This paper critically discusses different philosophical conceptions of laws of nature by examining how putative laws are treated in physical theorizing. These different conceptions are, first, views that take laws to be metaphysically basic; second, Humean views, which take laws to be reducible to patterns of instantiations of non-modal properties; and, third, a cluster of conventionalist or instrumentalist views that understand laws as part of the epistemic toolkit for building models and a reflection of a particular perspective of investigation. I argue that scientific practice best supports a moderate version of the third view: while the laws of physics do not form a single tightly organized axiomatic structure and there exists a multiplicity of frameworks in which putative laws are justified by their predictive use and relevance in a particular context, general overarching principles nevertheless play an important role in physics and provide some integration of different domains.

Numerous outbreaks of a disease whose most prominent effects were gangrene and loss of limbs occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages. Sufferers sought relief at the shrine of St Anthony at Vienne in France. Quite early, it was recognized that the disease was a poisoning due to the consumption of bread prepared from rye contaminated with the fungus ergot. Many interesting substances have been isolated from ergot, some of which are used in medicine in migraine and in childbirth, but the most dramatic substance derived from ergot is LSD. The circumstance of some of these discoveries is recounted.

This article discusses religion in public space and the case study is Muslim minorities in Sweden. The discussion deals with secularisation trends within Muslim communities in Swedish society in view of the notion of counter-secularisation as a fixed and unchanged form of religious expressions in contemporary public life. What happens in Muslim communities as Muslims of various cultural backgrounds and religious orientations meet and interact in a new secular context? The article argues that, similar to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian reform movements opened up for a relativisation of faith and thus to a certain extent initiated a secularisation process, a relativisation of faith is at present an ongoing process in Muslim communities in Sweden. Of the three definitions on secularisation, promoted by Jose Casanova, secularisation as ‘differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’, ‘marginalisation of religion to a privatised sphere’, and ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, Muslim practices in Sweden indicate an adherence to these two first notions of the relation between ‘church and state’. As for the last definition of secularisation; ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, which has to do with private religious practices, many Muslims would regard themselves as religious without claiming a public role for religion, similar to many Christians in Sweden. Furthermore, many of the traits considered to be ‘religious’, might well be attempts to protect a particular cultural context rather than being signs on increased religion as such.

TOPO-EUROPE is a multidisciplinary international research program that addresses the interaction of processes inherent to the deep Earth (lithosphere, mantle) with surface processes (erosion, climate, sea level), which together shaped the topography of Europe. The objective of the TOPO-EUROPE project is to assess neotectonic deformation rates and to quantify related geo-risks, such as earthquakes, flooding, landslides, rock falls and volcanism. Research, incorporating iterative data interactive modelling, focuses on the lithosphere memory and neotectonics, with special attention on the thermo-mechanical structure of the lithosphere, mechanisms controlling large-scale plate boundary and intraplate deformations, anomalous subsidence and uplift, and links with surface processes and topography evolution. The TOPO-EUROPE natural laboratories, in which these processes are analysed, cover a wide range of geodynamic settings. These include the post-collisional Alpine/Carpathian/Pannonian-Basin system, the very active Aegean-Anatolian and Apennines-Tyrrhenian orogens and back-arc basins, the Caucasus-Levant area in the Arabia-Europe collision zone, the Iberian Peninsula caught up between Alpine orogens, the meta-stable West and Central European Platform, the stable East-European Platform and the seismically active and elevated Scandinavian continental margin. The TOPO-EUROPE project is a component of the International Lithosphere Program and was initiated with the support of Academia Europaea. A European Science Foundation EUROCORES project provides funding for part of the TOPO-EUROPE research. Other parts of TOPO-EUROPE require support by participating organizations.

The end of Putin’s presidency – or at least what one could regard as the end of his presidency – was marked by several major riots between ethnic Russians and people from the Caucasus of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. ‘Caucasians’ are usually seen as awry by the majority of Russians. Chechens are often singled out as the symbol of all the negative effects that the presence of ‘Caucasians’ and, in fact, all minorities, brings with it: domination of the market, crime, and changes in the demographic/cultural balance of the country. In more general terms, ‘Caucasians,’ especially Chechens, have coalesced in the minds of many Russians as responsible for all the ills of the post-Soviet era and which have continued through Putin’s tenure. There is increasing social as well as regional division. In fact, the gap between prosperous Moscow and a few other big cities and the small towns and cities and rural areas of the Russian heartland continues to be quite wide. All of this social and social/regional tension has manifested itself not so much in social/class animus, as was the case at the beginning of the 20th century, but in increasing ethnic tension. This has led to several major ethnic riots in the last years of Putin’s tenure, with those in Kondopoga, a small city in Karelia in the northern part of European Russia, as the best known. These riots, in which hundreds of people were involved, left several dead, and many injured. They received much coverage in the Russian press and stuck in the mind of the public as few events in recent Russian history have done. While, in themselves, the Kondopoga events have not led to any major upheaval, their occurrence indicates the serious tension in Russian society, which plays an important role in the case of major crises. The Kondopoga violence also indicates that Russia has the same problems as most countries of the West, which recently have experienced changes in demographic and social/cultural composition due to waves of immigrants, mostly from non-European countries.

