The Introduction presents the book’s general argument. It describes the main objectives and central themes related to the conceptualization of not-knowing. It argues for an anthropology of that which remains nameless in anthropology, lost in the gaps between culture, structure, and process. Not-knowing refers to the difficulty of accounting for certain intense individual and collective experiences that often arise in ritual, spiritual, and religious contexts and, in many ways, defy any attempt at complete rationalization. It deals with situations in which meaning is broken, forcing anthropologists to think beyond reason. It describes how an otherness of a radical nature unfolds before the anthropologist’s gaze, both in its experiential dimension and ethnographic and argumentative construction, as well as the discipline´s blind spots. The Introduction also describes the book’s structure, the organization of each chapter, and its contribution to anthropology.

I begin Chapter 9 by situating the lessons from the Irish case study within a broader theoretical context. Although there are particularities to all case studies, theoretical frameworks can be developed from in-depth investigations in specific contexts. In this chapter, I explore the relevance of the moral psychology of fairness and feelings of relative deprivation across several other case studies: in the United States, Sudan, Chile, France, and during the Arab Spring in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Economic inequalities across multiple global regions are a key explanation for civic unrest, feelings of unfairness, and attempts at radical social change. The rise of populism and authoritarian leaders is the subject of the following chapter.

This paper proposes demoicratic representation as a subtype of representation in international organizational practice. It develops a social ontology of the People and theory of representation which underpins the thesis that the People is represented only by all the different types of representative persons who act within different types of governmental institutions and procedures of the People. A further important tenet of the paper is that democratic Peoples are accountable to each other as Peoples and to each other’s citizens. In a union of Peoples whose representatives act under any decision rule there is a possible second-order consent-deficit about the decision rule. Consequently, in demoi-cratic representation IOs ought to embody all the representative institutions of the People in their organization or be part of a system of mutual accountability and thereby assure demoicratic representation by IOs. Demoicratic representation ought not to be understood as working exclusively under the principle of consent. Rather it is the representational space in which the consent-deficit about the decision rule of inter-People relations is addressed and calibration sought.

Multiverse hypotheses are often accused of falling so far outside the bounds of “science” that they collide with “religion.” In response to such critiques, proponents will insist that the scientific method necessarily involves extrapolation and speculation, and that the multiverse is merely the most recent in a long line of revolutionary discoveries stretching from Copernicus to Darwin to Einstein and Bohr. This chapter parses two major arguments in favor of multiple (or “parallel”) universes, suggesting that one maintains the multiverse as a scientific hypothesis under active investigation, whereas the other amounts to outdated philosophical theology.

This comprehensive yet accessible guide to enterprise risk management (ERM) for financial institutions contains all the tools needed to build and maintain an ERM framework. It discusses the internal and external contexts within which risk management must be carried out, and it covers a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques that can be used to identify, model and measure risks. This third edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect new regulations and legislation. It includes additional detail on machine learning, a new section on vine copulas and significantly expanded information on sustainability. A range of new case studies includes Theranos and FTX.

Suitable as a course book or for self-study, this book forms part of the core reading for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ examination in ERM.

I argue that there are lessons for both philosophers of science and for astrophysicists in the emerging literature on the epistemology of astrophysics. First, contrary to the manner in which it has sometimes been represented by philosophers, astrophysics is not a purely observational science. This complicates arguments that disparage the epistemic status of astrophysics in contrast with experimental sciences. Second, the epistemological structures of arguments in astrophysical research benefit from close philosophical analysis. Such analysis can reveal both important limitations and opportunities. In addition, I argue for a lesson for astronomers from the epistemology of astrophysics. Even when it involves purely observational research, astronomy is not necessarily epistemically inferior to experimental sciences. This is because observation is not generally epistemically inferior to experimentation.

Chapter 7 analyzes the “absurd” paranormal experiences of a family in Santiago and moves to question the notion of the “uncanny,” unheimlich, as relying on the familiar. The chapter proposes the concept of the weird. It argues that the weird cannot be reconciled with the familiar because certain events and experiences are not self-identical; they are like the Möbius strip, with no relation to its outside. The chapter describes the Japanese study of monsterology as an example of how pliable spirit cosmologies can be, while remaining mysterious, mutable, and on the edge of reason. The weird is further explored through the notion of the body-horror, the non-human body in relation to several ethnographic instances, from the pains of spirit bodies in Cuban mediums, to the horror of abduction and alien feelings within one’s own identity and bodily surface, and the explanations of a Chilean demonologist.

