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This chapter sets up the division the book will explore: the split between “top‐down” and “bottom‐up” views of the laws of nature. The scholastic view is a bottom‐up picture: although God must concur with the powers of bodies, those bodies determine the precise course of events. Descartes's invention of the laws of nature results in a top‐down picture: what happens in the world depends directly on the will of God.

This chapter presents purely combinatorial results that are needed for the proof of Statement G. The motivation for these results comes from the appearance of divisibility conditions through the factor δ‎n(Σ‎; α‎) defined in (15.2) that appears in Theorems 15.3 and 15.4. According to Statement F, the sum of Λ‎subscript Greek capital letter gamma(α‎, σ‎) over an f-packet is equal to the corresponding sum of ΛΔ‎(α‎′, σ‎). In order to prove Statement F, the chapter proceeds by identifying terms in the resulting double sum that can be matched. It considers subsignatures of η‎ and concurrence as an equivalence relation.

The focus is on two classic descriptions of birthdays occurring on the same day. That is, the probability that two people selected at random from 23 have the same birthday and a specific probability a person’s birthday matches a specific day.

The conclusion considers the use of manuscripts in literary studies as a matter of framing. If one does not regard manuscripts as part of the literary work, the manuscripts are just pragmatic and functional, cognition-enhancing tools for the writer. In that case, the manuscripts are outside of the frame. This book, however, is an invitation to look at works of literature as ‘unframed’ pieces of art. If there are extant manuscripts and other preparatory notes of a particular work, it is worth our while to take a look at them. Evidently ‘unframing’ a work of art is also a form of framing. Taking account of the context of its creative process is a choice. It is an approach that sees literature as an artefact that, while it was in the process of being made, left traces of alternative narratives, twists, phrasings; it is a form of critical framing that is interested both in the ‘factum’ (the artefact as finished product) and in the ‘facere’ (the making-of). This involves an enhanced awareness of the sociology of writing; of the ecologies of the creative process; of the concurrence of writing projects and their mutual impact; of the relevance of manuscripts to genetic narratology or narrative analysis across versions; and of the value of manuscript research for the study of intertextuality. It requires genetic editions and a set of reading strategies, to the development of which this book tries to give an impetus.

A perichronal cue is any temporal property of an element other than the trigger that helps the hearer determine the target. Such perichronal cues are of either the majority indirect type or the minority direct type. Perichronal cues of the majority type are the temporal properties of the elements near a trigger that indicate which of those elements can serve as cues to its target. They are indirect because they help determine the cues, not the target itself. They variously require that certain conditions be met. Perichronal cues of the minority type are the temporal properties of the elements near a trigger that indicate certain temporal properties of its target. They are direct because they help determine the target itself, not just cues to it. They pertain only to the target of a subsentential prosodic trigger — specifically, only to the precise time and duration of its occurrence. The elements providing such cues are basically either co-forms or gestures. The temporal properties of these elements that can serve as perichronal cues are their temporal relation to each other and to the trigger, and the speed of their production.

This chapter chronicles the first three aborted proposals to network the Soviet nation, including military engineer Kitov’s short-lived attempt to share a military network with economists, information theorist Kharkevich’s proposal for a unified communication network for all data signals, and Kovalev’s idea to rationally control the economy. Each network design follows hierarchical, rational, and state-unified principals for mid-century computing. Some attention is also paid to the historical concurrence of cold war networks and the military-industrial-academic complex, including the US ARPANET and SAGE. It is argued that historical “first” claims are often misleading given the complex international research networks that precede national computer networks.

Chapter 1 explains the doctrine of occasionalism. Section 1.1 unpacks the occasionalist claim that God is the only efficient cause, by explaining the concept of an efficient cause, as it was typically understood in medieval and early modern texts. Section 1.2 contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, which says that God “concurs” with the actions of created substances. Section 1.3 clarifies the difference between occasionalism and the Thomistic theory of divine concurrence using the notion of a causal power: According to this analysis, occasionalism entails that created substances do not have intrinsic active causal powers. Malebranche expresses this claim by saying that created beings are “occasional causes” that merely “give occasion” to God’s actions. However, section 1.4 argues that there is also a Scholastic tradition that uses terms such as “occasion” and “occasional cause” to refer to a type of true efficient cause.

