Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain involves legal and policy choices, disregarding the need to implement human participation and contestability in these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes to examine how privacy-compliance technologies can incorporate human participation and contestability: first, resorting to the interdisciplinary literature to examine how technological design could balance privacy with human oversight; second, discussing the challenges to ensure ex post contestability for aggrieved data subjects; third, examining the difficulties in identifying liable parties in a blockchain platform. The current disregard of the social and human element risks undermining the role of privacy-compliance technologies in the blockchain.

Launched in April 2018, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Smart Cities Network (ASCN) initiative raises important issues regarding the tensions between achieving smart city objectives on the one hand and protection of human rights on the other. The aim of this paper is to explore these tensions using a Knowledge Commons Framework analysis. I first analyse the three key pillars of the ASCN pilot city knowledge commons – knowledge resources, community attributes and governance ‘rules in use’ – using human rights criteria. I the apply the lessons of this analysis to two fundamental aspects of human experience in smart city contexts – mobility through transport systems and access to essential services through energy supply.

As a former diplomat currently engaged in praxis-oriented research and teaching, I examine Böckenförde’s importance in the broad context of the debate on the future of Europe. First, I trace some of Böckenförde’s specific thoughts on the development of the European Union, notably concerning trends that impact on the shared “sense of belonging” that underpins deliberative democracy. Second, accepting Böckenförde’s crucial distinction between the granular provisions of the law and an underlying ethos or sense of direction, I argue that the Böckenförde paradox is strongly supported at the roots of our culture by ancient Greek political thought, in ways that can help us develop our thinking in new directions—involving Aristotelian conceptions of orientation, community (koinōnia), and discernment. Finally, I address the challenges currently facing the European Union, taking as my point of departure President Emmanuel Macron’s evocation of the “contribution which a living Europe can bring to civilisation.” The political thought of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, illuminated by conceptions of orientation, community, and discernment, can help to prepare us for a future intercultural dialogue in the service of peace.

Much of historic Christian philosophical theology has affirmed that God not only exists, but is Existence itself. Nowadays, this claim is widely rejected as unintelligible by theists and non-theists alike. I argue in contrast that if there is such a thing as Existence itself, that thing must be a maximally excellent being, which is what many philosophers call God. This is because Existence would itself need to exist, which is only possible if Existence exists in a paradigmatic way, that is, as a perfect instance of existence. My argument thus offers both a defence of the coherence of the claim that God is Existence itself, and a new way of arguing for theism.

This article traces the origins and developments of Chinese studies in Austria. In addition to factors and institutions that were instrumental in the development of these studies, the lives and works of individuals important to this development are revisited, starting with brief remarks on the scholarly interest in China in eighteenth century Austria and on early efforts to obtain Chinese books and Chinese printing types in the nineteenth century. The achievements of individual scholars are examined against the backdrop of their institutional affiliations and their experiences, if any, in China. In addition, the reasons for the delayed institutionalization of Sinological studies at university level are highlighted.

In this article I defend the possibility of the Virgin Mary's free consent to bear the Son of God at the Annunciation against Blake Hereth's argument that God's offer cannot but be either coercive or deceptive, or both. I argue that the Immaculate Conception does help ensure this possibility, contrary to what Hereth also argues against me.

This article explores the early modern understanding of the gut-mind relationship through a study of the beliefs and practices surrounding the hellebore plant in seventeenth-century England. Hellebore has been strongly associated with mental illness for most of recorded European history, and it is only during the past two centuries that it has lost this association. Taking a phenomenological approach, I demonstrate that the study of this specific plant, its representations, and its practices is significant not just to plant folklorists and medical historians but also to wider histories of culture, religion, emotion, and the body. The use of hellebore as a treatment for disorders of the mind reveals a fully embodied view of emotion in which the gut played a key role in shaping subjective experience. It also reflects a potently negative understanding of emotion as excremental matter, as something inherently impure, dangerous, and evil, warranting a violent remedy that was as punitive as it was therapeutic. By analyzing medical sources—herbals, pharmacopoeias, practitioners’ casebooks, and domestic receipt books—alongside devotional literature and religious polemic, I show that hellebore's symbolic importance was inseparable from its practical use as a treatment for mental illness, which depended upon an understanding of emotion and religious identity that accorded vital significance to the relationship between belly and brain.