Corporate Capacity

This chapter examines the ultra vires doctrine, under which the capacity of companies used to be limited by the objects stated in their memorandum. This doctrine could be justified through a concession style argument as well as through contractual analysis. The doctrine, however, proved unsuitable for the operation of commercial organizations. These organizations need flexibility, and the law adapted to the requirements of organizational action and now mandates that all non-charitable companies have unlimited capacity. The chapter then analyses the recent recommendation for companies to set themselves a purpose discouraging them form making the generation of financial return their primary objective. It argues that the programmatic statement of a corporate purpose is likely to bring about only cosmetic changes. If there is a desire for wider aims to be integrated into corporate decisions these would have to be institutionalized. This can be achieved, for example, by identifying a board member to represent these interests on the board.

What is a realist theory of law?

This essay offers a programmatic statement for a realist theory of law. Although I have been influenced by (and written about) the work of earlier American, Scandinavian, Italian and other legal realists, this is not an essay about what others have thought. This is an essay about what I take realism about law to mean and what its theoretical commitments are; I shall use other realists to sometimes illustrate the distinctive positions of a realist theory of law, but will make clear where I depart from them.

WHAT IS A REALIST THEORY OF LAW?

This essay offers a programmatic statement for a realist theory of law. Although I have been influenced by (and written about) the work of earlier American, Scandinavian, Italian and other legal realists, this is not an essay about what others have thought. This is an essay about what I take realism about law to mean and what its theoretical commitments are; I shall use other realists to sometimes illustrate the distinctive positions of a realist theory of law, but will make clear where I depart from them. A realist theory of law involves both a “realist” and a “naturalistic” perspective on law. Let me explain how I understand these perspectives.

Adam Smith’s ‘Science of Human Nature’

There is no programmatic statement in Smith about the nature of human nature only, rather, a profuse scattering of remarks. However, it is clear that he shared the aspirations of the 'Enlightenment project', within which a self-awareness of a ‘conception of man’ was focal. There was a convergence on the idea that human nature is constant and uniform in its operating principles. By virtue of this constancy human nature was predictable so that once it was scientifically understood then, as Hume argued, a new foundation was possible for, inter alia, morals, criticism, politics and natural religion. While Smith is more circumspect he shares Hume’s ambitions for the “science of man”, which Smith calls the “science of human nature” and which he believes was, even in the seventeenth century, in its “infancy.” What Smith implies about this ‘science’ is explicated.

Early Modern Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework

This article is a programmatic statement advocating a materialist reading of early modern Ottoman science. I argue that a history of science that is sensitive to the material life of Ottoman subjects will help scholars cut through the unwarranted vocabulary of “Islamic science,” “Westernization” or “Ottoman civilization.” Two mini studies substantiate the programmatic claims. The first study presents a preliminary reinterpretation of the earliest mention of Copernican astronomy in Turkish, dated 1662. The second study reveals the maritime and mercantile genealogy of the eighteenth-century Ottoman prayer compass.

Sarah Coakley’s Théologie Totale: Starting with the Holy Spirit and/or Starting with Pneumatology?

God, Sexuality, and the Self, the inaugural volume of Sarah Coakley’s théologie totale, is a revision of the task of systematic theology that comes at a time in which some critics feel this genre of theology should be jettisoned. Intertwining the doctrine of the Trinity and theological method, the book is a programmatic statement on the relationship between human and divine desire. It also proposes a close relationship between social-scientific field work and qualitative analysis in constructive theology. What is perhaps most important for Pentecostal theology is the potential the book creates for théologie totale to be a third article theology, a theology with a pronounced pneumatological orientation throughout. Based largely on Romans 8, Coakley’s ‘incorporative’ model of the Trinity invites theologians to ‘start with the Holy Spirit’. This should encourage Pentecostals to pursue further the prospects of a pneumatological theology. At the same time, Pentecostals might want to incorporate the voice of Luke–Acts into the Pauline voice that Coakley accentuates well.

CAESAR CRISS-CROSSING THE RUBICON: A PALINDROMIC ACROSTIC IN LUCAN (1.218–22)

Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival (ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas, 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus, as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ (inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem | signa tulit propere, 1.204-5). This has been pinpointed both as a metapoetic signpost of Lucan's engagement with the anti-Callimachean swollen river of grandiose epic (Callim. Hymn 2.108-9) at the outbreak of (his) Civil War, and as a programmatic statement that the whole Bellum Ciuile will set up a series of contrasts between Caesar's urgency in crossing boundaries and Lucan's narrative obstructions to or compliances with Caesar's progress. In fact, as Jamie Masters notes, ‘in spite of the “undoing of delay,” the perfect “tulit” and the adverb “propere,” Caesar has not crossed the river yet; or if he has, he must do it again’, precisely at 1.213–22. Within this densely self-reflexive passage, Lucan inserts a palindromic acrostic which signals both the doubling of Caesar's action (or at least the poet's double mention of the action) and Lucan's poetic representation of Caesar taming the forces of nature.

Gesture And Photography. A Performative Symposium

The slightly modified programmatic statement of the performative symposium Gesture And Photography, organized on October 21st and 22nd 2013 at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, as a part of the festival Warsaw Photo Days 2013 (http://warsawphotodays.com).

STRIPPING THE ROMAN LADIES: OVID'S RITES AND READERS

Ovid's disclaimers in the Ars Amatoria need to be read in this context. My main argument is that, in his disclaimers, Ovid is rendering his female readership socially unrecognizable, rather than excluding respectable virgins and matronae from his audience. Ars 1.31–4, Ovid's programmatic statement about his work's target audience, is a case in point. A closer look at the passage shows that he does not necessarily warn off Roman wives and marriageable girls:este procul, uittae tenues, insigne pudoris,quaeque tegis medios instita longa pedes:nos Venerem tutam concessaque furta canemusinque meo nullum carmine crimen erit. Ov. Ars Am. 1.31–4Stay away, slender fillets, symbol of modesty,and you, long hem, who cover half the feet:we shall sing of safe sex and permitted cheatingand there will be no wrong in my song.

Bodily experience as both source and target of meaning making

Bodily experiences (BE) are often theorized by cognitive linguists as sources of meaning making, encoded and projected at the levels of grammar, semantics, and discourse. For example, Conceptual Metaphor Theory regards embodied image schemas (Johnson 1987) and, more recently, live simulations of embodied experiences (Gibbs 2013) as vital to the emergence and understanding of conceptual metaphors. Interestingly however, BE also feature as targets or topics in certain discourse contexts, which leads to underexplored scenarios where BE is simultaneously a source and a target of meaning making. This paper presents examples of metaphors in psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a case in point. In psychotherapy, experientially concrete sources are often used to conceptualize abstract issues such as emotions and subjective experiences. In the case of PTSD, however, bodily experiences turn out to be both potential source concepts as well as target topics of therapeutic discussion, a phenomenon seldom discussed in cognitive linguistics. I examine psychotherapy transcripts involving victims of the 2010–12 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, discuss how this source-target simultaneity of BE is exploited for therapeutic ends, and highlight three strands of implications pertaining to cognitive, discursive, and strategic aspects of metaphor use in psychotherapy. I conclude with a more programmatic statement about psychotherapeutic discourse as a productive site of inquiry for applied cognitive linguistics and applied metaphor research.