Perkins argues for the harmony of a human willing that is genuinely contingent and characterized by capacity for opposite or contrary choices with the overarching providence of God. To accomplish this, he adopts a version of the theory of a divine “premotion.” This premotion is necessary to the eventuation of any and all events, whether necessary, contingent, or free. This resolution has affinities with the argument posed by Dominican or Thomist writers in Perkins’ time against the Molinist notion of middle knowledge. Conjoined with Perkins’ voluntarist reading of freed choice, it serves to explain how divine and human will only as taken together are sufficient to explain free acts of human beings.

This chapter provides the nuts and bolts of what happens after your campaign secures an author for its bill. It describes each aspect of the process in detail—from meeting committee members to testifying at a committee hearing to having a bill go to the floor of each chamber that needs to approve it. There is considerable detail about the key elements needed for preparing and delivering testimony before a committee – something that many new advocates find difficult. The chapter highlights the key stages in the process and provides an easy roadmap for advocates to follow. Annamarie and Travis end their story with a victory!

This chapter goes to the heart of Kant’s theological problem, by focusing on the precise ‘causal joint’ between God’s creative action and our free actions. Drawing upon Freddoso, Burrell and Tanner, the chapter sets out the conceptual options in the medieval and early modern period for understanding the relationship between divine and human action: occassionalism, mere conservation and concurrence. The favoured position amongst orthodox philosophical theologians (including Aquinas, Suarez and Leibniz) was ‘concurrence’ or ‘concursus’, where God not only creates and sustains every creature, but acts directly in every action of every creature, including free human action. The chapter shows that Kant is a mere conservationist about both nature and human freedom. Although Kant uses the language of concursus in relation to miracles, and the assistance God gives to human beings, he does so in a ‘conservationist’ way that the tradition would consider to be theologically inadequate.

Here the author interacts with the work of Luis de Molina and his views on divine concurrence. He argues that Molina’s work centers on the potential role of specific divine assistance in the performance of human actions in relation to salvation and predestination. He also argues Molina is motivated by explicitly theological concerns for the integrity of divine aseity, perfection, love, and mercy. He also claims that Molina’s efforts to sustain a genuine place for human action in salvation, providence, predestination, and reprobation have significant implications for understanding the nature of divine knowledge. The author suggests that Molina’s conception of divine concurrence through merit ought to be revised for contemporary concerns about the integrity of human action, along with patient attention to the language of causality with respect to salvation that one finds in the Augustinian–Pelagian debates.

This chapter concerns Leibniz’s attempt to argue in the Theodicy that God is not the author of the “moral evil”—that is, sin—deriving from the free choice of created agents, despite the fact that he “concurs” with this evil in both a “moral” and “physical” manner. This chapter begins by explaining why Leibniz holds that moral evil, as opposed to “metaphysical” or “physical” evil, introduces the most serious difficulty for divine conduct. Then it considers the crucial importance for Leibniz’s account of God’s moral and physical concurrence of his claim that God merely permits, and does not actually will, sinful action. Here the chapter focuses in particular on Leibniz’s contention that privations in creatures serve as a special kind of “deficient cause” of sin, with which God does not physically concur. The conclusion is that this position provides essential support for Leibniz’s conclusion that God merely permits sin in morally concurring with it.

This chapter uses an Australian abduction case to examine some of the linguistic mechanisms involved in securing apparent witness consent to the propositions of lawyers in cross-examination. Using syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic means in a demonstrably coercive way, the defense lawyers constructed the child victim-witnesses’ answers as consent to the proposition that they had consented to go with the police officer defendants charged with their abduction. These two layers of consent facilitated a third construction of consent: namely, the consent of the legal system to the police removal of Aboriginal people from public places. The analysis highlights the central role of problematic ideologies about interpreting speech acts in a decontextualized way, and about what it means to be equal before the law. These ideologies enabled the linguistic mechanisms exemplified here to work in the perpetuation of inequality both in and through the legal process.

