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This book uses the martyrs’ imitation of Jesus in the acts of the martyrs as a window into the history of ideas. It argues, first, that the presentations of the deaths of the martyrs are modeled on portrayals of the death of Jesus in early Christian literature and practice. Given that the martyrs are presented as Christ figures, they serve as narrative reinterpretations of the death of Jesus and can serve as valuable, early sources for the reception history of the New Testament. It also argues that the assimilation of the martyrs to Christ goes further than the narrative contours and stylistic features of their deaths. In the depiction of the salvific value of the martyr’s death, the postmortem functions of martyrs in heaven, and the martyrs’ status vis-à-vis Christ in the afterlife, the martyrs continue to be presented as Christly figures. As a result, the martyr acts can also contribute to our understanding of the development of ideas about Jesus (Christology) and the way in which human beings are saved (soteriology) in the early church in the pre-Constantinian period.

Despite the global popularity of rights language, nagging suspicions remain about the compatibility between the practice of rights claiming and democracy. Does rights claiming advances democratic freedom and equality or does it undermine participatory practices while reinforcing dominant forms of power? Should marginalized individuals and groups make rights claims to challenge oppression and injustice or should they seek an alternative language and form of political contestation? Making Rights Claims provides a unique entrée into these important and timely questions. Rather than simply taking a side in the debates for or against rights claiming, Zivi argues that we first need to understand the relationship between rights and democracy anew. Combining insights from speech act theory with recent developments in democratic and feminist thought, she develops a theory of the performativity of rights claiming and argues that if we understand and study rights claims as speech acts that create the world they seem to represent, we will see that it is through rights claiming, that we constitute and reconstitute ourselves as democratic citizens, shape our communities, and transform constraining categories of identity in ways that may simultaneously advance and challenge aspects of democracy.

Jürgen Habermas seeks to defend the Enlightenment and with it an “emphatical”, “uncurtailed” conception of reason against the post-modern critique of reason on the one hand, and against so-called scientism (which would include critical rationalism and the greater part of analytical philosophy) on the other. His objection to the former is that it is self-contradictory and politically defeatist; his objection to the latter is that, thanks to a standard of rationality derived from the natural sciences or from Weber's concept of purposive rationality, it leaves normative questions to irrational decisions. Wishing to offer an alternative, Habermas tries to develop a theory of communicative action that can clarify the normative foundations of a critical theory of society as well as provide a fruitful theoretical framework for empirical social research. This study is a comprehensive and detailed analysis and a sustained critique of Habermas' philosophical system starting with his pragmatist turn in the seventies. It clearly and precisely depicts its long path from an analysis of speech acts to a discourse theory of law and the democratic constitutional state via the theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, and the attempts to apply the approach to, and support it with, empirical theories.

This is an account of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from among the Research Councils of the United Kingdom in 2005. It focuses on the campaign carried forward from the 1997 Dearing Report to the 2004 Higher Education Act to establish a public agency investing in humanities and arts research that would be equivalent to those funding natural and social science research. Built on interviews with leading participants, regional and national press coverage, and analysis of influential national studies, this book shows how engagement with contemporary issues — the knowledge economy, devolution, and the expansion of higher education — as well as a long tradition of scholarly excellence, led to the fashioning of a new model funding agency: an agency that addressed frontier issues in the arts and humanities such as increasing the scale of research, substantive collaboration with scientific fields, and explicit consideration of the results of research.

This book situates Acts’ story of Stephen’s death within the emerging discourse of early Christian martyrdom, challenging the historicity of this narrative and arguing for its significance in constructing a social group of Christians, distinct from “the Jews.” It analyzes Stephen as the perfect martyr in terms of rhetorical fittingness, noting key aspects of the story perfectly suited to the rhetorical aims of Luke-Acts to denigrate nonbelieving Jews, to affirm Roman imperial views on security, and to introduce “marcionite” identity claims concerning the distinctiveness of Christian mercy. It also analyzes the Christian tradition that Stephen was perfected through his dying forgiveness prayer. This distinctive prayer proved more radical than Gospel teaching on enemy love since the plea for forgiveness of undeserving persecutors, more so than the enemy love exhortation, posed a challenge to notions of cosmic justice. The prayer was frequently read intransitively, as idealizing the one who so prays, without having any effect on the prayer’s object, thereby functioning analogously to the Roman discourse of clemency. Those who read the prayer otherwise landed upon this radical challenge, which explains the prayer’s complicated reception history. The book also introduces related extracanonical narratives of the martyrdom of James in Hegesippus, Josephus, and the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions to disrupt the perfect coherence and singularity of the canonical narrative and to evoke a more complex historical narrative of violence, solidarity, and resistance among Jews and Christians under empire.

