Epistemology and research history significantly shape scientific understandings, debates, and publication strategies, albeit often implicitly. In Palaeolithic archaeology in particular, these factors are rarely examined in depth. Here, we present a historiographic analysis of how research history has influenced the debate concerning the possible Neanderthal occupation in Scandinavia. We provide a qualitative discussion of this contentious research field as well as a citation network analysis that visualizes, quantifies, and hence clarifies some of the underlying conceptual, geographic, and temporal patterns in the development of the debate. Our results show significant regionalism as a structuring principle driving this debate as well as a basic rift between professional and avocational archaeologists in how they interpret and publish the available data. We also identify a troubling lack of cross-referencing, even when taking language barriers into account. We argue that the debate about Neanderthal occupation in Scandinavia has been shaped (negatively) by the following phenomena: regionalism, nationalism, lack of research and researchers, non-cumulative work, publication in Nordic languages, science by press release/sensationalism, and a lamentable trend towards arguments ad hominem. In order to take this research field forward, we propose an epistemological turn towards a cumulative, international, and hypothesis-driven agenda based on renewed research efforts and novel citizen science tools.

Human activity has eliminated many of the natural lowland ecosystems of the Middle and Lower Yellow River Valley, and has modified the rest, making it difficult to understand what species are native to the region. As a step towards the reconstruction of these lost environments, this paper employs zooarchaeological and other evidence to identify the native mammals of the region. We provide basic ecological information about these animals and discuss controversial or difficult cases in more depth. Our goal is not only to study China's environmental history, but also to make clear that conventional understandings of species ranges are based on the distributions of animals in the modern period, when many had already been eliminated from large areas by human activity.

Ben Bramble, Dan Haybron and others have endorsed the idea that there are unconscious, or unfelt, pleasures and pains. These would be sensory experiences that are genuine pleasures or pains, but experiences of which the subject is unaware. The idea that there are such things is worthy of attention in its own right; but I am interested in this alleged phenomenon for a further reason. I am attracted to an attitudinal theory of sensory pleasure and pain. Bramble has claimed that the existence of unconscious pleasures and pains reveals that attitudinal theories cannot be true. Chris Heathwood has offered a reply on behalf of attitudinalism. I think a better reply can be provided. In this article I explain why an attitudinal theory of pleasure and pain is consistent with whatever is plausible in the ‘unconscious pleasure and pain’ phenomenon.

This article pursues an immanent critique of a scholarly movement and mood that I call “the new genealogy of religious freedom” and sketches an alternative proposal. The new genealogy of religious freedom claims that religious freedom is incoherent, systemically biased, oppressive, ideological—and necessarily so. Its critique deploys a methodology inherited from Nietzsche and targets a vision of religious freedom associated with “foundationalists” like Kant and Rawls. This article calls both the methodology and the vision into question. The version of genealogy that this movement promotes proves self-destructive and incoherent, veering toward nihilism and unable to account for its own status as critique. Its attack on foundationalist religious freedom is effective, but it presupposes—and targets—conceptions of freedom, neutrality, and power that we need not endorse. For foundationalists and genealogists alike, these assumptions define religious freedom. This article rejects those assumptions and that vision of religious freedom. It sketches a pragmatist, dialectical vision of religious freedom rooted in alternate conceptions of power, freedom, and neutrality and a corresponding strategy for legally defining “religion,” inheriting the strengths of genealogy and foundationalism while avoiding their weaknesses.

In liberal democracies with religiously diverse populations, it would be surprising and troubling if a judge relied on a religious text or precept to resolve a legal dispute. It would deeply offend principles of religious freedom if individuals were bound by judicial pronouncement to obey the dictates of a faith they do not share. However, some commentators have long claimed that a person's cultural worldview has an impact on the way they interpret laws and facts, and there is some empirical support for this claim. There is thus reason to expect that judges’ worldviews have some effect on their decision-making. I argue that when judges deliberately avoid engaging with their own moral perspectives, they may mask to themselves the impact that such perspectives have on their decisions. The alternative of explicit reference to religious sources in judicial decisions, however, is too problematic for the religious freedom of legal subjects. I argue that judges should instead endeavor to be conscious of the influence their backgrounds have on their decision-making, but suggest that judicial institutions may be resistant to adopting practices that would support such an approach. The article draws on Canadian and American case law to demonstrate its argument but has wider applicability to liberal states.

The story of Hebron during the 1948 Palestine War remains largely untold, obscured by the larger historical forces of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and refugee crisis that resulted from Israel's declaration of independence. This article examines the history and historiography of Hebron from mid-May 1948 until the departure of Egyptian troops from the country on 30 April 1949, a period referred to as the ‘Dual Era’, an unusual configuration between Jordan and Egypt in which both countries temporarily ruled over the city. It analyses the Dual Era against an emerging Egyptian and Jordanian proto-pan-Arab nationalism as each country's locally based leaders vied for support for their rule from the Palestinian population in Hebron.