In recent years there has been a marked escalation in the study of Graeco-Roman associations. Useable data for recreating associational groups usually derive from the inscriptions embedded in stone monuments that have survived in the material record. Because data of this kind usually originate from groups with middling economic resources, it is imperative to focus particular attention on any data emerging from groups lower on the socio-economic scale. The second-century b.c.e. papyrus fragments of SB 3.7182 from Philadelphia in Egypt are a prime resource in this regard, surfacing from what must have been one of the most inconspicuous of associations. This article offers a detailed investigation of the general prosopography of the low-level association comprising a few enslaved men. It proposes that ten meetings are evident in the heavily damaged associational ledgers; that the association consisted of enslaved members of three distinct households; that a subscription or epidosis was collected at one meeting; and that we get a rare glimpse of low-level generosity enacted within the association in relation to the payment of membership fees, as well as an extremely rare glimpse of the agency of the enslaved.

The thesis uses various approaches to explore the algorithmic complexity of families of subsets of natural numbers. One of these approaches involves investigating upper semilattices of computable numberings of a given family and their complexity in different hierarchies. These semilattices, known as Rogers semilattices, can help distinguish different structural properties of families of partial computable functions and computably enumerable sets. As a result, by using Rogers semilattices of computable numberings, we can measure the algorithmic complexity of the corresponding family.

In the first part of thesis, we focus on limitwise monotonic numberings for families of limitwise monotonic sets and define their Rogers semilattices. The chapter investigates global invariants that show differences in the algebraic and elementary properties of the Rogers semilattices of families of sets from arithmetical hierarchy and Rogers semilattices of limitwise monotonic numberings. Such invariants include cardinality, laticeness, and types of isomorphism.

Within the second part of thesis, we explore the different forms of isomorphism exhibited by Rogers semilattices of families of sets in the analytical hierarchy. Additionally, we take into account various set-theoretic assumptions. Our research demonstrates that, when set-theoretic assumption known as Projective Determinacy is assumed, there exist an infinite number of non-isomorphic Rogers semilattices at each $\Sigma _n^1$-level of the analytical hierarchy.

I would also like to acknowledge the Grant of Science Committee of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan (AP19676989) and the Nazarbayev University Faculty Development Grant (N021220FD3851) for funding this research.

Abstract prepared by Zhansaya Tleuliyeva

zhansaya.tleuliyeva@nu.edu.kz.

URL: http://nur.nu.edu.kz/handle/123456789/7769.

Experiential learning opportunities are recognized to help students put classroom discussions into practice, build new peer networks, and challenge their own preconceptions about the roles of global structures and systems to advance health and wellbeing. After a pandemic-related hiatus, the University of Southern California Institute on Inequalities in Global Health returned to Geneva, Switzerland with students for two weeks at the time of the 2024 World Health Assembly to learn and engage with how global health governance plays out on an international stage. We brought eleven passionate and engaged USC Master’s in Public Health (MPH) students whose interests covered a range of issues, including child and maternal nutrition, sexual and reproductive health and rights in conflict settings, mental health, and noncommunicable diseases, among many other topics. We spent two weeks meeting with inter-governmental organizations, international advocacy organizations, United Nations agencies, and joint funded programs, and our students built their own event schedule during the World Health Assembly to cover the health topics they were most interested in pursuing. Our aim was to have students engage with the complex interplay of health, law, and rights, and to see in real time how research and education inform policy, on local, national and global levels. As instructors and coordinators, we are convinced that the role of experiential learning has never been more important or influential. Multilateralism is under attack, and rights regressions are rampant. We found that fostering honest, content driven conversations with our organizational partners, and then having intense follow-up with our students, resulted in new perspectives– personally and professionally – which is likely to serve the work of the students in global health for the years to come. When the distance between classroom readings and the actual people steering global health can be bridged, university courses that center experiential learning offer the opportunity for emerging health leaders to truly understand the structures and systems in place, and better imagine their own roles in the fight for the right to health.

New lines of theorizing in international relations don’t appear very often. Realism proudly proclaims a lineage of 2,500-odd years. Liberalism, in its various forms, traces its roots back several centuries. The appearance and spread of constructivism in the 1990s thus invite explanation. In this essay we explore the “construction of constructivism”—both the conditions of possibility for intellectual change and the goals of scholars proposing it. Constructivism’s success was both unexpected and, in some ways, unintended. Proponents of existing theories remained (and remain) confident in their own tools and early constructivists often had modest goals. Constructivism took off for at least two broad reasons. One was the intellectual landscape of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a period when IR theory in the United States had sharply narrowed its concerns, leaving mainstream scholarship on the back foot when the USSR collapsed, and the Cold War ended. The second set of reasons lay in the nature of the constructivist ideas, themselves. Intellectually, constructivist ideas had a plasticity and capaciousness that other IR theories did not. Theoretically, it is a social theory, not specific to IR, which made it useful for tackling a broad range of problems. Empirically, it was portable and open to political analysis at all levels and in all places. Methodologically, it was pluralistic; scholars can and have used diverse methods to explore its claims. In this situation, constructivist scholars, overwhelmingly young and untenured, worked hard to carve out a niche for themselves in the field. That these ideas caught on and became broadly popular has surprised us as much as anyone.

It is often morally important that you have a choice between two options in the sense that each option is available to you and you are not coerced into choosing one or the other. Even when you have a choice, though, the presence of time constraints and other noncoercive influences can prevent you from taking the time you need to make up your mind and really choose for yourself. How are we to understand this latter phenomenon? In this essay, I argue that while choosing for yourself seems, at first glance, to be an exercise in discovering your preferences, this is not the whole story. At least sometimes, choosing for yourself instead involves creating your preferences—and, in so doing, choosing what kind of person and valuer to be—through the exercise of what I call formative autonomy. I then explore some objections to this account and some implications for public health policy and clinical ethics. Throughout, I draw primarily on examples that involve choosing whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy and the regulations governing such choices.

I find myself largely in agreement with the argument presented in Frieman's debate article (2024) on knowing and narrativity in archaeology, and I share the author's view of feminist epistemology as key to embracing the conditions of the discipline (see e.g. Pétursdóttir & Sørensen 2023; Sørensen et al. 2024). Here, I consider some of the perspectives that Frieman leaves slightly underexplored.

During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.

This paper offers a new perspective on a well-known topic: Seneca’s quotations from the Aeneid in his Moral Epistles. It takes as a starting point the commonly held view that Seneca uses Virgil, sometimes altering the text, sometimes decontextualizing it, to support his Stoic ideas, but without implying that this was originally in Virgil’s mind. An analysis of both the content and the form of the quotations shows that Seneca uses them not only to convey Stoic ideas but also to provide a narrative. Regarding the content, Seneca avoids descriptive passages, preferring instead passages focussed on a few key concepts: virtue and fighting, god and fate, death. These are at the same time the main themes of the epic poem and those of the Moral Epistles. The distribution of the themes throughout the collection and the contextualization of the quoted Virgilian lines reveal a narrative behind Seneca’s choices, which in the beginning aims at improving one’s virtue and then proceeds, toward the end, to an acceptance of death. As the author of his Epistles, Seneca uses the quotations from the Aeneid to describe his coming to terms with death. This is further stressed by the frequency of dialogic exchanges among the quoted lines: given the overlap between the fictive dialogue of the letter (author/reader) and that of the quoted lines, there is an identification of the two epistolary characters with the epic ones, and this contributes to Seneca’s self-portrayal as a master of philosophy and as an old man facing his approaching end.