This is the conclusion of the book. It reiterates my argument that in literature, risk is a necessary and creative force, an aesthetic category before anything else. It ends by proposing Franco–East Asian literatures as one form of world literature, one that is based on the aesthetic experience offered by particular texts, the potential for critical interactions between them and the imaginative comparison of literary traditions and areas that have traditionally been seen as separate.

In this chapter, I argue that the first book of the Parts of Animals (PA) expresses a form of realism about animal species. While the claim that Aristotle was a realist about species may seem obvious to those coming to the PA from the Metaphysics, the current view among specialists is that Aristotle’s zoology was not working with a concept of species. Some have even gone so far as to avoid translating eidos as “species” throughout his zoological writings. In contrast to this, I argue: first, that indivisible species constitute the ousiai of Aristotle’s zoology; and, second, that the aim of Aristotelian zoological division is to identify and organize the features specified in the definition of those species. The latter (epistemological) claim is explicit in the discussion of division in PA I 2–3, while the former (ontological) claim is advanced in PA I 4.

Our aim for this book is, in one sense, modest. We do not attempt to address pressing contemporary problems involving, for example, climate change, new technology, or growing inequality. Nor do we seek to adjudicate challenges to market society stemming from resurgent forms of authoritarianism and a growing disillusionment with capitalism. Instead, we have merely sought to articulate the implicit morality of market society in a more extensive manner.

The Left has long critiqued charity’s role in the alleviation of poverty. In the immediate post-war years, the Labour Party’s position was strongly influenced by Harold Wilson who was closely associated with War on Want, the ‘labour movement’s charity’. As Prime Minister, he brought into office an attitude that saw the real solution to the relief of poverty abroad to be state planning and the massive coordination of all local and national efforts through international government. The Ministry for Overseas Development, launched in 1965, looked to the UN agencies, to technical assistance programmes, to the creation of an International Development Agency. Yet within a few years, the ministers recognised that the humanitarian charities had a positive role to play. The Labour Party embraced charity as an ‘alternative’ provider of aid, initiating the Joint Funding Scheme in 1975 in which official funds were channelled through the charities. The Labour government embraced charity as a partner in development, helping to rethink state and voluntary sector relations more generally, and well before more ideologically driven pressures were placed on the social democratic welfare state.

Shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth completed Historia regum Britanniae, abbreviated adaptations began to appear in chronicles. Not many Continental chroniclers, outside of Brittany and Spain, considered it historically valid, but short accounts about Arthur appeared in Continental universal chronicles. In Britain, it was adapted into Anglo-Norman and English by Wace and Laʒamon, and abbreviated versions appeared as the introductory sections of chronicles that told of pre- and post-Conquest Britain. This context gave it historical authenticity. From the time of Edward I, Arthur began to be considered English rather than British since the part of Britain he lived in was Logres, which corresponded to England.  Arthur’s subjugation of Scotland in HRB appeared to justify English attempts to conquer Scotland and caused many Scottish chroniclers to develop their own version of the story in which the true heir to the throne was Arthur’s nephew, the Scot Modred.

Climate change represents both a physical and spiritual challenge to humanity in the twenty-first century. Facing the realities of climate change and environmental destruction requires our best political and scientific thinking as well as an attitude capable of confronting the bleak uncertainty that arises in this task. This chapter argues that the philosophy of William James offers a unique conceptual approach to this contemporary predicament. It brings together several distinct threads of James’s philosophy – radical empiricism, “the will to believe,” and pluralism – with contemporary analysis of climate change to describe ways of living with the real uncertainty of the Anthropocene without that knowledge becoming an excuse for inaction and fear. In the end, James’s philosophy offers a powerful lesson to us today: It teaches us to accept the world as we experience it – scary and troubling as that might be – but to find in that acceptance the possibilities of change.

In this chapter, Jane Thrailkill aligns the instructive aims and literary effects of Jamesian style to underline the broader pedagogical purpose of literary criticism. Her reading of The Principles of Psychology analyzes what she describes as James’s “troping devices,” special literary tools intended to catalyze in his audience a process of “experiential, tactile, sensory education.” In this key early work, Thrailkill argues, James’s stylistic play seeks to “capture the mind in action” – to make the text itself into the kind of experience from which we learn, rather than a static description of that experience. As this essay establishes, James’s experiments in thinking and writing are everywhere motivated by his commitment to pedagogy, combined with his knowledge of how learning actually occurs.