In science and scholarship, modelling is often used to purposefully simplify complex processes. In the case of genetic criticism, these processes are of a creative nature. They either have resulted in a work of art or at least have left traces. By means of these traces, genetic criticism tries to reverse-engineer the complex process, resulting in various models. One of these models is the ‘ecology’. This chapter discusses writers’ libraries as creative ecologies. A single document can be an ecology in its own right, for instance when a notebook fills up with notes and becomes such a stimulating creative space that a writer only reluctantly leaves it when it is full. Another ecology is the interactions with confidants, editors, censor, critics, and translators that constitute the sociology of writing, involving collaborative revision, editorial collaboration, censorship and self-censorship, collaborative translation, adaptations, collaborations for performance, or writing on commission. The author’s own writings can become an ecology as well, as concurrent projects often influence each other. The chapter ends with a discussion of this creative concurrence.

This final chapter concerns questions of the continuity of existence through time. There are various difficulties: if substances produce their own states, how is this compatible with divine concurrence? And if creation is continuous and yet their states are instantaneous, how does Leibniz avoid reducing monadic duration to a discontinuous aggregate of states? It is argued that a solution to these profound difficulties requires a recognition that monadic states are actually discrete and of finite duration, each containing other smaller states to infinity; yet they are physically continuous, in that each state issues by degrees from the preceding one, and there is no assignable instant at which change does not occur. It is also explained how momentaneous states and forces are to be understood in terms of Leibniz’s foundation for the differential calculus.

Chapter 4 establishes the ongoing promotion of the Reformed Conformist approach to grace during the 1630s, in the face of an attempt to stifle such opinions by royal proclamation in 1626. Using Ward’s professorial determinations at the Cambridge Commencement, it shows how he ensured that the Reformed vision of grace still held a prominent place within Cambridge and exhibited its compatibility with English Church polity. The chapter also explores Ward’s editorial collaboration with Davenant in the publication of Davenant’s academic works. It underlines that their work ensured that the University press remained a vehicle for Reformed Conformity throughout the 1630s.

This chapter asks whether Kant, in some sense, at least permits us to believe in the possibility of some sort of divine grace, in terms of a supplement to our moral action, or divine assistance. It is established that Kant does permit belief in what could be called a ‘reactive’ divine action, where the human being makes the first moral move in freedom, with God offering some sort of assistance. Kant, though, does not permit belief in proactive divine action, where God would be conceived of as first acting upon us, in a way that helps us to move towards the moral law. This would violate Kant’s demands in relation to freedom. Some commentators have suggested that Kant makes ‘room’ for some sort of concept of divine–human concurrence. This claim is dealt with by showing that, at most, Kant can be said to offer a translation of this concept, into the terms of ‘reactive divine action’, which, from the point of view of the Christian tradition, is tantamount to a denial of concurrence. Kant regards the more traditional conception of concurrence to be an ‘impenetrable mystery’. Kant does allow some space for specific types of mystery, but concurrence, for Kant, is the wrong type of mystery, being useless (and even dangerous) for both theoretical and practical reason.

The chapter argues that we can construe the relationship between Kant’s account of the moral law and God as a type of concurring moral dependence, on the basis of formal causation, such that the very activity of willing the moral law is a type of participation in the uncreated divine mind. In the end, morality does require divinity, and, even, a (carefully specified) type of divine activity, albeit that we do not arrive at this commitment through a traditional acceptance of the categories of revelation and faith. It is argued that there is a defensible sense of the notion of ‘divinity’ that Kant can be said to have warrant to believe in, given his assumptions about freedom, although it is a rather different sort of divinity from the ‘divine being’ of philosophical (let alone Christian) theism. I suggest that in his final fragmentary writings, Kant might be said to show some awareness of this. This interpretation throws a new light on Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends, whereby the happiness that constitutes the highest good can be construed as an enactment of divinity, through willing the moral law, rather than the contemplation of a divine being.

Some biblical texts represent God as unchanging, but many represent him as acting in the world. If human free will is real, it seems that God must acquire new knowledge and decide on new actions as history goes on, perhaps in response to prayer. This raises the notorious problem of evil: If God can intervene to prevent suffering, why does he not do so?