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2019 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 15 of 101

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses
  • Jolene Chu, Ollimatti Peltonen
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
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  • Jehovah's Witnesses began as an informal Bible study group in the 1870s that sought to recover first-century Christian beliefs and practices. They disseminated literature announcing the expected reign of God's Kingdom and called themselves Bible Students. In 1931, they adopted the name Jehovah's Witnesses, epitomizing their belief in the Christian obligation to preach the gospel worldwide. Known for their ethic of nonviolence and their evangelizing work, and despite worshipping freely in most countries, Witnesses are subject to controversy, particularly vis-à-vis mainstream Christianity, the State, and secularized societies. The authors are practicing Jehovah's Witnesses who present this work as neither apologia nor official account, but as an emic description of the history, beliefs, identity, and organizational structure of Witnesses, and their societal interactions. While briefly covering main controversies, this Element focuses on the culture and lived experience of the millions comprising the Witness community. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Comedy and Controversy

Comedy and Controversy
  • Scripting Public Speech
  • Sarah Balkin, Marc Mierowsky
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This is an Element book about stand-up comedy and public speech. It focuses on the controversies generated when the distinction between the two breaks down, when stand-upenters – or is pushed – into the public sphere and is interpreted according to the scripts that govern popular political and media rhetoric rather than the traditional generic conventions of comic performance. These controversies raise a larger set of questions about the comedian's public role. They draw attention to the intention of jokes and their effects in the world. And they force us to consider how the limits of comic performance – what can be said, by whom, and why – respond to, and can reshape, public discourse across changing media contexts.
Constructions and Compositionality

Constructions and Compositionality
  • Cognitive and Computational Explorations
  • Giulia Rambelli
  • Published online:
    17 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • How do we understand any sentence, from the most ordinary to the most creative? The traditional assumption is that we rely on formal rules combining words (compositionality). However, psycho- and neuro-linguistic studies point to a linguistic representation model that aligns with the assumptions of Construction Grammar: there is no sharp boundary between stored sequences and productive patterns. Evidence suggests that interpretation alternates compositional (incremental) and noncompositional (global) strategies. Accordingly, systematic processes of language productivity are explainable by analogical inferences rather than compositional operations: novel expressions are understood 'on the fly' by analogy with familiar ones. This Element discusses compositionality, alternative mechanisms in language processing, and explains why Construction Grammar is the most suitable approach for formalizing language comprehension.
Crisis Policymaking in the EU

Crisis Policymaking in the EU
  • The COVID-19 Crisis and the Refugee Crisis 2015-16 Compared
  • Hanspeter Kriesi
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
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  • This Element compares crisis-specific policymaking, its causes and consequences, at the two levels of the EU polity during the COVID-19 and the refugee crisis 2015–16. In both crises, EU policymaking responded to exogenous pressure and was dominated by executive decision-making. Still, it also differed in three critical aspects: it was much more salient, consensual, and effective during the COVID-19 than the refugee crisis. The present study accounts for both similarities and differences, which it attempts to explain by features of the nature of the crises. The key argument of the study is that the policymaking process during crises is, to a large extent, determined by the crisis situation – the crisis-specific functional problem pressure, the institutional context (of the EU polity), and the corresponding political pressure at the origin of a given crisis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Logic of Grounding

The Logic of Grounding
  • Fabrice Correia
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The concept of grounding – of a fact obtaining in virtue of other facts – has been a topic of intensive philosophical and logical investigation over roughly the past two decades. Many philosophers take grounding to deserve a central place in metaphysical theorizing, in great part because it is thought to do a better job than other concepts – e.g., reduction and supervenience – at capturing certain phenomena. Studies on the logic of grounding have largely been conducted with this philosophical background in mind. In this Element, I try to give a faithful picture of the contemporary development of the logic of grounding in a way that is both reasonably comprehensive and reasonably systematic.
Women, Gender, and Rebel Governance during Civil Wars

Women, Gender, and Rebel Governance during Civil Wars
  • Meredith Maloof Loken
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • How is rebel governance gendered, and how does women's participation in rebellion affect the development and execution of governance programs? The author develops a framework for evaluating and explaining rebel governance's gendered dynamics, identifying four areas where attention to women and to gender helps us better understand these institutions: recruitment and internal organization, program expansion, development of new projects, and multi-layered governance relationships. They explore the context and significance of these dynamics using cross-conflict data on rebel governance institutions and women's participation as well as qualitative evidence from three diverse organizations. They suggest that it is not only the fact of women's participation that matters but the gendered nature of social and political relationships that help explain how rebels govern during civil wars. They show how women's involvement can shape governance content and implementation and how their participation may help rebel groups expand projects and engage with civilian communities.
Semantics and Deep Learning

