In this chapter, we argue that human flourishing and the virtues are constitutive norms of human agency, thereby grounding virtue ethics in action theory. Building on Chapter 1’s critique of the Market Failure Approach, we argue that human action cannot be understood solely through instrumental rationality, as Humeans maintain. Instead, we contend that human flourishing – the harmonious pursuit of intrinsically valuable goods – is the constitutive aim of agency. Since the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice, and practical wisdom are essential to achieving flourishing, they function as constitutive standards of action. We show how practical wisdom enables agents to apply virtue concepts in concrete situations, unifying the demands of diverse virtues and resolving conflicts between incommensurable goods. Responding to critics of virtue ethics, including Kantians and situationists, we defend a substantive conception of practical reason that is sensitive to context. This chapter lays the foundation for the market virtues framework developed in Chapter 3 and throughout the book by articulating how agents flourish in market contexts – through virtuous, mutually beneficial exchange.

This chapter introduces sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions and develops basic concentration inequalities. We prove the Hoeffding, Chernoff, Bernstein, and Khintchine inequalities. Applications include robust mean estimation and analyzing degrees in random graphs. The exercises explore Mills ratio, small ball probabilities, Le Cam’s two-point method, the expander mixing lemma for random graphs, stochastic dominance, Orlicz norms, and the Bennett inequality.

The chapter summarizes the way in which the history of the French language has shaped representations and conceptions of literature, and how it has shaped its musical settings. France has had a unique relationship with language, based on centralism, equipping itself with tools to make the French language a tool for standardizing and homogenizing the country. The French mélodie thus takes shape within a specific framework. The mélodie emerged in the crucible of Romanticism, which continually invented new forms and genres capable of reflecting the new sensitivity of the individual. With Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été to poems by Théophile Gautier, the mélodie escaped drama, pathos, and narration. Thereafter, it retained this characteristic of paying attention, first and foremost, to language and poetic text.

This chapter brings in the complexities of the intersection between renewable resources, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining international guidance for renewable energy sources and their role in achieving sustainability objectives. This chapter then delves into the principles and rules governing sustainable forestry practices, fisheries management, and energy development. It highlights the importance of international agreements, protocols, and treaties in promoting responsible resource management, conservation, and the recognition of Indigenous rights and knowledge. By considering these principles and rules within the context of Indigenous treaty law, it highlights the need for harmonious and inclusive approaches to renewable resource use in the age of sustainable development. It underlines the significance of collaboration, respect for Indigenous knowledge, and the integration of sustainability principles to ensure a balanced and equitable relationship between renewable resources, Indigenous rights, and sustainable development.

The chapter argues for a reading of Parts of Animals I.1, 639b11–640a9 as a continuous argument, divided into 3 main sections. Aristotle’s point in the first section is that teleological explanations should precede non-teleological explanations in the order of exposition. His reasoning is that the ends cited in teleological explanations are definitions, and definitions – which are not subject to further explanation – are appropriate starting points, insofar as they prevent explanations from going on ad infinitum. Aristotle proceeds in the following two sections to criticize certain non-teleological accounts offered by his predecessors on the grounds that they are explanatorily defective: those accounts – unlike teleological explanations – neither begin from appropriate starting points nor entail the phenomena that they purport to explain. Along the way, the chapter proposes an alternative way to understand what “hypothetical necessity” refers to, for Aristotle.

The book’s Introduction begins by considering definitions of folk music, specifically that developed by the International Folk Music Council during the 1950s. I point out that Cecil Sharp’s work had a profound influence on this conception. The underlying logic behind such definitions is a habit of opposition in which folk music is situated as a paradigm of authenticity in contrast to something else tainted with commerce, frivolity, or bourgeois individualism. I show that folk music has most often been understood through a characteristic form of Marxist nostalgia surrounding older forms of culture opposed to modernity, capitalism, mass media, and the culture industry. The appeal of the folk, I suggest, has chiefly been as a vehicle of critique – a way of identifying alternative ways of being. As illustrations, I turn to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anti-colonial vision of Indian nationalism as well as the recent ‘ShantyTok’ trend on TikTok. Ultimately, folk music and song are inextricable from the social communities they have brought to life.

Chapter 4 examines how contemporary poetry plays with the world and necessarily puts its own relation to the world at risk, thereby making visible the fragility and creative potential of the world. I analyse wordplay, translational strategies and ‘drifting’ trajectories in poems by Hong Kongese Sinophone poet Xi Xi, contemporary French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Japanese-Francophone poet Ryōko Sekiguchi, Taiwanese Sinophone poet Hsia Yü and multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall. What makes these poets comparable, I argue, is their shared concerns about the poet’s relation to the world, about translational and translingual poetics, migratory and dispersive trajectories of language, identity and life. I examine how these poets employ ludic poetic language to incorporate and transform risk. A poetics of risk emerges from poetry’s performance of the precarious conditions of contemporary life and ultimately of poetry itself.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

The recruitment of men into armies had its counterpart in the placement of soldiers taken captive during war – and these, too, took place on the edge of consent. Customary laws of war prohibited hard labor for Christian prisoners of war. Yet a succession of English governments sent their European war captives into servitude with private masters. These governments and their collaborators instead operated under the logic of the English Poor Law, in which the indigent could meaningfully consent to serve a master even while under duress. The case of Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war in an East Anglian fen drainage project from 1648 to 1653 shows how the Council of State and the drainage company board members conceptualized lower-status prisoners as willing workmen. The broader arena of transatlantic and intra-European coercion of prisoner of war labor throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further reveals how the discourse of consent permeated even those more convoluted international relations.

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.

One relatively recent development related to the growth of practical market design is the need to deal with big strategy sets that may involve parts of the economic environment beyond the boundaries of the individual marketplaces. A related matter is that in naturally occurring environments, strategies may be discovered in the course of play. Discovering new strategies is very much like inventing new technology, or new game theory: all of these things can change the game in important ways. These issues blur the borders of what historically were regarded as separate domains of game theory, namely the theories of cooperative and non-cooperative games.

Lancelot is the sole Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes not to have been directly adapted in German. However, the integration of elements of Lancelot material bears witness to an indirect reaction on the part of German Arthurian romance to the provocative and virulent narrative tradition surrounding the Knight of the Cart. From reminiscences of the abduction of the queen in the early narratives, this chapter turns to the radical reinvention of Lancelot as a serial monogamist who works to uphold social order and consolidate Arthurian rule in Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet. It further discusses the remodelling of the fairy upbringing motif in Lanzelet and the anonymous Wigamur. Finally, the remarkable treatment of Guinevere’s abduction in Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône is considered in connection with the problematic relationship of the German Arthurian tradition with the otherworld.

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.

This response provides two examples for which an understanding of the biology of stress has informed approaches to supporting children. In the first, educators at the University of Cambridge Primary School are trained to view children’s behavior as a reflection of their needs and to utilise a variety of support strategies, including coaching, non-violent communication, careful language choices and emotional health education. In the second, the Yoga Story Time project, implemented in an at-risk school in Sicily, aimed to support the well-being of children who had experienced trauma. Through interactive storytelling, creative activities and yoga poses, the project sought to improve children’s communication skills, emotional regulation and social interaction.