This essay explores the interlocking roles of science and religion in Sino-Western exchanges by examining China's encounter with Jesuit mathematics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It first focuses on late Ming by studying the joint translation of Euclidean geometry by high-ranking scholar-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) and Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Then it studies how this encounter affected later literati-scholars, with a special attention to Mei Wending (1633–1721), the leading mathematical astronomer of early Qing. I argue that Xu's appropriation of Western mathematics not only helped strengthen the basis of Confucian statecraft in the milieu of late Ming crisis but also contributed to later reconstruction and renaissance of Chinese classical tradition through Qing-dynasty evidential studies. Far from predetermined, this cross-cultural encounter represents a trial-and-error process of contested accommodation dictated by different personal agendas, changing socio-political circumstances, evolving intellectual trends as well as shifting global balance of power.

“The Question of Icebergs” is a cryo-history (Sörlin, 2015) of Arctic infrastructures: How has ice and snow shaped communication infrastructures in the Arctic by both drawing in and deterring interest in travelling through, connecting with and building in the region? This study follows the case of the 160-year-old plans for “The Northern Route,” a transatlantic telegraph which would have placed Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands at the centre of transatlantic communication in the early 1860s. I draw on Actor-Network Theory and postcolonial studies to trace how notions of the Arctic Sublime, a dependency on “credible ice witnesses,” local ice knowledges and the “politics of comparison” influenced the eventual abandonment of the route, where Arctic territories were (dis)regarded and considered as mere “substrate” for infrastructure. I argue that this cryo-history of Arctic telecommunication infrastructures is an essential contribution to a new socio-technical agenda in cable studies, which shows how established logics about who to connect, and where, still influence infrastructural development in the region today.

There are many authors who consider the so-called “moral nose” a valid epistemological tool in the field of morality. The expression was used by George Orwell, following in Friedrich Nietzsche’s footsteps and was very clearly described by Leo Tolstoy. It has also been employed by authors such as Elisabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hampshire, Mary Warnock, and Leon Kass. This article examines John Harris’ detailed criticism of what he ironically calls the “olfactory school of moral philosophy.” Harris’ criticism is contrasted with Jonathan Glover’s defense of the moral nose. Glover draws some useful distinctions between the various meanings that the notion of moral nose can assume. Finally, the notion of moral nose is compared with classic notions such as Aristotelian phronesis, Heideggerian aletheia, and the concept of “sentiment” proposed by the philosopher Thomas Reid. The conclusion reached is that morality cannot be based only on reason, or—as David Hume would have it—only on feelings.

The role of power in healthcare can raise many ethical challenges. Power is ownership, whether given, ceded, or taken of another person’s autonomy. When a person has power over someone else, they can control or strongly influence the decision-making freedom of that person. From the principalist perspective1,2 of healthcare ethics, denying a person their freedom to choose, should only occur when justifying conditions related to beneficence and nonmaleficence are sufficiently satisfied. In healthcare, it is rare to be able to identify situations where paternalism is justified. However, experience suggests that abusive power in healthcare is used too frequently without justifying criteria.

During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.

Since its inception, the institution of postmortem organ transplantation has faced the problem of organ shortage: Every year, the demand for donor organs vastly exceeds supply, resulting in the deaths of approximately 8,000 individuals in the United States alone.1 This is in large part due to the fact that the United States, for the most part, operates under an “opt-in” policy in which people are given the opportunity to voluntarily opt-in to organ donation by registering as organ donors.2 In the United States, a person’s organs will not be removed for transplantation purposes unless she has registered as a donor or her family gives their consent for organ removal.3 Jointly, these policies generate a situation where we do not retrieve as many organs as we could.

What factors influence the formation of threat perception among the masses? Can the public perceive that external threats exist yet also feel safe? This article investigates both how threat perceptions form, as well as what factors influence security perceptions, in ethnically diverse countries and societies. While drawing on data from two nationally representative surveys, this article inquires to what extent the views of the government and society align regarding whether Russia represents a security threat to Latvia. We find that the determinants of threat and security perceptions differ. Above all else, the views of our respondents are shaped by their ethnic identities and regional effects. Consumption of different forms of media also influence threat perception. Perceived asymmetry of power is an additional important variable shaping security perception. Importantly, there is a correlation between seeing Russia as a security threat and Russophobia or fear of Russians living in Latvia. Overall, this article demonstrates that threat perceptions differ between Russian-speakers and Latvians, shows that it is important to differentiate between perceptions of threat and security, and identifies key explanatory variables influencing development of these perceptions in ethnically diverse societies.

