This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 9 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This chapter of the novel consists of an elaborate fairytale that Klingsohr tells Heinrich and a group of listeners at the home of old Schwaning. The fairytale is about a world divided into three realms, a celestial kingdom, an earthly realm, and an underground realm. It is shown how the fairytale allegorizes the state of the soul in fragmentation, as the soul becomes subject either to the ruling force of the intellect or fantasy. The fairytale further allegorizes the soul’s path to wholeness under the guidance of poetry.

This chapter critiques competing ideologies – socialism, populism, and liberalism – and their impacts on development. It revisits dependency theory, institutional economics, and recent policy experiments in Latin America. While state-led models expanded access and welfare, they often fostered dependency and inefficiency. A reformed liberalism, focused on inclusion, accountability, and strategic intervention, emerges as a viable path forward.

In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

Chapter 2 explores how networks of power both reinforced and blurred social and occupational boundaries for non-Muslims. It examines which professions they were barred from, which they were pushed into, and which they came to dominate. In some instances, demand for goods and services such as music, dance, and alcohol created negotiated spaces where Muslims relied on non-Muslims, illustrating how exclusion and dependence coexisted in ways that unsettled rigid divisions – a dynamic analyzed through the concept of heterotopia. At the same time, although formally restricted from certain trades, non-Muslims were entrusted with sensitive occupations such as banking and currency exchange that required significant trust. Many also became leading merchants or specialized craftsmen, using transnational networks of co-religionists to expand their influence, advocate for greater rights, and secure a stronger position in regional commerce. The chapter introduces some well-established non-Muslim trading firms.

Chapter 1 traces the conceptual history of judgments of perfection from Leibniz and Wolff to Kant, clarifying their significance for art criticism. In rationalist aesthetics, perfection was identified with beauty, and judgments of perfection were considered aesthetic judgments governed by rules. Kant’s rejection of this view marked a decisive break with the rationalist tradition, but his transformation of the concept has been largely overlooked. This chapter reconstructs Kant’s reinterpretation: judgments of perfection become nonaesthetic evaluations that attribute goodness to an object relative to a concept of its kind, such as “Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir film.” These judgments remain important within Kant’s framework, not as substitutes for judgments of taste but as judgments that can inform and support aesthetic evaluation. By recovering this neglected role, the chapter lays the groundwork for a Kantian account of criticism that honors Kant’s rejection of aesthetic testimony and general principles of taste while making room for reasoned evaluation.

Transitions are essentially changes in relation to physical locations, routines and experiences. This explanation from 2012 still appropriately identifies some of the key transitions in early childhood. Transitions happen whenever children switch from parent to educator, move from place to place, or change from one activity to another. However, since 2012, we have become more aware of the significance of different transitions and the impact they can have on many other aspects of a child’s life. This chapter will start by defining what transitions are in early childhood and the different transitions that occur for most children into, within and beyond the ECEC service. Individual children respond differently to transitions so we will explore how both large and smaller transitions can impact and influence some children. This chapter will conclude with the importance of maintaining high expectations for all children, through embedding different strategies that can be used to support all children during transitions, whether they are large transitions in early childhood or smaller transitions during the day.

The Iron Age and the Archaic period were a period of profound transformations in Sicily: Greek and Phoenician colonial settlers interacted with the Indigenous communities of the hinterland and played a key role in processes of change that also involved daily social and economic life.

This chapter presents the archaeological evidence from three settlements in western Sicily, dating from between the early Iron Age and the late Archaic period: Monte Maranfusa, in the middle Belice valley; Makella, located in the Eleuterio valley; and the small settlement on the Castello della Pietra in the lower Belice valley.

