The Chanyuan Covenant of 1005 that ended decades of war between Song and Liao precipitated a new political model that, from the Song perspective, exchanged wealth, territory, and dynastic pride in return for peace along the northern frontier, civilian sovereignty over a long-dominant military class, and the replacement of a culture of arms with the love of books. That “Chanyuan Paradigm” survived the Qingli war of 1040–1044 with the Tangut Xi Xia, but was steadily overturned in the expansionist wars promoted by Shenzong and his sons from 1068 through the fall of the Northern Song in 1127. This article argues that the fragility of the Chanyuan-style peace did not stem from the aspirations of a revanchist emperor and his confidantes, but was rather the consequence of the intrinsic difficulties of maintaining peace in a world of new players, internecine political contests, and shifting geopolitical alliances that characterized the mid-eleventh century.

David Lewis is widely regarded as the philosopher who introduced the concept of common knowledge. His account of common knowledge differs greatly from most later accounts in philosophy and economy, with the central notion of his theory being ‘having reason to believe’ rather than ‘knowledge’. Unfortunately, Lewis’s account is rather informal, and the argument has a few gaps. This paper assesses two major attempts to formalise Lewis’s account and argues that these formalisations are missing a crucial aspect of this account. Therefore, a new reconstruction is proposed, which explicitly discusses ‘reasons’ and uses a logic inspired by justification logic.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, geologists created the International Geological Congress (IGC) to achieve the methodological and terminological uniformity that they thought their science lacked. Their desire to standardize their practice and their use of the conference to do so was neither new nor unique. Although late nineteenth-century international conferences have been recognized as important arenas of standardization, relatively little is known of the ways in which conferences organized standardization negotiations. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how the IGC practically and socially organized standardization work. It appears that the session hall was not the sole and not even the main stage of geological standard-setting. The standardization process was also enacted through comparative study and informal exchanges that regular visits to purpose-built comparative geological exhibitions made possible. Relying on a sophisticated apparatus of commissions and subcommittees, the IGC also socially organized standards negotiation beyond the space and time of the triennial sessions. By tracing the material, spatial and social practices engineered through the IGC to serve geological standardization, this article unboxes the conference process and in so doing enriches our understanding of the period's wave of standardization.

In contrast to the well-known stories of the embryotoxic drug, thalidomide, in countries where it was responsible for large numbers of birth defects, there is limited information on its history in India. Its presence before 2002, when the country issued the first marketing licence for a thalidomide-containing preparation, is assumed to be negligible. This article challenges this view by showing that the drug entered the Indian subcontinent through the former Portuguese territory of Goa around 1960. We examine the subsequent development of its distribution, use and regulation in India from the mid-1960s up to the present situation. Colonial legacies are a crucial explanation for the early appearance of thalidomide on the Indian subcontinent. They also influenced its re-emergence as drug for treating leprosy reactions in India after 1965. We identify key actors in this process: the original German producer that delivered thalidomide free of charge, European doctors who worked for international non-governmental organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO), which supported clinical trials and later discouraged the use of the drug, and finally the Indian state institutions that limited its distribution and later quickly opened the way for the private sector to produce and market thalidomide and its analogues. Finally, we discuss the risk of thalidomide-induced birth defects by casting a critical look on the present state of regulatory provisions and the monitoring of birth defects in India.

Though the Hippocratic text On the Heart has garnered significant attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from classicists, physicians and historians of medicine alike, no commentary on this important work currently exists. There remain, however, central questions of interpretation concerning a number of important points: in particular, how the author understands the structure and functioning of the heart.

The significance of this text for the history of cardiovascular medicine can be found first in its position as being radically advanced in its portrayal of the inner structure of the heart when compared with any other Hippocratic text. At the same time, the text falls dramatically short of the discoveries of the Alexandrian researchers who studied during the Hellenistic period—that is, around the same period as this text’s likely composition. In addition, this work contains the first extant description of the valves of the heart, and its detailed descriptions of a cuspid valve and the chordae tendineae have led several scholars to imagine that this text even contains evidence of either a systematic dissection of an animal heart or—what seems impossible outside of Alexandria, Egypt at that time—evidence of the dissection of a human heart.

This article intends to provide a full commentary on the text by consolidating, and in some cases correcting, previous interpretive attempts to understand an often referenced, and at times misinterpreted, ancient medical treatise.

