This is a brief introduction to a special issue highlighting the relevance of philosophy of science to many core topics in theology and philosophy of religion. Several points of intersection between knowledge production in the sciences and knowledge production in philosophy and theology are discussed.

This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations.

The 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev (present-day Tartu) renaming law marks a key moment in the Romanov imperial government’s efforts to de-Germanize and Russify the Baltic provinces. This article brings legal perspectives to critical place-name studies by examining how the Romanov Empire used law to regulate and exert control over naming practices, and how local inhabitants leveraged their legal knowledge to spot ambiguities, exploit loopholes and defend naming rights in court, thereby engaging in various forms of toponymic resistance. By situating the 1893 renaming law within the broader imperial legal system, this article argues that even ideologically motivated changes to urban toponymy could be subject to legal checks and balances.

This article is a case study of the Kasarani Stadium in Kenya as a heuristic through which to understand President Daniel Arap Moi’s political style and priorities during the first decade of his regime. Drawing primarily from national and international newspapers, the archives of national and international sporting organizations and associations, records of the Kenyan government and biographies of Moi, I explore how Moi gave political meaning to sport to advance his populist politics at home and project Kenya on(to) the international stage. At home, he used sports to define himself as a leader of the ordinary mwananchi (citizen), in touch with the experiences, challenges, and visions of the common Kenyan. Internationally, he used sports to chart Kenya’s foreign policy and fashion himself as an international political personality. The article concludes that the study of sports and sporting infrastructure offers a productive way to write social, political, and cultural histories of postcolonial Africa.

This article examines the diachronic development of hedged performatives (HP) in spoken American English. HPs (e.g. I have to say, I must admit) combine a (semi-)modal verb and a performative verb, and were first analyzed by Fraser (1975). While subsequent research has investigated their discursive functions and established them as ‘constructions’, their diachronic development has not been analyzed within a Construction Grammar perspective. This article addresses this gap using three corpora: the TV Corpus, Movie Corpus and spoken COCA. We investigate fifteen HPs formed with three modals (have to, must, can), first sketching a constructional network with a macro-level ([I + MODAL + Vperf]), modal-specific meso-level (e.g. [I must Vperf]) and micro-level (e.g. [I must say]). Results show different diachronic trends at the meso-level: [I must Vperf] declines, [I have to Vperf] increases, and [I can Vperf] remains stable. These trends diverge from those of the base modals, confirming their constructional status. For must and have to HPs, change operates primarily at the meso-level, driven by evolving discourse norms. At the micro-level, must/have to HPs follow the meso-level trend, while can HPs show more variation. Finally, HPs are overrepresented in scripted speech, although diachronic trends remain consistent across registers.

Recent studies in Construction Grammar have suggested that contracted modals constitute different constructions from their full forms. In this article, we present a corpus-based analysis of the relationship between the modal forms going to and gonna in British English used on the blogging platform LiveJournal. We report a Collostructional Analysis and a Behavioural Profile Analysis based on a logistic regression model of blind annotations, assessing factors of semantic, pragmatic and social meaning on the choice of the variant, in addition to processing factors. The results show that register formality is the only significant meaning predictor for the alternation between going to or gonna in the corpus. We discuss these results in light of recent theoretical debates on isomorphism and synonymy avoidance in Construction Grammar: specifically, our study provides evidence that social meaning drives the distinction between going to and gonna, validating the recently formulated Principle of No Equivalence, and providing further evidence for the constructionhood of contracted modals.

Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.

2024 marked ten years since the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) took effect. Firmly rooted in international human rights and humanitarian law, the ATT is the first legally binding instrument to regulate international arms transfers. It is a framework for national action to (i) contribute to peace and security, (ii) reduce human suffering caused by irresponsible arms transfers and (iii) promote transparency in the international arms trade. This piece exploresrecent developments in the ATT process that represent a pivot from building treaty infrastructure toward more expansive stakeholder engagement, increased information exchange centred on state practice and a sharper focus on the ATT’s human impact. Key new features are discussions on actual arms transfer decisions and the examination of the independent human rights responsibilities of industry that operate alongside government risk assessment obligations. Finally, this piece assesses the potential impact of these efforts on the achievement of the ATT’s humanitarian purpose.

