This chapter reviews the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s (WGAD) approach to issues of evidence and burdens of proof. It aims to provide a useful point of comparison with the UNTBs’ evidentiary procedures. The WGAD has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to evidence, providing strong incentives for other decision-making bodies to take up its conclusions and procedures. In this chapter, the following arguments are substantiated: first, that the Working Group’s increasingly formalised and standardised approach to evidence reflects the maturing of the Working Group and its entrenchment in the ecosystem of human rights bodies; second, that its nuanced evidentiary approach can serve to enhance its credibility with states and claimants, in order to increase compliance rates; and third, its detailed approaches to evidentiary standards and challenges could provide precedents for UNTBs with individual claims mandates to follow a similar approach.

A chronologically ordered account of the different phases of Curll’s activities in the trade.

At the start of the aletheistic tradition, in the Confessions Augustine pioneers a phenomenological approach to fixing the reference to God by means of a novel linguistic act, overheard praise, which mirrors and frames the beautiful forms of created things as themselves overheard linguistic acts; the existential choice of the reader is either to leave the speech as overheard or to enter the speech as addressee. Augustine interprets things as signs of their source, works out the objective order of love, and thematizes the paradox of God’s hidden presence and the creature’s beauty as a sign of the creator.

Reference to the hidden God can be fixed at any time by a deferred ostension: “That which causes the world to be is ‘God’.” This chapter articulates an account of ostension in general and deferred ostension in particular and articulates the merits of the aletheistic tradition for handling the problem of semantic drift that dogs contemporary appeals to ostension for fixing the reference to God.

To which ‘God’ do philosophers refer? In dialogue with Schellenberg and his insightful distinction between “ultimism” and “theism,” this chapter examines the limits of the natural horizon of inquiry into ultimacy. To think adequately about God the creator entails subverting the natural horizon of thought in order to understand the natural whole as a pointer or deferred ostension of its ultimate source.

How transient is Curll’s work? He has preserved a measure of fame in book history: but some of that is due to extracurricular activities, such as his battles in the courts and the House of Lords. Many of his productions were confessedly ephemera, and he cannot have imagined that titles like The Bath Toasts for the Year 1715 would ensure his immortality. He did think about his reputation, as when he wrote in the preface to The Case of Seduction (1726) that his friends were worried ‘lest this Factum for the Abbée [sic)] des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head, if so, some future Fox must enrol me in the List of those Martyrs, whom Quevedo has doomed to suffer for the Sins of other Men’.1 The references are to John Foxe’s celebrated Book of Martyrs (1563) and the works of Francisco de Quevedo, most obviously Sueños (1627). He manages to advertise his own recent edition of Marvell, one of a number of halfway decent revivals of earlier English writers such as the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Browne. As noted at the start of this book, his antiquarian list varies in quality, but it does contain significant contributions by Richard Rawlinson, John Aubrey, Elias Ashmole, and others, while his volumes on devotional topics included some by highly esteemed authors such as John Tillotson, Robert South, and Thomas Burnet.

Symptom network analysis is now commonly used in psychopathology research. Network analysis results in networks with symptoms represented as nodes, while edges represent conditional associations between these. Direct causal relations between symptoms will produce nonzero conditional associations, but these associations can also be produced in other ways. In this chapter, Borsboom discusses six plausible mechanisms that could produce edges in symptom networks. The first is resource competition, where the presence of a symptom depletes resources, which causes another symptom to arise. The second is evidential overlap, in which judgments central to different symptoms involve a subjective assessment of the same evidence. The third is shared mechanisms, in which symptomatology involves processes that are shared among different symptoms. The fourth are consistency drives, which arise when individuals are prone to align their cognitions, affect states, and behavior. The fifth are statistical processes involved in research design and analysis (marginalization and conditioning). The sixth is the presence of unobserved common causes that affect multiple symptoms at the same time. The author argues that, in realistic situations, the mechanisms in question are not mutually exclusive, which preempts standard scientific approaches that pit one model against another to derive critically divergent predictions. Instead, making sense of symptom networks will require more advanced theory development and modeling.

This chapter focusses on Curll’s relations with the civic affairs of London. It gives a brief survey of his admission to a guild and position as a liveryman of the Cordwainer’s Company, outside the powerful body of Stationers. Further, it outlines his behaviour over a number of years in City and national elections, from 1710 to 1734, noting his tendency to veer between votes for opposition parties and those for pro-ministerial candidates, depending on the political climate and his personal situation. His relations with Robert Walpole are sketched out. Comparisons are drawn between his actions and those of representative figures in the trade, especially those with whom Curll worked regularly. Where appropriate, the distinct voting patterns of Stationers and Cordwainers are noted. A conclusion summarises the changing political stance across the first four decades of the century, both of Curll himself and of members of the Stationers’ bloc.

Craver’s chapter engages with the mechanism concept in psychiatry and the field’s goals of explaining, understanding, and ultimately improving psychiatric diseases and disorders. The mechanism concept has received significant attention in philosophical work, especially over the past two decades and in discussions of biology, neuroscience, medicine, and other life sciences. Craver’s work has contributed significantly to contemporary “new mechanist” views, which maintain that explanatory practice in the life sciences involves uncovering the mechanisms responsible for various outcomes of interest. (While philosophers have proposed numerous frameworks for capturing scientific explanation – frameworks that appeal to laws of nature, causes and causal systems, unifying patterns, and mathematical necessities – the new mechanist approach suggests that many explanations involve appealing to mechanisms.) On this framework, a natural phenomenon is explained when one identifies and cites the mechanism that produces the phenomenon in question.