Within the aletheistic tradition, Aquinas thinks creation, as a linguistic act, involves the theme of interpersonal manifestation. He is therefore able to overcome the apparent artificiality of Anselm’s linguistic ostension by setting the deferred ostension back into both the structure of created being and the natural longing for happiness.

Pushbacks are designed to prevent people on the move from accessing procedural and/or substantive legal safeguards. States thus tend to deny practising them and actively erase evidence of their occurrence. The resulting acute evidentiary challenges in any subsequent human rights litigation require adjustments to be made to the evidentiary framework. This chapter offers a four-branch matrix of what can logically happen to facts disputed in litigation. It then proceeds to critically examine how evidentiary issues have been handled in UNTB pushback case law, concluding the right findings have been made, but on a generally weak reasoning. The chapter finally stresses that the burden of proof should be shifted from complainant to state when two conditions are met: a context-proven to a high standard, such that the state can be presumed to have violated human rights; the complaint is linked to this context – with this proven prima facie. If the linkage is evidenced to a higher standard, the factual allegations must be recognised as established on the strength of the evidence –without any shift being alluded to, so as to avoid an upward slippage in the purposefully low standard of proof applied.

This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.

This chapter explores the idea that the concept of dynamical gestalt, defined across a heterogeneous collection of interacting variables/factors/processes (including biopsychosocial factors) and distributed across different scales, can provide a level-free explanation of psychiatric disorders. In this view, all relevant factors are defined by their causal interaction, albeit at different temporal and spatial scales. Accordingly, there is no reason to think that social factors are on a higher level than neuronal processes, or that neural processes are more basic than social factors in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. In combination with the model of interventionist causality, this approach allows for the development of a productive way of explaining psychiatric disorders and for insight into therapeutic practices.

The Descent of Man sparked many scientific revolutions, but none were more intellectually profound or ethically challenging than the exposure of human behavior to the bright light of natural science. Before Darwin, people could still hold out some hope that we were separated from the rest of nature by our souls, our creation in the image of God. Human behavior had always been in the domain of theology, or, among skeptics, philosophy; “behavioral science” didn’t exist. After Darwin, scientifically clear-eyed people had to recognize that behavior – personality, intellect, family, culture – evolved just as surely as our bipedal posture. No one was more attuned to this revolution than Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton made the application of Darwin’s new science to human behavior, in all its diversity, his life’s work. Human anatomy had been naturalized once scientific dissection of cadavers was permitted; the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt was already naturalizing human perception; Galton possessed unwavering confidence that the rest of human behavior was not far behind.

In their chapter, Federica Russo and Dingmar van Eck offer a novel approach to the network theory of mental disorders. According to the network theory, a syndrome such as depression occurs when the symptoms of depression become organized into an integrated causal network that remains stable over time. Rather than explaining the occurrence of depression with respect to hidden, underlying causes, the network theory emphasizes direct casual relationships between the symptoms themselves. According to this view, symptoms are not manifestations of an underlying common cause, but parts of the disorder. The organizational structure of the symptoms, therefore, constitutes the disorder. Russo and van Eck also suggest that as an alternative to the underlying cause model, the explanatory resources of the network model are underdeveloped. The purpose of their chapter is to expand on the explanatory potential of network models.

Using phenomenology to develop Plantinga’s analogy of God and other minds, and in dialogue with Feuerbach’s critique of the God–world difference, this chapter articulates how the order inherent in a work makes manifest the cause of that work even when it remains unknown just how the cause brought about the order. To see the world as created amounts to seeing the world as an ordered work indicating its author amounts to seeing it as created; the world can serve as a kind of protreptic but one that is only understood by those who read it carefully. “That hidden other, whose agency causes the world and me to be, is ‘God’.”

John Campbell reviews for us how to think about the causal processes that might be at work in psychiatry. The laws of physics cannot be a plausible model because it deals with matter – particles, planets, and the like. In psychiatry, we deal with patients who are both brained and minded. The brain is a physical system but one of staggering complexity. The mind is a whole different kind of thing, and it is here that empathic understanding must come into play. Given now important our interactions with our conspecifics are – our spouses, children, friends, and particularly enemies – evolution has likely tuned our emphatic understanding for accuracy to help us intuit the motivations and internal emotional states of our fellow humans.

After a brief overview, Lauren N. Ross and Kenenth S. Kendler begin their chapter reviewing the history of the proximal versus distal cause distinction in public health and epidemiology. Its purpose is to provide a framework for understanding how social and biological causes jointly impact the development of disease and health outcomes. This distinction traditionally utilizes a causal pathway model in which, for example, upstream, social factors such as organizational policies for remote work influence downstream, direct biological factors such as infection.