From the mid-twentieth century, Pablo Neruda was the most well-known Latin American poet in the Arab world. Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published poems by Pablo Neruda in a collection of his own translations, Qasa’id Mukhtara min al-Shi‘r al-‘Alami al-Hadith (Selected Poems from Modern World Poetry) in 1955. In 1975, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) published “Dhahibun Ila al-Qasida – Ila Bablu Niruda” (“On the Way to the Poem – To Pablo Neruda”), a poem dedicated to Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Years later, Darwish visited Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, Chile, in 1990, and thereafter composed another poem, which begins: “In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific / coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos / at his house.” Drawing on the translation, circulation, and reception of Neruda in the Arab world, this essay will explore the relationship of Arab writers to Neruda and little-known Arab Latin American engagements within internationalist networks of Global South solidarity and nationalist politics.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing several linguistic and psychological aspects of word meaning, with emphasis on those that have received the most attention in cognitive neuroscience. Specific topics include the treatment of word meanings as public concepts for social coordination; the decomposition of word meanings into semantic features; the characterization of word meanings in terms of frames, prototypes, mental models, and background situations; the nature of word associations and co-occurrence patterns; the influence of context on interpretation; and the importance of crosslinguistic similarities and differences.

Chapter 7 concentrates on abstract words like democracy, luxury, and chance. These words are harder to characterize and investigate than concrete ones like bird, mug, and banana, but the pace of progress in understanding their cognitive and neural bases has dramatically increased in recent years. For instance, it’s now clear that compared to concrete words, abstract ones rely more on verbal associations, occur in a broader range of contexts, and are rated higher for certain types of semantic features (e.g., time, social interaction, emotion, and drive). Consistent with these differences, it’s well-established that abstract words rely more than concrete ones on a few very high-level cortical areas that play vital roles in language processing while also contributing to the GSN/DMN. And yet there’s also mounting evidence that, like concrete words, many abstract ones are anchored to some extent in systems for perception and action. In addition, an increasing amount of research has been exploring how different categories of abstract words (e.g., those for numbers, emotions, mental states, and moral judgments) are associated with different sets of partly shared and partly segregated brain regions.

St. Thomas and Thomists hold that the ground for having basic rights (including the right to life) is being a person. And a person can be defined as: an individual substance of a rational nature. This chapter sets out and defends this position, including its application to the beginning of human life, issues at the end of life, and capital punishment and killing in war. I argue that St. Thomas’s principles for determining when human life begins are correct, and that when applied to the embryological facts known today, show that human beings begin at fertilization. I set out St. Thomas’s position on capital punishment (where he holds that a human being can lose his inherent dignity) and discuss both criticisms and defenses of this position by later Thomists, indicating the centrality for this issue of the notions of dignity, the common good, and punishment.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

The reintroduction of multiparty elections threatened the survival of the Togolese regime, but they also represented an opportunity to remove potential enemies in neighbouring countries. In Togo, the transition to multiparty elections initiated a period of power contestation where the dictatorial regime of Gnassingbé Eyadema had to adapt, and by doing so, used cross-border mechanisms to its advantage. Chapter 8 shows the implications of cross-border voting in the international relations between Ghana and Togo when Rawlings and Eyadéma used elections in an attempt to topple each other in the 1990s. As a consequence, the chapter concludes on showing the far-reaching international consequences of the ways in which the local level scales up to the national and the transnational levels.

This Chapter examines whether and to what extent WTO members can be accountable for applying security measures before international adjudicators and how the invocation of security exceptions can impact the international courts’ or tribunals’ proceedings. The idea of balancing free trade and national security is bound to substantiate itself in a compression of the right to sovereignty, which can be assessed through the good faith review or the use of a necessity test. The investigation of the meaning and mechanisms of these tests and the scope of discretion that should be granted to the decisions of WTO members in their national security matters allows for establishing the framework for reviewing security exceptions.

Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

This chapter explores the practical realities of what it is to perform Strozzi’s music in a twenty-first century context and the artistic possibilities those realities open up, the challenges they raise, and the potentialities they create. Combining personal experience, recent classical music industry research, and cross-genre artistic ideas and insights, this chapter suggests new ways in which Strozzi’s works might be made to sing, in multiple meanings of that word. Identifying barriers to performing Strozzi’s music, this chapter then turns to Strozzi’s working practices in search of tools with which to overcome or side-step those barriers. Through sharing the author’s methods for creating new performances of Strozzi’s works, inspired by Strozzi’s example, this chapter concludes with an invitation to readers to discover their own ways of singing Strozzi today.

Chapter 3 begins to elaborate a central theme of the book, which is that word meanings are not localized in just one part of the brain; instead, they have a widely distributed web-like layout that includes many different cortical areas and corresponding types of representation. This particular chapter focuses on the experiential (e.g., visual, auditory, and motor) features of word meanings. The key idea is that, in keeping with theories of grounded/embodied cognition, these concrete features are identical to some of the modality-specific representations that allow us to make sense of our nonlinguistic experiences involving the pertinent types of entities and events. For example, the word “scissors” denotes a kind of household tool with specifications for shape, motion, sound, and manipulation, and considerable research suggests that we store these features directly within some of the same cortical areas that are engaged when we see, hear, and use scissors. Such findings are exciting because they support the intuitive view that words are like instructions for neurally simulating experiences, albeit usually in an automatic, implicit manner. There’s still a great deal of debate, however, about the precise ways in which word meanings relate to perception and action.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

Divine Truthmaker Simplicity (DTS) avoids collapsing God into a metaphysical property by arguing that, to identify God with God’s wisdom, goodness (etc.) is not to identify God with a property, but rather to claim that God is the truthmaker for the predication “God is wise” (etc.). DTS has been the target of a number of recent objections. This chapter explains how Aquinas’s often overlooked distinction between two ways in which a thing can have a perfection – essentially and by participation – enables a response to these objections.