Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are two of the most important classical authors in the social sciences. The influence of their respective theories and methodological approaches is still seen in the work of many contemporary authors. This article presents some contributions of the authors to qualitative and quantitative research. For this, we discuss Weber’s qualitative research in the work Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism and Durkheim’s quantitative research in Suicide: A Sociological Study. We are interested in showing how the authors use methodological and epistemological constructs to produce a sociological analysis with interpretative and causal scopes on social phenomena.

This paper investigates the chronological and geographical evolution of the practice of recarving sculpture in the first three centuries CE, assessing the impact it had on ancient viewers, as well as the agency of sculptors and patrons. After considering the reasons for the higher or lower frequency of reworking during specific periods, the paper presents an overview of the geographical distribution of recarved portraits of Roman emperors throughout the Empire, showing that the practice was not connected with the location of main sculptural centers, but rather followed its own logic, connected with local preferences and resources. Lastly, the paper considers how thoroughly imperial portraits were reworked, to investigate the agency and technical choices made by ancient makers.

In her Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit, Sally Sedgwick sets out to:

In the first part of the book Sedgwick is concerned with freedom being temporally conditioned. The second part consists of the last two chapters and is concerned with the claim that ‘all our thought is indebted to this actual realm as well’ (TH: 8). Hegel repeatedly asserts, Sedgwick notes, ‘that none of us can escape our time in thought’ (TH: 143).

I am grateful to the Reviews Editor for the Hegel Bulletin, Susanne Herrmann-Sinai, for arranging this discussion of my book, Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit (2023). I appreciate this opportunity to clarify and expand on some of the main ideas of the book, including those that are the most challenging to defend. I also owe thanks, of course, to each of my four critics for giving their valuable time to this project. In the context of so few pages, it is not possible to respond to every criticism; I have had to pick and choose. In the process, I may have failed to do full justice to my critics’ concerns.

Scientists still debate whether small groups of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of large Ice Age animals like prehistoric elephants, giant sloths and cave lions. Beyond paleontology, this question has deep sociological implications and is relevant for how we understand the role of humankind in today’s environmental crisis. A human-driven megafauna extinction has often fostered the idea of a naturalization of human environmental impacts and the belief that all people (modern or ancient, rich or poor, from any part of the world) share responsibility for the current crisis. But is that true? In the review, I discuss whether a long evolutionary history of impacts really makes us inevitably destructive, compelling humanity to accept a devastating anthropocentric dominance as the fateful destiny natural selection built for us. In contrast, I argue that, while our exceptional ability to shape environments has made us a ‘hyper-keystone’ species, benefiting only a few species and humans, this same ability also has the potential to help us restore balance to the world. That requires rejecting anthropocentric supremacy and placing ecosystems at the center stage of our relationship with nonhuman nature. We may have wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, but human destructiveness is not fate.

This study examines the emergence of 35 agricultural gardens that were newly created or expanded in Pompeii after the earthquake of 62 CE, focusing on 24 of these gardens in Regions I and II alone. Building on Wilhelmina Jashemski’s (1990) estimate that 9.7 percent of Pompeii’s urban area was dedicated to agriculture, this research reveals an elite-driven, opportunistic response to crisis and increasing commercialization in the mid-1st c. CE. Through a novel methodological approach, this study demonstrates how landowners adapted urban spaces for cash crops, balancing economic opportunity with local food security. These gardens were not developed through state intervention but were rather the result of private enterprise, playing a key role in urban resilience and socio-economic adaptability. Beyond profit, they contributed to improved nutrition and infrastructure. By reconstructing Pompeii’s final years through its green spaces, this research reframes agriculture as integral to the city’s economy, crisis response, and urban transformation in the lead-up to 79 CE.

Following the 2023 national elections, the first half year of 2024 focused on negotiations between four parties from the centre-right to the radical right, resulting in the formation of the Schoof Cabinet. With an independent former top civil servant as Prime Minister, the new government proposed more stringent migration measures, budgetary discipline, democratic reforms and a long-term perspective for Dutch farmers, as well as a more open and transparent relationship between Parliament and the Cabinet. This marked the first time in over a century that the Prime Minister was not affiliated with one of the coalition parties. This arrangement paved the way for the most right-wing government in the Netherlands since the postwar era. In the second half of the year, however, the coalition's fragile nature became evident, as the Cabinet found itself on the brink of collapse on three separate occasions.

