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243 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 13

Glazed Ceramics of the Islamic World 700–1600 CE

Glazed Ceramics of the Islamic World 700–1600 CE
  • Moujan Matin, Michael Tite
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Of all the material culture of the Islamic World prior to the sixteenth century, only ceramics survive in a way which forms a continuous representative visual history. As such, ceramics provide a unique collection of material from which to study the history of technology. The main technological developments associated with glazed Islamic ceramics were the introduction of tin-opacified glazes, stonepaste bodies, and an extended range of colorants. For each of these developments, consideration is given to the reasons why new technologies were introduced, from where the ideas for the new technologies originated, and why particular technological choices were made. In addition, brief consideration is given both to the very different glaze technologies employed in contemporary China, and to the subsequent spread of the glazed Islamic technology into Western Europe.
Kant and Teleology

Kant and Teleology
  • Thomas Teufel
  • Published online:
    17 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
  • Kant's mature teleological philosophy in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is predicated on innovations that address a set of unprecedented challenges arising from within critical philosophy. The challenges are (1) a threat of “transcendental chaos” between sensibility and understanding, emerging from the structure of critical epistemology; (2) a threat of “critical chaos” between determination and reflection, generated by Kant's response to that first threat. The innovations include (a) a transcendental conception of purposiveness, (b) a principle of nature's purposiveness based on that conception, (c) a power of judgment governed by that principle, (d) and so governed in an unusual (self-given and self-governing) way, (e) a view on which nature does make leaps. This Element argues that Kant's mature teleological philosophy – and a fortiori Kant's aesthetics and philosophy of biology – cannot be understood without a fully systematic account of these challenges and innovations, and it presents such an account.
Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint

Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint
  • Jack B. Greenberg, John A. Dearborn
  • Published online:
    15 April 2025
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    31 May 2025
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  • This Element explores how Congress has designed laws reliant on an assumption of presidential self-restraint, an expectation that presidents would respect statutory goals by declining to use their formal powers in ways that were legally permissible but contrary to stated congressional intent. Examining several laws addressing political appointments since the 1970s – statutes involving the FBI director, Office of Personnel Management director, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, director of national intelligence, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, inspectors general, Senior Executive Service, vacancies, Social Security Administration commissioner, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director – the authors demonstrate lawmakers' reliance on presidential self-restraint in statutory design and identify a variety of institutional tools used to signal those expectations. Furthermore, the authors identify a developmental dilemma: the combined rise of polarization, presidentialism, and constitutional formalism threatens to leave Congress more dependent on presidential self-restraint, even as that norm's reliability is increasingly questionable.
Literary Form in Early Medieval England

Literary Form in Early Medieval England
  • Jennifer A. Lorden
  • Published online:
    14 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • The earliest English writers left little comment on their literary forms. In contrast to the grammatical treatises of late antiquity or critical studies of contemporary and modern literature, early medieval English writing offers only sparse contemporaneous self-commentary, often in brief or conventional notes along the way to other things. But Old English and Latin literature had lively and evolving practices of literary form and formal innovation. Literary Form in Early Medieval England examines both more and lesser known forms, considering the multilingual landscape of early medieval England and showing that Old English literary forms do not simply end with the rupture of the Norman Conquest but continue in surprising ways. Literary Form in Early Medieval England offers a concise tour of what we do know of literary forms, both those that have received more attention and those that have been relatively overlooked, across the first six centuries of English literature.
The κ-Statistics Approach to Income Distribution Analysis

The κ-Statistics Approach to Income Distribution Analysis
  • Fabio Clementi, Mauro Gallegati, Lisa Gianmoena, Giorgio Kaniadakis, Simone Landini
  • Published online:
    11 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • This Element presents the κ-generalized distribution, a statistical model tailored for the analysis of income distribution. Developed over years of collaborative, multidisciplinary research, it clarifies the statistical properties of the model, assesses its empirical validity and compares its effectiveness with other parametric models. It also presents formulas for calculating inequality indices within the κ-generalized framework, including the widely used Gini coefficient and the relatively lesser-known Zanardi index of Lorenz curve asymmetry. Through empirical illustrations, the Element criticizes the conventional application of the Gini index, pointing out its inadequacy in capturing the full spectrum of inequality characteristics. Instead, it advocates the adoption of the Zanardi index, accentuating its ability to capture the inherent heterogeneity and asymmetry in income distributions.
Ukrainian Literature