This book offers a study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, the book also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged “failures” have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the 20th century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. This book aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. This book contrasts relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, it argues, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

This book offers a general theory of expressive behavior, including but not limited to such behavior as it occurs in our own species. At the core of the project is the thesis that self-expression is a matter of showing a cognitive, affective, or qualitative state in such a way that the showing is a product of design. Design may be the result of conscious intention, natural selection, artificial selection, or convention. Showing comes in three forms: showing that something is so, showing something in such a way as to make it perceptible, and showing how an object appears or how an experience or affect feels. This elucidation of self-expression as designed showing of something inner sheds light on such issues as the distinction between saying and showing, the nature of speaker meaning, speech acts, the problem of other minds, implicature, the psychology and evolutionary biology of facial expression, idiosyncratic and conventional aspects of expressive behavior, empathy, qualia, and artistic expression, particularly expression in music. The work blends insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, experimental psychology, neuroscience, pragmatics, and the philosophies of mind and language.

Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts do not exist. An interesting question to raise about these views is whether they imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic facts, do not exist. This book develops the argument that they do. That is, it contends that moral and epistemic facts are sufficiently similar that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts also do not exist. But epistemic facts (facts that concern reasons for belief), it is argued, do exist. So, moral facts also exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. This argument provides not simply a defence of a robustly realist view of ethics, but a positive argument for this position. In so doing, it engages with sophisticated sceptical positions in epistemology, such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. These positions, it is claimed, come at a high theoretical cost. It follows that realism about both epistemic and moral facts is a position that we should find highly attractive.

How can we help African American and Latino students perform better in the classroom and on exams? Why are so many African American and Latino students performing less well than their Asian and White peers? Researchers have argued that African American and Latino students who rebel against “acting white” doom themselves to lower levels of scholastic, economic, and social achievement. However, this book argues that what is needed is a broader recognition of the unique cultural styles and practices that non-white students bring to the classroom. Based on extensive interviews and surveys of students in New York, the book demonstrates that the most successful negotiators of the American school systems are the multicultural navigators, culturally savvy teens who draw from multiple traditions, whether it be knowledge of hip hop or of classical music, to achieve their high ambitions. The book refutes the common wisdom about teenage behavior and racial difference, and shows how intercultural communication, rather than assimilation, can help close the black-white gap.

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the “acting white” slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, this book argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, the book shows how equating school success with “acting white” arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about “the burden of acting white” emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The narratives in this book throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how America organizes its schools.

A theory of collective rationality identifies collective acts that are evaluable for rationality and formulates principles for their evaluation. This book argues that a group's act is evaluable for rationality if it is the product of acts its members freely and fully control. It also argues that such an act is collectively rational if the acts of the group's members are rational. Efficiency is a goal of collective rationality, but not a requirement, except in cases where conditions are ideal for joint action and agents have rationally prepared for coordination. A theory of collective rationality also yields principles concerning solutions to games. One principle requires that a solution constitute an equilibrium among the incentives of the agents in the game. In a cooperative game some agents are coalitions of individuals, and it may be impossible for all agents to pursue all incentives. Because rationality is attainable, the appropriate equilibrium‐standard for cooperative games requires pursuit of an incentive only if it provides a sufficient reason to act. The book's theory of collective rationality supports an attainable equilibrium‐standard for solutions to cooperative games and shows that its realization follows from individuals' rational acts. This book's theory of collective rationality contributes to philosophical projects such as contractarian ethics and to practical projects such as the design of social institutions.