We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This Element argues that Heidegger's concept of science has two core features. Heidegger critiques a security-oriented concept of science, which he associates with the dominance of physics in modern science and metaphysics and with a progressive resistance among philosophers and scientists to ontological questioning. Meanwhile, Heidegger advances an access-oriented concept of science, on which science is essentially founded on ontological disclosures but also constantly open to the possibility of new revolutionary disclosures. This Element discusses how these commitments develop in Heidegger's early and later thinking, and argues that they inform his views on the history of Western metaphysics and on the possibilities for human flourishing that modernity, and modern science specifically, affords. The Element also discusses Heidegger's dialogue with Werner Heisenberg about quantum physics; and throughout, it highlights points of contact and divergence between Heidegger and other philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Helen Longino.
This Element introduces a young field, the 'philosophy of mathematical practice'. We first offer a general characterisation of the approach to the philosophy of mathematics that takes mathematical practice seriously and contrast it with 'mathematical philosophy'. The latter is traced back to Bertrand Russell and the orientation referred to as 'scientific philosophy' that was active between 1850 and 1930. To give a better sense of the field, the Element further contains two examples of topics studied, that of mathematical structuralism and visual thinking in mathematics. These are in part presented from a methodological point of view, focussing on mathematics as an activity and questions related to how mathematics develops. In addition, the Element contains several examples from mathematics, both historical and contemporary , to illustrate and support the philosophical points.
What connects the phenomenon of music as an art with the belief in one indivisible God? What has music, a non-linguistic medium, to say about the personal, loving, communicative God of Scripture and the Prophets, or the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcendent God of the Philosophers and can it bring these 'concepts of God' together? To answer these questions, this book takes divine Creation as its starting point, that the God of monotheism must be the Creator of all that is. It thus argues that anything which instantiates and facilitates communication within the created realm has been enabled to do so by a God who communicates with His Creation, and who wishes that His Creation be communicative. Indeed, it will argue that the communication allowed by music, and aesthetic experience in general, is the very raison d'être of Abrahamic monotheism and might thus allow an opportunity for dialogue between monotheistic faiths.
This Element provides a fresh approach to the representation and experience of the French Disease, by reassessing a wide range of textual and visual sources through the lens of contemporary medical ideas. It analyses how knowledge about the Great Pox was transmitted to a literate and also a wider public through performance and the circulation of popular prints. Chronicles, satirical and moralistic poems and plays about prostitutes, along with autobiographical accounts, described symptoms and the experience of patients, reflecting how non-medical men and women understood the nature of this terrible new disease and its profound physical and psychological impact. The second major theme is how the French Disease was represented visually. Woodcuts and broadsheets showing the moral and physical decline of courtesans are analysed together with graphic medical illustrations of symptoms and their treatment together with images of the diseased body of St Job, patron saint of the French Disease.
How do we know what is possible or impossible, what is inevitable or unattainable, or what would happen under which circumstances? Since modal facts seem distinctively mysterious and difficult to know, the epistemology of modality has historically been fraught with uncertainty and disagreement. The recent literature has been dominated by rationalist approaches that emphasise a priori reasoning (sometimes including direct intuition of possibility). Only recently have alternative approaches emerged which recognize a broader range of sources of modal knowledge. Yet even emerging non-rationalist views have tended to assign scientific investigation at best a supporting role. Our project in this book is to develop and defend a new approach to the epistemology of modal facts which assigns a central role to scientific investigation. According to modal naturalism, science (construed broadly) is our primary source of evidence concerning the modal facts.
Uncannily similar projects, Beckett's and Derrida's oeuvres have been linked by literary and philosophy scholars since the 1990s. Taking into consideration their shared historical and personal contexts as writers whose main language of expression was 'adopted' or 'imposed', this Element proposes a systematic reading of their main points of connection. Focusing on their engagement with the intricacies of beginnings and origins, on genetic grounds or surfaces analogous to the Platonic khôra, and on their similar critiques of the aporias of sovereignty, it exposes the reasons why multiple readers, like Coetzee, consider Derridean deconstruction a philosophical mirror of Beckett's literary achievements.
