Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations – incentives for believing – can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this (...) argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance, marking the collapse of Marxist politics and economics. Indeed, Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seems, all reason to take the writings of Karl Marx seriously. Jonathan Wolff argues that if we detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of some never-to-be-realized worker's paradise, he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. The author shows how Marx's main (...) ideas still shed light on wider concerns about culture and society and he guides the reader through Marx's notoriously difficult writings. Wolff also argues that the value of a great thinker does not depend on his or her views being true, but on other features such as originality, insight, and systematic vision. From this perspective, Marx still richly deserves to be read. Why Read Marx Today? reinstates Marx as an important critic of current society, and not just a figure of historical interest. (shrink)

My paper ‘Hobbes and the Motivations of Social Contract Theory’ was published in this journal in 1994. In this contribution I explain the background that led me to write that paper at an early stage of my career, relating the explanation to my education as a student at UCL, and, briefly, at Harvard and contrasting the methodological approaches I experienced in the two departments. The Hobbes paper itself offers a type of ‘rational reconstruction’ of Hobbes, drawing on the logic of (...) different social contract arguments, and while there is much in the paper I still agree with, it assumes an approach to Philosophy that I would not adopt now. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These changes are (...) ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

This book evaluates the consequences of economic, social, environmental and cultural change on people living and working within Teesside in the North-East of England. It assesses the lived experiences, working lives, health and cultural perspectives of residents and key stakeholders in the wake of serious de-industralisation in the region. The narrative is embedded within the long-term industrial history of Stockton: an area once dominated by steel, coal and chemical industries. This past still continues to shape its future and influences the (...) ways in which that future is conceived and envisioned. The author explores a 'biography of place' analytical framework to offer a holistic view of the area, which considers the interaction between the social, economic, cultural, visual and environmental legacy of the community, which is firmly grounded in the past, present and future prospects of those who live and work there. (shrink)

"The selections are well chosen... the Introduction and headnotes are extremely clear and well written... appropriately pegged for a very introductory audience." --Steven Gerrard, Williams College.

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that...

All of a historian's work is devoted to sources. Even his personal memories become sources, as his historical research advances. – Arnaldo Momigliano1 The Loop GarooGoin’ down to JunkanooThe Loop G...

Science is considered as an open system that constitutes a sub-entity of the total system "society" and whose functions include the production, systematization, communication and application of knowledge. Since this system is made up of individuals and groups, its functions are dependent on psychological factors. This fact serves as a starting point for a psychology of science, which can contribute to optimizing scientific practice by treating the heuristic, organizational, technological, and normative aspects of scientific activity.

Any worlds semantics for intentionality has to provide a plenitudinous theory of impossibility: For any impossible proposition, it should provide a world where it is true. Hence, also any semantics for impossibility statements that extends Lewis’s concretism about possible worlds should be plenitudinous. However, several such proposals for impossibilist semantics fail to accommodate two kinds of impossibility that, albeit not unheard of, have been largely neglected in the literature on impossible worlds, but that are bound to arise in the Lewisian (...) context. The proposals discussed here stop short of plenitude because they adhere to what Lewis occasionally referred to as ‘ontological truth’, as they lack the semantic ability to misrepresent ontological facts. The paper develops a framework for systematic misrepresentations on the basis of Mares’s situation-based account of impossible ‘worlds’, and which confines ‘ontological truth’ to possibility. It thus illustrates how a plenitude of impossibilities can be achieved. (shrink)

First published in 1976, this book presents a view of language as a matter of systematic communicative behaviour.

This paper argues that the idea of creative destruction enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s (...) standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative. (shrink)