In 1872, Hong Kong’s colonial government passed an ordinance prohibiting hawkers from crying wares in the parts of town where Europeans lived and worked. This was precipitated by a local discourse on ostensibly Chinese noise that took shape in the English-language newspapers that constructed Chinese people as intrinsically noisy and Europeans as noise averse. These ideas drew upon existing rhetoric produced in response to noise nuisance in London and a broader transatlantic discourse on the relationship between noise and civilization. The transformation of these ideas in Hong Kong established a model whereby Chinese people were producers of noise, unaffected by hearing it, while intrinsically quiet Europeans suffered from hearing noise. This process justified the differential treatment of space, enabling the creation of a privileged ‘European’ zone legally protected from ‘Chinese’ noise.

The question of how to pursue politically relevant and engaged scholarship has been an ongoing theme within socio-legal scholarship. In the United States of America, Presidential Addresses of the Law and Society Association have consistently urged greater political engagement (Lempert 2001; Seron 2016; Scheppele 2023). In the United Kingdom, journals such as Social & Legal Studies have placed critical and engaged scholarship at the core of their mission (Editorial 1992; Editorial 1998). In the Majority World1 – where the socio-legal field is less institutionalised – scholars have often been more directly involved in political action, re-imagining colonial law and using it as a tool for social change (Shivji 2018; Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso Sierra 2019). These scholars have not only inspired calls for activist scholarship in the Minority World (Munger 2001) but have also unsettled the very dichotomy between scholarship and activism (D’Souza 2009).

This article focuses on French espèce de + NP! ‘you + NP!’ to make a case that impoliteness can be conventionalized in linguistic form beyond the level of the lexicon. We argue that the pattern can be considered a construction in its own right and also that it is strongly conventionalized for impoliteness in particular. To support this claim, we adopt both a corpus-based and a questionnaire-based approach. The corpus study reveals not only that espèce de + NP! mainly serves impolite purposes in actual usage but also that it tends to force an impolite interpretation onto noun phrases that do not themselves express negative evaluation. Our questionnaire study complements these findings by showing, inter alia, that the construction is generally judged to be ill-formed when combining with positively evaluative or evaluatively neutral nouns and, at the same time, that such nouns are indeed rated as impolite in the construction. It also points to a difference between calling someone espèce d’idiot! ‘you idiot!’ and calling them just idiot!. We conclude the article with some reflections on why espèce de + NP! is an impoliteness construction.

While the idea of predistribution is gaining traction, it may seem inherently elusive. The source of confusion is the prefix ‘pre’, which denotes priority or prevention. This paper proposes a new functional definition of predistribution that is practically useful and unifies different predistributive policies. Through defending predistribution as policies of ex ante distribution, I offer a philosophically robust notion of priority (‘procedural priority’) and different functions of prevention that help make sense of predistribution. I also develop typologies of different predistributive policies and explore justificatory grounds and strengths of predistribution. I emphasize instrumental reasons for supporting predistribution.

It is often argued that religious experience should enjoy the epistemic presumption of innocence (EPI), analogous to the deliverances of perception, memory and other non-inferential basic beliefs. However, many religious belief systems incompatible with theism (theistic-unfriendly in my terminology) would also count as justified on this presumption. Awareness of the vast number of theistic-unfriendly beliefs that are epistemically on a par with theism can significantly undermine confidence in the latter. To counter this challenge, defenders of theism could resort to two core naturalistic claims: that the physical realm is causally closed, and that mental states supervene on physical states. Given naturalism, supernatural agents, including God, are not able to produce humans’ religious experience and beliefs by direct interventions. However, a theistic God could take an alternative route to provide people elected by Him with true religious beliefs through causal processes prearranged at the moment of creation of the physical world. By contrast, low-ranking spirits and polytheistic deities cannot act in this way, either because they do not participate in the process of creation or, if they do, because they lack full control over the initial conditions of the universe. It follows that theistic-unfriendly beliefs arise by chance rather than through reliable truth-aimed belief-producing processes. Under naturalism, therefore, such beliefs cannot be justified, even if, by unlikely coincidence, they are true. This naturalistic argument for theism serves to boost confidence in theistic belief by narrowing the range of rationally available religious options.