David Phillips (2011) and Thomas Hurka (2014a, 2014b) argue that Sidgwick’s critique of deontology contains three serious flaws. First, it has no force against moderate deontologies composed of prima facie duties rather than unconditional duties. Second, Sidgwick’s preferred principles fail to meet the very criteria by which he rejects deontological principles. Third, Sidgwick’s employment of his key maxim of Rational Benevolence equivocates between all-things-considered and other-things-equal formulations. I defend Sidgwick against all three criticisms. (1) While some of Sidgwick’s arguments apply only to absolute deontology, others apply to moderate versions as well. (2) Although Sidgwick’s preferred principles do not fare perfectly against his criteria, they still fare better than the deontological principles. (3) The suggestion that Sidgwick relies on an all-things-considered formulation of Rational Benevolence is based on a misunderstanding of the structure of his argument. The upshot is that Sidgwick’s overarching line of argument is stronger than recent critics suggest.

The article begins by understanding Karl Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation (PA) as a historical process integrated by both internal and external components. Situating itself within the Marxist tradition that views PA as an originating, historical process that experienced closure by the end of the colonial period, it draws on history and theory to delineate how the external dimension of PA, British colonialism, unfolded in Punjab. Operating in cahoots with local actors, this colonial form of the “original sin” succeeded in subordinating the pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalism and established a new private property order as well as permanent agricultural settlements, using political, legal, ideological, and coercive means. It makes a distinctive contribution to the debates around PA by arguing that the external of PA (in British Punjab) differed radically from its internal (in England): the accumulation project involved mass sedentarization as opposed to mass expropriation. The article concludes by examining how the dialectics between dissolution and conservation form the dominant feature of colonialist PA in Punjab and how that can help us redefine PA in colonies.

This research article examines the licensing of complementizer agreement with nominals (namely thematic subjects and objects) in the left periphery, focusing on data from Jordanian Arabic (JA). It demonstrates that obligatory complementizer agreement with A-bar elements is evident in JA grammar due to the effects of the Agree Identification Condition, which enforces an agreement inflection on the probe when the goal is not phonologically overt (e.g., a pro). This enforcement also applies when the probe agrees with a chain consisting of two silent links (e.g., when the complementizer agrees with a wh- or a focused element). This finding supports the proposal that the morphological realization of Agree dependencies is ruled by interface conditions, which are also proven to be responsible for the presence of an obligatorily overt complementizer when extraction of the embedded nominal takes place.

This article examines the contributions of Bert Bolin, the first chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to the collective understanding of the panel’s nature, operations and results, as well as his efforts to safeguard the credibility of the IPCC process in the face of criticism. Based on the scholarship on expertise and its relationship with the political process, I argue that Bolin’s contribution to that process can be summarized in three points. First, he acted as a mediator between producers of climate change knowledge and its users, in this case governments and corporations. Second, he selected and emphasized some of the information provided by the IPCC and used it to advocate for immediate action to tackle climate change. Third, he played a major role in legitimizing the IPCC as the best possible assessment organization, especially through boundary work. Additionally, it is suggested that Bolin’s role in the advisory process was not static but changed within an evolving political and social context. Through this case study, I aim to contribute to the scholarship that examines how environmental problems are defined and brought into the political arena, and the role of experts in this complex process.

The polar regions are famous for being inhospitable, difficult to access, and one of the final frontiers for exploration. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with explorers seeking the achievement of being the first person to the Pole. These harrowing stories have action and adventure but lack a critical component: women. Women historically have not played a primary role in polar research or exploration. Many barriers to access existed such as prejudice, lack of education opportunity, and physical restrictions. Today, women have better access to the Antarctic and Arctic for research and research support but still face barriers to equitable participation. A “boys club” environment in stations can lead to women being excluded or subjected to sexual harassment. Despite this, the addition of women is shown to improve team dynamics, morale, and the culture within research stations. Women’s representation in polar research is better today than it’s ever been, yet there is still improvement being made for the future.

The Avicennan text De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum had a great influence on the alchemical thought of the thirteenth century. This Latin text disputed both the veracity of alchemy and the possibility of alchemical transmutation by arguing that art is inferior to nature and that the alchemists cannot manipulate a metal because its true characteristics are hidden from our senses; thus an alchemist cannot change something which is unknown to him. Newman’s pioneer studies examined the diffusion and impact of the first Avicennan argument on medieval alchemy and he shed light on the art-versus-nature debate. This paper has a twofold aim: on the one hand it aims to further Newman’s study by focusing on the second Avicennan argument, which is closely related to the problem of substantial form, and on the other hand it aims to show how the aforesaid problem paved the way for the emergence of corpuscularianism, which flourished during the early modern period. In this regard, it will become clear that the historiographical case of alchemy and its problem of substantial form can serve as an exegetical tool for ‘bridging’ the Middle Ages and the early modern period with respect to the relation between Aristotelianism and corpuscularianism.

In this article, which has a strong methodological focus, we establish the labour relations that characterized the urban population of the Swedish town of Västerås in 1820. Several sources are combined: the so-called Tabellverket (an early form of demographic statistics) and observations made in, primarily, local court records. To assign labour relations as defined by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations project, the preliminary picture based on the Tabellverket is complemented by systematically adding information from court records analysed in the Gender and Work project. This information captures both what people did and also, to some extent, what labour relations they were involved in. Subsequently, all the information is collated to estimate the labour relations characterizing the whole population in the selected town. The result of this experiment is a much more encompassing and richer picture of the labour relations within the selected community, one that acknowledges both women’s work and multiple employments. In a broader perspective, the case study contributes to our understanding of the gradual increase of commodified labour in the world.