Ukrainian Literature
  • A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers
  • Marko Pavlyshyn
  • Published online:
    11 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers is an introduction for general readers and students to Ukrainian literature in English translation. It takes as its starting point the responses of Ukrainian poets and prose writers to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the preceding eight-year war. Each of the Element's ten sections describes a key event in Ukrainian cultural history in its literary context, surveying related works and their authors, Ukrainian and international literary and intellectual movements, and developments in political and social life. The Element gives preeminent attention to a theme which the war has foregrounded: the enduringly fraught relationship of Ukraine and Russia. While focussing mainly on texts in Ukrainian, the Element refers to other literary cultures – Polish, Russian, Jewish and Crimean Tatar, among others – whose participants were active on the territory of today's Ukraine.
Logic and Science

Logic and Science
  • An Exploration of Logical Anti-Exceptionalism
  • Filippo Ferrari, Massimiliano Carrara
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
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    10 April 2025
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  • This Element delves into the relationship between logic and the sciences, a topic brought to prominence by Quine, who regarded logic as methodologically and epistemologically akin to the sciences. For this reason, Quine is seen as the forefather of anti-exceptionalism about logic (AEL), a stance that has become prevalent in the philosophy of logic today. Despite its popularity and the volume of research it inspires, some core issues still lack clarity. For one thing, most works in the debate remain vague on what should count as logic and what should count as a science. Furthermore, the terms of the comparison are rarely specified and discussed in a systematic way. This Element purports to advance the debate on these crucial issues with the hope of fostering our understanding of the fundamentals of AEL. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Family Matters

Family Matters
  • How Romantic Partners Shape Politicians' Careers
  • Olle Folke, Moa Frödin Gruneau, Johanna Rickne
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
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    10 April 2025
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  • This Element studies how career support from romantic partners affects career patterns and costs in politics. It argues that a lower level of career support from romantic partners leads to a lower likelihood for political promotion among women politicians (the partner support hypothesis), as well as greater stress on women politicians' relationships when they advance (the career stress hypothesis). Both predictions find support in Swedish data for more than 80,000 political careers over a fifty-year period. Women politicians are in relationships that prioritize their male partner's career and where that partner does less unpaid work in the household. This is important in explaining women's career disadvantage. It also explains why promotions double the divorce rate for women but leave men's relationships intact. The analysis sheds light on the role played by romantic partners in gender inequality in politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In Search of National Ancestors

In Search of National Ancestors
  • Heritage, Identity and Placemaking in China
  • Shu-Li Wang
  • Published online:
    08 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • This Element examines how international heritage discourses are internalized and reshaped in China, using the Yellow Emperor cults as a lens to explore broader themes of intangible heritage, religious resurgence, and identity construction. The central argument is that cultural heritage serves as a powerful tool for shaping new religious expressions and enabling Chinese localities to assert their uniqueness while redefining historical narratives. Through case studies of several localities across China, this research illustrates how these regions engage in heritage competition by branding themselves with Yellow Emperor culture to shape their identities. This study argues that the cult of the Yellow Emperor-a legendary figure-is empowered by nationalism, a local search for tradition and religious revivals, and is further amplified by international discourses that reinforce national identity through heritage-making. Together, these forces drive the resurgence of ancestral cults and contribute to cultural identity formation in contemporary China.
Israel and its Heirs in Late Antiquity

Israel and its Heirs in Late Antiquity
  • Andrew Tobolowsky
  • Published online:
    08 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • This Element explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samaritan Israelites, and Christian authors in Late Antiquity, especially early Late Antiquity. It identifies three major strategies for claiming an Israelite identity between these three groups: a 'biological' strategy, a 'biology plus' strategy, and an 'abiological' strategy, referring to the difference between Jewish claims to Israel premised on exclusive biological descent, Samaritan Israelite acknowledgments of shared descent, and the 'Verus Israel' tradition in Christianity, which disavows the importance of descent. Using this framework, it makes various general conclusions about the construction of ethnic identity itself, including the inadequacy of treating descent claims as the sine qua non of ethnicity and role played in any given vision of ethnic identity by the individual creativity of a given author.
Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960–1990

Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960–1990
  • An Intimate Cultural History
  • Epp Annus
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • Russia's twenty-first-century military aggression has inspired calls for re-thinking the Soviet era and its aftermath – in particular, for drawing attention to the non-Russian parts of the (former) USSR. At the same time, the present era of anthropogenic climate change urges us to consider the global and planetary implications of local actions. This Element combines these two scholarly impulses to consider Soviet Estonian society between the 1960s and the 1980s: it investigates how natural environments and social ideas and circumstances were intertwined in fundamental ways. Estonian intellectuals cared deeply about their local environments, but they also took inspiration from environmentalist works of global importance. Various aspects of Estonian environmental thought and practices are analyzed as tied to local, intimate environments, while being at the same time connected to the global circulation of ideas, sometimes in dialogue with Soviet centers in Russia.
Bad Public Policy

Bad Public Policy
  • Malignity, Volatility and the Inherent Vices of Policymaking
  • Michael Howlett, Ching Leong, Tim Legrand
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • Policy studies assume the existence of baseline parameters – such as honest governments doing their best to create public value, publics responding in good faith, and both parties relying on a policy-making process which aligns with the public interest. In such circumstances, policy goals are expected to be produced through mechanisms in which the public can articulate its preferences and policy-makers are expected to listen to what has been said in determining their governments' courses of action. While these conditions are found in some governments, there is evidence from around the world that much policy-making occurs without these pre-conditions and processes. Unlike situations which produce what can be thought of as 'good' public policy, 'bad' public policy is a more common outcome. How this happens and what makes for bad public policy are the subjects of this Element. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Aesthetic System of François Delsarte and Richard Wagner

The Aesthetic System of François Delsarte and Richard Wagner
  • Catholicism, Romanticism, and Ancient Music
  • Bradley Hoover
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • On 17 September 1839, Richard Wagner arrived in Paris. Although scholars agree that the composer learned a great deal much about aesthetics during his first sojourn in the city, what has not been known is exactly what he learned or from whom. This Element explores the striking similarities between Wagner's early aesthetic writings and Delsarte's 'Cours d'esthétique appliquée', a theoretical and practical training course for artists which Delsarte began teaching in Paris in May 1839. This Element also details the rise of François Delsarte (1811–1871) as a celebrated teacher of aesthetics and interpreter of Gluck's repertoire during the same years Wagner was living in the city. By comparing historical timelines, published documents, and manuscript sources, and by analysing Wagner's treatises, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft and Oper und Drama, and the essay 'Über Schauspieler und Sänger', the author shows that Delsarte's course is the most likely source of Wagner's aesthetic transformation in Paris.
Social Ontology

Social Ontology
  • Brian Epstein
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • Social ontology is the study of the nature of the social world. This Element aims to provide an overview of this burgeoning field, and also to map the questions that theories in social ontology address. When we encounter a theory of some social thing – groups, law, gender, and so on –how are we to read it? What classes of theories have been explored and abandoned, and what classes are new and promising? The Element distinguishes theories of social construction from theories that characterize the products of social construction. For each, the Element works through a 'toy' theory and then discusses features that more realistic theories ought to include. Three running examples are discussed throughout the Element: (1) property, or ownership; (2) race, or racialized kinds; (3) collective attitudes (i.e., beliefs, desires, knowledge, intentions, etc., of groups and organizations). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Generative AI in Computer Science Education

Generative AI in Computer Science Education
  • Challenges and Opportunities
  • Diana Franklin, Paul Denny, David A. Gonzalez-Maldonado, Minh Tran
  • Published online:
    05 April 2025
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    24 April 2025
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  • Generative AI is a disruptive technology that has the potential to transform many aspects of how computer science is taught. Like previous innovations such as high-level programming languages and block-based programming languages, generative AI lowers the technical expertise necessary to create working programs, bringing the power of computation to more people. The programming process is already changing as a result of its presence, even for expert programmers. It also poses significant challenges to educators around re-thinking assessment as some well-established approaches may no longer be viable. Many traditional programming assignments can be completed using generative AI tools with minimal effort, thus potentially undermining learning. In this Element, the authors explore both the opportunities and the challenges for computer science education resulting from the widespread availability of generative AI.
The Impasse of Constitutional Rights

