Sophocles’ extant tragedies are all characterised by a pervasive concern with the relationship between divine and mortal and with the conditions of human existence in a world dominated by powerful, inscrutable and unpredictable gods. Each play enacts this concern within, and through, its unique narrative, dramatic and communicative structures, which instantiate specific theological and philosophical questions and open them up to their audiences.

This chapter introduces the U.S. Constitution by exploring its purposes, functions, and significance as a written document, contrasting it with Britain’s unwritten constitutional system. It argues that a written constitution limits governmental power, including legislative authority, unlike the British system of parliamentary supremacy. The chapter traces the American shift in the 1760s toward viewing constitutions as superior laws fixed by the people’s consent and enforceable against the legislature. It outlines the settlement functions of constitutions – establishing government structures, ensuring stability, and channeling disputes – emphasizing how written constitutions enhance these functions. The chapter further examines the ends of free government, balancing liberty and order through democratic self-governance and the protection of natural rights, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s preamble. It introduces the Constitution’s structural features – separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances – while addressing critiques of its alleged undemocratic nature and introducing the Founders’ intent to create republican remedies for the diseases most incident to republican government.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Germany, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

Chapter 5 examines central aspects of Wittgenstein’s view on mathematical proof, as integrated within his normativist eliminativism. It elucidates and defends the claim that “the proof creates a new concept.” His (‘interactionist’) conception of proof is spelled out, as a clarification of the idea that proofs “change the grammar of our language.” The main outcome is an explication as to why the puzzle generated by the seemingly absolute power of a mathematical proof – to produce an unbreakable link between the (concepts appearing in the) premises and the (concepts in the) conclusion of a mathematical argument – vanishes. The chapter appeals to examples from both advanced and ‘pure’ mathematics. An important concern will be expounding on Wittgenstein’s point that proofs ensure the objectivity of (higher) mathematics, since for him proofs justify changes in the network of mathematical norms. Advanced, new rules are introduced on the basis of proofs, making the management of the network a nonarbitrary process. The chapter also argues for Wittgenstein’s priority over Lakatos in advocating interactionism.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

Szemerédi’s regularity lemma and its extensions and generalizations are one of the powerful and broadly applicable tools for extremal problems in graphs and hypergraphs. We study the removal lemma and some of its applications, as well as sparse regularity.

The Conclusion summarizes the main themes of the book, noting how they have special salience as the second administration of Donald Trump unfolds and as we near the 250th anniversary.

Scholars once divided British Romanticism into two generations (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake; Byron, Shelley, Keats), seeing the 1800s as a transitional period with little significant work. However, this view has changed with the rediscovery of women poets, working-class authors, and Black and Brown writers highlight Romanticism’s connection to global warfare, imperialism, slavery, and the expansion of communication technologies and print media. This chapter examines problems of communication in the works of William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith, using their writing to reconsider Romantic temporality. It explores how both poets engage with time’s contradictions – its rapidity and slowness – driven by commercial and geological changes. By analyzing their differing approaches to temporal irregularity, the chapter argues that Romanticism reflects not only rapid changes (revolutions, industrialization, media) but also slower, more subtle transformations. This view of time, including geological slowness, offers Romantic poets a way to explore time and history, presenting Romanticism itself as a poetic expression of the tension between speed and slowness.

In the Indian, Arabian, and Malay seafaring worlds, the burden of ‘piraticality’ fell upon successive sets of maritime and littoral communities. As seen through the prism of the colonial archive, the sailors of these societies inhabited a dynamic frontier of imperial expansion, beginning in India in the eighteenth century, and pushing outwards from the shores of the subcontinent. Building from recent reinterpretations of the sea as a category of historical analysis, this introduction charts the emergence and transformation of piracy as a concept, spilling out from the early-modern Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. Moving beyond the more familiar pirates who positioned themselves within and between competing seaborne empires in the Caribbean and Atlantic, this study considers piracy instead as a projected category of imperial encounter. Across the Indian Ocean world, ‘pirates’ lost the individuality associated with their Atlantic counterparts, causing entire communities to be defined by their immutable characteristics—cast in terms of race and geography, as temporally inert and irredeemably backward, incapable of modernising except by the violence of purportedly enlightened empires.