Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

Examines the concept of God by exploring “Perfect Being Theology” (PBT), the view that God should be conceived as a perfect being. The chapter engages with several contrasting challenges to “doing” PBT: that disputes over what attributes are perfections should reduce a believer’s confidence that God has the characteristics they ascribe; that nothing can be said about God except what actions He performs (negative theology); that in the Bible, Talmud and Midrash, He is not portrayed as a perfect being; and that statements about God should be interpreted in a “non-realist” fashion, i. e. not referring to an actual being.

By the time of his death, Lincoln had earned substantial recognition as a great president, even admiration as a statesman of outstanding quality. His assassination heightened the sense of loss and mourning Americans and others felt, in tributes, eulogies and sermons.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Describes Meade’s involvement in economic policy debates during the 1960s.

George Lippard popularized a new form of novel whose thickly interlaced plotlines and generic layering conveyed social and moral dimensions of urban experience inaccessible to more conventional literary and journalistic modes of depicting cities. Dwelling on various forms of nefarious association tethering and tainting Philadelphia’s citizens, Lippard’s sensational novel, The Quaker City (1845), focuses on two social “shapes” urban participatory sin can take, structural complicity and network complicity. It devotes major plotlines, each featuring a distinct narrative form, to the investigation of each. Each kind of complicity imposes crucial aesthetic constraints on its own narrativization, and these constraints are overcome, the novel suggests, only when these two narrative forms are subsumed within a totalizing vision of Christian eschatology, or apocalypse.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter examines the contemporary upsurge of African speculative fiction. After the global financial crisis that started in 2007, the production, circulation, and consumption of African speculative fiction (ASF) increased significantly. Starting as a relatively unknown and independent phenomenon, authors, publics, and publishers globally embraced ASF in the long decade that followed the Global financial crisis (2007–2020). Now, ASF authors and fans have both constructed a cultural infrastructure in which the genre can flourish, most notably in the form of the online ASF magazine Omenana and the African Speculative Fiction Society. Moreover, ASF works compete for major awards and involve publishers from the core of the world-system: for example, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Disney started producing Iwájú (Nelson 2021). This chapter provides insight into this ASF phenomenon. It discusses why the upsurge took place, how the history of the genre before the upsurge has been understood, and what the role is of terms like “African,” “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” “Afrofuturism,” and “Africanfuturism” for understanding the genre. Finally, it provides an outlook on ASF’s possible future.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.