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This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Keystone State's formal and informal political institutions and players, past and present, and elucidates the place each holds in governing the commonwealth today. Covering a period of more than three hundred years, this volume presents a clear and succinct overview of • the commonwealth's political history, culture, and geography; • interactions between office holders, civil servants, special interest groups, and the media; • policy development and implementation; • how laws are created, enacted, and enforced; • hierarchy and interaction among state, county, local, and special district government bodies and officials; • tax collection and disbursement; and • the political upheaval in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Featuring practical appendixes and interviews with current and past office holders, bureaucrats, party leaders, and political journalists, this astute and informative book is an indispensable tool for understanding politics in the Keystone State.

There is a long-standing debate in epistemology on the structure of justification. Some recent work in formal epistemology promises to shed some new light on that debate. I have in mind here some recent work by David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg, hereafter “A & P”, on infinite regresses of probabilistic support. A & P show that there are probability distributions defined over an infinite set of propositions {p₁, p₂, p₃, …, pi , …} such that (i) pi is probabilistically supported by pi + 1 for all i and (ii) p 1 has a high probability. Let this result be “APR” (short for “A & P’s Result”). A & P oftentimes write as though they believe that APR runs counter to foundationalism. This makes sense, since there is some prima facie plausibility in the idea that APR runs counter to foundationalism, and since some prominent foundationalists argue for theses inconsistent with APR. I argue, though, that in fact APR does not run counter to foundationalism. I further argue that there is a place in foundationalism for infinite regresses of probabilistic support.

Epistemic infinitism, advanced in different forms by Peter Klein, Scott Aikin, and David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg, is the theory that justification of a proposition for a person requires the availability to that person of an infinite, non-repeating chain of propositions, each providing a justifying reason for its successor in the chain. The reductio argument is the argument to the effect that infinitism has the consequence that no one is justified in any proposition, because there will be an infinite chain of reasons supporting any proposition (and similarly, a chain supporting its negation). Four ways of defending infinitism against the reductio argument are considered and found wanting: Peijnenburg and Atkinson's use of probabilistic chains of reasons; Klein's concept of emergent justification; Aikin's insistence that there be non-propositional input in the justification of any proposition; and Klein's use of the distinction between reasons that are and are not available to a person. I contend that, in the absence of some further defence, the reductio argument makes infinitism untenable.

This article seeks to state, first, what traditionally has been assumed must be the case in order for an infinite epistemic regress to arise. It identifies three assumptions. Next it discusses Jeanne Peijnenburg's and David Atkinson's setting up of their argument for the claim that some infinite epistemic regresses can actually be completed and hence that, in addition to foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism, there is yet another solution (if only a partial one) to the traditional epistemic regress problem. The article argues that Peijnenburg and Atkinson fail to address the traditional regress problem, as they don't adopt all of the three assumptions that underlie the traditional regress problem. It also points to a problem in the notion of making probable that Peijnenburg and Atkinson use in their account of justification.

The university administrator, preacher and poet Zachary Boyd (1585-1653) relied heavily on epithets and similes borrowed from Josuah Sylvester's poetry when composing his scriptural versifications Zion's Flowers(c. 1640?). The composition of Boyd's adaptation of Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzars Fierie Furnace, provides an unusually lucid example of the reading and imitation practices of a mid-seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterian in the years preceding civil war. This article begins by re-considering a manuscript transcription of Fierie Furnaceheld at the British Library previously described as an anonymous playtext from the early 1610s, then establishes the nature of Boyd's reliance on Sylvester by analyzing holograph manuscripts held at Glasgow University Library, a sermon Boyd wrote on the same theme, and the copy of Sylvester's Devine Weekes, and Workes that Boyd probably used.

Its due to something called atmospheric river events, said University of Victoria Associate Professor David Atkinson. He said that veritable rivers of atmospheric moisture are picked up over the equator due to the high energy (of sunshine) over those regions. This prompts the storage of very moist air, which, if drawn toward the North American landmass by a combination of strong pressure systems, has the effect of causing substantial, prolonged rainfall events.