This article analyses the development of Italian health policies in the post-Second World War period. Shortly after the setting up of the ‘Beveridge model’ and the creation of the British National Health Service, Italy also introduced a new approach to health, which became part of the Constitution. However, the implementation of the necessary reforms was delayed due to resistance from the country's institutions and government parties. The introduction of a radical health reform became possible only in 1978 through pressure generated from social conflicts, trade unions and left-wing parties. The implementation of the National Health Service encountered a number of obstacles due to the specific conditions of Italy, but also owing to changes at the international level. The neoliberal policies started in the 1980s introduced restrictions in health spending, the regionalisation and privatisation of services, and a new selective approach to health. In spite of these limitations and contradictions, the Italian healthcare system has been considerably successful, leading to strong improvements in health and to a life expectancy at birth among the longest in Europe. The recent developments – and the experience of the pandemic – confirm the important impact of a public, universal health service and, at the same time, the persistent policy efforts aimed at weakening its reach.

Taking as a starting point the variation in introspective judgments on embedded gapping in English in the literature, the main goal of this paper is to test the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ experimentally. Building on a first experimental study designed to measure the interaction between that-omission and factivity in English embedded complement clauses, we conducted two experiments testing the role of the complementizer in embedded gapping, paying special attention to the semantic nature of the matrix predicates (non-factives vs semi-factives vs true factives). Our results show, on the one hand, that the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ makes too strong claims that are not backed up by our experimental findings, and, on the other hand, that embedded gapping is affected by both the presence/absence of that and by the semantic class of the matrix predicate in English. In particular, embedded gapping seems to be more acceptable under non-factive verbs, especially in the absence of a complementizer. Both constraints (that-omission and factivity) can be accounted for by a constructionist fragment-based analysis, where the gapped clause is a non-finite phrase that has to address the same Question Under Discussion as its source. This explains, in turn, why embedded gapping under true factive predicates is considered significantly less acceptable. We show that the acceptable cases of embedded gapping involve true syntactic embedding (so, the matrix clause has no parenthetical use). We conclude that English has the same sensitivity to the semantic class of the matrix predicate as other languages, but that the requirements on the presence/absence of that are English specific.

This article looks at different strategies in which authoritarianism operated in relation to the redesign of Skopje during the rule of the conservative party VMRO-DPMNE and its leader Nikola Gruevski. It argues that the promoters of the urban project called “Skopje 2014” relied on a set of nondemocratic mechanisms and involvement and coordination of various individuals and institutions on all levels to implement and legitimize the project and expand its political dominance. These ranged from state-driven mechanisms and urban design strategies to contributions of non-state groups, thus demonstrating a systematic effort behind the makeover of Skopje. Examining the project through the concept of authoritarianism, the article goes beyond (methodological) nationalism to understand the complexity of the revamp of North Macedonia’s capital. It also demonstrates how the party used its ideological principles to leave its enduring mark on Skopje’s urban environment. Additionally, the article points out the need to study urban space politics in the context of hybrid and competitive authoritarian regimes.

We provide a variety of empirical arguments in favor of a paratactic account of recomplementation constructions, in which a left-dislocated element appears in between two complementizers. Contrary to integrated analyses assuming Complementizer Phrase (CP) recursion or Rizzi’s split periphery, we assume that the dislocated phrase is structurally independent from the embedded clause it precedes, which in turn is an elliptical sentence fragment. The juxtaposed fragmentary sentences are linked by the doubled complementizer, which serves to overtly flag a ‘restart’ in discourse. We show that this account makes a range of welcome predictions while sidestepping non-trivial problems that arise for integrated/cartographic analyses, which assume that dislocated XPs are in left-peripheral positions (such as Spec-TopicP) and that the doubled complementizer spells out Topic0. A further advantage of the approach is that it provides a handle on recomplementation constructions beyond the core cases involving left-dislocation, which reduce to a mere subcase of the general phenomenon of elliptical ‘restarts’ in discourse.