According to Dazai Shundai, observations of heaven are important for making calendars, but heaven and its intentions ultimately lie beyond the limits of human knowledge; for this reason, heaven should be feared. The music of the ancient sage kings is based in a correct system of tonal pitches, which must be spread throughout the realm. Systems of weights and measures must also be uniform throughout the realm. Geographical records are an important tool for governing, and these records should be made broadly available to the people.

Chapter 8 summarises and concludes the analysis presented in the previous chapters. As highlighted throughout the book, the power of the courts to effectively protect freedom of expression is limited in the face of global digital networks and powerful private technology companies. This makes it all the more important to recognise not only the individual but also the institutional dimension of fundamental rights as objective value judgements under constitutional law, the implementation of which falls under the state’s duty to protect. Given the enormous technical and social complexity of the digital revolution, this task can only be accomplished through legislation.

This chapter examines a wide range of rabbinic sources and demonstrates that the rabbis gave considerable attention to God’s independent existence and strongly affirmed our capacity to refer to and speak truthfully about God.

This chapter addresses Arthurian romance and its transition from manuscript to print in the Renaissance, in its four European heartlands, France, Germany, Iberia and Italy. The first printed editions appear in the last decades of the sixteenth century, and seem to have met with success, with printer-publishers capitalising on the popularity of Arthuriana in manuscript: extending or condensing, resurrecting more obscure romances and adapting them to new tastes, modernising language – but also furnishing, in the face of moralists’ disapproval, alluring prefaces which stress their educational and moral value, and their importance as records of ancestry and hence for the revival of ancestral chivalry. Increasingly, however, publishers look to novelty, turning to new heroes like Amadis de Gaule, or Perceforest, or new adventures for familiar heroes, witness Maugin’s Nouveau Tristan. Ultimately, however, Arthurian romances come to seem trivial, or morally suspect, or simply outdated – and they are largely discarded by printers.

Chapter 10 looks at the listing of foreign companies in China, which is the other side of the coin of cross-border listings. This chapter critically examines the development and regulation of the initial public offering (IPO) and listing of foreign companies in China, and based on such examination, make suggestions for improvement. Since 2018, China has launched a pilot program to allow the listing of “Red-chip Companies,” which are established by Chinese people in offshore financial centers and are technically foreign companies. The Chinese regime for regulating foreign listings has similarities and differences with those in the US and Hong Kong, both of which have developed capital markets and are top destinations for Chinese companies to get listed overseas. This chapter argues that China should follow the Hong Kong model to grant preferential treatments only to those cross-listed in China, and also learn from the US experience with American Depositary Receipts to enhance the utility of Chinese Depository Receipts.

I met Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) twice at Stanford University, the place where he lived, taught, and researched for most of his life. The first meeting was on his invitation to join him for lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club to decide whether he would schedule a meeting with me later to do the actual interview. Being a warm day under the California sun and given that he was already in his nineties, I expected Arrow to be accompanied by his wife or some other relative who would give him a ride to the club and pick him up afterward. This quickly turned out to be a complete misconception. Arrow arrived in his silver Toyota Camry all by himself and dressed up with coat and tie; he quickly entered the club and was greeted by name by almost everyone working there – including the waiters and the young woman stacking white plates next to the salad bar. He had reserved a quiet table in the back of this bright and large restaurant room that he also preferred for his weekly lunches with Pat Suppes, which they apparently have held every Monday for many years. Almost two hours later, when we finished our ice cream and said goodbye, he added, to my relief, that he would be willing to meet again at his office to conduct the interview the next week. He sprinted to his car and drove away. So, lunch had gone well; I had survived the test. Next time, we met in his office at Stanford’s sandstone-colored Landau Economics Building. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his office was literally packed with books, files, and papers. At the same time, given the elegance and orderliness of Arrow’s mathematical abstractions, there was something thrilling and even life-affirming in seeing that he kept an office in such an improvisational state – a testament to his unfiltered and teeming curiosity. After removing and stacking even more books spanning topics from environmental economics to the history of economics – the desk had disappeared under piles of notes and annotated drafts – two chairs suddenly emerged somewhere in the middle of the room. Arrow sat down, almost disappearing between these mountains of sources he had engaged with over the years.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

In 1973 Coetzee gave an early manuscript version of what would later become ‘The Vietnam Project’ to his friend Daniel Hutchinson. In a covering note he drew attention to the parallels between the two stories of Dusklands that were, on the face of it, worlds apart: ‘You will notice that these two stories are thematically and formally identical. I am puzzled by this phenomenon and would be most interested to have it explained to me.’1 ‘The Vietnam Project’ was set in contemporary America, and in the story’s centre is Eugene Dawn’s marital and mental breakdown against the background of his classified Vietnam War research; ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ is a semi-fictionalised account of a late-eighteenth-century Cape frontiersman who embarks on an expedition to Namaqualand. In a subsequent interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee thought that the two narratives shared ideas, ‘but otherwise the relation is loose’.

Chapter 3 investigates the reasons why many Chinese companies have decided to seek cross-border listings in the past three decades. It examines a variety of relevant theories, such as legal bonding, private benefits and market fragmentation and evaluates the extent to which they may apply to the case of Chinese companies. The overseas listing of Chinese companies offers a good case study due to the apparent disparity between China’s regulatory regime and those in the listing places. However, existing empirical research shows ambiguous or, at best, weak effects of legal bonding. This calls for a closer examination of how to interpret these empirical results and why the legal bonding effect is not as strong as expected.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

Describes Meade’s involvement in economic policy debates during the 1960s.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to privatize infrastructure construction through the public-private partnership (PPP) market, the majority of investors in this sector are still state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, the government that contracts for the infrastructure construction and service usually holds a significant proportion of shares in PPP projects. This chapter explains this phenomenon using the legal theory of SOEs. It finds that, in practice, the government typically retains the power to terminate PPP projects in the public interest when new circumstances arise, while the courts offer limited protection to private investors. As a result, private investors may be deterred from investing due to concerns about government opportunism. Furthermore, it observes that a judicial reform enhancing the independence of judges is associated with an increase in the proportion of shares held by private investors and a decline in shares held by SOEs and local governments. These findings suggest that a robust legal system promotes the extent of privatization by boosting the confidence of private investors.