What's the matter? draws readers into the ongoing inquiry about the natural world, providing an overview of how physics has developed through the centuries, in the words of the scientists who made the great discoveries.

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. But political actors do things – they engage in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion, yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely because they serve to purposively alter citizens’ beliefs, intentions and behaviour. With this article, I explicate a conception of political (...) manipulation to capture this sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of democratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that self-respect is ‘perhaps the most important’ primary good and that its status as such gives crucial support to controversial ideas like the lexical priority of liberty. Given the importance of these ideas for Rawls, it should be no surprise that they have attracted much critical attention. In response to these critics, I give a defense of self-respect that grounds its importance in Rawls’s moral conception of the person. I show that this (...) understanding of self-respect goes well beyond giving support to the lexical priority of liberty, also supporting Rawls’s still more controversial view of public reason. On my account, taking self-respect seriously requires the coercive enforcement of public reason. This is a novel argument for public reason, in that it grounds the idea in justice as fairness and mandates its coercive enforcement. (shrink)

"Liverpool is going through the most significant period of change in its recent history, and the evidence is clear to see in the evolving cityscape. In this book, photographer Alan McKernan documents this process in his characteristically dramatic style, capturing the clutter and upheaval of reconstruction, the confidence of the glittering new skyscrapers, and the stubborn persistence of an architectural past that refuses to be swept away by the tide of the modern. With illuminating commentary by architectural historian Matthew (...) class='Hi'>Whitfield, these photographs mark a time of gathering strength, of deep breaths and diggers. Unfamiliar Journeys Continued is a compelling exploration of the contest between light and shade in a re-forming city."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This book presents a focused analysis of the core value of Confucian thought, namely the jen, through an investigation of Hsieh Liang-tso's analysis of the Analects of Confucius. Selover argues that Hsieh's handling of key issues in interpreting and applying the Confucian Analects, his experiental reasoning as well as his deference to scriptural classics and earlier tradition, bear important similarities to the practice of theology in Western religious traditions. The volume also contains a translation of Hsieh's commentary on the Analects, (...) and a foreword by the renowned scholar of Confucianism, Tu Wei-ming. (shrink)

African nations are increasingly focusing on exporting high-value crops. However, a major challenge exists: high rates of food waste within supply chains. The problem is often seen as a technological issue—a lack of proper infrastructure and coordination creates inefficiencies. This research takes a different perspective, focusing on social relations within the supply chain. It uses the concept of “food waste regimes” to understand the underlying structures, relationships, and systems that cause food waste, with a focus on Tanzania’s avocado trade. The (...) goals of the research are to: (1) Identify the factors contributing to food waste within Tanzania’s avocado supply chains, particularly in the context of export-oriented production; (2) Explore how these factors change as production shifts towards exports; (3) Analyse the fairness (equity) of how waste burdens are distributed among those involved. We adopted a “follow the thing” approach, combining interviews and observations across both domestic and export avocado supply chains in Tanzania. The research reveals that interactions between various aspects of the supply chain—practices, physical properties of the product (avocado perishability), and established institutions—influence where food waste occurs and who shoulders the burden of that waste. The research exposes how unequal power dynamics between participants lead to some actors bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk and cost of food waste. By taking a social relations approach, this research highlights that tackling food waste and social inequality are intertwined issues. The paper suggests potential areas for future research and intervention to address these interconnected challenges. (shrink)

"Unfamiliar journeys is a unique collection of 100 hand-printed photographs by Alan McKernan. This is a rich, visual exploration of Liverpool's urban landscapes to intrigue, fascinate, and delight."--BOOK JACKET.

The Malabo Declaration places the transformation of agriculture and food systems at the centre of regional and national policy priorities across Africa. Transformative change in the way that food is produced, processed and consumed is seen as not only necessary for addressing the complex challenges of food security and poverty alleviation, but also as a driver of new employment opportunities and economic development. As pointed out within the recent UN Food Systems Summit, essential elements of food system transformations include digital (...) transitions and the empowerment of women and youth. However, there are few empirical examples demonstrating how these agendas come together to affect food system change. Here we focus on an enterprising group of young farmers referred to as Malawi’s _new achikumbe elite_, who are urban based, educated and engaging in agriculture on a commercial basis. The aim is to characterise this emergent group of agriculturalists and to understand the role that they have within the transformation of Malawi-s agricultural sector. We explore how digital platforms are supporting the emergence of this new category of farmer and positioning young people as agents of change in food systems transformation. Based on interviews and ethnographic research with 32 young farmers between 2018 and 2022 combined with interviews with representatives of service providers and agricultural organisations, we argue that this group is characterised by a higher level of education, self-dependency and use of digital platforms, enabling them to adapt their context to sourcing production resources and engaging in commercial agriculture. We present evidence that digital platforms are supporting the new achikumbe elite (NAE) to engage flexibly with new commercial markets, contracts and access a wider range of training and advice. However, while digital platforms can offer more equitable access to information and market opportunities, they also represent potential avenues for food system transformations that are inequitable. As such, we argue that there is need for digital technologies to mitigate against potential inequalities. (shrink)

