Humanities & Social Sciences

A fundamental reappraisal of Plutarch’s attitude towards rhetoric. Plutarch was not only a skilled writer, but also lived during the Second Sophistic, a period of cultural renaissance. This book offers new insights into Plutarch’s seemingly moderate attitude towards rhetoric. The hypothesis explored in this study introduces, for the first time, the broader literary and cultural contexts that influenced and restricted the scope of Plutarch’s message. When these contexts are considered, a new perspective emerges that differs from that found in earlier studies. It paints a picture of a philosopher who may not regard rhetoric as a lesser means of persuasion, but who faces challenges in openly articulating this stance in his public discourse. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

This book presents the proceedings of the conference held in Florence on 7 and 8 May 2009 upon the conclusion of a MUIR study. The inspiration behind it can be summarised in two keywords. The first is "modernity", because it focuses on the sectors of criminal liability of the doctor and the entrepreneur, those that have been most dramatically affected by social change and technological developments, straining to the limit the "classic" configuration of criminal law categories. The second is "case law", in the sense that we have sought to focus on the reality of living law and to investigate the concepts of the causality, blame and complicity of individuals as they are actually illustrated by precedents.

Nations Apart tells a provocative new story about Nazi occupation of the Czech Lands during World War II. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich Agreement is typically recalled in Czech historical memory as the beginning of a period of humiliation, occupation, and resistance. Against this narrative of victimhood, this monograph argues that the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia witnessed the unexpected expansion of the Czech welfare state, contributing in turn to the stability of Nazi governance. Local nationalisms played a huge role in this process. Through extensive research in Czech, German and Swiss archives, Nations Apart demonstrates that ethnically exclusive Czech national ideology dominated politics and everyday life after Munich and during Nazi rule. Illustrating similarities between the wartime ‘Protectorate’ and the occupation regimes in Western Europe, the monograph sheds new light on occupied societies during WWII and on the origins of welfare states in post-war Europe.

This open access book comprehensively covers the fundamentals of clinical data science, focusing on data collection, modelling and clinical applications. Topics covered in the first section on data collection include: data sources, data at scale (big data), data stewardship (FAIR data) and related privacy concerns. Aspects of predictive modelling using techniques such as classification, regression or clustering, and prediction model validation will be covered in the second section. The third section covers aspects of (mobile) clinical decision support systems, operational excellence and value-based healthcare. Fundamentals of Clinical Data Science is an essential resource for healthcare professionals and IT consultants intending to develop and refine their skills in personalized medicine, using solutions based on large datasets from electronic health records or telemonitoring programmes. The book’s promise is “no math, no code”and will explain the topics in a style that is optimized for a healthcare audience.

Equitable access to decent housing remains a major global challenge, particularly for lower-income populations reliant on subsidised, affordable homes. This is exacerbated by the continued commodification of housing, demographic change, and the increasing time many people now spend at home. Addressing these challenges requires, as this book argues, stronger state intervention, closer cooperation between housing regulators, providers, and occupants, and a more robust evidence base that links housing policy, supply, quality, and design, along with a shift towards more long-term social and environmental housing values. This book examines how housing design governance and lived experience shape the quality of homes and the wellbeing of residents, analysing the political, economic, social, historical, and environmental drivers of design. Drawing on new and rich comparative data and evidence from England, Chile, China, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, it explores how contextual standards, cultural norms, and regulatory practices influence everyday life and perceptions of subsidised housing. Combining historical, technical, and social perspectives through a comparative international lens, this interdisciplinary design research offers a multidimensional understanding of housing quality. It provides insights for policymakers, housing providers, and designers, demonstrating how design research and lived experience can inform standards and policies to create more inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable homes and neighbourhoods, with implications for contemporary housing practice.

