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There are few literary authors in whose work animals and other creatures play as prominent a role as they do in Franz Kafka's. Exploring multiple dimensions of Kafka's incorporation of nonhuman creatures into his writing, this volume is the first collection in English of essays devoted to illuminating this important and ubiquitous dimension of his work. The chapters here are written by an array of international scholars from various fields, and represent a diversity of interpretive approaches. In the course of exploring the roles played by nonhuman animals and other creatures in Kafka's writing, they help make sense of the literary and philosophical significance of his preoccupation with animals, and make clear that careful investigation of those creatures illuminates his core concerns: the nature of power; the inescapability of history and guilt; the dangers, promise, and strangeness of the alienation endemic to modern life; the human propensity for cruelty and oppression; the limits and conditions of humanity and the risks of dehumanization; the nature of authenticity; family life; Jewishness; and the nature of language and art. Thus the essays in this volume enrich our understanding of Kafka's work as a whole. Especially striking is the extent to which the articles collected here bring into focus the ways in which Kafka anticipated many of the recent developments in contemporary thinking about nonhuman animals.

The Causes and Consequences of Group Violence: From Bullies to Terrorists offers a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation of the causes and consequences of violence, ranging from bullying and hate crimes to revolutions, genocide, and acts of terrorism. Editors James Hawdon, John Ryan, and Mark Lucht bring together empirical investigations of these specific types of violence as well as theoretical discussions of the underlying similarities and differences among them. Focusing on both the perpetrators and targets of violence, The Causes and Consequences of Group Violence, this book is a valuable resource for sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, behavioral scientists, peace studies scholars, and psychologists.

Kant helps us understand the conditions for peace by reminding us that lasting peace requires both cosmopolitan legal reform and individual moral improvement, including resistance to egoism and the cultivation of cosmopolitan attitudes. The duty to pursue peace includes the duty to promote the rule of domestic and international law and work against its unilateral subversion. The juridical cosmopolitanism of a worldwide league of free peoples enables resistance to the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes and their dangerous willingness to manipulate their subjects and ignore international law. Constraining egoism enables people to overcome the tyranny of their desires and cultivates a sense of affiliation with the larger community of humanity in general, providing the moral foundation needed to support a cosmopolitan legal order. Moral development to a great extent is fostered through the arts and humanities, and a robust cultural life therefore ought to play a central role in the pursuit of global peace.

Immanuel Kant's thought typically is represented as hostile to environmental concerns, but his aesthetics offers significant resources for environmental ethics. His account of the disinterestedness of taste raises the possibility of a manner of motivating a noninstrumental and responsive—rather than self-interested and consumerist—attitude toward nature. The aesthetic consciousness thus can help situate us within rather than pit us against the natural world. Kant's thinking about the beautiful and the sublime point to an ambiguous conception of subjectivity, a picture of the subject who experiences itself both as immersed within a meaningful world and as raised above a world to which it is morally superior. Such a conception may orient investigations in environmental philosophy by providing a more realistic view of the relationship between human beings and nature than do either dualistic or monistic theories.

Kant helps us understand the conditions for peace by reminding us that lasting peace requires both cosmopolitan legal reform and individual moral improvement, including resistance to egoism and the cultivation of cosmopolitan attitudes. The duty to pursue peace includes the duty to promote the rule of domestic and international law and work against its unilateral subversion. The juridical cosmopolitanism of a worldwide league of free peoples enables resistance to the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes and their dangerous willingness to manipulate their subjects and ignore international law. Constraining egoism enables people to overcome the tyranny of their desires and cultivates a sense of affiliation with the larger community of humanity in general, providing the moral foundation needed to support a cosmopolitan legal order. Moral development to a great extent is fostered through the arts and humanities, and a robust cultural life therefore ought to play a central role in the pursuit of global peace.

.  Immanuel Kant's thought typically is represented as hostile to environmental concerns, but his aesthetics offers significant resources for environmental ethics. His account of the disinterestedness of taste raises the possibility of a manner of motivating a noninstrumental and responsive—rather than self‐interested and consumerist—attitude toward nature. The aesthetic consciousness thus can help situate us within rather than pit us against the natural world. Kant's thinking about the beautiful and the sublime point to an ambiguous conception of subjectivity, a picture of the subject who experiences itself both as immersed within a meaningful world and as raised above a world to which it is morally superior. Such a conception may orient investigations in environmental philosophy by providing a more realistic view of the relationship between human beings and nature than do either dualistic or monistic theories.

