This chapter focuses on the Works of Love deliberation “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” (and, where relevant, Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourses on that topic), exploring the figure of the “one who loves” [den Kjerlige]. Drawing on the deliberation’s discussion of silence, mitigation explanations, and forgiveness, and some arguments from my book Love’s Forgiveness about love’s way of seeing ambiguous evidence, I sketch the contours of a virtue manifested in den Kjerlige: generosity of spirit. I then ask: If we took seriously Kierkegaard’s portrait of den Kjerlige, what are the implications for contemporary moral and social discourse? How would such a person engage in moral criticism or social critique? What does this suggest about the controversial category of “microaggressions?” Through a consideration of “Love Hides,” some recent work on the ethics of “social punishment,” especially online public shaming, and contemporary debates about microaggressions, this exercise in “applied Kierkegaard” will argue that Kierkegaard’s deliberation offers an important counterweight to hyper-suspicion, judgmentalism, and self-righteousness in a polarized world.

Chapter 1 examines the ‘discovery’ of the audience in twentieth-century Britain and sketches out the anxieties about the audience’s impressionability which were voiced in government and non-governmental committees on films and television throughout the century. The concept of a highly impressionable British audience subsequently took hold, paving the way for new, self-proclaimed experts on audience wants and needs that emerged, including Stephen Tallents and Robert Silvey, as head of a new department of ‘Audience Research” at the BBC. This chapter unpicks the racialised assumptions that informed the creation of this field and the audience it presumed to measure.

Experimental writing challenges familiar ways of the representation of reality through a literary text. This chapter interrogates the notion of experimental writing and considers its place among African literary genres. The chapter then zooms in on experimental writing in African languages, with a case study of two contemporary Swahili writers, Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) and William Mkufya (1953–). Both writers have interrogated in their writing the nature of African postcolonial reality and considered possibilities of altering that reality, through reparation and reconstruction, but also through a full-fledged recasting and redefinition of the intellectual frameworks that support contemporary African life. Both authors use Swahili, but they load language and style with a multitude of new meanings. In effect, language becomes an abstract and flexible structure capable of thorough transformation to conceive of and express a radically new reality. The same applies to the adoption and adaptation of literary genres. Genres lose their typical literary and ideological determinations. The experimental writing of these authors challenges literary realism in African literature and creates a “novel genre” to articulate texts of a futurist and truly emancipatory African philosophy.

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 explores the structure–culture–agency interplay in the English language learning context of Cancun, Mexico. The body of empirical data is analysed through CR-grounded linguistic ethnography. Of specific interest are three Mexican students’ reflexive deliberations and strategies to position themselves in relation to the English language, its symbolic and economic value, and to broader structural and cultural forces, in the fulfilment of their goals. Analysis of the findings reveals the powerful influence of social class distribution partly based on ethnicity, and the role of language learner reflexivity in the adoption of diverse approaches to English language learning. The study of reflexivity in this chapter shows how agentive processes lead to different degrees of investment and successes, including resistance to and acceptance of the necessity for English in relation to Cancun’s social and economic context. Analysis also reveals English as the language of the dominant yet not fully accepted North American culture, and how it is seen a paramount tool in the fulfilment of personal and communal projects in the context of Cancun.

As World War Two drew to a close, tens of thousands of Moldavian Jews began their journey home. Some had just been liberated from Transnistrian camps and ghettos, while others returned from Soviet evacuation or military service. This chapter examines the challenges these returning Jews faced as Soviet power consolidated its rule over the Moldavian SSR. For many, home was unrecognizable – Jewish communities had been eradicated, and their possessions seized by local Gentiles and Axis occupiers.

Confronted with this reality, and either scarred by the Holocaust or drawn to Soviet urbanization, many soon left their former towns. A significant number resettled in Chernivtsi, now part of the Ukrainian SSR, transforming it into a center of Yiddish culture. A central theme of this chapter is the profound hardship experienced by Jews – and, to some extent, non-Jews – as they struggled with acute food and housing shortages, as well as the widespread poverty that defined postwar life in Moldavia until the early 1950s. Rebuilding their lives in the post-Holocaust era meant striving to restore a sense of normalcy in a world irrevocably changed.

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.

On the Parts of Animals (PA) is our main source for Aristotle’s explanations of animal character. This he locates in the qualities of an animal’s blood (or it’s analogue), whether it is hot, cold, thick, then, turbid, or pure (PA II.2, 651a16). This chapter sets out the main debate about character in Aristotle’s biological writings, whether it is formal or material, and argues that it is part of an animals’ material nature. While the materials existing in the blood vessels are not put there for the purpose of underlying character, they are often utilised for this end, displaying a complex coordination of material and formal natures. The chapter ends with a detailed analysis of which fluid elements in the body are responsible for underlying character and at which point they emerge in the digestive process. This further clarifies the relationship between animal bodies, nutritive processes, and the character potentials animals possess.