This article advances historical understandings of health, veterinary medicine and livestock agriculture by examining how, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, the diseases of livestock were made collectively knowable. During this period, the state extended its gaze beyond a few, highly impactful notifiable diseases to a host of other threats to livestock health. The prime mechanism through which this was achieved was the disease survey. Paralleling wider developments in survey practices, it grew from small interwar beginnings into a hugely expensive, wide-ranging state veterinary project that created a new conception of the nation’s livestock as a geographical aggregation of animals in varying states of health. This article traces the disease survey’s entanglements with dairy cows, farming practices, veterinary professional politics and government agendas. It shows that far from a neutral reflection of reality, surveys both represented and perpetuated specific versions of dairy cow health, varieties of farming practice and visions of the veterinary professional role. At first, their findings proved influential, but over time they found it harder to discipline their increasingly complex human, animal and disease subjects, resulting in unconvincing representations of reality that led ultimately to their marginalization.

This article focuses on the role of textbooks in the construction of national identity by analyzing state-approved versions of national identity and history in Kazakhstan. By doing so, this project seeks to highlight what understanding of identity prevails in the history textbooks of Kazakhstan, what narratives regarding the key historic events are promoted, particularly with respect to the Dzhungar wars, annexation of Kazakh Khanate by the Russian Empire, and the Soviet era. Finally, this article compares the main narratives in the textbooks published in Kazakh and Russian languages to illustrate differences and various understandings of identity in the two linguistic realms of Kazakhstan. The article argues that Kazakhstan’s textbooks combine new, independence-focused narratives with the old approaches and partial reproduction of the Soviet symbolic discourse.

Yujin Nagasawa has recently defended two reformulated Ontological Arguments, one adapted from Anselm's ‘Classical’ version and one from Plantinga's ‘Modal’ version. This article explains in detail why both of them fail, and then goes on to present general objections to any Ontological Argument.

The tragic Andrée balloon expedition of 1897 serves as a haunting reminder of the dangers posed by ice drift during polar exploration. This paper examines Andrée’s initial decision after his balloon flight to march towards Cape Flora in Franz Josef Land, despite its much greater distance compared to the Sjuøyane archipelago. The rationale behind this choice remains unclear, but potential factors include stored supplies, the demonstrated winter survival in Franz Josef Land and the scientific interest in unexplored regions. By analysing historical accounts and employing scenario analyses, this study contributes to a better understanding of Andrée’s perception of ice drift and its impact on their ill-fated journey. The paper explores major forces affecting ice drift, reviews the historical development of understanding ice drift in the area, and presents an analysis of Andrée’s understanding and decision-making. The overall conclusion is that Andrée probably was unaware of the substantial deflection to the right of the direction of the wind that ice drift in the Arctic on average is characterised of due to the Earth’s rotation (the Coriolis effect). Without this deflection, the decision to march towards Cape Flora would have made sense under the assumption of continued northerly winds.

After the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the Turkish state started to produce a new official history of the event as a narrative of popular resistance against a military coup for the sake of democracy. This narrative with a religious aura was supported by “democracy watch” meetings and new commemoration days, museums, and monuments across Turkey. It was based on four concepts, symbolized by the Rabia sign: one nation, one homeland, one flag, and one state. However, the use of the Rabia sign has fallen from grace recently, creating a critical gap or “glitch” in the mnemonic infrastructure. This paper offers a visual categorization of July 15 monuments across Turkey and positions them in the historiography of Turkish national monuments. Finally, Rabia monuments are analyzed as a case study to show part of the complex (trans)national narratives of the “New Turkey.”

The frigid geographical environment in the Arctic has shaped the exploration attribute of the polar cruise shipping network. In this study, the typical characteristics and special structure of the Arctic adventure cruise shipping network are investigated by using the network analysis method based on the data of 172 adventure cruise itineraries in the Arctic. It is found that the Arctic adventure cruise itineraries are dominated by 8–17 days of medium itineraries, and the ratio of one-way itineraries to round-trip itineraries is about 1:1. There are differences in the centrality of different ports, forming two core ports Reykjavík and Longyearbyen and a sub-core port Kangerlussuaq. The overall contact strength of the Arctic adventure cruise shipping network is low. Under the joint influence of such factors as centrality and contact strength, the Arctic constitutes the dual-core clusters of Iceland and Svalbard Islands and a sub-core cluster of Greenland.