Local anaesthetics are used to produce nerve blocks in a specific region of the body. The difference between anaesthesia and analgesia is that anaesthesia is defined by the loss of all sensation, whereas analgesia is the loss of pain sensation only. In dentistry, the main aim of using local anaesthetics is local analgesia; that is, to avoid pain while other sensory elements such as touch and proprioception remain intact.

This chapter analyzes devotional experience, especially as it is displayed in contemporary evangelical approaches. Devotion is examined not as a singular practice but as a way of living out religion in daily life, within regular social, economic, and political structures without radical withdrawal from them. Devotional experience is marked by a deeply personal affective experience of a loving God who is seen to accept even the most evil and wretched person. This serves as a horizon of friendship that enables the devotional self to confront its faults and shortcomings. Devotional experience is marked by its intensely emotional and individual forms of expression. It accompanies people in their concrete daily lives and is experienced as suffusing and transforming daily and ordinary experiences without separating oneself from the society or the world. Devotional experience thus capitalizes on the human need for loving relationship and personal guidance in daily life.

The familys economic and socio-cultural capital and how it is shared among its members influence a person’s capabilities and choices. This chapter posits that the family acts as a collective conversion factor, and presents a case study in Mali. A typology of household configurations that best expresses the diversity of family forms is built, then used to see the relation to the overall quality of life of household members, measured by goods (household assets) and opportunities (child education and women’s autonomy). The association between these configurations and children’s access to schooling, controlling for the household standard of living, is then considered, regression analysis results showing that access to education is correlated with the household standard of living, but there is also a household configuration net effect. Extended households seem better off and better suited to develop solidarity strategies that facilitate access to schooling. But the priority given to education also appears to play a role in differences between households, shown by a higher education rate of children in rural households headed by an educated man and in urban ones that are female-headed.

By focusing on the relevance of regional identities in the self-presentation of Hellenistic victors, this chapter explores agonistic fame beyond the level of the polis. As the best documented case, the agonistic representation of Thessalian victors is of particular importance. It reveals that Hellenistic horse owners from Thessaly always emphasized their regional instead of their polis identity in order to enhance their horses’ value as objects of prestige and to create a virtual “hall of fame” of victorious horses and their owners. Although this was an exceptional case, regional identities were also expressed by Phokian and Arkadian athletes in the early Hellenistic age. Taken as a whole, the period saw the heyday of Greek federal states; and yet, the basic unit in the agonistic discourse remained the polis.

Despite the fact that the Vienna Convention prescribes a holistic approach to treaty interpretation, it is widely believed that the dominant interpretive approach in international law is textualism. Textualism is premised on the distinction between what is inside and what is outside the text of a treaty and assumes that it is possible to interpret a text without reference to factors that are extraneous to it. This chapter situates the preference for textualism in the intellectual history of the discipline. Building on philosopher John Searle’s work, it argues, however, that no treaty interpreter is or can be a textualist. It also introduces the concept of intertextuality and discusses the tension between the official functions of textualism and the practice of treaty interpretation.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

Eight under-accomplishing premierships since Thatcher stood down in 1990, and a long list of long-standing domestic problems not resolved by successive administrations, including stalled productivity in the economy, crumbling transport infrastructure and chronic housing shortages, repeated failures to address social care and a failing health service, speak of a failure of leadership at the top. Many PMs – not all– who stepped up were potentially well-equipped for the job. So what has happened? Has the job now become impossible: or is it the quality of the incumbents and their preparedness for office that have declined? This final chapter seeks to provide answers. It probes the issue of quality, and examines which prime ministers have been successful and why, assigning them to one of six grades. It examines how judgements about premierships are formed, and the role of the individuals themselves in shaping those perceptions, before concluding with five proposals to ensure that, as we move towards the mid twenty-first century, prime ministerial performance might improve.

I look at Wittgenstein’s statement, in his letter to Russell, of the “main contention” of his book. I consider also the relation between his main contention and what he describes in the book as his fundamental idea. I discuss also what he means when he says that what he calls his main contention, and his main point is the cardinal problem of philosophy.

Sexual selection theory has undergone both a theoretical and an empirical revolution over the last few decades. New understandings of female choice, partnership dynamics and the impact of sociodemographic factors on mating strategies have led to a flourishing of studies within human behavioral ecology and related evolutionary social sciences. Drawing from this literature, this chapter outlines how mating markets operate and the particular traits that are thought to be most important in human mate choice. Following this overview, the chapter examines how temporal and contextual facets of human partnerships affect mating decisions. Finally, the chapter shifts the focus to debates about the dual roles of fidelity and paternity and how these affect mating strategies. Throughout, the chapter focuses on data from non-WEIRD societies in order to highlight aspects of mating where universals are evident and where cross-cultural variation is important. In addition, the chapter highlights how studies of human mating by human behavioral ecologists offer a distinct and valuable perspective which cannot be found in other subfields of the evolutionary social sciences.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

Life history theory has revolutionized the study of the evolved life course both across and within species. Humans are no exception. Life history theory provides nuance to claims of human uniqueness in the tree of life, including among mammals, and among primates in particular. This chapter first explains how life history theory delivers optimal trait characteristics given trade-offs that are defined by costs and benefits of different “solutions” to fitness-relevant problems. It reviews the current understanding of the evolution of the human life course, and the chapter evaluates explanations of long postreproductive life spans in human populations. It then provides a framework for modeling how selection pressures in different socioecological settings could shape the flexible expression of demographic, physiological, and even psychological traits in our species. Special emphasis is placed on the role that exogenous mortality and environmental unpredictability (and their cues) play on shaping a number of behavioral and physiological traits related to survival. Claims certainly outpace definitive tests, but after a half century, since life history theory was first introduced to the human life sciences, promising new directions are expanding the breadth of topics covered beyond demography, using multiple methods and spanning diverse disciplines.

In Chapter 2, I develop and defend an account of human rights as universalist and minimalist. First, I characterize rights as universal, protecting all people universally and absent any qualifying characteristic. Second, I argue that the human right to subsistence is a basic human right. I argue that without enjoying the substance of the human right to subsistence, we will neither be able to enjoy the substance of any other, non-basic right nor pursue any other ends, moral, or non-moral. And third, in response to critics who believe that the universality of human rights entails remaking the world in our image (i.e., maximalism), I develop a minimalist account of human rights. According to minimalism about human rights, human rights should enable us to live minimally decent and autonomous lives. On these terms, human rights aim to protect people from the worst rather than to promote the best.