The invention of human nature: the intention and reception of Pufendorf’s entia moralia doctrine

In treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism.     

Literature in the German science of the soul: Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Dreams

The early history of anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany wove together contributions from medicine, metaphysics, and a host of other disciplines in an attempt to develop a holistic ‘science of man.’ This paper examines a literary text written by prominent figure in that movement, Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Dreams (Träume) (1754). The collection of parables staged as dreams in this book presents specifically literary cases against the sufficiency of either philosophy or physiology for the study of human life as a whole. Through close readings of a number of these dreams and related texts, this paper shows how Krüger’s Dreams advocates an approach to anthropology that recognizes the importance of literature for an interdisciplinary study of human life. More than simply recognising literary writing as another means of studying human life, the vision of a new anthropology implied in this book draws on literary devices to counter the overconfidence and partisanship of existing philosophical and medical theories of human nature.     

The famished soul: resonance and relevance of the Irish famine to Irish men’s accounts of hunger following immigration to England during the 1950s and 1960s

This paper uses a hermeneutically informed analysis to reveal how Irish men’s accounts of acute hunger on arrival in England during the 1950s and 1960s resonate with archival oral accounts of the Great Hunger in Ireland during the 1840s. The paper makes the case for a new continuum of memory which foregrounds the corporeal and spiritual dimensions of acute food deprivation and its significance over space, place and time. I argue that a corporeal-spiritual medium of memory represents a two-sided reality, a pivotal yet nebulous point of contact which exemplifies our understanding of how discourses of hunger recounted over the course of a century help shape reconstructions of Irish sociocultural identity. The symbolic potency of hunger and particular foods to expose a distinct moral and social order during both time periods is examined. I also show how this more burnished and fluid medium of corporeal and spiritual memory highlights the importance of intracultural diglossia in respect of Irish sociocultural identity and with it, the interface between individual, collective and folk memory.     

Timor-Leste’s foreign policy approach to the Timor Sea disputes: pipeline or pipe dream?

Over recent years, Australia and Timor-Leste’s bilateral relationship has been consumed by contested maritime boundary claims in the resource-rich Timor Sea. Intractable disagreements over the right to build a petroleum export pipeline have led Timor-Leste to reinvigorate its pursuit of permanent maritime boundaries as ‘a national priority’. This article examines Timor-Leste’s interests in the Timor Sea and assesses its strategies for achieving its foreign policy goals. It argues that Timor-Leste’s attainment of its stated goals relies on Australia shifting its Timor Sea policy, which has been largely consistent since the 1970s. Timor-Leste’s key strategy is a public diplomacy campaign that positions permanent maritime boundaries as the final stage of its independence struggle, and presents Timor-Leste as owning the disputed Greater Sunrise gas field under international law. While the public diplomacy campaign aims to win enough Australian ‘hearts and minds’ to put pressure on the Australian government, it ultimately fails to negotiate the strategic and historical realities of the interests that define Australia’s realpolitik approach to the Timor Sea.     

Let’s meet at Baiae: a journey of 2000 years to the edge of Europe

Since Antiquity, seaside resorts have figured among the most popular sites of leisure and tourism on the European continent. In many ways these sites clearly expressed and supported converging trends in European culture and society. Spa resorts brought together visitors from a range of nationalities in a shared culture of health, pleasure and recreation. This contribution aims to explore how the Mediterranean spa resort of Baiae in the Bay of Naples functioned as a significant cultural setting where visitors and local actors shaped, experienced, discussed and shared cultural values in a changing world throughout the ages.     

Getting personal while narrating the ‘field’: a researcher's journey to the villages of the Narmada valley

In this article, I discuss my experiences, dilemmas and emotions following my field surveys conducted in the rehabilitated villages of Sardar Sarovar. The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) is a multi-purpose river valley project that has dislocated thousands of Adivasis and non-Adivasis from their traditional lands. I have used the narrative method to research and gain insights into the lifestyle changes of the Adivasis displaced by the SSP. Accordingly, I reflect critically on the negotiation of ethics and insider–outsider status in international field research and pay close attention to the importance of reflexivity, positionality and power struggles.     