This chapter begins by exploring the concept of a biosignature in the context of its use in the search for extraterrestrial life. While newer biosignature-based search strategies, such as the “Ladder of Life Detection” strategy, and the recently popular (but misnamed) “agnostic biosignatures” strategy, avoid the problem of presupposing which features of familiar life are fundamental to (aka defining of) life, they nonetheless assume that we know far more than we do about the diverse ways in which biotic and biotic processes may manifest under radically unfamiliar chemical and physical conditions on other worlds. In this light, we propose a new, more promising approach for searching for extraterrestrial life: search for potentially biological anomalies (vs. life per se) using tentative (vs. allegedly universal, let alone defining) criteria. We argue that this strategy has the advantage of increasing our chances of finding forms of life differing from our own in unanticipated ways, whereas the competing approaches are likely to result in such phenomena being summarily dismissed as the product of poorly understood abiotic processes. Indeed, as we discuss, there is reason to believe that astrobiologists have already encountered some intriguing potentially biologically anomalies.

In this golden age of astronomy, the sky is full of riveting objects: white dwarves, neutron stars. But nothing has captured the same wide attention as black holes, for mathematics, physics, astronomy, and the history and philosophy of science as well as photography and art. Type in quotes “philosophy of black holes” into a search engine and you will get seminars, conferences, books; “philosophy of neutron stars” and you find “no results.” In 2015, a group of us from across disciplines began formulating a center where the various disciplines could join forces to approach these perplexing objects. In 2016, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard brought the approaches together. April 2019 saw the publication by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the first image of a black hole, M87*. Looking ahead, the next-generation EHT launched “History, Philosophy, Culture” as one principal scientific working group. Studies of responsible telescope siting, foundations of black hole science, algorithm/inference and visualization, and scientific collaboration became focal points. Now new challenges are emerging here, including a NASA small explorer mission to detect and measure the photon ring. Perhaps there is a new model integrating history, philosophy, and culture into science in real time.

Chapter 1 describes the complexities and paradoxes of thinking about the extraordinary, anomalous, and impossible, both theoretically and methodologically. The first part engages with the philosophical work of Jeffrey Kripal and his proposal to conceive what has been excluded and ignored within a given cultural and cognitive system. Following his advice, the chapter asks: what would happen if we didn’t take the impossible off the table? And what are the consequences of doing it for an anthropology obsessed with clarity and coherence? The second part of the chapter introduces the concept of the weird. We argue that the weird, as a master trope, serves as the scaffolding for paradox itself, which is essential to thinking the impossible or unknowable.

I present the first of three possibilities for the future of economic development and inequality. In this scenario, the rich continue to get richer, leaving the rest of us behind. I describe four implications of this continued concentration of wealth. First, the super-rich will continue to disproportionately influence politics, furthering fragmentation and polarization in society and deepening civic discontent. Second, economic inequality will amplify ill-health. Third, poverty will persist despite increased aggregate prosperity. Fourth, the climate will continue to deteriorate to our collective detriment. This dystopian possibility underscores the urgency of imagining and pursuing alternative futures.

The problem of perception – how far we can trust the senses, and how we come to believe what we think we know about the external world – goes back to the ancient Greeks. Naive realism – that we immediately know reality in what we see – is refuted by cases in which appearances are obviously distorted by perceptual artifacts, like the black drop in the case of transits of Venus. Perhaps the most famous case of the difficulty in visual telescopic observations is that of the canals of Mars, which led to a long-running controversy, not only among observers but engaging the wider public as well, about the nature of the actual surface markings of the red planet. In the end, there proved to be no canals in the artifactual sense, and instead the subtleties of perception revealed themselves – which include the nature of the visual system, the way that sense-information is processed in the brain, and the way the brain uses guided perception and prediction to make “sense” of the sense perceptions.

This chapter examines two forms of emotionlessness and asks how it is that emotionlessness can be a name for two very opposed valence-laden situations. The best-known emotionless context is sometimes expressed by the term ‘emotional numbness’. It refers to a multi-faceted mental disturbance, often quite difficult to identify unequivocally with a specific pathology; a less well-known emotionless context is referred to as a form of ‘emotional detachment’. It has been experienced along centuries by nuns, monks, and spiritual teachers as a practice of inner liberation. Shedding light on these different situations of emotionlessness, the chapter discusses what a non-emotional life tells us about human beings, if emotions are truly at the heart of human beings.