Die raum-zeitliche Konfiguration „Israel-Palästina“ ist das hochmediatisierte und affektiv aufgeladene Wahrnehmungsobjekt par excellence. Immer wieder stellt sich das „Nahostproblem“ auf der Ebene von kinematographischen und massenmedialen Bildern und Tönen. Peter Grabhers Studie untersucht, wie sich die audiovisuelle Repräsentationen Palästina-Israels und die visuellen Kulturen seit 1960 verändert haben und wie darauf die Essayfilme von Filmautor*innen der Avantgarde reagieren. Welche transgressiven Strategien entwickelte das zwischen Dokument und Fiktion changierende essayistische Kino? Was vermögen diese in Richtung einer Transfiguration der Wahrnehmung des Chronotopos „Palästina-Israel“? Grabher untersucht einen exemplarischen Korpus von Essayfilmen, die am Blick arbeiten und ihn verändern. Im ersten Teil der Untersuchung arbeitet er Fragestellungen und filmanalytische Methoden aus und referiert die Entfaltung der seit dem frühen Kino virulenten Idee eines "denkenden Bildes". Ausgehend von Eisenstein, Astruc und Richter wird die Poetik des filmischen Essayismus bis hin zur aktuellen Diskussion dargestellt. Die Analyse von vier filmischen „Kraftfeldern“ bildet schließlich den Kern der Arbeit. In dichten Beschreibungen wird gezeigt, wie französische (Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville), israelische (Ariella Azoulay/Udi Aloni) und palästinensische Filmautor*innen (Ula Tabari/Elia Suleiman) in ihren Filmen auf dominante Repräsentationen und kollektive Narrative eingehen und diese ästhetisch überschreiten. Die Analyse setzt 1960 ein, dem Jahr der Verhaftung Adolf Eichmanns, die jüngsten Filmbeispiele gehören der „Post-9/11-Welt“ an. Produktionsgenealogie, Poetik und Rezeption von emblematischen Filmen wie Chris Markers „Beschreibung eines Kampfes“ (1960) und des titelgebenden Hier und anderswo (1976) von Jean-Luc Godard und Anne-Marie Miéville werden erstmals umfassend dargestellt. Mit Ariella Azoulays The Angel of History (2000) und Udi Alonis Mechilot (2006) werden zwei radikale Werke des aktuellen israelischen Kinos analysiert; mit Ula Tabaris Jinga48 und Elia Suleimans The Time That Remains (2009) zwei Schlüsselwerke des aktuellen palästinensischen Kinos. Im Kontext der medialen Repräsentation des israelisch-palästinensischen Problems, in dem Bilder Mittel und Schauplatz des Krieges sind, die als affektauslösende Objektivitätsbehauptungen die Wahrnehmung kapern, kommt diesen Beispielen einer essayistischen Ästhetik eine radikale politische Bedeutung zu.

Native Americans and the Environment brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars whose works continue the conversations that Shepard Krech started. The essays examine topics as divergent as Pleistocene extinctions and the problem of storing nuclear waste on modern reservations; the image of the "ecological Indian" and its use in natural history displays alongside a consideration of the utility and consequences of employing such a powerful stereotype for political purposes; the nature and evolution of traditional ecological knowledge; and the divergence between belief and practice in Native resource management.

This is an open access book. What is the history and current state of play of EU law and policy covering irregularised human mobility? What has been the role and contributions of the 2019-2024 European Commission as regards EU migration policy? This book investigates how migration policies have been problematised at the EU institutional level, in particular by the European Commission. It critically assesses the assumptions lying behind the Commission’s political priorities, agendas and policy outputs. Through the concept of irregularity assemblages, the book examines how EU policy professionals and bureaucracies in the relevant Commission services problematise their respective mandates/portfolios; how they interact with each other and even compete; and how they frame certain forms of human mobility as being an ‘irregular migration problem’ or not. After retracing key historical developments in the framing of irregularised human mobilities at the EU level, the book identifies six policy approaches in the work and structures of the 2019-2024 European Commission. It finds that a home affairs and criminalisation approach that prioritises a law enforcement understanding of cross-border and intra-EU mobility, and pursuing a Ministry of Interior-like agenda, has prevailed. This approach stands at odds with human dignity and other legitimate public policy approaches, such as those giving priority to employment and social inclusion, non-discrimination, and fundamental rights, where the administrative migration status of the individual is not the entry point. The overriding priority driving EU migration policy has been the expulsion, policing and criminalisation of people framed or categorised as ‘irregular migrants’. The analysis shows how Commission has failed to effectively perform its role as guardian of the Treaties and unequivocally enforce and comply with EU Treaty constitutive values, EU law and Better Regulation commitments in migration policies.

This open access book gives a systematic introduction into the spectral theory of differential operators on metric graphs. Main focus is on the fundamental relations between the spectrum and the geometry of the underlying graph. The book has two central themes: the trace formula and inverse problems. The trace formula is relating the spectrum to the set of periodic orbits and is comparable to the celebrated Selberg and Chazarain-Duistermaat-Guillemin-Melrose trace formulas. Unexpectedly this formula allows one to construct non-trivial crystalline measures and Fourier quasicrystals solving one of the long-standing problems in Fourier analysis. The remarkable story of this mathematical odyssey is presented in the first part of the book. To solve the inverse problem for Schrödinger operators on metric graphs the magnetic boundary control method is introduced. Spectral data depending on the magnetic flux allow one to solve the inverse problem in full generality, this means to reconstruct not only the potential on a given graph, but also the underlying graph itself and the vertex conditions. The book provides an excellent example of recent studies where the interplay between different fields like operator theory, algebraic geometry and number theory, leads to unexpected and sound mathematical results. The book is thought as a graduate course book where every chapter is suitable for a separate lecture and includes problems for home studies. Numerous illuminating examples make it easier to understand new concepts and develop the necessary intuition for further studies. ; Self-contained introduction to the theory of quantum graphs First time treatment of inverse problems in detail Numerous examples from physics included Open questions at the end of several chapters

