Derek Parfit famously opined that causing a person to exist with a life barely worth living can be wrong, although it is not wrong for that person. This conundrum is known as the nonidentity problem. Parfit also held that persons can, in a morally relevant sense, be caused to exist in the distant future by actions that make the agent a necessary condition for a person’s existence. When these views are combined, which he did, and applied explicitly to persons with a life not worth living, which he did not, an interesting conditional conclusion can be drawn. If every family line eventually produces a person with a life not worth living, and if causing that person to exist cannot be justified by the benefits befalling others in the family line, it is always wrong to have children. Parfit did not draw this antinatalist conclusion, but an analysis of his introduction of the nonidentity problem shows that he could have. Since Parfit’s other views on population ethics continue to be discussed with relative respect, it stands to reason that the antinatalist position should be no exception. Right or wrong, it has its legitimate place in considerations concerning the future of reproduction.

In the year 1900, Otani Kozui, along with three travel companions, ventured on a one-month Arctic cruise, visiting the Norwegian fjords, the North Cape, Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and Iceland. The turn of the 20th century was a formative time for early Arctic tourism, and the aura of exploration was still a part of the northern allure. While Otani and his friends were not the first Japanese to cross the Arctic Circle, they were seen among their contemporaries as holding the record for being the first Japanese to cross the 70th parallel, which became a badge of honour in the exclusive Arctic Circle Society that was established in Japan in the early 1930s. As one of Japan’s most important 20th-century explorers, Otani is well known for having collected and studied Buddhist treasures from across Central Asia and the Silk Road. This paper aims to establish the facts surrounding Otani’s Arctic cruise and the Arctic Circle Society, both of which have gone mostly unnoticed by contemporary scholars. The paper also discusses how Otani’s voyage – which contains elements of tourism, study and competition – should be perceived, both in the context of his legacy and the broader historical developments of the era.

A recurrent trope in the reception of Joseph Joachim's performances is the notion that that he magically transformed himself into the composer of the work. In particular, his performances of violin concertos frequently evoked this perception, as documented by Andreas Moser, Otto Gumbrecht, Hans von Bülow, and Johannes Brahms. Building on work by Katharina Uhde and Karen Leistra-Jones, this article will propose that Joachim's cadenzas played a central role in fostering the perceived slippage between the composer and performer. Joachim composed – and performed – cadenzas for many of the concertos in his core repertoire, including works by Giuseppe Tartini, W. A. Mozart, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Brahms. I will argue that Joachim's cadenzas enact a compositional approach to the thematic material. The depth of this engagement is profound, encompassing not only the soloistic passages but also the ritornello sections as material for developmental reworking and modulatory processes. In fact, he often explores harmonic avenues that are only hinted at in the ‘parent’ concerto, highlighting and fulfilling moments of unrealized potential. Joachim's cadenzas thus create the impression that the composer of the concerto is revising and expanding his own work. I propose that he inhabits the genre of the cadenza as a site of compositional and performative virtuosity, fusing the two personas at a time when they were becoming increasingly polarized in European musical culture.

Greenland is the world's largest island, but only a narrow strip of land between the Inland Ice and the sea is inhabitable. Yet, the Norse chose to settle here around ad 986. During the eleventh century ad, precontact Inuit people moved into Greenland from northern Alaska via Canada. Although the two cultures faced the same climatic changes during the Little Ice Age, the Inuit thrived, while the Norse did not, for multiple causes. The authors focus on one of these causes, the hitherto overlooked contribution of young children's learning strategies to societal adaptation. The detailed analysis of a large corpus of play objects reveals striking differences between the children's material culture in the two cultures: rich and diverse in the precontact Inuit material and more limited and normative in the Norse. Drawing on insights from developmental psychology, the authors discuss possible effects of play objects on children's future adaptability in variable climatic conditions.

In 1853, a Taiping army infiltrated North China, threatening Beijing and the Qing dynasty itself. Though this army never reached Beijing, its northern siege had acute and lasting impacts on communities in the capital region (jifu 畿輔). Attention to the capital region invites reflection on the temporality and strategic nature of commemoration. Focusing on Cangzhou 滄州, I examine how capital region communities memorialized the northern chapter of the Taiping Civil War, even as for the rest of the empire, the war remained unfinished until 1864. In gazetteers, private histories, and commemorative records, local authors reframed ambiguous realities to write their localities into a story of northern victory, regardless of the fate of the south. The timeline for commemoration in Cangzhou was interrupted, not seamless, and took place over decades. Initially addressed to Beijing and elites along the Grand Canal, Cangzhou's commemorative project was later brought into the orbit of ascendant Tianjin.

The authors critique the NY Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which does not denounce continued captivity and invasive research in the pursuit of animal consciousness markers. They argue that such research often increases animal suffering by accepting harmful practices. Instead, they propose a nonanthropocentric, ethical framework aligned with the Belmont Report’s principle of beneficence, advocating for noninvasive methods in natural habitats. This approach prioritizes animal well-being, recognizing and safeguarding the intrinsic value of all conscious beings.