This chapter explores the origins, nature, and persistence of Cold War liberalism in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by analyzing the writings and policies of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1953–59). Dulles was both a pivotal and archetypal figure in the history of U.S.–Middle East relations. The chapter posits three pillars of Cold War liberalism that, with some variation, have undergirded U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since Dulles’ tenure. First, the United States is preoccupied with the establishment of a global order predicated on a preponderance of American power. This is not a “rules-based” order but rather one upheld by security alliances constructed to advance America’s perceived interests, often in defiance of international laws or norms. Second, Cold War liberalism’s raison d’être is couched in and sometimes shaped by discourses of freedom and self-determination. Third, rhetorical commitments to promoting democracy notwithstanding, Cold War liberalism fuels skepticism, even hostility, toward genuine expressions of democracy and mass politics in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter argues that Cold War liberalism in the Middle East is not limited chronologically to the Cold War. All three pillars have Wilsonian antecedents and continue to shape US–Middle East relations.

This chapter considers the place of the four books of the Parts of Animals (PA) within Aristotle’s envisaged sequence of biological writings. It argues that PA I belongs integrally with II–IV (rather than being a self-standing theoretical essay) and that the entire project of PA I–IV presupposes key theoretical and factual discoveries made in the Historia Animalium (HA), contra the ‘Balme hypothesis’ according to which HA postdates the explanatory treatises and represents a more advanced stage of inquiry. Finally, it shows that the mantra “being is prior to coming-to-be” (which governs the PA–GA axis) has important implications for our understanding of the explanations in PA II–IV. It concludes with some remarks on the overall structure of Aristotle’s biological corpus.

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.

The argument which I have been advancing throughout this book is that we should properly regard Machiavelli as a philosopher of the state. Although I hope that the investigation has already brought to light sufficient evidence to sustain this case, I should like to close it by returning to summarize very briefly two main reasons why the body of thinking about lo stato which he progressively articulates from Il Principe to the Discorsi qualifies him as such.

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.

Protest poetry has long been a central element within South Africa’s literary culture and was arguably the defining genre of the country’s anti-apartheid literature. This chapter traces this history from the 1950s to the present. It argues that the genre has evolved through a rolling wave of distinct literary moments deeply linked to the prevailing politics of the time. These include the Colored poetry of the 1950s, the anti-poetics of the 1970’s Black Consciousness affiliated Soweto Poets, the dramatic worker poets of the 1980s, and today’s #Fallist reincarnation of the genre. In offering this history, the chapter disputes traditional understandings of protest and, instead, proposes a new definition of a genre that is characterized by a call for change that is never achieved. Moreover, it highlights the importance of audience and demonstrates how each wave, describing an increasingly desperate need for social and political change, has been addressed to an ever-widening demographic.

The literature on learning in games interprets equilibrium strategy profiles as the long-run average behavior of agents who are selected at random to play the game. As suggested by Nash, in normal-form games we expect that as the agents accumulate evidence about play of the game they will develop accurate beliefs, so that the stationary points of the process correspond to the Nash equilibria. The definition of Nash equilibrium applies unchanged to games in extensive form, but the learning foundation for it does change, because in games with a nontrivial extensive form simply playing the game repeatedly may not lead agents to know how their opponents would respond to deviations that the agents have not tried. Thus there is no reason to expect learning by myopic agents to lead to Nash equilibrium in general games, as agents may not experiment enough to learn the consequences of deviating from the equilibrium path. Instead, learning is consistent with self-confirming equilibrium, introduced by Fudenberg and Levine in the early 1990s. The focus here is on settings where the agents are patient, so they do have an incentive to experiment. In this case, Nash’s mass action interpretation of equilibrium is again valid. But extensive-form games typically have many equilibria, and not all of them seem equally plausible. An advantage of the learning approach is that some actions that are off-path according to the limiting equilibrium distribution are not counterfactual, but will actually be played by young agents as “experiments,” so that equilibrium refinements can be derived from properties of optimal experimentation.

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.

The Bill of Rights applies to all law, and binds the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and all organs of state.