Arts & Humanities
Re-evaluating Buchanan’s conception of law and law-making
Nobel laureate James Buchanan might not be as well-known to a broader public as other 20th century economists such as Milton Friedman or Maynard Keynes. But in extending the economic behavioural model to democratic politics Buchanan was pivotal. Being an anti-elitist foe of populism, before its ascent he appealed to the democratic electorate to vote for constraining democratic politics by […]
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Thinking through livelihood: How a peasantry of princely Rājpuţāna became educated and activist rural citizens of Rajasthan, India
R. Thomas Rosin, Professor Emeritus, explores how folk knowledge and partnerships among tenant farmers in the desert region of Rajasthan, India supported peasant activism and rebellion in the decades around Indian Independence. Demanding livelihoods involving computation and ethno-hydrology prepared them for formal education. Gandhi’s Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) campaigns in British India inspired them as citizens to overturn their domination as […]
How context influences language processing and comprehension
Words, words, words. They’re all around us, on toothpaste tubes, cell phones, cereal packets and television screens – and that’s before we leave the house! We read thousands of words every day and take our human ability to use language very much for granted. Yet language comprehension is a highly sophisticated process. Aided by technologies which track eye movement and […]
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The science of singing: When speech and music combine
Speech and music unite in the form of song. Human speech and music both use the characteristics of pitch, loudness, duration and timbre to communicate with the audience. In a series of diverse studies, Professor Jaan Ross of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and his colleagues have investigated how speech and music combine in the form of song. […]
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Assessing the role of foreign aid donors and recipients
In his book ‘Re-Inventing Africa’s Development’, Dr Jong-Dae Park, South Korean Ambassador in South Africa, examines the relationships between sub-Saharan Africa aid recipients and its foreign aid donors. Dr Park looks at the inherent limitations of foreign aid and the international development architecture, and the paradox that the region remains poor and underdeveloped, despite massive amounts of aid. He contends […]
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Envisioning Utopia: Being-in-the-zone and the game of our life
In The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Bernard Suits devises a thought experiment using dialogues between Aesop’s Grasshopper and two former ants. These characters debate the definition of “game,” and how game playing might relate to the meaning of life. In Utopia, all activity would be voluntary and intrinsically valuable, rather than necessary and instrumentally valuable. Unfortunately, Suits leaves the […]
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The dispute settlement crisis in the World Trade Organization: Issues, challenges and directions
On December 11 2019, one of the two members of the Appellate Body (AB), the appeals board of the World Trade Organization (WTO) retired, an on-the-face-of-it innocuous event, but one which may lead to the disruption of the global economy in the near future. Professor Julien Chaisse at The City University of Hong Kong explores this issue. He examines the […]
What makes Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet what it is? An unexpected meeting between Aristotle and Schumann
What makes a great work of music what it is? What integrates a given piece as one coherent whole? It may help to step back and ask what makes any given thing essentially itself. Fortunately, Aristotle can help us understand this question and its surprising ramifications. No less surprising are the parallels between Aristotle’s ideas and what Robert Schumann says […]
Hate speech regulation on social media: An intractable contemporary challenge
Catherine O’Regan and Stefan Theil of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford investigate initiatives to regulate hate speech online. They highlight the difficulties of finding a widely agreed definition of hate speech and assess the legislative initiatives in four major jurisdictions to inform those engaged in the policy debate concerning […]
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Fractured Knowledge: “Fake News”
Prof Jagdish Hattiangadi, York University, Canada explores how a common or shared knowledge base, including specialised secular science, helped bring peace to warring religious factions in modern liberal democracies. This interreligious peace is threatened by a philosophical backlash, with claims and counter claims of fake news, thus fracturing the common knowledge base needed for dispute resolution. Populist political movements have relied […]