A simple argument against Lewisian modal realism as portrayed in On the Plurality of World arises from its treatment of doxastic modalities. It is easily shown that if it is true, it is impossible to doubt the theory on ontological grounds, or, that, if it is possible to maintain doubt about modal realism’s existential postulate, it has to be false. The argument hinges on the fact that modal realism’s main ontological hypothesis, if true, is necessarily true.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Literary Power and the Criteria of TruthThomas ReinertLiterary Power and the Criteria of Truth, by Laura Quinney; xx & 183 pp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995, $35.00.Given the predominance of cultural materialism and historical scholarship, literary studies no longer ascribe much of a distinct, autonomous role to literariness as such. Current critics are interested in the complicity of individual works in the propagation of social and political (...) power, but the notion of literariness as a power in its own right has for the most part dropped away. The decline of this concept is a real loss; how great a loss becomes evident when one reads a book like Laura Quinney’s Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth, which in a gripping and authoritative fashion recalls the seductiveness of the literary.Quinney writes with a deconstructionist’s sense of the shaping influence that the desire for literature exercises over claims about the world. For Quinney, the literary—not just individual works, but literariness as a distinct disposition of language—has power and solicits attention on its own terms. To explain her general view of the prevalence of the literary in human experience, she makes use of Wittgenstein’s account of language as an engrossing and primary activity, irreducible to other drives or aims. To discuss the special case of literature, she turns to Maurice Blanchot’s notion that literature constitutes a distinct, impersonal, absorbing, but also uncanny and desolate “space.” Her book aims to affirm and expand on this Blanchotian idea.Quinney is primarily concerned with what she calls the “tragic paradigm” whose basic premise is that grim and depressing depictions of life somehow tell a greater or deeper truth than happy and comic depictions do. Working from this premise, writers and readers tend to set tragedy and the sublime above comedy and the beautiful in the hierarchy of literary forms. Quinney both acknowledges the force of this preference and puzzles over its oddity; she tries here to explain its origins.Through an examination of some of its most compelling exponents, Quinney interprets the tragic paradigm as a symptom of the struggle between an attraction to and a recoil from the “literary,” understood in Maurice Blanchot’s sense as an impersonal elaboration of language—language as a motiveless, subjectless compulsion akin to repetition in Freud. According to Quinney, literature is necessarily oriented toward representation, and for this reason, a passion for literature expresses itself as a “love of mimesis.” But because there is an irreducible difference between representation and what it represents, and because the truth it tries to tell is bound to be distorted, the love of it leads to a feeling of loss and mourning; and in turn this feeling seems to reflect the deepest truth of literary experience. According to Quinney, works that obey the logic of the tragic paradigm see the world through the prism of this failure of mimesis, the failure of literature to coincide with the world, and as a result the world appears to them colored with the pain of that failure.After a preliminary discussion of the sublime and tragedy, focusing on [End Page 275] Aeschylus, Edmund Burke, and Simone Weil, Quinney devotes the bulk of her book to Samuel Johnson and Percy Shelley as major representatives of the tragic paradigm. Johnson embodies the paradigm in all its ramifications, Quinney argues. Shelley, conversely, offers an example of the peculiar, almost surreal desolation that takes over when an author tries to break with the paradigm—that is, to deny tragedy any special epistemological authority—yet remains compulsively under its spell.These are dense, riveting, illuminating, and groundbreaking chapters. Readers will admire Quinney’s range of reference, her sureness of judgment, her originality, and her power to fascinate. Her argument takes counter-intuitive, paradoxical turns, but always with deliberation and patience. The book is strange, but its strangeness never feels gratuitous or self-indulgent; it only recalls the strangeness that may after all be intrinsic to literature itself.Thomas ReinertWellesley CollegeCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On NietzscheThomas ReinertOn Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille; translated by Bruce Boone; xxxiv & 199 pp. New York: Paragon House, 1994, $12.95 paper.Dating from 1944, On Nietzsche has the feel of a transitional work. Its themes of excess, risk, and self-loss had dominated Bataille’s writing since the late 1920s and do not seem freshly imagined here. They are, rather, brought together in a large, compendious argument, suggesting that at (...) this point Bataille was interested in systematizing his thoughts and ascertaining their deepest philosophical implications. A couple of years later he was to publish his major work, La part maudite, and it is tempting to see On Nietzsche as a kind of preparation for it.The book’s substantial preface lays out the vast cultural context in which Bataille sets his argument. He is concerned with experiencing “humanness” in its “entirety.” Since entirety involves an openness to all possible states, he argues, any undertaking or discipline that focuses desire—any orientation towards a goal—should be seen as a debilitating constraint. Earlier cultures seemed to indulge the free play of desire in their religious rituals; but in fact their mysticism was only a disguise for a kind of utilitarianism. The modern era’s secularism has done away with this obfuscation, and as a result the perplexing problem of human wholeness has now acutely posed itself.Generally, it is a problem of going “beyond” oneself. Bataille thinks of the self intuitively as a tender, vulnerable, delicately protected enclosure, something like an egg or a jelly. When it follows the dictates of goal-oriented thinking and the rationale of self-preservation, it pays the price of remaining single and isolated. Human “entirety” requires going beyond oneself; but this implies, in Bataille’s conceptualization, receiving a wound, being broken open and spilling out. The classical model of