An examination of the role of the affects in the thought of Kant and Heidegger shows both that feeling plays important yet largely unrecognized roles in each thinker's work, and that the thinking of each thinker resonates with that of the other in ways generally ignored in the literature. Kant's aesthetics shows that feeling has deep import for his ethics, and I argue that his account of the judgement of taste leads even to the idea that feeling may serve to justify the moral project itself; what is more, aesthetics aids moral reflection by offering sensible representations of abstract moral ideas. Kant's account of the sublime indicates that we possess the capacity to present to sensibility representations of our moral vocation, as well as points to the affects' capacity to draw us to that vocation. Examination of Kant's understanding of the affects also reveals that his work anticipates Heidegger's in important ways, in ways suggesting that Kant's thinking is less “traditional” than often is allowed. Kant attributes to feeling the capacity to reveal that human being and nature are much more closely related than is recognized by reason and the understanding, thereby anticipating a crucial Heideggerian insight, his account of the beautiful as symbol of the morally good anticipates Heidegger's attempt to articulate a vision sensitive to moral significance, and his account of the sublime makes clear that, as for Heidegger, the significance of our moral obligations is given not, first of all, to reason, but rather to feeling. Contrary to arguments of influential commentators, Heidegger's work has important moral implications, and his thinking presents us with a viable candidate for a contemporary ethics. The moral aspects of his thought constitute an appropriation and broadening of much of the content of Kant's categorical imperative, and elucidation of the function of the affects in his thought shows that he is a moral realist, for whom it is primarily feeling and perception that are sensitive to the moral significance naturally belonging to things. Whereas Heidegger attributes to Kant's aesthetic work the discovery of the attitude sensitive to such natural significance, he focuses on somewhat unfruitful features of the account of the judgement of taste; his attempt to find Kantian anticipations of his own work would be served better, were Heidegger to turn to those aspects of Kant's account of feeling at issue in this dissertation, those that bear more directly on Kant's ethics.

Background Although job loss has been associated with decline in health, the effect of long term unemployment is less clear and under-researched. Furthermore, the impact of an economic recession on this relationship is unclear. We investigated the associations of single transitions and persistence of unemployment with health. We subsequently examined whether these associations are affected by the latest recession, which began in 2008. Methods In total, 57,911 participants from the Dutch Health Interview Survey who belonged to the labour force between 2004 and 2014 were included. Based on longitudinal tax registration data, single employment transitions between time point 1 (t1) and time point 2 (t2) and persistent unemployment (i.e. number of years individuals were unemployed) between t1 and time point 5 (t5) were defined. General and mental health, smoking and obesity were assessed at respectively time point 3 (t3) and time point 6 (t6). Logistic regression models were performed and interactions with recession indicators (year, annual gross domestic product estimates and regional unemployment rates) were tested. Results Compared with individuals who stayed employed at t1 and t2, the likelihood of poor mental health at the subsequent year was significantly higher in those who became unemployed at t2. Persistent unemployment was associated with poor mental health, especially for those who were persistently unemployed for 5 years. Similar patterns, although less pronounced for smoking, were found for general health and obesity. Indicators of the economic recession did not modify these associations. Conclusions Single transitions into unemployment and persistent unemployment are associated with poor mental and general health, obesity, and to a lesser extend smoking. Our study suggests that re-employment might be an important strategy to improve health of unemployed individuals. The relatively extensive Dutch social security system may explain that the economic recession did not modify these associations.

Analysis of Earth system dynamics in the Anthropocene requires explicitly taking into account the increasing magnitude of processes operating in human societies, their cultures, economies and technosphere and their growing feedback entanglement with those in the physical, chemical and biological systems of the planet. However, current state-of-the-art Earth system models do not represent dynamic human societies and their feedback interactions with the biogeophysical Earth system and macroeconomic integrated assessment models typically do so only with limited scope. This paper (i) proposes design principles for constructing world–Earth models (WEMs) for Earth system analysis of the Anthropocene, i.e., models of social (world)–ecological (Earth) coevolution on up to planetary scales, and (ii) presents the copan:CORE open simulation modeling framework for developing, composing and analyzing such WEMs based on the proposed principles. The framework provides a modular structure to flexibly construct and study WEMs. These can contain biophysical (e.g., carbon cycle dynamics), socio-metabolic or economic (e.g., economic growth or energy system changes), and sociocultural processes (e.g., voting on climate policies or changing social norms) and their feedback interactions, and they are based on elementary entity types, e.g., grid cells and social systems. Thereby, copan:CORE enables the epistemic flexibility needed for contributions towards Earth system analysis of the Anthropocene given the large diversity of competing theories and methodologies used for describing socio-metabolic or economic and sociocultural processes in the Earth system by various fields and schools of thought. To illustrate the capabilities of the framework, we present an exemplary and highly stylized WEM implemented in copan:CORE that illustrates how endogenizing sociocultural processes and feedbacks such as voting on climate policies based on socially learned environmental awareness could fundamentally change macroscopic model outcomes.