La constitution, la préservation et l’exploitation de sources nativement numériques impliquent, au-delà de leur documentation, une « redocumentarisation », qui consiste par exemple à produire des métadonnées supplémentaires conditionnant leur archivage et leur accessibilité ou à garder une trace des opérations nécessaires à la reconstruction des documents, au prix, parfois, de transformations. Ce patrimoine redocumentarisé requiert une très grande diversité d’opérations techniques, mises en œuvre par de nombreuses institutions et acteurs (bibliothèques et archives, initiatives militantes et participatives, acteurs privés et internationaux). Il soulève des enjeux d’accessibilité, de partage, de contextualisation et d’ouverture, qui influencent l’exploitation scientifique des archives nativement numériques. En s’appuyant principalement sur l’archivage du web et des réseaux sociaux numériques, mais aussi sur celui du code source, des CD-ROM et des courriers électroniques, l’article explore les logiques de documentation et de redocumentarisation ainsi que les pratiques et tensions qui y sont à l’œuvre. Celles-ci peuvent en effet être déterminantes pour les recherches en histoire et plus largement en sciences humaines et sociales, puisqu’elles les accompagnent et leur permettent davantage de contextualisation.

Music notation has evolved to accommodate music and musical instruments as they have changed over time. However, the rapid advancement of musical technology has not been accompanied by a corresponding development and consensus in notation. This paper examines the challenges faced by notation in representing music written for augmented instruments. We contend that a novel understanding of musical works is necessary and propose a work-concept that recognises the significance of the technology – medium – that composers develop alongside their creations. We emphasise the role of the score within this work-concept model and present an instrumental augmentation system as a case study. Finally, we propose notation guidelines for augmented instruments and argue that standardising notation could facilitate the discovery of common ground that guides the development of augmented instruments and music written for them.

Analogies appear to permeate the entire domain of international humanitarian law (IHL), but as an independent subject of inquiry, they remain largely overlooked within IHL scholarship. This article seeks to initiate a debate by examining the role(s) of legal analogies in the historical development of IHL from 1864 to 2001. It pursues two specific objectives. First, it undertakes an empirical investigation into the prevalence and significance of analogies in IHL. Drawing on the collected data, the article proposes a taxonomy of IHL analogies encompassing three categories: analogies preceding IHL norms, analogies embedded within IHL norms, and analogies following IHL norms. Second, building on the hypothesis that analogical reasoning plays a pivotal role in shaping the normative content and structural evolution of IHL, the article analyzes such reasoning from an axiological perspective, identifying the underlying values and benefits that it conveys within the field. In the context of IHL’s historical development, two traditional values emerge prominently: coherence and flexibility. On the one hand, analogies have enabled the discipline to evolve coherently, avoiding chaotic progressions; on the other, they have brought flexibility, allowing the law to adapt to changing realities on the ground. This two-pronged approach demonstrates that analogical reasoning in IHL is both pervasive and substantive: it has played a crucial role in the transformation of IHL over time.

The article offers a new defense of democratic meritocracy. Existing defenses of the hybrid regime have centered on ordinary citizens’ lack of sophisticated political knowledge and the importance of having particularly able individuals in charge of governing. But since electoral democracy also contains certain built-in mechanisms that, when combined with a functioning party system, are capable of reducing the cognitive burdens of average voters and empowering more competent individuals, such defenses fail to make a compelling case for democratic meritocracy. Specifically, they owe us a fully developed account of how those mechanisms of electoral democracy will be weakened by its other inherent features so that the hybrid regime becomes a desirable alternative. This article provides such an account by exploring how a well-designed democratic meritocracy can better avoid pathologies of unconstrained political competition that are not only troublesome in themselves but which also undermine electoral democracy’s ability to generate superior political outcomes.

The results of research on the human remains and artefacts recently discovered at Heaning Wood Bone Cave, Cumbria, UK are reported. A programme of radiocarbon dating has established that the human remains include the earliest so far discovered in northern Britain, the ‘Ossick Lass’, which date between 9290 and 8925 cal BC. The cave was used for burial during three phases in prehistory: one individual dating to the Early Mesolithic, four to the Early Neolithic and two to the Early Bronze Age and is thus an important addition to our developing knowledge about the deposition of human remains in caves in north-west Europe at these dates. Genomic analysis has established that all but one of the sampled individuals were biologically female. Osteological and taphonomic analysis shows that, in each phase, the burial practice seems to have been successive inhumation of the recently deceased body into the vertical entrance of the cave. Artefacts associated with the burials include perforated periwinkle shell beads radiocarbon dated to the Early Mesolithic, a small assemblage of worked stone, including diagnostically Early Neolithic pieces, and sherds of Early Bronze Age Collared Urn pottery.