self-surpassing, in his view, is the wounded, crucified figure of Christ, who enables humanity to unite with divinity by subjecting his divinity to defilement.The conundrum of “going beyond oneself” is that one cannot set that activity itself as a goal for oneself. According to Bataille, even defining it theoretically, as his book tries to do, blocks the approach to it. It happens, when it happens, by chance; at most, one brings it on by taking risks, and so exposing oneself to chance. When the risk is real, it necessarily induces anxiety and distress, both because it raises the possibility of disaster, and because it neutralizes one’s powers of acting and leaves one helpless. Self-surpassing is agonizing, though it can be exuberant.More specifically, Bataille writes here about communication with other people; and, above all, about sex. Much of the book is a journal recorded between February and August 1944, at which time he was pursuing an affair with a woman he refers to as “K.” The distress of taking risks and of passively enduring chance figures here primarily in his relation with K. He felt with her [End Page 169] the impossibility of determining his fortune by his actions. Perhaps she was peculiarly unpredictable: at one point, Bataille compares her to Brett in The Sun Also Rises. But the account of their affair, like the book as a whole, unfolds at such a high level of abstraction that Bataille seems in it to expose himself to chance in general, as if the affair had been metaphysical rather than interpersonal.The book’s evocation of sex overall leaves one wondering how much Bataille’s metaphysical vocabulary gave rise to his anguish. In his terms, what is “not the self” is “nothingness”; when we make love, we go down from “transcendence” into “immanence” by “risking” ourselves in the “nothingness” of “woman’s nakedness.” The extremity of such language, the spareness of such categories, seems to generate a dire scenario that neither “communication” nor “humanness” is obliged, perhaps, to support.Thomas ReinertWellesley CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On NietzscheThomas ReinertOn Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille; translated by Bruce Boone; xxxiv & 199 pp. New York: Paragon House, 1994, $12.95 paper.Dating from 1944, On Nietzsche has the feel of a transitional work. Its themes of excess, risk, and self-loss had dominated Bataille’s writing since the late 1920s and do not seem freshly imagined here. They are, rather, brought together in a large, compendious argument, suggesting that at (...) this point Bataille was interested in systematizing his thoughts and ascertaining their deepest philosophical implications. A couple of years later he was to publish his major work, La part maudite, and it is tempting to see On Nietzsche as a kind of preparation for it.The book’s substantial preface lays out the vast cultural context in which Bataille sets his argument. He is concerned with experiencing “humanness” in its “entirety.” Since entirety involves an openness to all possible states, he argues, any undertaking or discipline that focuses desire—any orientation towards a goal—should be seen as a debilitating constraint. Earlier cultures seemed to indulge the free play of desire in their religious rituals; but in fact their mysticism was only a disguise for a kind of utilitarianism. The modern era’s secularism has done away with this obfuscation, and as a result the perplexing problem of human wholeness has now acutely posed itself.Generally, it is a problem of going “beyond” oneself. Bataille thinks of the self intuitively as a tender, vulnerable, delicately protected enclosure, something like an egg or a jelly. When it follows the dictates of goal-oriented thinking and the rationale of self-preservation, it pays the price of remaining single and isolated. Human “entirety” requires going beyond oneself; but this implies, in Bataille’s conceptualization, receiving a wound, being broken open and spilling out. The classical model of self-surpassing, in his view, is the wounded, crucified figure of Christ, who enables humanity to unite with divinity by subjecting his divinity to defilement.The conundrum of “going beyond oneself” is that one cannot set that activity itself as a goal for oneself. According to Bataille, even defining it theoretically, as his book tries to do, blocks the approach to it. It happens, when it happens, by chance; at most, one brings it on by taking risks, and so exposing oneself to chance. When the risk is real, it necessarily induces anxiety and distress, both because it raises the possibility of disaster, and because it neutralizes one’s powers of acting and leaves one helpless. Self-surpassing is agonizing, though it can be exuberant.More specifically, Bataille writes here about communication with other people; and, above all, about sex. Much of the book is a journal recorded between February and August 1944, at which time he was pursuing an affair with a woman he refers to as “K.” The distress of taking risks and of passively enduring chance figures here primarily in his relation with K. He felt with her [End Page 169] the impossibility of determining his fortune by his actions. Perhaps she was peculiarly unpredictable: at one point, Bataille compares her to Brett in The Sun Also Rises. But the account of their affair, like the book as a whole, unfolds at such a high level of abstraction that Bataille seems in it to expose himself to chance in general, as if the affair had been metaphysical rather than interpersonal.The book’s evocation of sex overall leaves one wondering how much Bataille’s metaphysical vocabulary gave rise to his anguish. In his terms, what is “not the self” is “nothingness”; when we make love, we go down from “transcendence” into “immanence” by “risking” ourselves in the “nothingness” of “woman’s nakedness.” The extremity of such language, the spareness of such categories, seems to generate a dire scenario that neither “communication” nor “humanness” is obliged, perhaps, to support.Thomas ReinertWellesley CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Oxford Translation of Aristotle was originally published in 12 volumes between 1912 and 1954. It is universally recognized as the standard English version of Aristotle. This revised edition contains the substance of the original Translation, slightly emended in light of recent scholarship three of the original versions have been replaced by new translations and a new and enlarged selection of Fragments has been added. The aim of the translation remains the same: to make the surviving works of Aristotle readily (...) accessible to English speaking readers. (shrink)