Semantics and Deep Learning
  • Lasha Abzianidze, Lisa Bylinina, Denis Paperno
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element covers the interaction of two research areas: linguistic semantics and deep learning. It focuses on three phenomena central to natural language interpretation: reasoning and inference; compositionality; extralinguistic grounding. Representation of these phenomena in recent neural models is discussed, along with the quality of these representations and ways to evaluate them (datasets, tests, measures). The Element closes with suggestions on possible deeper interactions between theoretical semantics and language technology based on deep learning models.
Worked Bone, Antler, Ivory, and Keratinous Materials

Worked Bone, Antler, Ivory, and Keratinous Materials
  • Adam DiBattista
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element addresses the study and documentation of objects made from the durable materials of animal bodies, including bone, antler, ivory, and keratinous tissues. This category of artifacts is common across cultures and regions, yet often escapes close study. The Element aims to be a guide to understanding and documenting worked animal objects for those without a background in zooarchaeology or experience with such artifacts. This Element provides a means of identifying and distinguishing animal materials by emphasizing the value of caution and making full documentation of all observations. Using illustrations and descriptions to help researchers understand the structure of these materials, the volume introduces the terminology and diagnostic factors that differentiate animal materials. It also outlines the techniques craftspeople used to modify animal materials in the past. Finally, this Element presents recording strategies for individuals wishing to study assemblages from archaeological excavations.
Embodiment, Dependence, and God

Embodiment, Dependence, and God
  • Kevin Timpe
  • Published online:
    15 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • The significance of our physical bodies is an important topic in contemporary philosophy and theology. Reflection on the body often assumes, even if only implicitly, idealizations that obscure important facts about what it means for humans to be 'enfleshed.' This Element explores a number of ways that reflection on bodies in their concrete particularities is important. It begins with a consideration of why certain forms of idealization are philosophically problematic. It then explores how a number of features of bodies can reveal important truths about human nature, embodiment, and dependence. Careful reflection on the body raises important questions related to community and interdependence. The Element concludes by exploring the ethical demands we face given human embodiment. Among other results, this Element exposes the reader to a wide diversity of human embodiment and the nature of human dependence, encouraging meaningful theological reflection on aspects of the human condition.
Religious Trauma

Religious Trauma
  • Michelle Panchuk
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • When religion is the site of abuse and trauma, it can deeply impact a person's ability to relate to God and engage in spiritual practice. As such, religious trauma is ripe for philosophical exploration. Section 1 of this Element provides a brief history of the concept of psychological trauma, contemporary accounts of its neurobiological basis, and its impact on human agency. Section 2 sketches a model of religious trauma through the first-person narratives of survivors and emerging psychological data. Section 3 explores the social epistemology of religious trauma, focusing on how failures of knowledge create space for religious abuse and the insights of survivors may help communities guard against it. The last two sections consider three perennial topics in philosophy of religion from the perspective of religious trauma: the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and religious experience.
Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music

Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music
  • Practice-Based Research
  • Toby Martin, Seyed MohammadReza Beladi, Đăng Lan
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.
The Problem of Divine Personality

The Problem of Divine Personality
  • Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • The main question of this Element is whether God has a personality. The authors show what the question means, why it matters, and that good sense can be made of an affirmative answer to it. A God with personality - complete with particular, sometimes peculiar, and even seemingly unexplainable druthers - is not at war with maximal perfection, nor is the idea irredeemably anthropomorphic. And the hypothesis of divine personality is fruitful, with substantive consequences that span philosophical theology. But problems arise here too, and new perspectives on inquiry itself. Our cosmos is blessed with weirdness aplenty. To come to know it is nothing less than to encounter a strange and untamed God.
Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence
  • Neil Sinhababu
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The idea of the eternal recurrence is that we will live the exact same lives again an infinite number of times. Nietzsche appreciates that this would multiply the value of a single life by infinity, justifying intense emotional responses. His unpublished notes provide a cosmological argument for the eternal recurrence that anticipates Poincaré's recurrence theorem. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes its hero discovering this idea and struggling to accept the recurrence of all bad things. He eventually comes to love the eternal recurrence because it will bring back all the joys of his life, and teaches this idea to others.
Heidegger and Kierkegaard

Heidegger and Kierkegaard
  • George Pattison
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The work examines the presence and significance of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's work. After setting out the context of Heidegger's reception of the Danish thinker and examining his likely knowledge of his writings, the work first examines key Kierkegaardian concepts that are explicitly present in Being and Time, including existence, 'idle talk' (Gerede), anxiety, the moment of vision, repetition, and the existential significance of death. It is seen that Heidegger regarded Kierkegaard as an essentially religious writer whose work was only indirectly relevant to Heidegger's own project of fundamental ontology. Subsequently, the work considers the place of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's writings from the 1930s onwards, concluding with consideration of the paper Heidegger submitted for the 1963 Paris UNESCO conference marking the 150th anniversary of Kierkegaard's thought.
Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change

Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change
  • Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Nina Hall
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Non-governmental and civil society organizations have long been recognized as crucial players in climate politics. Today, thanks to the internet, social media, satellite, and more, climate activists are pioneering new organizational forms and strategies. Organizations like Fridays for Future, 350.org, and GetUp! have used social media and other digital platforms to mobilize millions of people. Many NGOs use digital tools to collect and analyze 'big data' on environmental factors, and to investigate and prosecute environmental crimes. Although the rise of digitally based advocacy organizations is well documented, we know less about how digital technologies are used in different aspects of climate activism, and with what effects. On this basis, we ask: how do NGOs use digital technology to campaign for climate action? What are the benefits and downsides of using technology to push for political change? To what extent does technology influence the goals activists strive for and their strategies.
Public Contracting for Social Outcomes

Public Contracting for Social Outcomes
  • Clare J. FitzGerald, J. Ruairi Macdonald
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
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  • Governments all over the world have transitioned away from directly providing public services to contracting and collaborating with cross-sectoral networks to deliver services on their behalf. Governments have thus pursued an array of policy instruments to improve interorganizational progress towards policy goals. In recent years, outcomes-based contracting has emerged as a compelling solution to service quality shortcomings and collective action challenges. Informed by public policy, public administration, and public procurement scholarship, this Element details the evolution of social outcomes in public contracting, exploring the relationship between how outcomes are specified and managed and how well such instruments deliver against policy goals. It comments on the possible drawbacks of contracting for social outcomes, highlighting how governments may use outcomes as an excuse to avoid actively managing contracts or to sidestep their accountability as outlined in public law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon

The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon
  • An Ethiopian Intellectual in Early Modern Rome
  • Matteo Salvadore, James De Lorenzi, Deresse Ayenachew Woldetsadik
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
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  • This Element examines the life and legacy of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian intellectual Täsfa Ṣeyon. It reconstructs his formative years in the Horn of Africa and his diasporic life in the Holy Land and Italian peninsula, where he emerged as a prominent intermediary figure at Santo Stefano degli Abissini, an Ethiopian monastery within the Vatican. He became a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent advisor to European humanist scholars and Tridentine Church authorities concerned with the emerging field of philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. The Element reconstructs his wide-ranging contacts with the Roman Curia and emerging orientalist academy, and then scrutinizes his editio princeps of the Ge'ez Gospels. A final section traces his modern influence, erasure, and rediscovery by later generations of European, Ethiopian, and Eritrean intellectuals.
Defence Economics and Innovation

Defence Economics and Innovation
  • Gustavo Fornari Dall'Agnol
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element presents an analytical model for assessing the success or failure of innovative large-scale defence projects. To achieve this goal, it constructs a theoretical model based on a three-angle analysis: the International System, the innovative potential, and the domestic political arena. Each angle of analysis generates an independent variable, namely: level of threat, technological feasibility, and political consensus. It is held that technological feasibility and political consensus are necessary and conjointly sufficient conditions to explain the success or failure of large-scale defence projects. The success of the innovative defence projects is strongly and positively related to the level of external threat. The initial hypothesis is tested by scrutinizing three specific projects in the United States (Future Combat Systems, The B-2 Stealth Bomber and the F-35). The conclusion is that the model is sound and might be generalized to analyse the prospects of success or failure of other large-scale defence projects.
Democracy in Trouble

Democracy in Trouble
  • Democratic Resilience and Breakdown from 1900 to 2022
  • Myles Williamson, Christopher Akor, Amanda B. Edgell
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • This Element investigates the process of executive aggrandizement to identify factors associated with democratic resilience. We focus on five democracies that showed resilience in the face of incumbent-led autocratization. To understand how these cases survived, we pair them with similar cases where incumbents successfully dismantled democracy from within. Through structured focused comparisons, our inductive exercise provides insights into how the process of executive aggrandizement unfolds. The case narratives reveal similar patterns, with incumbents often targeting the media, civil society, and judiciary and using shared tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Where democracies survived, anti-democratic incumbents made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, which ultimately cost them their positions and allowed democracy to rebound. Where democracy broke down, incumbents were largely able to avoid or mitigate such errors, often through ethnopopulist appeals.
Global Ships

Global Ships
  • Seafaring, Shipwrecks, and Boatbuilding in the Global Middle Ages
  • Amanda Respess
  • Published online:
    11 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Global Ships examines the major seafaring traditions and technologies that engendered long-distance connections across the world's oceans during the Global Middle Ages. Between the years 500–1500 CE, maritime trade networks spanning the seas globalized commodities, religions, and trade diasporas in an increasingly mobile world. Focusing on shipbuilding traditions, nautical cultures, sailing itineraries, and examples of recovered shipwrecks and cargoes from around the world, Global Ships provides an expert overview of the major vessels that sailed the seas in the Global Middle Ages. A concise interpretive guide to global maritime technologies and cultures for researchers, teachers, and students, Global Ships highlights essential historical context, technological case studies, and logics of seafaring around the world before the modern age.

Page 15 of 101