Sovereignty as Value is one of the first books to examine sovereignty using solely a normative approach. Through fourteen original essays, the book seeks to understand its viability in a globalized world, thus taking into account the inclusion of a language of rights, limitation and legitimacy. The authors' focus is on whether sovereignty as a normative concept might be understood as a criterion of legitimate power and authority; as a foundational concept of public ethics applied to political and legal institutions. How should notions of legitimacy be linked with the notion of sovereignty? In what manner is sovereignty challenged by territoriality and territorial control? How does sovereignty relate to political legitimacy? Are all the forms of sovereign authority legitimate? Does the project of advancing human rights globally conflict with the logic of exclusion inherent in the classic notion of national sovereignty? These are some of the questions that will be assessed in this collective volume.

This book gathers a series of studies by scholars who have dedicated these last few years to research in the field of participatory democracy. Their purpose is precisely to engage in a theoretical discussion about the value of participatory democracy in the 21st century. Part I deals with the challenge of antipolitics. This is one of the greatest challenges faced by contemporary democratic theory: How can it be possible to take into account in political decision-making processes those whose voices issue disagreement with the available alternatives in the exact same political decision-making processes, without simply excluding them provisionally from democratic participation? Part II focuses on challenges to deliberative systems. Deliberative democracy is probably the most important alternative conception of democracy in today's available literature on the topic, insofar as it responds to a sort of general uneasiness with mere preference aggregation by majoritarian voting, and instead seeks to incorporate the vast spectrum of heterogeneous interests in modern societies in the search for mutually acceptable policies. However, it is also subject to specific theoretical challenges that must be overcome if it is to be taken seriously as a viable alternative for providing better conditions of political participation. Part II deals with some of those challenges, even if in a sympathetic attitude towards deliberative decision-making. Finally, Part III approaches pluralism and cultural diversity in a shared public space. Its main challenge consists in promoting an idea of active citizenship that can meet the demands of a world increasingly defined by the processes of globalization. Ultimately, that is what will end up combining a valid notion of active citizenship with effective decision-making procedures in pluralistic democracies. More than a simple summary of research, Challenges to Democratic Participation is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to activists and average citizens who are interested in seeking a theoretical groundwork for democratic practices; it also intends to enhance current scholarship, serving as a guide to existing research and identifying useful future research.

This volume collects some of the best writings on Spinoza's philosophy of law and includes a critical examination of Spinoza's theory of the types of law, his natural law theory, as well as the modern reformulation of his approach to the nature of laws and to natural rights. This collection of essays (some of which are published in the English language for the very first time) shows how Spinoza was able to deliver a revolutionary idea of natural law that breaks away from the traditions of natural law and of legal positivism. The bulk of Spinoza's references to law derive from his metaphysical and political texts, but they have sufficient depth in order to form a groundbreaking theory of law that has been somewhat neglected by modern jurisprudence. The volume also features an introduction which places Spinoza's writings in the context of modern jurisprudence as well as an extensive bibliography. It is suited to the needs of jurisprudence scholars, teachers and students and is an essential resource for all law libraries; it is also essential to anybody who wishes to engage in Spinoza studies nowadays, whose practical philosophy has received a recent boom in attention by readers throughout the world.

This short primer offers non-specialist readers a concise, yet comprehensive introduction to the field of classical fluids - providing both fundamental information and a number of selected topics to bridge the gap between the basics and ongoing research. In particular, hard-sphere systems represent a favorite playground in statistical mechanics, both in and out of equilibrium, as they represent the simplest models of many-body systems of interacting particles, and at higher temperature and densities they have proven to be very useful as reference systems for real fluids. Moreover, their usefulness in the realm of soft condensed matter has become increasingly recognized - for instance, the effective interaction among (sterically stabilized) colloidal particles can be tuned to almost perfectly match the hard-sphere model. These lecture notes present a brief, self-contained overview of equilibrium statistical mechanics of classical fluids, with special applications to both the structural and thermodynamic properties of systems made of particles interacting via the hard-sphere potential or closely related model potentials. In particular it addresses the exact statistical-mechanical properties of one-dimensional systems, the issue of thermodynamic (in)consistency among different routes in the context of several approximate theories, and the construction of analytical or semi-analytical approximations for the structural properties. Written pedagogically at the graduate level, with many figures, tables, photographs, and guided end-of-chapter exercises, this introductory text benefits students and newcomers to the field alike.

The1stand2ndInternationalConferencesonFunctionalImagingandModelling of the Heart (FIMH) were held in Helsinki, Finland, in November 2001, and in Lyon, France, in June 2003. These meetings were born through a fruitful sci- ti?c collaboration between France and Finland that outreached to other groups and led to the start of this biennial event. The FIMH conference was the ?rst attempt to agglutinate researchers from several complementary but often i- lated ?elds: cardiac imaging, signal and image processing, applied mathematics and physics, biomedical engineering and computer science, cardiology, radi- ogy, biology, and physiology. In the ?rst two editions, the conference received an enthusiastic acceptance by experts of all these communities. FIMH was ori- nally started as a European event and has increasingly attracted more and more people from the US and Asia. This edition of FIMH received the largest number of submissions so far with a result of 47 papers being accepted as either oral presentations or posters. There were a number of submissions from non-EU institutions which con?rms the growing interest in this series of meetings. All papers were reviewed by up to four reviewers. The accepted contributions were organized into 8 oral sessions and 3 poster sessions complemented by a number of invited talks. This year we tried to allocate as many papers as possible as oral presentations to facilitate more active participation and to stimulate multidisciplinary discussions.

Written for the general reader, this book is both a colorful introduction to the history and study of dinosaurs and an eye-opening survey of dinosaur discoveries in Spain. At the time of the dinosaurs, Iberia was in the process of becoming a peninsula of Continental Europe and looked very different than it does today. Now an area only slightly larger than Vermont and New Hampshire, Eastern Iberia contains one of the richest fossil records of Mesozoic vertebrates in Europe. This record spans an 80-million-year period that includes key moments in Earth s history, such as the extinction events at the Jurassic-Cretaceous and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundaries. Dinosaurs of Eastern Iberia tells the story of Iberia s tumultuous geological history and presents a detailed synthesis of the region s dinosaur discoveries, with fact sheets and reconstructions of each species found there. This volume also describes the flora and fauna that made up the ancient ecosystems and explores the paleobiogeography of this dynamic region."