiate this view, this article assesses the evidence of Higuchi’s involvement in the supposed rescue, examines the narrative’s post-war evolution, and analyses the motives for its initial dissemination and recent surge in popularity.

In the entirety of his corpus, Spinoza uses the phrase ‘simplest bodies’ [corporibus simplicissimis] exactly twice and never offers an explanation of what it means. That said, it appears to play a fundamental role in his thought. This paper evaluates two twentieth-century readings of Spinoza in order to present a new original theory of simplest bodies. Ultimately, I present a reading of Spinoza which accepts a nuanced amalgamation of these accounts. I argue that the right understanding of Spinozistic simplest bodies is something like the following: simplest bodies are portions of extension featuring motive homogeneity among their necessarily infinite parts. For Spinoza, simplest bodies thus feature no mereological simplicity at all, but rather only motive simplicity, in that they are properly characterized by a single ratio of motion and rest.

Chichilticale is a long-sought-after location on the Coronado expedition route in southeastern Arizona. It is referred to numerous times in documents, and various expedition members stayed there, making it potentially one of the most discoverable of the Coronado expedition camp sites. Nonetheless, it remained lost until recently when data from a variety of sources provided a basis to establish hypotheses that were then tested and retested until Chichilticale was located. This site, 1 km long, has hundreds of Spanish period artifacts related to the 1539–1540 two-month winter encampment established during Melchior Díaz's reconnaissance north to check on Fray Marcos de Niza's report. Crossbow bolt heads, copper lace aglets, caret- or gable-headed nails, copper bells, and many other artifacts and features provide a surprisingly rich archaeological record of this place and of an unexpected and unrecorded battle that changes history for the Sobaipuri O'odham.

Let $B^{H}$ be a d-dimensional fractional Brownian motion with Hurst index $H\in(0,1)$, $f\,:\,[0,1]\longrightarrow\mathbb{R}^{d}$ a Borel function, and $E\subset[0,1]$, $F\subset\mathbb{R}^{d}$ are given Borel sets. The focus of this paper is on hitting probabilities of the non-centered Gaussian process $B^{H}+f$. It aims to highlight how each component f, E and F is involved in determining the upper and lower bounds of $\mathbb{P}\{(B^H+f)(E)\cap F\neq \emptyset \}$. When F is a singleton and f is a general measurable drift, some new estimates are obtained for the last probability by means of suitable Hausdorff measure and capacity of the graph $Gr_E(f)$. As application we deal with the issue of polarity of points for $(B^H+f)\vert_E$ (the restriction of $B^H+f$ to the subset $E\subset (0,\infty)$).

How does power affect threat perception? Drawing on advances in psychological research on power, I find that the sense of state power inflates the perception of threats. The sense of power activates intuitive thinking in the decision-making process, including a reliance on gut feelings and cognitive shortcuts like heuristics and prior beliefs. In turn, as psychological IR research shows, these mechanisms tend to inflate threat perception. The powerful assess threats from the gut rather than the head. Experimental evidence from the US and China, a reanalysis of a survey of Russian elites, and a large-scale text analysis of Cold War US foreign policy elites lend support to this expectation. The findings help to psychologically reconcile enduring theoretical puzzles—from “underbalancing” to “overextension”—and generate entirely new ones, like the possibility that decision makers of rising, not declining, states feel more fear. Together, the paper offers a “first image reversed” challenge to bottom-up accounts of psychological IR. Decision-maker psychology is also a dependent variable shaped by the balance of power, with important implications for a world returning to great power competition.