Multiply vulnerable populations: mobilising a politics of compassion from the ‘capacity to hurt’

This paper reflects on the concept of insecurity defined as ‘the capacity to hurt’. It begins by considering asylum seekers and refugees as hyper-precarious groups that have experienced bodily, material and psychological ‘hurt’ in the UK. At the same time, the paper considers how these hyper-precarious groups are perceived to have the capacity to hurt (bodily, materially, psychologically and spatially) the majority population. Having drawn out two understandings of the capacity to hurt—both the ability to be or feel hurt and the act of hurting others, we argue that a shared recognition of what it means to feel hurt (co-suffering or suffering together)—albeit to very different extremes and with very different consequences—and an understanding of the processes which drive this might be mobilised politically to challenge the act of hurting others. In doing so, we argue for a group politics of compassion to respond to increasingly insecure times.     

Contextualizing Constantine V's radical religious policies: the debate about the intercession of the saints and the ‘sleep of the soul’ in the Chalcedonian and Nestorian churches

Abstract

This article argues that in the last years of his reign Constantine V came to reject the intercession of saints, despite the fact that the Council of Hieria, which he himself had convened only a decade earlier, had explicitly anathematised those who held such a view. Moreover, it makes the case that the emperor participated in a broad religious discourse that began in the sixth century and continued into the ninth century, both among the Chalcedonians of Byzantium and the Levant and among the Nestorians of the East.     

Anatomy of the Superman: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Response to Nietzsche

This essay explores D’Annunzio’s reception of Nietzsche—particularly his sociopolitical theory and idea of the Übermensch—as dramatized in his novel Le Vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks). D’Annunzio’s attitude towards Nietzsche was complicated and contradictory, varying from fascination and rivalry to rejection and negation: rather than a philosopher or master, he saw Nietzsche as a poet and soulmate. Like many writers and artists of fin-de-siècle Europe, D’Annunzio too was attracted by Nietzsche’s elitist social theory and Übermensch, of which he presents his own version especially in Maidens of the Rocks. In the novel, the young aristocrat Claudio Cantelmo aspires to overcome himself. However, the fact that Cantelmo fails to achieve his dream of fathering a New King of Rome, reveals D’Annunzio’s deep skepticism about contemporary Italy as well as his own “decadent” soul.     

Ontological security and the limits to a common world: subaltern pasts and the inner-worldliness of the Tablighi Jama’at

ABSTRACT

In this article, the often conflictual intersection between transnational dimensions of religious social formations and narratives of global governance and national security is interrogated. Concretely, the article examines how the relation, between the transnational activities and commonalities actuated by the Islamic revivalist movement Tablighi Jama’at and the perception that it hosts and nourishes extremist elements, both activates and makes manifest efforts at attaining ontological security. At the heart of the analysis is hence the question of where to locate the limits to the common world as it finds embodiment in contemporary expressions of global governance and transnationalism. By critically engaging the possibility of incorporating the many voices of being human into a singular and all-encompassing framework of human existence, the article moreover builds and expands on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorising of ‘subaltern pasts’ and relates it to the seeming need of selfhood to strive towards wholeness, that is, for subjectivity to be securitised. It is, as a consequence, suggested that the identity formation that emerges through Tablighi Jama’at’s comportment, and the controversies that surround it, must be understood as a manifestation of the limits to what narratives of globality might accommodate. By claiming this, the article confirms and furthers extant reasoning on the incomplete and fractured relation between the possibility of a common world and the intrinsic silence of the subaltern within the realms of the international and the global.     

Technological diffusion—the case of the differential gear

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce large questions about the transfer of technology by way of a case study in technological diffusion. At the same time the paper illustrates some of the possibilities and limitations of a narrow case study and underscores the need for some kind of synthesis or theory to help our understanding of technology diffusion. The differential gear commonly found in the rear axle of motorcars is a critical piece of mechanical technology. Over the past 250 years it has been applied for a variety of purposes each of which exploited its essential principle of allowing the division of a driving force—a division caused by intercepting it with some kind of weight or independent force (kidney cam in the equation clock; weights on the 'crown' wheel of a windmill governor and in a dynamometer; the weight of rovings on bobbins in the roving frame; friction of the road as a car corners).     