In 2015, French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which depicts a future France with a Muslim president, was repeatedly cited in political discourse about Islam, French identity, and terrorism. In the year of the novel’s publication, several Islamist terrorist attacks targeted France, and Houellebecq was often named in the debate on multiculturalism, immigration and the French secularist principle of laïcité. The reception of the novel is analysed in this article, focusing on ideological argumentation and political debate. Two opposite camps can be identified in this reception structure. Interestingly, the arguments of these camps are analogous to the arguments of the prosecutor and defence lawyer in the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert concerning his novel Madame Bovary. One and a half centuries after that trial, questions about the reader’s moral capacity and the author’s responsibility remain at the heart of the debate. While some liberal critics praise the ambiguities of the novel, trusting the reader’s ethical faculties, other critics condemn the novel and accuse the writer of expressing dubious values. As for the ideological homes of these critics, the liberal group represents left-wing, right-wing, and uncertain ideologies, whereas the gatekeeping group largely consists of left-leaning agents. The division into two reception groups and their respective discursive patterns and practices are analysed using the Bovary trial as a basis for comparison. It is concluded that in the anxious political climate of 2015 when terror, migration, and Islam were attracting considerable attention and when the populist right was on the rise, Houellebecq’s novel functioned as a political vehicle in government-sympathetic opinion making and as a practical tool for critics who positioned themselves as safeguarding generous migration and integration policies.

Roman ludi circenses are well known, especially chariot-racing, which was extremely popular during the Roman Empire. In many aspects, this competition even foreshadows modern sport seen as show business (the Circus Maximus could accommodate about 150,000 spectators). One could not say the same thing about the athletic exercises of Roman citizens: the common view is that Romans had a negative attitude towards athletics, which were not regarded as useful and were sometimes considered as scandalous. But Roman citizens did, in fact, practise much sport, for instance in the Campus Martius in Rome, and in the palaestrae of public baths. They were particularly fond of ball-games and of swimming in very large cold pools.

John Rawls construed the Theory of Justice as central to political philosophy, and defended a series of purportedly egalitarian versions of such a theory. This essay points out that Rawls' philosophy became increasingly influential during precisely that period in recent history – the last quarter of the 20th century – in which global inequality increased most dramatically, and explores some possible explanations of this peculiar fact. It concludes by arguing that methodological defects make his approach fundamentally misguided: early versions of his theory are too abstract to be of relevance to understanding politics or as guides to action, and later ones too parochial.

The literature about global democracy deals with two different types of democratization: Type 1 is about spreading democracy across sovereign states as the basis for good governance. It focuses on the quality of the state/society-nexus: the balance between coercion, reward and identity. Type 2 is about democratizing world politics as such. In its most concrete expressions it focuses on the relationship between international society (a community of states) and world society (a community of people). The contemporary structure of multilevel governance provides the rationale behind this: national democracies are ineffective in controlling essential centres of power. This implies a need to scale up democracy to global proportions. However, in Type 1 considerations the term democracy often is an empty shell. This blinds observers for checks and balances and types of pluralism in non-democratic states. It also blinds them for misuse of democratic claims in democratic states. Aspiring global democracy in terms of Type 2 ignores that the presence of a central authority is a precondition inherent to the concept of democracy. Democratic theory cannot escape and is consequently caught up in its preconditions of a people (demos) and a government (cratos).

We live in an age where the extinction of languages has become a topic of discussion in many different circles. Opinions on whether the process should be stopped or considered profitable differ widely even in the field of linguistics, let alone in the public domain. A rational attitude presupposes the recognition that a language may constitute a value for some and that value judgements are controlled by more or less outspoken and divergent interests. In the case of a language, interest is taken in its maintenance (or suppression) at all the levels from the individual via the speech community and the scientific community up to mankind. These interests have to be made explicit before the value of a language can be assessed. Ultimately, such an evaluation must even be confronted with the costs that arise in the maintenance of a minority language or in the revitalization of a dying language.

