This chapter explains the council and king’s ratification of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. It outlines the pathways through which vassals of all social backgrounds suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council’s overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions’ vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a multistep archival methodology, this chapter demonstrates how scholars can match vassals’ petitions to decrees, then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire’s agenda from the ground up. It considers the lawmaking royal signature, as well as some vassals’ dangerous decision to attempt its forgery. Lastly, it reflects on the nature of the de partes/de oficio divide in decree production, the number of gobierno royal decrees, and the costs of their production for vassals.

Categorization – assimilating objects to psychological equivalence classes – is a crucial cognitive capacity that has always enhanced vertebrate fitness. This chapter reviews from a primate perspective the state of knowledge in comparative categorization’s subdomains: prototypes, exemplars, rules, and abstractions. Primate studies have made a profound contribution to the prototype-exemplar debate – essentially resolving it. They have illuminated the evolutionary emergence of a cognitive capacity for category rules, illuminating also the emergence of humans’ explicit-declarative cognition. In this area, primates appear as a pivotal transitional form. In the literature on abstract concepts (e.g., Same-Different), primate studies highlight the differences in cognitive capacities across vertebrate lines. The review will demonstrate the crucial role of a fitness/ecological perspective in understanding categorization as an adaptive, information-processing capability. It will raise important questions about the similarity structure of natural (and unnatural) kinds and categories. It will show strong continuities between human and animal cognition, but important discontinuities as well. In all the subdomains, the primates have been extraordinary behavioral ambassadors to the broader field of categorization.

This chapter examines Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of the actualization of an agent’s active power, namely its action, and the patient’s passive power, namely its passion. Aquinas claims that one and the same motion constitutes both an agent’s action and its patient’s passion. This chapter considers Aquinas’s motivations for defending the “action-passion sameness” thesis and his responses to common objections. The chapter also includes a solution to a longstanding interpretive difficulty regarding Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of action. Aquinas claims in some texts that actions are accidents in the agent as subject. This seems to conflict with his standard view that an agent’s action is the motion which it causes in its patient. While advancing a solution to this textual difficulty, the chapter proposes a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between forms and accidents and the metaphysics of inherence.

This chapter outlines an approach to the study of categorisation in language practice grounded in the work of American sociologist Harvey Sacks known as Membership Categorisation Analysis. MCA proposes that categories and their associated ‘normative orders’ are not simply stored in people’s heads; they are used as part of the accomplishment of practical tasks in various social settings. Thus, MCA focuses on how categories are used to do things within talk and text, such as criticising, complaining, praising, encouraging, inviting, commending, blaming, and so on. Moreover, we also propose that power relations can be central to the study of categories. We demonstrate this in a political context through analysis of a political speech made by the previous British Prime Minister, Theresa May. We show that May’s category-based reasoning about social injustice was used to appeal to a sense of social solidarity and moral responsibility of ‘the fortunate’ to help the ‘less fortunate’ in society. We conclude that MCA has value for students and practitioners of language because no other approach comes as close to the study of how categories are used in talk and text in real-life situations.

The distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience has been a source of consternation to many commentators, since Kant’s claim that only judgments of experience involve the application of the categories seems to run afoul of the central doctrine of judgment found in the first Critique, where Kant proposes that all judgments are categorial. This chapter casts the distinction in a new light, by focusing not on whether all judgments must be categorial, but rather on what processes guide the transformation of judgments of perceptions into judgments of experience. Drawing on a comparison Kant makes between the categories and grammatical principles, the essay suggests that the way that categories apply to perceptual content mirrors how grammatical rules structure linguistic content, and that this allows for a new understanding of the role that judgments of experience play in the Prolegomena, and Kant’s critical idealism more broadly.