The Impasse of Constitutional Rights
  • Jacob Weinrib
  • Published online:
    04 April 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
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  • Constitutional rights are often seen as invitations to engage in all things considered moral reasoning about how public authorities should act. The Impasse of Constitutional Rights challenges this widely accepted view by showing that it generates an irresolvable deadlock between rival theories of constitutional rights that share the same defects. This Element develops the alternative idea that rights-based constitutional order has its own distinctive moral project, which consists in rendering public authority accountable to the inherent rights of each legal subject. Taking this project seriously requires reconceiving the basic building blocks of rights-based constitutional order: justification, purposive interpretation, and proportionality. The resulting account both escapes the impasse to which the leading contemporary theories of constitutional rights succumb and expounds the normative connection between rights-based constitutional order and its most fundamental doctrines.
Mechanisms of Change and Creativity in Nature and Culture

Mechanisms of Change and Creativity in Nature and Culture
  • Arne Dietrich
  • Published online:
    03 April 2025
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    03 April 2025
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  • This Element is about change. Specifically, it's about the underlying mechanisms that cause change to happen, both in nature and in culture; what types there are, how they work, where they can be found, and when they come into play. The ultimate aim is to shed light on two barbed issues. First, what kind of system of change is culture and, second, what kind of change in that system counts as creativity; that is, what are the properties of the mechanisms of change when we explore unknown regions of the cultural realm. To that end, a novel theoretical framework is proposed that is based on the concept of a sightedness continuum. A sightedness framework for the mechanisms of change can integrate the three mechanisms causing gradual, adaptive, and cumulative change – evolution, learning, and development – into a single dimension and provide a clear view of how they cause change.
A Theology of Home in a Time of Homelessness

A Theology of Home in a Time of Homelessness
  • Siobhán Garrigan
  • Published online:
    03 April 2025
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    08 May 2025
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  • Homelessness abounds today in various forms of displacement and as a pervasive condition of unbelonging. It ruins health, lives, communities, habitats, creativity, and hope. This Element argues that for theology to play its part in ending homelessness, it must better understand its own concept of 'home'. The Element proposes a vision of home capable of resisting the tacit, mistaken theology of home that undergirds the various iterations of modern homelessness. Weaving biblical and ritual sources, the argument constructs theological responses to the twin forces of consumerism and nationalism which, alloyed with sexism and racism, constitute the time of homelessness in which we live. It asks the reader to imagine home as 'participating instead of possessing' in every sphere of life, in pursuit of a theology of home capable of preventing homelessness and not merely ministering to people experiencing it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Norms, Practices, and Social Change in Global Politics

Norms, Practices, and Social Change in Global Politics
  • Steven Bernstein, Aarie Glas, Marion Laurence
  • Published online:
    31 March 2025
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    24 April 2025
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  • Since the introduction of modern revues in 1925, the genre faced near-constant political scrutiny in Budapest. Yet by the 1930s, the city had become the capital of Central European cosmopolitan nightlife. The closure of Hungary's borders after World War II ended any hope of reclaiming this international status. Under communism and the Stalinist totalitarian regime, the revue—despite its popularity—remained politically stigmatised. For the first time, entertainment was treated as a cultural matter rather than merely a law enforcement issue, but it was forced to conform to ideological expectations. Three attempts to legitimise the genre in the 1950s ultimately failed, shaping the trajectory of live entertainment in the era. By the 1960s, revues were officially accepted, yet their cultural significance had faded amid the rise of new entertainment forms. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Environmental Ethics of War

Environmental Ethics of War
  • Tamar Meisels
  • Published online:
    31 March 2025
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    24 April 2025
  • War is bad for nature, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to environmental military ethics by just war theorists and philosophers of war. Most wars since 1945 have been civil conflicts, often in areas containing the greatest biodiversity. Combining environmental ethics with ethics of war, this Element examines how the environmental crisis should challenge and change the rules of war. While environmental wartime regulation has been addressed rarely by just war theorists, environmental jus ad bellum has hardly been tackled at all. Can environmental harm trigger a new justification for war? Can targeting nature constitute terrorism? And what would be a proportionate response to 'environmental aggression'? With global degradation and climate change right around the corner, this Element discusses some of the most pressing practical ethics issues of our times, suggesting that grave environmental transgressions should be combatted by measures that do not themselves cause disproportionate harm to nature.

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