David Hume and Adam Smith were friends, but their friendship does not imply that the two authors shared the same ideas, or should have shared the same ideas. Money is an example of a subject of disagreement between David Hume and Adam Smith that has either been ignored or interpreted as a puzzle, given their friendship. I suggest that Smith did not replicate or cite Hume’s exposition of the quantity of money in his Wealth of Nations because Smith thought Hume was wrong. For Smith, Hume fell into the mercantilist fallacy of considering the accumulation of money as wealth. Rather than accumulating money through market restrictions, as other mercantilists would, Hume advocated the accumulation of money through commerce and hoarding, but Hume’s goal was still the accumulation of gold and silver. Smith saw through Hume’s mistakes and addressed each of them, thus rejecting Hume’s theory of money, while maintaining their friendship.

Music historiography generally describes opera seria as an archetypal genre built on two premises: role typology and the number and placement of arias. Approaches from the perspective of theatre scholarship (Gilles de Van) and musical dramaturgy (Dahlhaus, Bianconi, Feldman, Heller), however, highlight the importance of the constellation of characters and the complementarity of actions in the construction of the drama. Adopting the latter perspective, this article explores the distinctive characteristics of the twenty-six dramas written by Metastasio, considering the singular constellations found in each of them (in terms of status, kinship and emotions) as well as the convenienze teatrali imposed by the business of opera. We show how Metastasio built a twofold dramaturgy in his dramas to meet both the expectations of dramatic literature and the requirements of musical expression of emotions. This explains why the primo uomo (Poro) could be the antagonist of the hero (Alessandro) in Metastasio's Alessandro nell'Indie.

When someone gets in legal trouble in America, their case is almost invariably decided by a lawyer (a judge), lay people (a jury), or a combination of the two. Professional discipline, however, is a giant unexplained exception. In professional discipline matters, accusations of dangerous or incompetent practice are decided, usually in the first instance but always in the last, by state licensing boards composed of other members of the accused’s profession. These licensing boards wield immense power as labor regulatory institutions, covering ten times as many American workers as the minimum wage and more workers than private and public sector unions combined.

Given how unusual this setup is, there has been surprisingly little study of professional discipline within any academic field—and virtually none within law. This inattention is troubling not only because of professional discipline’s immense footprint, but also because of the potential for widespread social harm. That potential is most obvious in health care, which accounts for approximately two-thirds of licensed professionals. But even in professions outside of health care, like engineering and accountancy, unethical or incompetent practice can cause wide-spread social harm. The decision-makers controlling whether bad actors can continue to practice have no experience in policy, regulation, or adjudication. They are playing lawyers without really knowing how.

This article is the first comprehensive assessment of professional discipline’s regulatory design. It argues that the busy volunteer professionals who handle disciplinary matters lack the regulatory expertise, training, and standards necessary to ensure public safety and provider competence. Fortunately, other jurisdictions offer promising models for reform. We compare the American system to that in the United Kingdom, which demands more legal expertise, decision guidance, and non-professional perspectives. To add rigor to the comparison, we provide two new hand-coded datasets—one from a US state and one for the UK, showing that disciplinary outcomes are more appropriately harsh in the UK. We argue, in conclusion, that a similar model in the United States would be promising step forward.

In the topic-sensitive theory of the logic of imagination due to Berto [3], the topic of the imaginative output must be contained within the imaginative input. That is, imaginative episodes can never expand what they are about. We argue, with Badura [2], that this constraint is implausible from a psychological point of view, and it wrongly predicts the falsehood of true reports of imagination. Thus the constraint should be relaxed; but how? A number of direct approaches to relaxing the controversial content-inclusion constraint are explored in this paper. The core idea is to consider adding an expansion operator to the mereology of topics. The logic that results depends on the formal constraints placed on topic expansion, the choice of which are subject to philosophical dispute. The first semantics we explore is a topological approach using a closure operator, and we show that the resulting logic is the same as Berto’s own system. The second approach uses an inclusive and monotone increasing operator, and we give a sound and complete axiomatiation for its logic. The third approach uses an inclusive and additive operator, and we show that the associated logic is strictly weaker than the previous two systems, and additivity is not definable in the language. The latter result suggests that involved techniques or a more expressive language is required for a complete axiomatization of the system, which is left as an open question. All three systems are simple tweaks on Berto’s system in that the language remains propositional, and the underlying theory of topics is unchanged.

The provocative work of German artist Christoph Schlingensief may seem to be not possible today. However, it developed an afterlife of its own. Against the backdrop of current discourse shifts and political developments my article historicizes this work from the early stage productions at the Berlin Volksbühne after the fall of the Wall to taking to the streets of Vienna at the turn of the millennium, when right-wing populism entered government politics in Europe. Determining the politicality of its fabrication of public tensions, the article calls for a closer consideration of concepts of affect studies in theatre and performance analysis and confronts the memory of Schlingensief's work with a more recent production and their reception in the context of current discussions on race and gender. Turning to Claudia Bosse's IDEAL PARADISE (2016), a street procession in Vienna, it suggests to locate Schlingensief's afterlife in new performative formats re-negotiating contemporary affective politics.

After its launch on 30 November 2022 ChatGPT (or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) quickly became the fastest-growing app in history, gaining one hundred million users in just two months. Developed by the US-based artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI, ChatGPT is a free, text-based AI system designed to interact with the user in a conversational way. Capable of answering complex questions with sophistication and of conversing in a breezy and impressively human style, ChatGPT can also generate outputs in a seemingly endless variety of formats, from professional memos to Bob Dylan lyrics, HTML code to screenplays and five-alarm chilli recipes to five-paragraph essays. Its remarkable capability relative to earlier chatbots gave rise to both astonishment and concern in the tech sector. On 22 March 2023 a group of more than one thousand scientists and entrepreneurs published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on further human-competitive AI development – a moratorium that was not observed.