In modern scholarship, much ink has been spilled over the significance of St. Augustine in the history of Western philosophy and theology. However, little effort has been made to clarify the legacy of Augustine in East Asia, especially his contribution to China during the early Jesuit missionary work through the Maritime Silk Road. The present article attempts to fill this lacuna and provide a philosophical analysis of the encounter of Chinese indigenous religions with St Augustine, by inquiring into why and how Augustine was taken as a model for the Chinese in their acceptance of the Christian faith. The analysis is split into three parts. The first part reflects on the contemporary disputations over the quality of the paraphrasing work of the early Jesuits, analyzing the validity of the allegedly careless inaccuracies in their introduction of Augustine's biography. The second part analyses some rarely discussed Chinese translations of Augustine, which I recently found in the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, with particular focus on their ideological context. In particular, the paraphrased text concerning Augustine's theory of sin and the two cities will be highlighted. The third part goes a step further in exploring the reason why Augustine was considered an additional advantage in dealing with the conflicts between Christian and Confucian values. The primary contribution this essay makes is to present a philosophical inquiry into the role of Augustine in the early acceptance of Christianity in China by suggesting that a strategy of “Confucian-Christian synthesis” had been adopted by the Jesuit missionaries. Thereby, they accommodated Confucian terms without dropping the core values of the orthodox Catholic faith. The conclusion revisits the critics’ arguments and sums up with an evaluation of the impact of Augustine's religious values in the indigenization of Christianity in China.

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.

The importance of fish for the medieval and early modern economy in the Baltic Sea is known through separate studies by historians and archaeologists. This article aims to combine zooarchaeological data with account books from castles in Kastelholm (Åland Islands) and Raseborg (south-western coast of Finland) in order to understand the processing and transport of fish in the area. Fish was paid as tax by the peasants but was also fished by the castle fishermen and brought to the castles to be consumed there. Here, the preserved fish products are primarily studied through pike and cod, which represent the main economically important larger fish species in the Baltic Sea. The study reveals some differences between the castles studied and the importance of fish for the castle economy.

Emerging critiques of mainstream accounts of secularism reveal the imbrication of the sacred and the secular in ‘secular’ states. In the context of colonial Northern Nigeria, this sacred-secular entanglement, which took the form of the co-option of Islam for the colonial ‘secular’ enterprise, did not leave Islam unchanged. Co-opting Islam for the colonial project necessitated the making of an Islamic Law amenable to the colonial state. With a focus on criminal law, this article narrates the making of a British Colonial Islamic law in Northern Nigeria through the unprecedented expansion of siyasa. Departing from orthodox accounts of Islamic law's reification in colonial Northern Nigeria and heterodox assertions of its erosion by the colonial state, this article argues that neither the reification nor the erosion accounts illuminates the relationship between the colonial state and Islamic law. To show how the colonial state could assert secularism while co-opting Islam, this article presents a narrative of reform that foregrounds the following questions: Who had (and exercised) the power to decide what Islamic law was? How was the exercise of this power justified? How did the exercise of this power fit with the broader colonial project of governing religious difference? What were the consequences of these processes for Islamic law, institutions and colonial subjects?

The ‘non-identity problem’ raises a well-known challenge to the person-affecting view, according to which an action can be wrong only if it affects someone for the worse. In a recent article, however, Thomas D. Bontly proposes a novel way to solve the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms. Bontly's argument is based on a contrastive causal account of harm. In this response, we argue that Bontly's argument fails even assuming that the contrastive causal account is correct.

Over 120 prehistoric pottery sherds from mainland Finland and the Åland Islands in the north Baltic region were studied for their organic residue content. Preserved fat residues found in these vessels indicated that the food procurement pattern was broad during the Neolithic and Early Metal periods. Based on previous research and these results, it appears that animal husbandry came to Finland with the Corded Ware culture. Groups using the succeeding Late Neolithic Kiukainen Ware did not, however, practice animal husbandry to any great extent, as there is an indication of dairy fats in only a single sherd. In general, even after dairy farming arrived in the area, prehistoric groups in southern and south-western Finland continued or returned to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. During the Early Metal period, animal husbandry increased in importance among the groups living in the area, and the level of dairying then intensified.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the mining industry in Britain was subject to recurrent disputes about the risk to miners’ lungs from coal dust, moderated by governmental, industrial, medical and mining bodies. In this environment, precise measurements offered a way to present uncontested objective knowledge. By accessing primary source material from the National Archives, the South Wales Miners Library and the University of Bristol's Special Collections, I demonstrate the importance that the British Medical Research Council (MRC) attached to standardized instrumental measures as proof of objectivity, and explore the conflict between objective and subjective measures of health. Examination of the MRC's use of spirometry in their investigation of pneumoconiosis (miner's lung) from 1936 to 1945 will shed light on this conflict and illuminate the politics inherent in attempts to quantify disability and categorize standards of health.

In this article I explore different ways archaeologists can contribute to and learn from theorizing the digital world beyond the traditional functionalistic means of applying computational methods. I argue that current digital technologies can be a very constructive tool to create non-human experience and awareness. I pursue this argument by presenting ideas from a work-in-progress project experimenting with the post-human and the virtual, and by exploring significant otherness in Roman religion and the dark spots in human perception, through the analysis of an absent temple in Rome. Applying post-human philosophies and an expanded concept of virtuality beyond the digital makes it possible to change our approach to object/human/divine relations in Roman cults and how we present Roman heritage towards a post-humanist framework. Through this, digital archaeology can become one of the ways of re-examining and reinventing our ideas of the human, the past and the digital.

This paper discusses a type of wh-exclamative whose wh-component and degree component do not seem to go hand in hand. These are wh-exclamatives in Catalan whose moved wh-phrase is headed by the determiner quin ‘what, which’, and whose NP contains an optional DegP headed by tan ‘so’ or més ‘more’. By taking a closer look at these wh-exclamatives, we will be able to contribute to the debate on the role of gradability and of the wh-component in the semantics of wh-exclamatives. My claim is that the DegP in these wh-exclamatives leaves behind a degree variable that is ultimately bound by an expressive speech act operator. Following Castroviejo (2006) and building on Rett (2009), I adhere to the claim that wh-exclamatives in Catalan are necessarily scalar as a requirement of the expressive operator. Moreover, as a downward-monotonic operator, I show that it licenses upward-directed inferences, which ensures that wh-exclamatives express unexpectedness toward a high degree.

This article investigates dynamics of mobilization over environmental and human rights norms in the context of undemocratic governments. We test the suggestion in norm diffusion theories that the success of domestic struggles in this context depends on the level of internalization of norms brought about by international pressure. We find that the internalization (or lack thereof) of global norms by the Government of Sudan does not explain its recognition of environmental justice claims in this case. Furthermore, the various litigation efforts pursued by affected people outside Sudan did not influence their campaign. However, a combination of the political climate in the country and a unique political interplay between the government and a distinct group of the affected people may have led to the singular success of their campaign. We use a combination of discourse analysis, legal analysis, norm mapping, and semi-structured interviews to reach conclusions.