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

Recently, more attention has been paid to the nature and value of the intellectual virtue of epistemic autonomy. One underexplored issue concerns how epistemic autonomy is related to other intellectual virtues. Plausibly, epistemic autonomy is closely related to a number of intellectual virtues like curiosity, inquisitiveness, intellectual perseverance, and intellectual courage to name just a few. Here, however, I will examine the relation between epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility. I will argue that epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility bear an interesting (...) relationship to one another in that they are interconnected and mutually supporting intellectual virtues. In sections 2 and 3 I will provide a brief overview of the predominant accounts of intellectual humility (section 2) and epistemic autonomy (section 3) in the literature. With an understanding of these intellectual virtues in hand, we will examine their relationship of mutual support in section 4. Section 5 will explore a challenge to this relationship coming from the epistemology of disagreement, and section 6 concludes. (shrink)

" Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human.

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith (...) in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794. (shrink)

Die Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East erscheinen als Supplement der Zeitschrift Der Islam, gegründet 1910 von Carl Heinrich Becker, einem der Väter der modernen Islamwissenschaft. Ziel der Studies ist die Erforschung der vergangenen Gesellschaften des Vorderen Orients, ihrer Glaubenssysteme und der zugrundeliegenden sozialen und ökonomischen Verhältnisse - für alle historisch arbeitenden Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften.

The Sustainable Development Goals have attracted both defenders and critics. Composed of seventeen goals and 169 targets, the overly broad scope of the SDGs raises the question of whether there are priorities that need to be set within them. This essay considers the SDGs from the perspective of a “basic goods approach” to development policy, which takes a needs-based and basic-subsistence-rights view on policy priorities. It focuses on a subset of SDGs that directly address the provision of nutritious food, clean (...) water, sanitation, health services, education services, and human security services. In doing so, it proposes a set of seven “basic development goals” and ten associated targets. It argues that this more focused approach can better protect basic rights, more effectively contribute to progress on human wellbeing, and make accountability more likely. (shrink)

Recently, reliable interindividual differences were found for the way how individuals process multiple tasks and how they organize their responses. Previous studies have shown mixed results with respect to the flexibility of these preferences. On the one hand, individuals tend to adjust their preferred task processing mode to varying degrees of risk of crosstalk between tasks. On the other, response strategies were observed to be highly stable under varying between-resource competition. In the present study, we investigated whether the stability of (...) response strategies also persists with increased risk of crosstalk or whether individuals adjust their choice of response strategy, similar to what has been found at the level of task processing modes. Besides, related differences in multitasking efficiency were assessed. For this purpose, 53 participants performed the Free Concurrent Dual-Tasking paradigm, which allows them to control their task scheduling and response organization. The participants completed the FCDT paradigm under two conditions including task pairs characterized by either low or high levels of risk of crosstalk. The free choice of task scheduling resulted in the previously found distinct response patterns, best described as blocking, switching or response grouping. Remarkably, we did not find any notable adjustments of strategies of response organization to the extent of crosstalk. However, we observed suspected performance decrements of a switching strategy in the condition of high risk of crosstalk. The results suggest that individual strategies of response organization are stable habits. Further, they illustrate disadvantages of switching vs. blocking strategies of response organization in case of high task similarity. (shrink)

_Bringing Out the Dead_ Directed by Martin Scorsese (Paramount Pictures Corporation and Touchstone Pictures, 1999).

Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East (the former: Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients) are published as supplement to Der Islam founded in 1910 by Carl Heinrich Becker, an early practitioner of the modern study of Islam. Following Becker's lead, the mission of the series is the study of past societies of the Middle East, their belief systems, and their underlying social and economic relations, from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia, and from the (...) Ukrainian steppes to the highlands of Yemen. Publications in the series draw on the philological groundwork generated by the literary tradition, but in their aim to cover the entire spectrum of the historically oriented humanities and social sciences, also utilize textual sources as well as archival, material, and archaeological evidence. Its editors are Stefan Heidemann (Universität Hamburg, editor-in-chief), Gottfried Hagen (University of Michigan), Andreas Kaplony (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), and Rudi Matthee (University of Delaware). (shrink)