Material Objects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Sattig

This Element is a survey of central topics in the metaphysics of material objects. The topics are grouped into four problem spaces. The first concerns how an object's parts are related to the object's existence and to the object's nature, or essence. The second concerns how an object persists through time, how an object is located in spacetime, and how an object changes. The third concerns paradoxes about objects, including paradoxes of coincidence, paradoxes of fission, and the problem of the many. The fourth concerns views with radical consequences regarding the existence of composite material objects, including mereological nihilism, ontological anti-realism, and deflationism.

Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Kent Roach

This chapter examines the distinct operational and ethical challenges that prosecutors face in national security and especially terrorism cases. The second part of this chapter focuses on the operational challenges that prosecutors face. These include demands for specialization that may be difficult to fulfill given the relative rarity of national security prosecutions; the availability of special investigative powers not normally available in other criminal cases; exceptionally broad and complex offenses; and the demands of federalism and international cooperation. The third part examines ethical and normative challenges that run throughout the many operational aspects of the prosecutorial role in national security cases. These include the challenges of ensuring that often exceptional national security laws are enforced in a manner consistent with the rule of law and human rights. There are also challenges of maintaining an appropriate balance between legitimate claims of secrecy and legitimate demands for disclosure and between maintaining prosecutorial independence and discretion while recognizing the whole of government and whole of society effects of the many difficult decisions that prosecutors must make in national security cases.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
B. Setiawan ◽  
Tri Mulyani Sunarharum

Of the many important events that occurred in the two decades of the 21st century, the process of accelerating urbanization—especially in third-world countries—became something quite phenomenal. It's never even happened before. In the early 2000s, only about 45 percent of the population in the third world lived in urban areas, by 2020 the number had reached about 55 percent. Between now and 2035 the percentage of the population living in urban areas will reach about 85 percent in developed countries. Meanwhile, in developing countries will reach about 65 percent. By 2035, it is also projected that about 80 percent of the world's urban population will live in developing countries' cities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Behnke ◽  
Diana Armbruster ◽  
Anja Strobel

Safeguarding the rights of minorities is crucial for just societies. However, there are conceivable situations were minority rights might seriously impede the rights of the majority. Favoring the minority in such cases constitutes a violation of utilitarian principles. To investigate the emotional, cognitive, and punitive responses of observers of such utilitarian rule transgressions, we conducted an online study with 1004 participants. Two moral scenarios (vaccine policy and epidemic) were rephrased in the third-party perspective. In both scenarios the protagonist opted against the utilitarian option which resulted in more fatalities in total, but avoided harm to a minority. The scenarios varied in whether the minority would have been harmed accidentally or deliberate. The majority of participants chose not to punish the scenarios’ protagonists at all. However, 30.5% judged that protecting the minority over the interests of the majority when only accidental harm would have occurred (vaccine policy) was worthy of punishment. In comparison, only 11.5% opted to punish a protagonist whose decision avoided deliberate harm to a minority at the cost of the majority (epidemic). Emotional responses and appropriateness ratings paralleled these results. Furthermore, complex personality × situation interactions revealed the influence of personality features, i.e., psychopathy, empathy, altruism, authoritarianism, need for cognition and faith in intuition, on participants’ responses. The results further underscore the need to consider the interaction of situational features and inter-individual differences in moral decisions and sense of justice.


Author(s):  
Chukwudi I. Nnamchi ◽  
Chukwunweike O. Okoye ◽  
Arinze L. Ezugwu

In this study changes in the alpha and glucoamylase activities of four different improved sorghum varieties were monitored over a 96-hour malting time to determine how the expression of the enzymes were affected by malting. Preliminary tests showed that SK5912 had the highest weight of 40 g/1000 grains and lowest malting loss of about 13%, while KSV 8 followed a weight of 36 g/1000 grains and the most malting loss of 22.6%. Enzyme results showed that the different sorghum varieties differed in their expression of the two of them across different malting regimes. However, all the varieties showed much higher expressions of glucoamylase than α-amylase at all the malting regime. Glucoamylase consistently showed its highest activities of over 71 U/ml across the four sorghum varieties after the first day of germination with variety SRNA giving the highest value slightly above 72 U/ml. The least glucoamylase activities were also given consistently across the four varieties by the unmalted raw grain. The highest α-amylase activities were generally shown across the four varieties after the third day of germination, with variety KSV 8 showing the highest value of about 14 U/ml. The control also gave the least α-amylase activities across all varieties with KSV8 giving the least. Considering the many important and multi-faceted roles that amylases are nowadays known to perform, the study of their expression dynamics in different plants and processes, one of which we report here, could help further the understanding of their characteristics and thus facilitate their maximal utilization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9s3 ◽  
pp. 29-50
Author(s):  
Lynn Hodeib

This article examines how objects embedded in the domestic life of the generation of the Lebanese civil war and the subsequent generations evoke stories that disrupt the state�s hegemonic production of history. The article explores stories surrounding two objects that survived the war, and took on residues of memory later heard and retold by the subsequent generation. These objects illuminate ways in which the legacy of intergenerational memory is produced and transmitted�and how these alternative spaces and stories emerge in present struggles, including the October 2019 revolution. In the first section, the article examines how material objects operate as intergenerational symbols of the experiences of war and as media for the process of narrativisation. In the second section, the argument explores the role of the material as a witness to what resists language and as a locus to memory�s temporality. In the third section, the article looks into the affective dimension of the material object as it provokes an opening to narration and challenges linear understandings of history. This search through material and domestic objects seeks stories that resist closure, and is essential to understanding today�s struggle against the Lebanese political class.


