Artificial Intelligence systems increasingly match or surpass human performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Recent advances in large language models have yielded conversational abilities often indistinguishable from human dialogue. In this chapter, we argue that whether artificial agents should be considered empathetic depends on how empathy itself is defined and how it relates to subjective experience. We show that different philosophical schools produce distinct, and often incompatible, answers to the question of whether such a system should be considered genuinely empathetic. On one hand, empathy is a functional trait that can be fully characterized by observable behavior; on the other hand, empathy is inseparable from subjective experience and conscious feeling. Drawing on the philosophical notion of the “zombie” we introduce a thought experiment involving a hypothetical chatbot that exhibits perfect empathic behavior across all conceivable benchmarks while lacking any subjective experience. This framing allows us to disentangle functional performance from conceptual attribution and to examine whether empathy judgments depend on observable behavior alone or on assumptions about inner experience. As artificial agents become increasingly integrated into emotionally contexts, understanding how and why humans attribute empathy to machines becomes a pressing scientific, ethical, and societal question.

This chapter situates methodologism within neopragmatist thought, particularly in relation to the work of Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and Huw Price. Neopragmatists generally prioritise doing over thinking, practice over theory, and action over contemplation. They also favour pragmatics over semantics, naturalised epistemology over metaphysics, and knowing-how over knowing-that. However, they differ in the strength of their anti-representationalist commitments. Methodologism is radically and consistently anti-representationalist, aligning closely with the positions of Rorty and Wittgenstein. Methodologism can be characterised by four central commitments: (1) deep pragmatism, (2) strong anti-representationalism, (3) linguistic inferentialism, and (4) normative social-discursivism. Additionally, methodologism is anti-metaphysical and non-sceptical in orientation.

This chapter introduces use theories of meaning, originating in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and further developed by numerous authors over the following decades. According to use theories, the meaning or meaningfulness of an expression consists in or is constituted by its use. The chapter argues that philosophical attention shifted too quickly towards other kinds of meaning theories, overlooking the potential of use-based approaches.A particularly fruitful version, inferentialism, was developed by Wilfrid Sellars. After outlining the basic intuition behind use theories, the chapter focuses on Sellars’s functional theory of meaning. This theory is explained through five central premises: (i) meaning is not a simple (worldly) relation between an expression and an object; (ii) meaning is use; (iii) meaning is a functional role; (iv) abstract notions are distributive singular terms; and (v) the rules governing use are semantically constitutive.

The chapter examines the semiotic, cognitive, and functional foundations of Natural Linguistics, highlighting their significance in Natural Phonology and their subsequent adaptation in Natural Morphology and Natural Textlinguistics. The contribution of semiotic principles, particularly of Peircean semiotics, is emphasized as a crucial metatheoretical framework for understanding language. The most influential publications and recent advancements are reviewed. The chapter highlights how semiotic, cognitive, and functional bases can be interdependent, convergent, or conflicting, and that their influence varies across different linguistic subtheories. The impact of semiotic parameters is shown in the gradual diachronic transformation of phonological processes into morphonological rules. Text and discourse structures are also analyzed through the lens of semiotics, with grapholinguistics presenting new opportunities for understanding writing as a secondary semiotic system. In sum, this chapter illustrates the extensive interplay between semiotic, cognitive, and functional factors across linguistic domains, affirming NatLing’s comprehensive approach to understanding the intricacies of language.

Many contemporary international organizations (IOs) are empowered to adopt international law that claims to bind their Member States (and, directly or indirectly, their peoples). Certain IOs have also become members of other Ios or, at least, active participants in international lawmaking processes that claim to bind those IOs and their Member States (and their peoples).Generally speaking IOs play a central role in contemporary international lawmaking: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today, be it through international conferences, international courts, or as IO secondary law. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those Ios may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States’ peoples and, accordingly, under which the international law they have the right or discretion to adopt inside and outside of IO organs and processes may claim to bind those peoples legitimately.