A new biography of one of the founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle, is no easy undertaking, but no scholar is better poised to give us a revisionist view of this iconic figure than Michael Hunter. For fourteen years Hunter, together with Edward Davis, supervised the definitive fourteen‐volume edition of Boyle's complete works, published and unpublished. This was the first such undertaking since the 1744 edition compiled by the cleric and antiquary Thomas Birch. Almost no Boyle scholar has (...) been as privileged—or as dogged—in probing every bit of Boyle's legendary scribblings as Hunter. With his new biography, which gestated for decades and reflects the accumulating wisdom gained only with disciplined, persistent, and wide‐ranging reading, Hunter has shed new light on Boyle's life and character. Specialists will delight in having Hunter's path‐breaking articles gathered together in one volume from journals as far ranging as the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Medical History to the more standard venues of the profession.Which Boyle have historians of early modern science more recently encountered, and how does Hunter's book enhance or change our understanding? Richard S. Westfall and Marie Boas Hall produced portraits of Boyle as a bona fide, uncomplicated mechanist devoted to testing his view of the universe by frequent experimentation. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their Leviathan and the Air‐Pump set the stage for a more complex version of Boyle. They portrayed him as a consummate strategist who craftily used his experimental philosophy to serve his own conservative political and social agendas. Shapin's more recent A Social History of Truth claimed that Boyle relied heavily on his social status to carefully craft his public image as a gentleman in order to gain credibility and trust from his audiences. Lawrence Principe in his Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest has shown us a Boyle who was passionately committed to alchemy and fascinated by, if fearful of, magic. Barbara Kaplan in her Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick emphasized Boyle's long‐standing interests in medical issues and medical practices.What sort of Boyle does Hunter offer his audience, and how has his high place in Boyle scholarship enabled him to present such a novel interpretation? Hunter shows us a Boyle whose fully complex personality directly contributed to, and thwarted, his scientific production as an experimenter. Hunter's analysis is not deeply seated in psychoanalytical theory but, rather, emerges from a fine‐grained analysis of Boyle's intense religious preoccupations. In the case of Boyle, Hunter argues, earlier eighteenth‐century biographers—including Gilbert Burnet, Roger North, Henry Miles, and William Wooton—produced adulation for a figure whose deep religiosity enhanced his scientific endeavors. Rather than casting his lot with contemporaries who sought a conservative solution to church and state relations after 1660, Boyle had troubling religious preoccupations so that things for him were not so simple, as Hunter shows. Indeed, Boyle befriended and associated with men who were openly acknowledged as mystics and enthusiasts and never allied himself exclusively—or even primarily—with Church of England spokesmen or ecclesiastics. Moreover, Hunter argues, Boyle felt more acutely aware of the dangers of excessive rationalism than he did of the claims of direct divine inspiration. Boyle's religious anxieties, far from mere youthful preoccupations, plagued him throughout his lifetime. Hunter reproduces Boyle's notes on two full confessional interviews he had with two prominent churchmen toward the end of his life. The two churchmen, Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, appeared unsympathetic with the great man's scruples over the legitimacy of his ownership of considerable lands once belonging to the Church. But for Boyle this was no trivial matter; throughout his life he was similarly plagued about the moral rectitude of inheritances from his wealthy father, about constant incursions of blasphemous thoughts, and about the moral propriety of taking oaths. Indeed, for Hunter Boyle's obsessive concern in salving his conscience induced his refusal to accept the presidency of the Royal Society in 1680 because of the oath‐taking necessitated by the position. His tortuous, obsessive religious preoccupations, Hunter argues, find their parallels in Boyle's equally exacting procedures related to his punctilious scientific experiments. Thus, while some historians might see the scrupulous religiosity of Boyle as “dysfunctional,” the same instincts and personality features made him a highly “functional” scientist.Hunter's careful probing of Boyle's defensive apologies, frequently found as prefatory material in his published treatises, reveals another side of Boyle, hitherto largely ignored by his biographers. Excessively