2019 ◽  
pp. 212-242
Author(s):  
Brandon M. Schechter

This chapter focuses on all manner of trophies, from German prisoners of war to objects looted from houses in the Third Reich. Between 1941 and 1945, soldiers of the Red Army were confronted with an enemy who was often better dressed, wealthier, and initially much more effective. First on Soviet territory and then abroad, Red Army soldiers confronted an alien culture. For average citizens, this trip abroad was a unique chance to go beyond Soviet borders, one that came at great personal risk and with a clear objective—to destroy Fascism and the Third Reich. What soldiers saw along the way was puzzling. They not only reckoned with material objects and institutions that the Soviet Union had purged but were also left to wonder why people who lived materially so much better than they did had waged a genocidal war against them, marked by systematic rape, pillaging, and wanton destruction. The chapter then shows how a Soviet understanding of jurisprudence and a particular perception of the bourgeois world combined with a desire for vengeance to both justify looting and frame Soviet understandings of the Third Reich.


Author(s):  
Vivien A. Schmidt

Chapter 5 discusses the pathway to legitimacy of the European Council (and the Council), with a special focus on Germany’s predominance through “one size fits one” rules. The chapter begins with an analysis of the Council’s particular sources of power and grounds for throughput legitimacy in Eurozone governance. It questions member-state leaders’ assumptions about their representativeness (input legitimacy), then asks if they meet the requirements of deliberative mutual accountability (throughput legitimacy) or even whether Germany fits the criteria expected of a benevolent hegemon. Next the chapter discusses the Janus-faced public perceptions of Council crisis governance. These are divided between views of the Council as an unaccountable (German) dictatorship or as a mutually accountable deliberative body (in the shadow of Germany). This part first presents the Council as an unaccountable dictatorship by detailing the ways in which Germany was predominant on its own and/or in tandem with a weaker France. It then counters with a discussion of the Council as a mutually accountable deliberative body, by charting not only the many instances in which member states agreed with German preferences but also where Germany acquiesced to those of other member states. The chapter ends with an examination of the actions of the Council (in particular the Eurogroup of Finance Ministers) and the Troika (IMF, Commission, and ECB) with regard to the program countries. This can be seen as two sides of the same coin: harsh dictatorship (especially the third Greek bailout) or deliberative authoritarianism (eg, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Greece in the second bailout).


Author(s):  
Arie Reich ◽  
Hans-W. Micklitz

The concluding chapter sums up the overall findings of the project through three different strands of analysis: the first breaks down the eleven jurisdictions into three groups based on the relative quantity and impact of Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) citations found in these jurisdictions. By drawing conclusions from all the country reports through a comparative and macro-perspective, the goal is to distil the insights of the entire project and formulate policy recommendations in the light of EU external policy and legal integration objectives vis-à-vis its neighbourhood; the second examines the many factors that a priori could have an impact on whether judges are likely to cite the CJEU in their judgments, and then discusses what the research has found in relation to the actual role played by these factors; the third tries to place the current project into the context of overall research on the global reach of EU law, which can be ‘exported’ to non-members of the EU through various mechanisms, such as mutual and formal agreement or through more unilateral and spontaneous forms. They include modes of extraterritorial application of EU law, territorial extension, and the so-called ‘Brussels Effect’. The chapter concludes with some general observations and thoughts and formulates possible policy recommendations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512093398
Author(s):  
William Clyde Partin

This article considers the history of donation management tools on the livestreaming platform Twitch. In particular, it details the technical and economic contexts that led to the development of Twitch Bits, a first-party donation management service introduced in 2016. Two contributions to research on the platformization of cultural production are made. One, this article expands the empirical record regarding Twitch by chronicling the role of viewer donations in livestreaming since 2010, as well as the many tools that have facilitated this practice. It is argued that this history traces the complex and co-productive interactions between Twitch as a sociotechnical architecture and a political economy. Two, by considering how the first-party donation tool Twitch Bits has gradually challenged the dominance of the third-party tools that preceded it, this article theorizes the notion of platform capture, a critical rereading of platform envelopment, a popular concept in business studies. Ultimately, it is argued that platform capture demonstrates how platform owners leverage power asymmetries over dependents to aid in their platform’s technical evolution.


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