The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition commemorated the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The St. Louis fair was the first organized after the United States had obtained a territorial empire in 1898. While it might seem evident that classicizing architecture should be used to serve empire, surprisingly, it was not. The so-called “Free Renaissance” architecture of the fair was not primarily classical. Instead, under the banner of the Free Renaissance, vaguely historical and undeniably imposing, if not supersized, buildings were erected. The most original building at the fair, the Mines and Metallurgy Building, embodied the spirit of the neo-antique, combining multiple historical forms, including Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture. Cass Gilbert designed the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts. Now the St. Louis Art Museum, the building is modeled on the Baths of Caracalla and demonstrates that one of the most enduring appropriations of ancient architecture was for buildings associated with high and elite culture. While Roman architecture was used in several important buildings, many of the key edifices, including the Festival Hall, did not evoke ancient architecture. Certain state pavilions and territories—with no apparent connection to antiquity—employed classicizing forms to demonstrate their progress and cultural sophistication.

Here, I provide a summary of the notion of our agency for which I argue throughout this book, and how it resolves several longstanding problems within the philosophical literature on free will; namely – the “basic argument” and the “luck problem.”

The best models for certain neural matters underlying the expression of our agency are stochastic or probabilistic. While this fact has been thought to be consistent with the notion that we are irreducible agents who settle matters that aren’t already settled, this consistency has come under dispute. It has been argued that, given probabilistic models apply to the underlying neural matters, for the way we express the ability to settle matters that aren’t already settled to perfectly align with what should be expected would, over the long run, amount to a wild coincidence. I argue that this objection is an empirical objection that goes against empirical findings. Thus, it isn’t credible. Moreover, what we continue to observe through neuroscience is evocative of the idea that we are irreducible agents who do this sort of settling in the midst of disposing and inclining factors.

Composed of twenty-four states (2.6 million square miles), the Trans-Mississippi region was once described as the “Great American Desert”, due to its sparse population. This narrative gave way to one of settlement and progress as the region became home to white settlers, who displaced Indigenous Americans. To many, the region represented the West, agriculture, and the frontier. Omaha (Nebraska) hosted the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898. The fair aimed to demonstrate that Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi region were economically important. The fair organizers utilized ancient architecture to create the fair’s main court and purposefully evoked Chicago’s Court of Honor. The fair’s architects incorporated original details that reflected the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. The fair’s second season, named the Great American Exposition, reused the fairgrounds and its architecture to create the first colonial exhibition in the United States. The intersection between classicizing architecture and colonialism is also explored. Ancient Egyptian architecture was erected only in the Midway, the fair’s entertainment zone, reflecting a shift in how Americans perceived Egypt and architecture. Lastly, the chapter explores how Indigenous Americans were architecture-less at this fair and how this reflects their marginalized position in American society.

The introduction argues that architecture is a valuable but underutilized medium for understanding classical reception. It contextualizes architectural studies in classical reception research and explores why scholars have not fully examined architecture as a lens for reception. It also provides an overview of the current state of the field of classical reception studies and the role of architectural studies within it. The book’s central argument is that ancient architecture at U.S. world’s fair–specifically in Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco–embodied abstract ideas and ambitions, helping each city project itself as a modern, progressive metropolis with a unique local identity, rivaling major global cities like New York, London, and Paris. The introduction outlines theoretical frameworks such as hyperreality, which can be applied to the study of the architecture of world’s fairs. It also introduces the neo-antique, a concept for analyzing the reception of classical (Greco-Roman) and Egyptian architecture together. Additionally, the chapter surveys the historiography of world’s fairs and situates this study within this context, arguing for the importance of architecture as a type of evidence for understanding world’s fairs as a phenomenon. The introduction concludes with a summary of the book’s five chapters.

There has been an enduring debate as to whether psychological and neuroscientific findings bring the conventional idea that we are intentional agents into question. I argue that certain assumptions about intentional behavior which underly this debate are problematic. From observations made in Chapter 1, I make the case for a longstanding dispositional alternative, which I argue is more ecologically valid and consistent with neo-behavioral and cognitive psychological observations. According to this alternative, intending to behave is a way of being disposed to behave, and all sorts of other dispositions or inclining factors – cognitive and/or behavioral, psychological and/or neural – may be operative which either facilitate, or impede, forming and/or manifesting an intention. The upshot is that, not only is it unclear how neuroscientific observations might provide evidence against the conventional notion that we are intentional agents, this notion is consistent with and brings together both experimental findings and ancient insights.