This Element examines how climate scientists have arrived at answers to three key questions about climate change: How much is earth's climate warming? What is causing this warming? What will climate be like in the future? Resources from philosophy of science are employed to analyse the methods that climate scientists use to address these questions and the inferences that they make from the evidence collected. Along the way, the analysis contributes to broader philosophical discussions of data modelling and measurement, robustness analysis, explanation, and model evaluation.
In the last few years, digitizations and reissues of historical recordings of Spanish zarzuela - from wax cylinders in the 1890s to long-play records in the 1950s - have revealed a range of contrasting vocal performance styles. By focusing on portamento, this Element sets the foundations for a contextually sensitive history of vocal performance practices in zarzuela. It takes stock of technological changes and shifts in commercial strategies and listening habits to reveal what the recorded evidence tells us about the historical development of portamento practices and considers how these findings can allow us to reconstruct the expressive code of zarzuela as it was performed in the late nineteenth century and how it transformed itself throughout the next half century. These transformations are contextualized alongside other changes, including the make-up of audiences, the discourses about the genre's connection to national identity and the influence of other musical-theatrical genres and languages.
This Element examines the notion of content-independence and its relevance for understanding various aspects of the character of law. Its task should be understood expansively, as encompassing both inquiry into that which makes law into what it is, and inquiry into what law ought to be, which values it ought to serve, and which aspects of its character may play a facilitative role in law realising aspects of its potential. Many existing discussions of content-independence focus largely on the justificatory aspects of content-independence: whether, and, if so, how, there can be content-independent reasons for action, or content-independent justifications of rules, or the extent to which political obligation is content-independent. This Element, too, examines such issues but also seeks to explore an additional possibility: that the notion of content-independence can illuminate issues regarding law's existence, identification, and systematicity.
A microcosm of busy operatic life during the reign of the enlightened King Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95), Warsaw reveals complex processes and entanglements affecting dissemination of opera in the late eighteenth century. To the fun-loving city torn by whimsical contradictions, imported as well as domestic opera provided attractive and increasingly accessible urban entertainment, while also serving important utilitarian functions prescribed by local initiatives. Warsaw's participation in transnational circulations of works and performers encompasses both ideological and pragmatic factors that had far-reaching consequences not only for the city itself but also for Europe's shared cultural space.
This Element analyzes the incorporation of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by different parties in Latin America to organize volunteers and mobilize supporters during elections. It assesses ICT-related changes in how parties recruit prospective candidates, collect information about citizens' preferences, and mobilize for elections and how these changes have reduced the power of the rank and file within party organizations. Party leaders have an incentive to incorporate new ICTs to increase electoral efficacy and reduce the role of rank-and-file members in performing essential party functions. However, the result of the incorporation of technology depends on leaders' capacity to control the process within the party. Based on case studies of ICT incorporation by various Latin American parties and electoral campaigns, the authors posit that the incorporation of technology will consolidate a power dynamic that predates the adoption of ICTs to fulfill organizational functions.
This Element provides a somewhat comprehensive interpretation of general relativity, a description of what reality would be like if the theory were true. This concerns (i) what possibilities it represents, (ii) the internal structure of those possibilities and their interrelations, and, to some extent, (iii) how those possibilities differ from what's come before. By providing an interpretive foil that one can amplify or amend, it aspires to shape the research agenda in the foundations of general relativity for established philosophers of physics, graduate students searching for work in these topics, and other interested academics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Behavioral strategy has emerged as one of the most important currents in contemporary strategic management. But, what is it? Where does it come from? Why is it important? This Element provides a review of key streams in behavioral, interpreting behavioral strategy as a consistently microfoundational approach to strategy that is grounded in evidence-based insight in behaviors and interaction. We show that there is considerable room for furthering the microfoundations of behavioral strategy and point to research opportunities and methods that may realize this aim. The Element is of interest to strategy scholars in general, and to Ph.D. students in strategy research in particular.
This Element works as non-technical overview of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), a methodology which can be applied to economics, as well as fields of natural and social sciences. This Element presents the introductory notions and historical background of ABM, as well as a general overview of the tools and characteristics of this kind of models, with particular focus on more advanced topics like validation and sensitivity analysis. Agent-based simulations are an increasingly popular methodology which fits well with the purpose of studying problems of computational complexity in systems populated by heterogeneous interacting agents.