concerned about his reputation for establishing new empirical findings, Boyle reveals himself to Hunter in several instances as a masterful dissembler or plagiarist, careful in the extreme to conceal his debts to empirics, compilers, and less learned or less socially prominent men, including George Starkey, William Salmon, Johann Glauber, J. J. Becher, and Jean‐Baptiste DuHamel. What emerges from Hunter's depiction is the antithesis of the decisive, manipulative, socially prepossessing Boyle that Shapin has depicted. What Hunter furnishes is a Boyle who is perhaps far more insecure than the one historians have allowed themselves to envision and who struggled to hide his own vulnerability and inadequacy.In a satisfying exploration of Boyle's connections with medical circles, Hunter searches to explain why Boyle, well known among his contemporaries for enjoying a constant state of ill health and for his dissatisfaction with learned Galenic medicine passed down by the esteemed physicians of his day, was, nevertheless, so loath to publish his stinging criticisms of the medical profession. Historians have long recognized that Boyle evinced strong interest in medical matters from the time of his early researches with physicians in the 1650s in Oxford and that he continued to write about medical issues for the next several decades of his life. But Boyle was acutely aware—as his prefaces attest—that he was not a member of the profession and that his access to sick bodies was severely constricted by his status as a gentleman. Hunter suggests that Boyle's reticence in publishing his attacks on the Galenists owed something to his social position—he was, after all, on good social terms with many eminent physicians. His deference, Hunter argues, owed not just to his hesitation to attack a well‐respected profession, but also to his diffidence about proclaiming universal truths on matters as changeable—and ultimately untestable—as sick human bodies. Hunter further probes another paradox of Boyle's life. We know that Boyle freely gave out his medical advice and medicines that were produced in his private laboratory to friends and acquaintances and that, furthermore, he saw this as a moral duty and Christian charity. Yet Boyle, the champion of open communication in matters of natural philosophy, steadfastly refused to publish his medicine recipes . His unpublished drafts reveal a Boyle who was sharply committed to widening the access of his poor countrymen to chemically prepared and effective medicines. But Boyle stopped well short of making these recipes available for wider dissemination through the medium of print. Why? Again Hunter presents no simple answers but suggests a medley of motives. Exquisitely sensitive to his own reputation, Boyle, in part, may have censored himself lest he be seen as the equal of empirics, apothecaries, and quacksalvers, all abundant and thriving in London in the 1670s. Despite his high‐minded sense of philanthropy, Boyle was particularly concerned about his public persona, so much so that his private passions at times took second seat. Hunter suggests a similar explanation for Boyle's refusal to forthrightly publish his investigations of supernatural phenomena, including witchcraft, visions, angelic apparitions, and second sight. In addition to his strong religious scruples that such investigations might be tainted by demonic participation, Boyle censored himself out of his fear of the charge of easy credulity. As popular satires of experimenters were beginning to pour forth from the pens of Thomas Shadwell and Samuel Butler, Boyle must have smarted at the thought of being classified among those indulging in magical pursuits unbecoming to a genteel experimenter. Hunter concludes by revealing a Boyle far from being a confident showman and expositor of the new science. Instead he shows us a conflicted, ambivalent man who suffered from his high social status, even as he manipulated it for his own aggrandizement or for that of the Royal Society and its experimental program.Hunter's depiction of a tortured man—hitherto most often conceived as an iconic devotee of experimental science or as a consummate, self‐fashioning, smooth‐talking gentleman—will not sit well with some historians. Nor will his characterization of Boyle's lifelong religious scruples sit well. Just as Lawrence Principe presented readers with a disturbing vision of a Boyle duped by alchemical operators or conversing with angelic voices, Hunter offers up a tentative, hesitant, and uncertain man who does not seem to fit with earlier portraits. With extremely convincing and documented evidence, Hunter draws a complex, strong personality that left its stamp on his scientific agenda. Hunter's most piercing insight is to see Boyle's deep‐seated diffidence not as an obstacle to his science but as a driving force behind his commitment to experimentalism. In the end Hunter's view will outlast earlier, less complex versions. (shrink)