We have seen thus far that the intellectual underpinning of the 1990 Act (as amended) - the embryo’s rather vague ‘special status’ - has not changed since the Act’s inception. Moreover, we have seen that any attempts change the intellectual basis of the Act, for example the 2008 Act, have been cautious at best. Thus, as a way of mapping the landscape to date, and also of clearing a path towards novel approaches to regulating the embryo, this chapter undertakes two important tasks: (1) an academic analysis of the caution mentioned above - a fade from discourse - which has only intensified the confusion surrounding the ‘special’ legal status of the embryo; and (2) an exploration of some of the ways in which the unclear nature, source, and extent of the legal status of the embryo could be clarified by exploring two key normative legal tools that are often employed to provide certainty: binding objects within a regulatory space, and drawing boundaries. Ultimately, this chapter posits that the root of the vague nature of the embryo’s ‘special status’ is a prevailing uncertainty regarding how we ought to treat embryos in vitro, because, by its very nature, it does not easily fit into normative social, moral or legal categories.

Chapter 1 discusses how the categories of analysis traditionally used by scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity can be refined, with critical attention paid to terminology, vocabulary, and anachronism. Invoking the work of J. Z. Smith, Stanley Stowers, Eric Hobsbawm, and others, this chapter challenges how Christianity was rhetorically “invented” after the first century and how a figure like Paul the Apostle was transformed into one of the founders of Christianity, despite questions about how effective his so-called ministry was at creating cohesion about presumed Christian “communities.”

The Introduction outlines the primary theoretical approaches of the monograph and scrutinizes why the study of early Christianity and the New Testament tends to adopt idiosyncratic methodologies when compared with allied fields like classics. Chapter summaries are provided as well as a discussion of what I term the “paradigm of exceptionalism,” or the reasons why so-called religious literature – that is, writings associated with still-practiced religions – often faces a different set of evaluative criteria within the academy.

Focusing on its 1781 version, Chapter 5 interprets the transcendental deduction in light of Kant’s overall investigation into the conditions under which metaphysics is possible. Whereas most commentators take the text to be mainly concerned with the conditions of possibility of empirical cognition, it seeks to demonstrate that the various strands of Kant’s investigation primarily aim to identify the conditions under which categories can be used to produce objects of a priori cognition as such. On Kant’s account, categories can contribute to the production of such objects only if they function as a priori rules for the thoroughgoing unification of successive representations, which is not the case if they are used to determine alleged objects such as the soul, the world as such, and God. Thus, I contend that the transcendental deduction passes a balanced judgment on Wolff’s unqualified affirmation of the possibility of a priori cognition of objects and Hume’s unqualified rejection of the same.

Chapter 6 seeks to establish that Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason yields the same result as the transcendental deduction, but does so by approaching the question concerning the legitimate use of categories from the angle of time qua pure form of intuition. On my reading, Kant conceives of transcendental schemata and categories as different instances of the a priori rules that determine how the mind can unify a manifold at all. Since transcendental schemata present these rules as ways of unifying successive representations, they can be said to constitute the sensible condition of any a priori cognition of objects. I take Kant to argue that Wolffian metaphysics ought to use categories independently of this condition in order to establish itself as a purely intellectual discipline and, hence, that a priori judgments about the soul or God do not amount to cognitions of objects.

This chapter examines the topic of bailments. It sets out the basic concept of a bailment and the required factors that must be in place for a bailment relationship to exist. The chapter then examines sub-bailments, the categories of bailment, the duties common to all bailments, and the relationship between bailment and other legal categories. The issues pertaining to bailments and the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) are discussed in .

This chapter introduces the theoretical assumptions that ground the analyses in later chapters. I refer to this model as MDM: Minimalist Distributed Morhpology. It presents a minimalist syntax with emphasis on phases as cycles of syntactic derivation. Roots and categories are separated as distinct syntactic nodes and roots are reanalyzed as indices that link an Encyclopedia item with an exponent. Morpholoy is realizational, with an important role for impoverishment rules and vocabuary insertion rules. Code switching data is used to present these assumptions. The third module of the model is the Encyclopedia, where minimal syntactic structures find conceptual meaning.