In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases – plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward – would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was ‘a global scientific obsession’ with finding a ‘substitute’ for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.1

After outlining sceptical theism (ST) and the fine-tuning argument (FTA), I demonstrate how arguments for the former undercut the latter. I then consider and reject three recent proposals for ameliorating the conflict: positive ST, considerations about normative superiors, and appeal to theistic metaethics. I contend, however, that Kirk Durston’s complexity argument for ST does not undercut the FTA but in fact supports it. In defending that thesis, I respond to Climenhaga’s contention that ST undermines all warrant for theistic belief, the FTA included.

The interface of science and law is a territory frequently occupied by policymakers. In facilitating this interface, epistemic communities have become significant influencers in policymaking, especially at the European Union (EU) level, as a result of its complex multilevel governance system. In this article we assess the quality and nature of interactions between epistemic communities and EU stakeholders on the Horizon-funded project ‘PrecisionTox’, by deploying the concept of epistemic communities developed by Haas, as well as the learning modes of epistemic communities as presented and adapted by Dunlop. The overarching goal of PrecisionTox is to advance the safety assessment of chemicals by establishing a new, cost-effective testing paradigm built from evolutionary theory, which entails reduction, replacement, and refinement of mammalian testing (the 3Rs). The study shows that EU-funded projects can provide an excellent platform for building epistemic communities and forging alliances with EU policymakers, especially when novel technologies may be unlocked and socialized. This study also explores the early interaction of policymakers with epistemic communities through different forms of learning to better understand the complexities surrounding these new technologies in order to set an agenda for policy interventions.

Objections to the orthodox doctrine of an eternal hell often rely on arguments that it cannot be a person’s own fault that she ends up in hell. The article summarizes and addresses three significant arguments which aim to show that it could not be any individual’s fault that they end up in hell. I respond to these objections by showing that those who affirm a classical picture of sin have Moorean reasons to reject these objections. That classical perspective holds that all (serious) sin involves choosing eternal destiny apart from God and that no sin could possibly be caused by God. Consequently, it is necessary for ending up in hell that someone commit a serious sin, and it is sufficient for ending up damned that one persists forever in sin. Since the objections conflict with Moorean commitments central to the classical perspective, those who hold to such a classical perspective on sin would have good reason to reject all these arguments, which involve assumptions that would entail that such a perspective is false.

Historiographic studies of transnational environmental law (TEL) are increasingly relevant as scholars and practitioners search for ways in which to deliver more quickly and efficiently effective regulation that is responsive to global environmental issues. This article uses new and original archival research to better locate the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa (1900 London Convention) in its legal-scientific historical context. Most of the scholarship on this topic draws on historian John M. MacKenzie's groundbreaking analysis of what he called ‘the hunting cult’ and its role in the imperial advance into India, Africa, and elsewhere. When viewed through the dual lens of legal history and the history of science, the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented a period of transition during which a new science-based perspective advanced by evolutionary biologists was embraced by science-minded policymakers, and expressed in domestic law and foreign policy aimed at the preservation of endangered species and the protection of biodiversity. The 1900 London Convention is an early example of a modern TEL instrument informed by science and by values that today most recognize as being critically important and universal. The new history in this article also resonates as an example of how polarizing political narratives can delay law reform and the importance of maintaining focus on collaborative problem solving and science-based regulation of complex transnational environmental issues.

A prominent challenge to analytic theology charges that its methodology leads to idolatry. This article explores a response to this challenge that draws upon the Eastern Orthodox apophatic tradition. Apophatic approaches, which emphasize how little we can truthfully say or know about God, are not exclusive to Orthodox Christianity. But these views take a unique form within the tradition insofar as they accord a prominent role to the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. The divine essence is what it is to be God, what God is as such, what God is at God’s core. In contrast, the divine energies are properties, modes, or activities of God not included in the divine essence but intimately related to it. Proponents of the distinction have claimed that it can help theorists to navigate the Christian tradition’s cataphatic and apophatic commitments, which don’t always sit comfortably together. This article argues that there are ways of crafting the essence/energy distinction that can also help to address the ‘Idolatry Argument’ against analytic theology.

Recent research has shown that music interventions involving body movements are beneficial for reinforcing music learning. Given the reported positive transfer between music training and phonological skills, we investigated, for the first time, the value of an embodied music training program for improving pronunciation skills. In a classroom experiment, 48 Chinese adolescent learners of English participated in three 40-minute sessions of either Dalcroze-inspired embodied music training or treatment-as-usual non-embodied music training. Participants in the embodied music group were involved in a series of activities designed to develop their rhythmic and melodic skills through bodily experiences. Participants in the non-embodied music group followed music lessons designed by their music teacher, appreciating music pieces and receiving music knowledge. Before and after training, participants were tested with a language imitation task using six unfamiliar languages and an oral reading task in second language English. Results show that the embodied music group significantly outperformed the non-embodied music group in both tasks. Overall, our findings suggest that an embodied music training program has beneficial effects on pronunciation skills, supporting an embodied-based language teaching approach.

An (ongoing) interrogation of colonial wrongdoing is important for debates on decolonisation, restorative justice, racial and gender equality and global political and socio-economic equality. This article presents a theoretical study of colonialism’s legal-political injustices and aims to (re)turn the discussion on colonialism to the field’s most powerful insight, i.e. that of of epistemic violence and injustice. This article also suggests that the reach of this historical injustice went much further than the politics of autonomy, usurpation of territorial rights, political disenfranchisement and resource appropriation. To address the question of colonialism’s distinctiveness as a political mission, which has been discussed in recent debates within analytic philosophy, it argues that colonialism’s epistemic injustice, which denied the very existence and the traditions of the colonised, is the foundational and distinctive feature of colonialism as a political system and which drives its continued impact to this day.

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949–53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.