With trade and the environment becoming increasingly interconnected, environmental impact assessments (EIAs) of trade negotiations help to integrate environmental considerations into trade-related treaty making by evaluating potential risks and opportunities, addressing public concerns, and facilitating the introduction of response measures. Despite international efforts, such ‘trade EIAs’ have not yet been universally adopted. At the domestic level, the United States, Canada, and the European Union have pioneered the use of EIAs through their institutionalized procedures for over 20 years. This article examines and compares the relevant practices of these three jurisdictions to identify major patterns and to discuss the pros and cons of existing differences in this area. It argues that the time-tested experience of these jurisdictions could provide benchmarks for consideration in promoting the widespread implementation of trade EIAs through global and regional trade regimes.

Situated at the intersection of language rights, nation-building processes, and security issues, this article analyzes language policies in Ukraine in the three decades since its independence (1991–2021). It traces the legal evolution and decisions of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court, identifying the specific ideological approaches towards language issues that emerge in such a development. We distinguish four periods in the evolution of Ukrainian laws, highlighting how these stages reflect specific ontological and societal (in)securities and related securitization processes, and their intersection with the process of nation-building and the role assigned to the Ukrainian language in such a process. In this way, the article discusses how, in light of the Soviet legacy and Russian kin-state activism and geopolitical agenda, Ukraine has moved to adopt a more assertive nationalizing approach to language issues that aim at promoting Ukrainian as the state language. Russia’s aggressive actions accelerated the ongoing nation-building process, interplaying with the relevance assigned to the Ukrainian language for the Ukrainian nation-state as well as the country’s ontological and societal (in)securities. In this way, our contribution complements our understanding of language policies, bringing to light the connections of their evolution and variations with how security concerns affect nation-building processes.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, is renowned for operating the world’s largest particle accelerator and is often regarded as a model of high-profile international collaboration. Less well known, however, is a key episode from the late 1950s, when CERN clashed with the research priorities of similar organizations. The issue centred on a CERN-sponsored study group on controlled thermonuclear fusion, which brought together scientists from CERN member states, as well as representatives from the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA) and the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). While their meetings succeeded in creating an international network for exchanging reports and coordinating projects to avoid duplication, the initiative failed to establish joint fusion research programmes in Europe. This article explores the reasons behind this outcome to provide insights into intergovernmental power dynamics and scientific competition and how these two factors favoured the creation of a new fusion research institution in the UK, the Culham Laboratory. In doing so, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of science in European integration, while also highlighting that CERN’s involvement in application-oriented research remains an underexplored aspect of its history.

In 1893, the British explorer Frederick George Jackson travelled in the north of the Russian Empire, where he learned lessons—particularly in the areas of diet, transport, and clothing—from the Nenets and Sami people. I argue that his travels in this area influenced both his subsequent Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition (1894–97) and British Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century, including those led by Robert F. Scott and Ernest H. Shackleton

Studying Jackson’s travels and writings can advance discussions about the role of Indigenous knowledge in British Polar exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Based on a new reading of both published and archival materials, the paper also charts some forms of knowledge that Jackson struggled to appropriate—particularly the use of reindeer for transport. In examining his failures, I argue that attempts to write Indigenous contributions into the history of exploration must focus on explorers’ failures as well as their successes—and on forms of Indigenous knowledge that proved difficult to use in other contexts.

This article contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing labour relations from a historical perspective. Firstly, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyles. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. Thirdly, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labour by considering the agricultural production of commodities as toxic frontiers against which workers’ unions have historically organized to protect their safety. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has met the micro scale of particles owing to the toxicity of twenty-first-century commodity frontiers.

This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of collective remembering of the American War in Vietnam, also known as the Vietnam War, as embodied in forty-nine photographs taken during the war and published in the digital edition of The New York Times on the Vietnam War’s forty-second anniversary commemoration. Collective memory and commemoration are understood as political and discursive practices that make up a site of contestation (Milani & Richardson 2022). This research attempts to unveil The New York Times’ semiotic control in presenting and recontextualizing a historical narrative of the Vietnam War to sustain a necropolitical architecture in the making of collective memory. Three major themes emerging from the data—dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death—are discussed in the context of what we call necropolitical discourse of collective remembering of the Vietnam War. (Necropolitical discourse, Vietnam War, CMDA, collective remembering, lieu de dispute)

This study examines Taiwanese netizens’ metapragmatic debates on tonal variation in Taiwan Mandarin, focusing on the pronunciation of 企業 qìyè ‘company/enterprise’ by two government officials during a nationally broadcast press conference. It investigates how the non-standard variant qǐyè, a relic feature historically present in Taiwan, becomes enregistered as a linguistic emblem of imported Chinese influence through the processes of clasping and semiotic differentiation. The study highlights the ideological stakes in linguistic boundary-making and explores how tonal variation functions as a site for negotiating national identity. It further connects this linguistic debate to broader ideological projects such as democratization, Taiwanization, and shifting Taiwan-China relations. By integrating variationist and metapragmatic approaches, this study contributes to discussions on the indexical field and the role of explicit metapragmatic commentary in shaping linguistic change. (Indexicality, language ideology, tonal variation, enregisterment, language policing, metapragmatics, Taiwan)