The central theme of Chapter 1 is the negotiation between non-Muslims’ sense of belonging and the degree of recognition granted by Muslims and state authorities. It examines the tension between national and religious identities and the legal frameworks that shaped non-Muslims’ lives, including the concept of dhimma/zemmeh, the payment of the non-Muslim tax (jezyeh), judicial procedures, and the valuation of blood money (diyeh). Particular attention is given to the Treaty of Torkamanchay and its consequences for non-Muslim Iranians, especially the establishment of the “Department of Diverse Peoples” within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to handle their cases. Patterns of migration and displacement also form part of this discussion. The chapter further argues that the emergence of the Babi and later Bahaʾi faith in Iran unsettled and redefined perceptions of all non-Muslims in Iranian society.

Nonparametric statistics is concerned with making inference about aspects of an underlying distribution without enforcing explicit structural assumptions on their form. We study the nonparametric statistical problem of estimating a (Lebesgue) density based on a sample of independent, real-valued random variables. Kernel density estimators are simple and conceptually appealing, and we present finite-sample guarantees on their variance and bias under appropriate smoothness assumptions. These clarify the role of the key tuning parameter associated with the method, namely the bandwidth. We also present two techniques for bandwidth selection, based on least-squares cross-validation and Lepski's method.

In a famous family memoir, Annabel Davis-Goff has represented the mental space inhabited by the minorities as a walled garden, secluded and sheltered from the outside world. The chapter considers several instances of how such ‘walled gardens’ actually worked, including the Big House and Protestant schools. One area in which schools were careful to negotiate their relationship with majority culture was the teaching of the Irish language. By contrast, in the surviving Jewish sources it is difficult to find any response other than acceptance of Gaelic in schools. They were in no position to resist or even to complain publicly about the language requirement. Perhaps the most important ‘walled garden’ of minority sociability, linking Jews and Protestants, was Freemasonry. Catholic media denounced the Craft for their anti-national values, secret unionism and theological heterodoxy. Yet, driven by their cosmopolitan ideals and by opportunism, Freemasons adapted to the new order. They saw the Free State not only as a challenge, but also as an opportunity to assert their alternative to nationalist legitimacy, one based on the post-imperial value of internationalism.

Chapter 1: Notes from the Field. Homer and Hesiod describe how Hephaistos worked in his fabled smithy. Later texts from Athens to Rome to Byzantion cover myth, history, and technology and introduce Pliny, Pausanias, Christodoros, and many other writers. We shall consider how they responded to bronze statues from what was to them ancient Greece, and their interest in lifelikeness, alongside their fascination with production – from wax to alloy to surface detail – and the effects of corrosion. Authors faced the conundrum of statues that looked alive because they were made of bronze or that were prevented from living for the same reason. Some statues were protectors, others were threatening enough to be punished, and a few were even destroyed so as to remove their evil influence.

This final discussion chapter has two goals. The first is to examine predictions that arise from the learning and memory model of hunger. The second is to examine some more general problems, identified in the book, that concern hunger, but fall on the margins/outside of the model. One set of predictions from the model concern how hunger develops. A key question is whether infant feeding experiences are critical or whether it is events that occur around weaning that are more important for the development of adult hunger. Other model-related predictions concern time-based hungers, the importance of operant learning, linkages to biology (neuropsychology, developing a better method of measuring the different facets of hunger – a hunger battery), and the functional importance of hunger in initiating the search for food. Several more general problems about hunger were identified in the book. One was the issue of psychological stress and its complex relationship with eating, another concerned starvation, with several questions emerging (hunger in starvation, links to hibernation, and impacts on development). The book ends with a brief summary of the learning and memory model of hunger.

The first half of this chapter explores the linguistic means by which Twa tell their story. By mobilising linguistic resources, they are challenging their continued exclusion under the charge of ‘mind-set’ problems and are attempting to renegotiate the social constructs that govern the position of Batwa in Rwandan society. As such, the language practice of contradiction is read as an assertion by Twa of their full membership in society and a demand for equal care. The second half of the chapter locates the Rwandan state as the key mediator of global life for Rwanda’s Twa, translating global ordering narratives into the everyday. The state makes use of the development narrative, refracting it through the prism of national unity, to offer Twa an attractive and accessible vision of a non-fragmented modern Rwandan subject.