In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm’s eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon’s thought. Sturm’s reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm’s salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.

Research suggests that caregivers of patients with disorders of consciousness such as minimally conscious states (MCS) believe they suffer in some way. How so, if they cannot experience sensations or feelings? What is the nature of their suffering? This paper explores non-experiential suffering (NES). It argues that concerns about NES are really concerns about harms (e.g., dignity-based harms), but still face problems. Second, it addresses the moral importance of bearing witness to suffering. It explores several possible accounts: epistemic (bearing witness generates important knowledge), consequentialist (witnesses’ interests also matter), and deontological (there is a duty to bear witness). It argues that witnessing suffering creates epistemic advantages and disadvantages for determining a patient’s interests; that clinicians’ interests to not bear witness may have considerable moral weight; and that the obligation to bear witness to NES is unclear.

Several studies have been devoted, partly or wholly, to the different uses of the adverb actually. Although there is considerable agreement on the main discourse functions actually can perform, there is little consensus on which subtypes to distinguish, and how these subtypes, and the functions they perform, are related to the formal properties of actually. Consequently, conclusions concerning the relation between the various functions of actually and its position and prosodic realization are often contradictory, and the overall picture is still incomplete. On the basis of data from the International Corpus of English – Great Britain, this article presents the results of a systematic (qualitative and quantitative) investigation into the function, position and prosody of actually, and the way in which these factors interact. It is demonstrated that (i) by classifying the many functions of actually identified in previous studies into three major types (propositional, discourse-pragmatic and discourse-organizational) and (ii) by appealing to additional functional factors, such as scope, strength and orientation, to distinguish a limited number of subtypes, it is possible to detect strong correlations between the functions of actually and its formal (positional and prosodic) features.

Differences between models of industrialization are increasingly recognized as an important element of global economic history, and the quality of jobs is receiving new interest as a better indicator of living standards than income alone. This paper considers the implications of historical development models for job quality using the spinning section of textile manufacture in the early United States as a case study. The three factory systems that originated in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and around Philadelphia varied in technical choice, management practices, and establishment size, and exhibited heterogeneity in components of job quality. The paper uses quantitative evidence, including more than 2000 observations of early industrial workers’ wages, qualitative material from government investigations, worker letters, and company correspondence, and the Historical Job Quality Indicators to analyse work quality for spinning workers and to explore variation between the three industrial models. Workers in the more competitive Philadelphia model had lower real earnings, less job security, and higher work intensity than employees of the paternalistic Massachusetts mills. The paper highlights the importance of considering variation by location when evaluating historical living standards and the implications of industrialization strategies for quality of life.

Using newspaper coverage of women's and girl's property offences in minor English and Irish courts, I analyze courts’ use of Catholic convent institutions between 1930 and 1959. Coverage of minor local hearings offers access to everyday cases, where boundaries between moral and legal transgression were blurred. I explore three interlocking themes in newspaper reports. First, those courts sent to convents were punished, at least in part, for breaching prevailing gendered moral norms. Second, judges represented convents as sites of moral reform; justifying convent detention by reinforcing gendered notions of damaged female agency. Finally, judges sent women and girls to convents even when they publicly resisted. In these ways, courts reinforced reliance on convents for gendered “moral reclamation.” In the conclusion, I explore the argument's implications for state reckoning with historical abuses in institutions like Ireland's Magdalene laundries, showing how abolition feminist legal histories can pose new questions about relationships between law and the experience of mass incarceration.

This piece outlines the engagement of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights with the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on business and human rights in light of the Advisory Opinion requested by Mexico on the obligations of the firearms industry. It outlines how the Court has relied on the distinction between positive and negative human rights duties, which has led it to constantly find states responsible for omissions (failing to ensure rights) instead of actions (carried out by private actors, including corporations). For the Court, such a distinction translates into the possibility that corporations can violate human rights directly.

This article analyses the depictions of immunity and immunological functions employed in proprietary medical advertising in British newspapers between 1890 and 1940. Using marketing copy to gain insights into the ways immunity was presented to the public and normalised outside of medical institutions and publications, I offer four main areas of discussion. First, I present an analysis of the ways advertisements evoked both natural and artificial immunity in their marketing copy, thereby affording us insights into the ways immunity was made palatable both to those supportive of and opposed to vaccinations. I then unpack the ways in which this advertising copy often emphasised immunity rather than the immunological, that is, presented immunity as resistance to infection achieved by purchasing particular brands, rather than as part of a defensive process taking place at a cellular level. Third, I examine the ways in which advertisements engaged with futurity and drew on a narrative of social exclusion that pitted created communities of the immune against the non-immune. Finally, I analyse the ways in which immunity was used to connect the biological and the psychological, looking particularly at the ways immunity against worry was sold to the public.

Existing scholarship on China's industrial politics in the early post-Mao era has not paid adequate attention to the tension between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the reform drives to consolidate managerial despotism in urban public enterprises, and policy endeavors to strengthen formal institutional channels for workers to participate in their enterprises’ democratic management. Focusing on the city of Wuhan in 1984–1985, this article examines the policy logic behind these two overlapping tendencies and how workers experienced and reacted to them. It argues that, on the one hand, Wuhan's local authorities merely intended the institutional formalities of democracy to facilitate and build popular support for the inauguration of managerial despotism. On the other hand, workers’ very involvement in this façade of democracy accidentally emboldened many of them to air grievances, make subversive demands, assert agency, and even resist managerial despotism. These findings shed light on the nuanced historicity of 1980s China and contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace democracy.

Traditionally, verbs like base have combined with the preposition on to express a meaning of derivation (based on). However, many writing in a US context have noticed the rapid rise of based off (of) alongside based on (Curzan 2013; Behrens 2014; Janda 2021). In this article, we document the relative increase of off in two English-language corpora in the verb base and six other verbs. The results show a clear real-time trend of increasing use of off, with some differences in the course of the change across different verbs. We also see an increase in use of off in apparent time, which we infer from the topical organization of comments in one of our corpora, the social media site Reddit.