Ancient Maya Economies synthesizes the state of the art across seven components: geographical and historical background, ritual economy, households, specialization, exchange, political economies, and future directions. Other Elements case studies use many of the same components, making it easy to compare and contrast ancient Maya economies with systems of production and consumption in other parts of the world. The time is right for this Elements case because knowledge of ancient Maya economies has undergone a revolution in the last few decades, resulting in a complex panorama of new economic information. Aerial laser scanning has revealed higher amounts of intensive agriculture and research on the ground has turned up better evidence for marketplaces. Maya economies feature specialized production, trade of both bulk goods and luxury goods, close integration with ritual and religion, and a carnival parade of political economies.
Modern popular music is closely linked to the 'traditional' heritage – intangible and material – of which artist-musicians have, in a way, usufruct. This Element examines the relationship between (cultural) heritage and the transformation of popular music in Côte d'Ivoire. It views heritage from a dynamic and innovative perspective as a constantly evolving reality, informed by a multitude of encounters, both local and global. It frees itself from the sectoralization and disciplinary impermeability of the sector – in places of music performance to understand how the artistic-musical heritage is transmitted, imagined and managed and the complex process of transformation of popular music in which it registers. It appears that heritage, far from being frozen in time, is rather activated, deactivated and reactivated according to the creative imagination. In addition, the work highlights a minor aspect of the heritage subsumed in popular intellectuality at work in popular music.
An intriguing link between a wide range of problems occurring in physics and financial engineering is presented. These problems include the evolution of small perturbations of linear flows in hydrodynamics, the movements of particles in random fields described by the Kolmogorov and Klein-Kramers equations, the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck and Feller processes, and their generalizations. They are reduced to affine differential and pseudo-differential equations and solved in a unified way by using Kelvin waves and developing a comprehensive math framework for calculating transition probabilities and expectations. Kelvin waves are instrumental for studying the well-known Black-Scholes, Heston, and Stein-Stein models and more complex path-dependent volatility models, as well as the pricing of Asian options, volatility and variance swaps, bonds, and bond options. Kelvin waves help to solve several cutting-edge problems, including hedging the impermanent loss of Automated Market Makers for cryptocurrency trading. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In the monotheistic traditions, there are people who report having special experiences that justify their monotheistic beliefs. They see, hear, or otherwise experience directly the one true God, ruler of the universe. In order to understand what is going on in these experiences and how we should respond to reports of these experiences, it is important to understand what religious experiences can and can't be, what the claim of monotheism entails, and therefore how what reports of such experiences mean, both for the experiencer and for the recipient of the report.
Theocratic movements are on the rise. But what does it actually mean for God to rule? This Element offers one answer by recovering the theocratic project of medieval Judaism's most important thinker, Moses Maimonides. Theocracy is often thought to quash human agency, evoking an overpowering deity and clerical domination. Yet by reconsidering Maimonides' debt to the Islamic philosopher al-Fārābī, and challenging Leo Strauss' influential reading, the author argues that among Maimonides' aims was to elevate humanity's role in divine rule. In its highest form reason is identical with revelation, action with providence. God's governance is delegated: theocracy requires human agency-the imitation of God. Maimonides focuses on philosophical-religious leaders. But he also broadens imitatio dei to anyone whose knowledge of God inspires love of God: By emulating God's goodness, we can become agents of divine rule. In this way, Maimonides' ideas suggest ways by which theocracy and democracy might, counter-intuitively, be reconciled.
Virtual exchange is an educational approach that uses technology to bring together people from geographically and/or culturally distant locations in sustained online interactions, often intended to develop their intercultural awareness and understanding. Though the practice has existed for several decades, it has gained popularity in recent years, in part due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic and recourse to online tools for international and intercultural learning. This Element explores intercultural communication in virtual exchange by looking at how and why culture is made relevant in the pedagogical design and framing of virtual exchanges and what impact this might have on student positioning, power dynamics, and on intercultural learning. From this framework three broad approaches are outlined, which are defined as comparative, challenge-based, and dialogue-based. Each approach is explored through examples and the opportunities, limitations, and risks for intercultural learning.