‘Arsenic of the size of a pea’

It is one of criminology’s (few) established truths that women commit far fewer violent crimes than men do. This has been especially evident when it comes to deadly violence. Besides witchcraft and infanticide there is, however, another serious crime that has been associated with women: poisoning. This article studies female poisoners in 19th-century Sweden. The investigation shows that poisonings were fairly common during this period, albeit far from being an exclusively female affair. The empirical findings reveal that these crimes were directed at several different categories of victims: spouses, children and elderly household members, as well as other women. It is also shown that a considerable number of the women accused of poisoning was acquitted, in many cases thanks to the strict process rules associated with the statutory theory of legal proof. Theoretically, the article hypothesizes an understanding of these poisonings where agency is placed at the centre. They are thus seen as acts where (female) subjectivity was created during this period.     

‘Defense of the realm’: evolution of a Capetian propaganda slogan

Historians have long recognized the importance of the Roman-canonical maxim ‘defense of the realm’ to the propaganda politics practised by later Capetian kings, most notably in the climactic struggle between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII. Although rightly conceding to Roman law the major impulse to its formulation, they have been less sensitive to the way in which the doctrine fits into historical images of Capetian kingship. The theory of the king as defender of the realm was critical in the early as well as late middle ages. In tracing the evolution of this slogan through the chronicle tradition of Saint-Denis, the most extensive and consistently royalist historical corpus in Capetian France, one sees the emergence of concepts congruent with those developed in legal and canonical texts, but which reveal little or no influence from these more learned sources.This article argues that the chroniclers' persistent focus on the image of the king as royal defender facilitated the interior evolution of the meaning of ‘defense of the realm’ from that of feudal tuitio to the public concept of Roman jurisprudence. The chroniclers of Saint-Denis thus testify to the way in which older theories of monarchy were being subtly transformed by the changing nature of kingship itself. But at the same time they lend an air of coherency and familiarity to one of the most disruptive periods of Capetian history and sustain a sense of the evolution of the French monarchy within the context of fundamental notions governing medieval kingship.     

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the rift in Leibniz’s conception of determinism after being rebuffed by the Parisian theologian Antoine Arnauld in their correspondence of 1686. As, in addition, his study of surds infracted his confidence in the “complete concept,” Leibniz embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance or “law of the series.” In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as “tweaking” the system to allow some self-assertion of free will. But as this article will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and the disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor an empirical proof can be given.     

The ‘Horns’ of a Medical Dilemma: Alexander the Great

Retrospective ‘diagnosis’ of clinical disorders of famous historical figures has been of medical interest. In the absense of a patient’s ‘body’, the validity of ‘physical symptoms’ and their interpretation by contemporary diagnostic criteria are questionable. When the symptoms have been gleaned from the patients’s effigy which, as in the case of Alexander the Great, is submerged in legend, the enterprise becomes inherently hazardous. In the present paper, some of the conceptual problems underlying retrospective diagnoses will be identified. Then the use of iconographic records, such as numismatics and sculpture, to provide evidence of clinical symptoms will be shown to be highly misleading.     

The evolution of the responsibility to protect: at a crossroads?

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), now ten years old, has been widely accepted at the international level. As the books under review demonstrate, debates around its legitimacy are over. Instead, we see a developing second generation of literature focusing on how the R2P needs to be understood more concretely in both academic and policy terms, as well as how it affects the linked issues of humanitarian intervention and state‐building. Within this literature, we see new and important questions emerging. These include how and when we should intervene and whether we can be successful at it; how we can assist states to ensure they fulfill their own responsibilities towards their populations; and where international authority lies. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are hard ones. Implementation, and how it reflects embedded culture at the international level, may be as hard—if not harder—as introducing the doctrine originally.