The fear of refugees and migrants that has flooded Europe in the last few years emphasises the threat posed to contemporary European culture by the supposedly radically different Islamic culture. However, the roots of European Islamophobia reach far beyond that, all the way back to the Crusades; while Central and parts of Eastern Europe have mostly been feeding these roots with memories of Ottoman invasions. After inspecting these roots, this article sheds light on the irrefutable Christian sources of European culture, but also exposes other influences without which the culture would not exist today – especially the antecedent Greco-Roman antiquity, and the subsequent Renaissance, Humanism and Enlightenment. This outlines modern European and Western culture, characterised mainly by secularity, which is the precondition for religious freedom of non-Christian, alternative, and ‘non-native’ religions as well. This article emphasises that it would be difficult to include Islam amongst these latter religions since it has been an important contribution to the shaping of European culture for centuries. The old antagonisms between European and Islamic cultures therefore do not stem from their irreconcilable differences but from their resemblances – in other words: in the West, we are not afraid of Muslims because they are so radically different but because they are strikingly similar. The real threat to European and Western culture is therefore not Muslim migrants but a demagogic fuelling of the fears of the supposed Islamic threat.

Organisms possess an internal ‘body clock’ that measures the passage of the day, although they respond directly to the influences of the sun. The site of this clock, its properties, and its molecular and genetic mechanisms are now beginning to be discovered. In humans, the clock enables the processes required for daytime activities and nocturnal sleep to be separated; but the system can go wrong or cause difficulties, as in the blind, anybody after a time-zone transition or during night work

We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on descriptive statistical analysis, we argue that both PT and AKP failed to build multi-class bases and thus had to mobilize the poor by using various strategies, most importantly expanding social assistance policies, which accelerated the emergence of a new welfare state.

Problem-based learning (PBL), besides a number of advantages, also has drawbacks. It makes it very difficult for students to identify with a good teacher, and aims, rather, at identification with a peer group. Therefore, it seems more suited for adolescents than for young adults capable of secondary identification. Furthermore, this form of staff–student contact, i.e. the teaching group, does not motivate staff to share knowledge with the students. The knowledge acquired through PBL tends to remain unorganized. It is therefore more suited for disciplines in which a compilation of factual knowledge is important (e.g. medicine) than where a systematic approach is needed (e.g. statistics).

The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two challengers is twice as large as the average support in the pre-election polls (a comparable difference was never registered in post-communist Romania). Our quantitative analysis uses election results from the past two decades and aggregated poll data from 2009 and reveals that a large share of the Romanian electorate avoids wasting votes and casts them for candidates with real winning chances. This article argues that polls presented to the voters, by the media during the elections, made the difference. They were used as electoral strategies to trigger strategic voting and thus promote specific candidates.

Conformity to observations takes on a particular significance in relation to weather prediction. Day-to-day weather changes constitute the temporal evolution of a complex and highly chaotic system, and yet the accuracy of weather forecasts can be, and are, readily and regularly assessed by both practitioners and the general public. Here, the development of weather prediction is portrayed against the backcloth of the role played by the criterion of ‘conformity to observations’ in regulating progress. It has served as a crude banner for castigating an early attempt at forecasting, sustaining an empirically-based but theoretically unsupported approach, summarily dismissing some attempts and yet ignored in another. In more recent developments the criterion has been both deliberately and justifiably weakened, and even turned on its head.

The title of Allen Guttmann's landmark study of sports history, From Ritual to Record, captures the way cinematic treatments of the Olympic Games, Europe's most resonant sporting invention, developed in the early twentieth century. Projected film and the modern Olympic Games began in the same year, 1896, and the way the two phenomena have grown together demonstrates a progression from formality and ritual to an ever-increasing emphasis on individual, nation and achievement. This transition from ritual to record is demonstrated by two Olympic films from the European Games of Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928, Les Jeux Olympiques Paris 1924 and De Olympische Spelen. These cinematic records are not only documentary records of the events they portray, but are an important reminder that modern sports are witnessed by most not as stadium spectators but as viewers – in the case of the 1924 and 1928 films, as members of a cinema audience. The film record is essential to our understanding of the popularisation of modern sports, while through their contrary impulses to document and to idealise (particularly through the use of slow-motion photography), the two films demonstrate what is meaningful about Olympic sport.

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who lived from 1872 to 1945, is considered to be one of the greatest historians of the 20th century. His work has been translated into many languages. More than 80 years after its first appearance, his most famous book, The Waning of the Middle Ages, is still read the world over and regularly reprinted. Huizinga is now mainly read and admired by historians, although his book, Homo ludens, is also appreciated by anthropologists. In the 1930s, he was even more well-known but in a different capacity: not as a cultural historian but as a cultural critic. His book, In the Shadows of Tomorrow, which appeared in 1935, was soon translated into eight languages. It was as influential as Ortega y Gasset's, The Rebellion of the Masses, and made him ‘the most famous man of the Netherlands’. This paper will describe Johan Huizinga's transition from cultural historian to cultural critic and discuss how far his cultural criticism can be seen as an example of ‘the spirit of the 1930's’.