The year 2024 was marked by a series of significant electoral events in the Czech Republic, including elections to the European Parliament, the Senate, and regional councils. ANO 2011 emerged as the dominant political force across all three contests, while parties in the governing coalition, particularly the Czech Pirate Party and the Civic Democratic Party, experienced electoral losses. New political alliances, such as Přísaha (Oath) and Stačilo! (Enough!), secured representation in the European Parliament. The September regional elections were shaped by severe flooding in the Moravian-Silesian and Olomouc regions. Following poor electoral performances, the Czech Pirate Party exited the government, and Cabinet reshuffles ensued. Parliament enacted electoral reform by introducing voting by mail for citizens living abroad. The Senate elections altered the balance of power in the upper chamber, and leadership changes followed within the Czech Pirate Party and the Christian and Democratic Union–Czechoslovak People's Party.

In this paper, we introduce a new technique to study the distribution in residue classes of sets of integers with digit and sum-of-digits restrictions. From our main theorem, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for integers with missing digits to be uniformly distributed in arithmetic progressions, extending previous results going back to the work of Erdős, Mauduit and Sárközy. Our approach uses Markov chains and does not rely on Fourier analysis as many results of this nature do. Our results apply more generally to the class of multiplicatively invariant sets of integers. This class, defined by Glasscock, Moreira and Richter using symbolic dynamics, is an integer analogue to fractal sets and includes all missing digits sets. We address uniform distribution in this setting, partially answering an open question posed by the same authors.

Farman Saeed Sedeeq and Percem Arman’s article aims to develop a framework of AI governance that avoids shortcomings in existing models such as limited enforceability and rigid data-sharing rules. The goal of the weighty undertaking is to develop a “structured yet flexible approach” to balancing AI advancements in public health with ethical imperatives. Three core “pillars” are used for evaluation: ethical accountability, regulatory adaptability, and transparency. The concept of ethical accountability is explored briefly in this commentary.

This article explores female healthcare at the crossroads of bacteriology and obstetric research. Puerperal fever or childbed fever manifested as an epidemic since the nineteenth century, and in both Europe and America, it charted a distinct course for bacteriological research. With the identification of bacteriological causes, new sets of public health regimes were instituted in both regions. The experience of the colonies, however, differed. This paper focusses on how colonial discourse on obstetric nursing, midwifery, clinical hygiene, and maternal healthcare can be positioned in this global history of female health research. The paper explores why, in India, on one hand, bacteriological research in female health suffered in terms of priority (unlike that of cholera and plague) despite the alarming rate of maternal mortality. On the other hand, medical practitioners trained in Europe worked as the conduit through which the bacteriological research of Europe made its way into India. Contemporary documents reveal how colonial prerogatives were channeled through the race theories linked to Indian cultural practices related to midwifery and obstetric nursing, and how the female health discourse was still marred by the notion of tropicality.

With the global proliferation of armed conflicts, children are among the most vulnerable, facing serious violations of their human rights, most notably the right to education. Although both international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) provide protection, schools continue to be attacked, educational infrastructure is destroyed, and millions of children lose access to learning. Against this backdrop, the present article examines the protection of children’s right to education under IHRL and IHL, and argues for a shift in how these existing norms are interpreted to better reflect the centrality of education to human dignity. Drawing on the established link between the right to education and human dignity under IHRL, the article proposes a novel interpretive lens that reframes the denial of education during armed conflict as a direct assault on the human dignity of the child, rather than merely a legal violation. Through this lens, education shifts from an ancillary social right to a core humanitarian concern grounded in the child’s dignity. The article argues that this human dignity-based understanding of education found in IHRL should inform the interpretation of IHL, as integrating this perspective would strengthen the normative coherence of IHL and offer stronger protection for children’s right to education in armed conflict. Recognizing schools as vital spaces for learning, stability and development, this approach emphasizes that access to education underpins children’s holistic growth, the realization of their rights and the safeguarding of their human dignity.