This chapter combines a focus on the scenic trajectories of Antigone and Creon with analyses of the tragedy’s choral songs. It traces the ways in which the characters’ actions, speech and deliberations are conditioned by the extent to which they understand (or misunderstand) the play’s complex reality. It argues that beyond the ethical conflict between them and questions of law and justice, both characters are presented in their own way as paradigms of human vulnerability and the limits of reason. Although Antigone’s action is eventually vindicated, it is not explicitly acknowledged by the gods, at least in her lifetime; instead, by the end of the play, her sacrifice appears to have been mere collateral damage in the gods’ plan to seek compensation for the exposure of Polynices’ corpse. Creon, because of his error of judgement in forbidding Polynices’ burial, undergoes a violent reversal of fortune from powerful and authoritative ruler to a ghost of a man. In the background, a pattern of divine control is interwoven with human agency in ways that are difficult to disentangle, both for the characters and Chorus and for the audience.

The focus of this chapter is the debate in the House of Lords and the attack there on Attorney General Richard Hermer’s adoption of Lord Bingham’s ‘thick’ definition of the rule of law in place of their allegedly apolitical ‘thin’ definition. It argues that the main attackers can’t help but espouse a thick conception of the rule of law, which, although less thick than the Hermer/Bingham conception, still shows that the Rwanda Act violated the rule of law. It also shows that the common good lawyers rely on a legal positivist position, which excludes human rights and international law from the content of the rule of law, while Hermer and Bingham, following Dicey, adopt a common law methodology that includes human rights and international law in the content of the rule of law.

Misogynist attacks on women for a purportedly vain and frivolous preoccupation with fashion have proliferated for centuries. This chapter focuses on a feminist response to such rhetoric by a seventeenth century Italian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti. Forced to enter a convent as a teenager, Tarabotti defended women's free enjoyment of fashion and pointed out men’s obsession with adornment. As Eugenia Paulicelli shows, Tarabotti’s theory of fashion offers a feminist critique of masculinity and patriarchy, links women’s right to fashion to their right to education, and articulates the value of women’s work with texts and textiles. Through her engagement with fashion, Tarabotti recasts early modern ideas about gender, as well as distinctions between bodily and intellectual pursuits. She also cannily takes advantage of the ways that her own writing and nuns’ traditional needlework are able to circulate despite their authors’ physical confinement.

The most shocking changes in the near future will involve the sharp decline in the world’s linguistic diversity, as massive numbers of languages cease to be spoken. The focus of this chapter is endangered languages, why the problem is so serious, what has brought it about, and what can be done about it.

This chapter examines the ethical considerations shaping Behavioural Data Science prior to the implementation of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. While recent regulatory developments mark a significant shift in legal obligations, many of the ethical challenges addressed here remain foundational and continue to inform practice today. Artificial intelligence and data science offer powerful tools for accelerating discovery across disciplines by enabling large-scale data analysis, uncovering behavioural patterns and revealing societal trends previously inaccessible to researchers. Yet the increasing reliance on data-driven methodologies introduces complex ethical risks – to individuals, communities and the broader social fabric – especially when behavioural insights are extracted from sensitive or repurposed data. This chapter traces how research communities and policy-makers, prior to the AI Act, developed and operationalised ethical data governance principles through various mechanisms. Among these, data trusts emerge as a particularly promising model. Situated between open access and rigid institutional control, data trusts provide a flexible framework for balancing the imperative to share behavioural data with the need to protect rights and foster public trust. The chapter explores the conceptual grounding and practical deployment of data trusts, arguing that, while formulated pre-AI Act, they remain highly relevant for ensuring legitimacy, accountability and transparency in behavioural data governance today.

Chapter 8 shows how Wittgenstein’s normativism integrates his thoughts on the Frege–Russell definition of number, and on the previously discussed topic of the infinite. The key concept under scrutiny is the notion of one-to-one correspondence; the main issue is the ‘grammar’ of the sentence ‘Sets A and B can be one-to-one correlated.’ I will contend that, for Wittgenstein, it has a normative status, despite its assertoric form; such sentences formulate permissions, not assert facts. And this means that the question, ‘Can sets A and B be one-to-one correlated?’ is fundamentally incomplete. What is missing is a specification of the permissible methods for achieving the correlation. We begin by discussing Wittgenstein’s discontent with the logicist definition of number, and note that the motivation to address this issue is traceable to his overall therapeutic concerns. His reservations about this key component of the logicist project are due to his conviction such a definition may not be needed, so the effort to find it, and thus answer the venerable question ‘What is a number?’, can be spared.

