This article addresses the theme of ‘death and immortality’ from the perspective of consciousness, and takes as its starting point a root text of Hindu philosophy, the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. fourth century ce). The text posits a dualist ontology in which consciousness is separate and autonomous from a material reality that includes body and mind. The goal is to be ontologically situated in a ‘pure’ consciousness (non-objective), which signifies existential liberation. There are mundane ways to understand this claim, such as referring to cognitive states that produce affective dissociation, or more radical interpretations, such as a post-death state. This article explores the question of what Sāṃkhya's consciousness is like: it is said to be immortal, plural, individuated, and contentless. What is the motivation for and implication of engagement with a system that describes an existential freedom that may only be known in a dualist reality or after death? And how can Sāṃkhya's concepts be brought into conversation with contemporary investigations into mind–body questions? Sāṃkhya rationality counters the argument of eternal oblivion or of consciousness as an illusion confined to the brain. Yet there are resonances with Chalmers's notion of consciousness as fundamental. This article concludes that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion can be enhanced by adding Sāṃkhya thought to its purview.

In environmental politics, social movements play a crucial role, promoting participatory rights and confronting injustice, inequality, and the interests of the powerful. This article examines an underexplored topic in the literature on social movements, especially in Latin America: the use of litigation to force decisionmakers to comply with participatory formats, specifically in the course of opposition to hydroelectric dams. These projects often are destructive to the local environment and communities. This study examines four cases of environmental litigation that halted dam construction in Brazil and Chile, singling out causal pathways for successful collective action. It focuses on two dimensions of movement success: the implementation of participatory formats and the resulting cancellation of dam projects. In line with the joint effect model of social movement theory, the cross-case comparison of legal disputes shows that pursuing legal strategies in parallel to broad social mobilization and the support of institutional allies, can lead to successful outcomes.

Numerous Roman grants to local communities of the right to use local law survive in contemporaneous copies starting in the second century BCE. Contemporaneous with these grants of autonomy, Rome urged institutional changes that reconstituted local elites as aristocracies of office. By contrast, evidence that individuals identified themselves as experts in local law survives in bulk only starting in the second century CE. The paper urges that the superimposition of Roman courts as courts of the second instance created a role in local polities for expertise in local law in mediation with these Roman courts, and that local elites sought to monopolize this role and the technocratic prestige that it brought.

According to Carolyne Larrington, legends of the past ‘offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers. . . – to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking . . . which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what's really important in an unfamiliar light’. The claim that ‘what is really important [is disclosed] by casting it in an unfamiliar light’ I take into a philosophical engagement with the figure of the ghost. Far from being of dubious interest for the philosopher of religion, the continuing fascination with ghosts and hauntings offers promising ground for the discussion of religion, for the study of ghosts holds out the possibility of engaging with the wonder and terror of the human condition. The figure of something that is dead yet alive is a creative representation of the fact that we who are alive are also mortal, destined to die. The resulting confrontation with death arouses anxiety, but also has the potential to enrich life. The wisdom of the ghost thus enables the possibility of returning philosophy of religion to the great themes of human existence – birth, suffering, loss, and death – which provide rich resources for understanding religion and its relation to the experience of being human.

Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

The study of nationalism in North America has focused heavily on national identity. Much of the scholarship in the region indicates that most individuals define their respective national identities as attainable and inclusive. In contrast to these findings, other evidence from nationalism and ethnic politics scholarship in North America suggests a strong racial link to national understandings. Focusing on national identity research in North America, primarily the United States, but also findings from Canada and Mexico, I try to address the connection between national identity, its political effects, and the boundaries of national identity content. This article identifies important findings from research in North America and proposes that scholars look beyond the current research to study national development – understood both historically and through the study of individuals’ constructive deployment of nationalism in everyday life.

This paper analyses five constitutional developments in Central and Eastern Europe that can impact the domestic implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Using Czechia, Poland and Slovenia as examples, the paper highlights four potential drivers, namely: (1) the process of constitutionalizing human rights; (2) the proliferation of the doctrine of horizontal effect of constitutional rights; (3) the constitutional legitimacy of state intervention in the free market economy; and (4) the mechanism of judicial review. Furthermore, the author underlines the most significant challenge, which is increasing resistance to international norms in some countries, e.g., Poland. The paper concludes that the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts can facilitate the domestic implementation of the UNGPs, particularly Pillars I (State duty to protect human rights) and III (access to remedy).

Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of religion or belief, and the freedom of expression. The article illustrates how organs of the Sri Lankan state have equated notions of ‘public interest’ with the majority community’s conceptions of ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘health’ and ‘morals’. It argues that this practice reflects a cleavage between the moral legitimacy and the legal claimability of fundamental freedoms of minorities and satirists in Sri Lanka. It concludes that legal regimes designed to guarantee fundamental freedoms offer very little protection to minorities when the underlying politics driving the application of law is majoritarian.

Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as a professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in 1966 where he discussed his interdisciplinary interests – mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition. Using archival resources and oral history, this article explores three aspects of Xenakis's trip to Argentina. First, the way the media framed the visit of the European composer and the reception of the events organized around it under a modernist discourse. Second, the direct impact that this visit had on some of the composers at CLAEM, particularly Graciela Paraskevaídis. Finally, the exchanges that Xenakis had with engineer Fernando von Reichenbach, who had been working on transforming graphic material into sound, something that crystallized with the development of Reichenbach's Convertidor Gráfico Analógico (1969), and Xenakis's Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC 1977).

There is a boom in the power of right-wing parties that are becoming government parties in Latin America and Europe. It has been pointed out that these are distinguished from traditional right-wing parties by their common ideology that transcends national contexts, which is why they have been grouped as New Right-wing parties. This article questions whether these parties share ideological themes or whether they are heterogeneous and obey national interests. This study systemizes the New Right-wing parties’ programs and classifies them to answer the question. This corpus is then studied through frequency, network, and principal component analysis. Two conclusions are reached from this. First, these parties agree on issues such as provider States and nationalist claims, and, second, their programs have diverse themes that do not show the formation of an identifiable transnational ideological agenda in their programs. Consequently, grouping these parties as an ideologically homogeneous phenomenon can make invisible the fact that they are parties that adjust to particular demands of their political environment, in a logic that obeys more catch-all parties than ideological and dogmatic parties.

This article suggests that in the investigation of World Englishes, which has tended to focus on syntactic, phonological and lexical preferences, the analysis of shifts in word meanings (and meaning–form relations in lexical items) needs to be incorporated. Exemplary small-scale studies show that in polysemic words certain varieties come to prefer specific meanings, and in word fields some varieties begin to prefer certain forms over others. Based on analyses of different ICE corpora, a set of prospective verbs, their meaning relationships and their varying correlations with syntactic construction choices in different varieties are investigated quantitatively (using HCFA and conditional inference trees) and qualitatively (showcasing interesting innovative, possibly emerging uses in some countries). Regionality is consistently shown to be a weakly conditioning significant factor. Thus, it is suggested that lexicosemantic variability and diffusion in the evolution of World Englishes deserve and need to be investigated systematically.