sovereign state
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Religion in France after the Revolution can be understood in terms of two forms of de-Christianization. The first of these is political, and takes place in the de jure separation of church and state. The second is a decline in religious practice among individual citizens. While the history of the former change is well documented, the latter is a more ambiguous phenomenon. Despite the statistical decline in religious participation in the ni...more
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Such is the gloom that surrounds settling down today and the glamour that attaches to mature bachelor freedom, it is hard to imagine that there was a time when marriage represented the summit of a young man's hopes. Forty years after the sexual liberalization of the 1970s, it is easy to forget that only marriage promised true sexual fulfillment for Christians, turning furtive or frustrated boys into fully-realized men. Marriage was t...more
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Stanford University's Brian Knutson is unraveling the mysteries of human desire with state-of-the-art medical imaging. Knutson's research sheds new light on how individuals make complex financial decisions, and offers new ways for alleviating schizophrenia.
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The lecture discusses developments in air quality monitoring and regulation in the United States, with an emphasis on regulating vehicle emissions. Monitoring takes place at fixed points with results being averaged over three years, and this data informs air quality standard setting. Studies have found that this form of monitoring underreports the amount of pollution that children and other susc...more
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According to the rational expectations hypothesis, traders know the probabilities of future events, and value uncertain future payoffs by discounting their expected value at the riskless rate of interest. Under this hypothesis the best predictor of a firm's valuation in the future is its stock price today. In one famous test of this hypothesis, it was found that detailed weather forecasts could not be used to improve on contemporaneous ora...more
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The basic principles of political geography; the “red and blue” map of the United States; different ways of mapping U.S. presidential elections; differences in voting behavior between national elections and state and local elections; electoral geography in selected foreign countries.
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The lecture explores the development of scientific proof of the harm that tobacco poses to human health and the legal tools used to regulate its use. The government has used warnings, control over advertising, and age restrictions to regulate tobacco. The tobacco industry has been able to complicate efforts to impose stricter regulations on tobacco consumption due to its power in the media due t...more
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Hobbes' most famous metaphor, that of "the state of nature," is explained. It can be understood as the condition of human life in the absence of authority or anyone to impose rules, laws, and order. The concept of the individual is also discussed on Hobbesian terms, according to which the fundamental characteristics of the human beings are the capacity to exercise will and the ability to choose. Hobbes, as a moralist, concludes that the la...more
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This is an introduction to the political views of Thomas Hobbes, which are often deemed paradoxical. On the one hand, Hobbes is a stern defender of political absolutism. The Hobbesian doctrine of sovereignty dictates complete monopoly of power within a given territory and over all institutions of civilian or ecclesiastical authority. On the other hand, Hobbes insists on the fundamental equality of human beings. He maintains that the state ...more
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The concept of sovereignty is discussed in Hobbesian terms. For Hobbes, "the sovereign" is an office rather than a person, and can be characterized by what we have come to associate with executive power and executive authority. Hobbes' theories of laws are also addressed and the distinction he makes between "just laws" and "good laws." The lecture ends with a discussion of Hobbes' ideas in the context of the modern state.
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The sanitary movement was an approach to public health first developed in England in the 1830s and '40s. With increasing industrialization and urbanization, the removal of filth from towns and cities became a major focus in the struggle against infectious diseases. As pioneered by Edwin Chadwick, the sanitary movement also embraced an explicit political objective, according to which urban cleansing took on a figurative as well as a literal...more
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The lecture explores the question of the state of being dead. Even though the most logical claim seems to be that when a person stops P-functioning he or she is dead, a more careful consideration must allow for exceptions, such as when one is asleep or in a coma. Professor Kagan then suggests that on some level nobody believes that he or she is going to die. As a case in point, he takes Tolstoy's famous character Ivan Ilych.