Revival processes appear central to folk musics across different cultural and national traditions. Consequently, this chapter argues that, rather than perceiving revival as the exception, processes of revival and change should thus be perceived as a central feature of tradition. As is outlined here, revival needs to be approached from a much broader perspective. Falling back on case studies from England, Latvia, and Germany, this chapter further analyzes how acts of revival are entangled with themes of authenticity and nostalgia. Utilizing different claims of authenticity as elaborated by Denis Dutton, these waves of revivalism might be described as a defensive mechanism against eras of accelerated global change. Following scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Ross Cole, folk revivalism can thus be understood as an act of imaginative investment in the past and future, a nexus where nostalgia and utopia – as a counterpoint or solution to this sentiment of loss – meet.

This chapter examines the post-independence cultural policy debates in Algeria. Following independence in 1962, Algeria emerged as a leader of the Global South but struggled internally to chart a path to “recover its personality” from French colonialism. In the periodical Révolution Africaine, FLN party intellectuals attempted to shape the state’s cultural policy. This periodical hosted a series of debates and acrimonious exchanges which involved Mostefa Lacheraf and Mourad Bourboune, and after the 1965 military coup, Malek Bennabi and Ahmed Taleb. These debates appeared to center on whether bilingualism or Arabization would best serve Algeria’s modernization and its cultural revival. Yet, this chapter argues, all of these interventions left untouched key notions of “backwardness” in their policy proposals, all of which had been inherited from the colonial period. As such, Algerian attempts to leap into independence were frustrated by its leaders prioritizing the need for action to make up for their so-called historical delay. This chapter also contextualizes Algerian cultural debates in its North African framework while reflecting on how this periodical was initially able to host these debates until it was co-opted by state imperatives.

In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the countable-infinitary logic called L-omega-1-omega. There is no computability theory in this chapter. We prove all the main results that are about countable structures. This includes the development of Scott ranks, and the type omitting theorem. All of this is done with the authors perpective, so that it fits better with the computability notions to be developed later.

Commentators on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love have typically taken spiritual love to mean the same as neighborly love, an unconditional moral duty owed by all humans to all humans. Ostensibly, this contrasts with the preferential love typical of a friend or spouse. We, however, take spiritual love to refer to the Trinitarian love that, when emulated by human beings, is called Christian love. This type of love either transcends or engenders both neighborly and preferential love. First, we show how the economy of salvation expresses the Father’s love in both neighborly and preferential ways, corresponding to the Son’s mediation of the Father’s love through the Incarnation and the Spirit’s mediation of the Father’s love through Pentecost. Second, we use the Trinitarian approach to elucidate Kierkegaard’s claim that God is love’s “middle term.” Third, we use this approach to resolve the apparent conflict between self-interest and self-denial in Works of Love.

The chapter challenges dominant narratives that reduce Soviet Jews to ideological symbols, instead foregrounding their everyday struggles and achievements under Stalinist policies, postwar hardships, and shifting identities. It proposes that Jews found meaning in work, education, and cultural life while actively shaping Moldavian society. The final section traces their long-term trajectories – from professional advancement in the USSR to later waves of emigration that redefined Jewish identity in Israel, the United States, and beyond. Despite political and social upheavals, Jewish contributions to Moldavian institutions and culture endure. The epilogue situates Soviet Jewish history within broader historical frameworks, encouraging interpretations that move beyond simplistic or exclusionary perspectives.

What is monastic law for? This chapter explores the goals of monastic law, beyond its concerns with regulation and governance. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and survey research, it examines the various ‘nonpositivist’ aims pursued by monastic jurists: preserving unity and unanimity (sāmaggi) among monks; maintaining discretion and protecting reputations; avoiding (further) conflict and identifying the root causes of strife; minimising judicial prejudice by eliminating the mental defilements (kilesa) that give rise to them; restoring offenders to the community by applying therapeutic sanctions; aligning the conduct of monks with the concerns of local laity and temple donors; and, most importantly, shortening saṃsāra and hastening nirvana. This chapter highlights the intertwining of positivist and nonpositivist elements in monastic law, shining light on a legal order that not only enforces standards of conduct but also impacts karma, saṃsāra and the path to nirvana.

This chapter shows how the theory of symmetric two-player zero-sum games, which was initiated by Borel in 1921, can be used for randomly selecting an alternative based on quantified pairwise comparisons between alternatives. It points out desirable properties satisfied by the equilibrium distribution and gives examples where these distributions arise as the limit of simple dynamic processes that have been studied across various disciplines, such as population biology, quantum physics, and machine learning.