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter examines the legislative veto, allowing Congress to override executive actions without bicameralism and presentment, tracing its rise amid broad twentieth-century delegations. Textually and structurally, the Constitution assigns distinct powers to each branch and specifies how each power can be exercised. INS v. Chadha (1983) rightly held that legislative vetoes are unconstitutional because, if such vetoes are legislative in nature, they do not satisfy bicameralism and presentment. If the veto were an executive or judicial act, it would be unconstitutional because Congress possesses neither executive nor judicial power. The chapter introduces the concept of “nonexclusive functions,” recognizing that some governmental actions, like agency rulemaking, can be achieved through legislative or executive power; others, like resolving claims against the government, can be resolved by any of the three branches exercising its respective power. Each branch must, however, exercise its power according to the constitutional requirements. Despite the unconstitutionality of legislative vetoes, the chapter advocates a constitutional amendment to permit such vetoes for regulatory actions, offering a practical solution to balance executive rulemaking with legislative authority and aligning with the Constitution’s original design.

Functionalism proposes that the translation process is guided by extra-linguistic factors, more specifically by the function of the translation. Chapter 2 reviews the theory of functionalism (based on Skopos theory, from the Greek skopos meaning “purpose”) and some basic notions associated with it, while also explaining how to apply them in translation practice and discussion. It addresses basic functionalist concepts: extralinguistic factors (also known as situational features) and how they shape both monolingual and translated texts; the translation brief and translation norms; changes in situational features, and how they influence and guide translation decisions; and the “lifecycle” of a commissioned translation. Examples and illustrations accompany the presentation. The chapter starts by considering the relationship between extra-linguistic factors and monolingual texts, progressing to translated texts and translation tasks.

Ch. 7 Analytic philosophy and hermeneutics offers two approaches to overcoming the contradiction between the God of Being and God as person. Analytic philosophy offers notions of paradox, modalism, and functionalism. And hermeneutics gives us the “face,” “spirit,” and “Name” of God.

If the history of human rights shows anything, it shows that claim-making has no predetermined agents, and this volume nods to the rights of the non-human in a chapter by Jim Davies, who analyzes what might be at stake in the recognition of artificial intelligence not just as an instrumental tool, but a rights-bearing claimant in its own right. Indeed, Davies pursues this possibility through an analogy with the rise of entitlements of non-human nature, especially non-human animals.

Brexit was a great revealer in many respects. In relation to Northern Ireland, it revealed the almost invisible role that joint EU membership had played in providing a scaffold for the peace process in the province and in resolving a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions. In addition to EU political support and in facilitating good relations between Ireland and the UK, joint membership of the single market and customs union, along with the Common Travel Area between the two jurisdictions, reduced the practical and symbolic effect of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was thus the functional effects of single market law which provided the context within which a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions could be managed. Brexit, particularly of the ‘hard’ variety, threatened to reintroduce this border, undermining a key element of the peace process. The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol or Windsor Framework is an imperfect substitute which results in an extremely complex legal landscape of multiple interacting sources of law: a form of legal pluralism or even legal entanglement.

This chapter addresses the Supreme Court’s recent, partly paradoxical lines of cases involving issues of presidential power, prerogative, and immunity. On the one hand, the Court has held that Article II and the Constitution’s overall structure endow the president with sweeping authorities and prerogatives. These include powers to control a “unitary” executive branch by removing officials who refuse to do the president’s bidding and, separately, a prerogative-like “immunity” from prosecution for many unlawful official acts, including ones that would constitute serious crimes if committed by anyone else. On the other hand, the Court has sought to limit the powers of agencies within the executive branch, which the president heads, on the theory that post–New Deal agency officials were allowed to assume functions that the Constitution reserves either to Congress or to the courts. Nowhere, this chapter explains, has the Court’s conservative supermajority pursued, or does it seem more likely to continue to pursue, a doctrinally revisionist agenda with more sweeping practical consequences.

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

Chapter I elucidates Tolkien’s puzzling claim that The Lord of the Rings should be primarily considered as “an essay in linguistic aesthetic”. It first analyses a passing reference to the “cats of Queen Berúthiel”, described by Tolkien as the only element in The Lord of the Rings “which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun”. This example introduces a discussion of a typical pattern of composition of Tolkien’s works: this begins as an experience of purely aesthetic fascination for a linguistic entity, which is then expanded into a narrative item, and later developed into a full, meaningful tale, through a heuristic process of ‘sub-creative discovery’. The second part of the chapter investigates the theoretical implications of such an approach, reconstructing Tolkien’s perceptions on the value and heuristic potential of a ‘gratuitous’ aesthetic event, and especially of a linguistic one, given the ‘divine’ inspiration of language and its original expression of both wonder at and knowledge of created reality.