‘He thinks you’ve completely fucked yourselves.’ This was Washington DC in late June 2016, a couple of days after the Leave victory, lunch with one of Obama’s inner circle, and his response to my question about how the President had viewed the outcome. My guest continued, ‘We just don’t understand why you would call a referendum which you didn’t need to hold without being absolutely certain of getting the right answer. Why would you do that? And what happens now you’ve blown yourselves up?’ The Obama team had form in questioning David Cameron’s judgement. They blamed him for miscalculating UK Parliamentary opinion on a proposed US–UK–France attack on Syria, summoning Parliament back from holiday in August 2013, then losing the vote, and triggering a chronically cautious Obama to back away from his plan to bomb Assad’s military bases. Brexit, in their eyes, was more of the same. But the mood on the nightly Washington social circuit was similar: I noticed people staring at me with a near-horrified look in their eyes: ‘What have you done?’

This chapter defends the nondelegation doctrine, arguing that the Constitution’s text, structure, and history prohibit Congress from delegating legislative power to the President or subordinate agencies. Textually, the Vesting Clause is an exclusive grant of legislative power to Congress and the Constitution omits any clause permitting delegation. Structurally, each branch is institutionally designed to performs its function effectively, a design disrupted if Congress cedes lawmaking authority to the executive. Historically, Madison’s warnings against power accumulation and other early statutes, discussions, and adjudications align with an “intelligible principle” or “important subjects” test, which refutes revisionist claims of broad delegations. The chapter critiques the Supreme Court’s lenient modern standard for upholding vague delegations, and proposes a reinvigorated doctrine requiring Congress to set major policies, preserving its deliberative function and preventing executive overreach.

This chapter examines the concept of legal capital and its role in capital formation within the European Union. It analyses the regulatory framework governing minimum capital requirements for companies, exploring how these rules aim to protect creditors and ensure financial stability. The chapter also considers the balance between safeguarding stakeholder interests and promoting entrepreneurial flexibility across diverse Member States. By reviewing EU directives, case law and comparative practices, it highlights challenges and reforms in harmonizing capital rules. The discussion underscores the evolving nature of capital formation in the EU’s integrated market and its impact on corporate finance and governance.

This chapter demonstrates that Sophocles’ Electra is pervaded by a strong sense of the fragility of human language and perception, drawing the spectators’ attention to the characters’ partial and often superficial understanding of events and conceptual categories such as familial strife, ancestral suffering, revenge and justice. The chapter focuses in turn on Orestes, Electra and the Paedagogus, analysing their experience of the tragedy’s reality and attempting to trace the larger networks of agency at work in their lives. Like Deianeira, Antigone or Creon, these characters operate in a world that is characterised by obscurity and constant upheaval; yet in Electra, the gods and the broad causal patterns governing the cosmos are more remote and elliptical than ever. Thus, the play can be located within the same intellectual, religious and philosophical traditions as other Sophoclean tragedies – but it engages with, and builds on, these traditions in a different way and to different effects, particularly in its radical questioning of humans’ ability to communicate successfully with the divine, and thus to access any kind of reality.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Vietnam, 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.

This chapter provides an overview of Behavioural Data Science and categorises it into three strands: Human Behaviour, Algorithmic Behaviour and Systems Behaviour. The Human Behaviour strand seeks to understand and predict human behaviour using large datasets in a wide variety of applications. The Algorithmic Behaviour strand seeks to improve the performance of algorithms by studying how algorithms behave as well as how they process data about humans and systems, predicting future patterns. The Systems Behaviour strand studies how humans and algorithms collaborate in complex systems. The chapter also highlights the challenges and limitations of Behavioural Data Science, including ethical considerations and potential biases in data interpretation. It concludes with a discussion of the future of Behavioural Data Science and its potential for further advancements.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in India (Western traditions), 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.