This edited volume is the first scholarly tome exclusively dedicated to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope. This concept, initially developed in the 1930s and used as a frame of reference throughout Bakhtin’s own writings, has been highly influential in literary studies. After an extensive introduction that serves as a ‘state of the art’, the volume is divided into four main parts: Philosophical Reflections, Relevance of the Chronotope for Literary History, Chronotopical Readings and Some Perspectives for Literary Theory. These thematic categories contain contributions by well-established Bakhtin specialists such as Gary Saul Morson and Michael Holquist, as well as a number of essays by scholars who have published on this subject before. Together the papers in this volume explore the implications of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope for a variety of theoretical topics such as literary imagination, polysystem theory and literary adaptation; for modern views on literary history ranging from the hellenistic romance to nineteenth-century realism; and for analyses of well-known novelists and poets as diverse as Milton, Fielding, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Papadiamandis and DeLillo.

The relationship between design and critique proves to be ambiguous. In its interventionist and constructive nature, design shares with other critical practices the premise of the shapeability and alterability of cultural, social, and political realities. Design can be seen as inherently critical and speculative as it sets out to project novel relationships between people, systems, and things from what it diagnoses as the status quo. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it partakes in stabilizing the past, normalizing the present condition and precluding just and sustainable futures. In the same way as design can unfold and make experienceable social boundaries, values and norms embedded in our material and visual culture, it is a major contributor to their manifestation and obscuration in the first place. This anthology aims to unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique. The contributions foster a vital rethinking of the foundational concepts and notions of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots and ideologies of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be.

Pierre-Sylvain Régis’s Cartesianism is quite singular in seventeenth-century French philosophy. Though, can we speak of a form of experimental science in Régis’s work? After exploring his notions of ‘system’ and ‘hypothesis’, I will define his position in relation to Claude Perrault, Jacques Rohault, and the Royal Society. I argue, first, that the contrasts which traverse French science are not so much about the use of experiments but about whether or not observational data can be traced back to hypotheses and to a coherent system. Secondly, that we can detect a significant similarity between Boyle’s positions and the views expressed by Perrault and also by Régis. Lastly, that French science, even in its Cartesian version, is much more probabilistic than English experimental philosophy.

Funny Fathers. Types of the ridiculous old man in Dostoevsky’s novels. The first chapters from Dostoevsky’s novel Netochka Nezvanova deal with the fate and the peculiar story of life of the heroine’s stepfather. He is called Efimov and, being an alcoholic and overconfident, he plunges his family into misery. Therefore, he can be considered a prototype of ridiculous father figures occurring in the great novels (Marmeladov from Crime and Punishment, General Ivolgin from The Idiot and Stepan Trofimovič from The Demons). The article focuses on the determining character traits of these figures who embody the dramatic failure of the father generation. While characterising those laughable vecchi, special attention is given to the seemingly paradox criterium of the tragicomic, which finally results in questioning the tension between freedom and a predetermined fate.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available to anyone who can sign up. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new skills, advance in careers, and provide quality educational experiences to a certain extent. Millions of people around the world use MOOCs for learning and their reasons are various, including career development, career change, college preparation, supplementary learning, lifelong learning, corporate e-Learning and training, and so on.

This open access book is part of the LAMBDA Project (Learning, Applying, Multiplying Big Data Analytics), funded by the European Union, GA No. 809965. Data Analytics involves applying algorithmic processes to derive insights. Nowadays it is used in many industries to allow organizations and companies to make better decisions as well as to verify or disprove existing theories or models. The term data analytics is often used interchangeably with intelligence, statistics, reasoning, data mining, knowledge discovery, and others. The goal of this book is to introduce some of the definitions, methods, tools, frameworks, and solutions for big data processing, starting from the process of information extraction and knowledge representation, via knowledge processing and analytics to visualization, sense-making, and practical applications. Each chapter in this book addresses some pertinent aspect of the data processing chain, with a specific focus on understanding Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Big Data Architectures, and Smart Data Analytics solutions. This book is addressed to graduate students from technical disciplines, to professional audiences following continuous education short courses, and to researchers from diverse areas following self-study courses. Basic skills in computer science, mathematics, and statistics are required.