Thomists and contemporary epistemologists don’t often seem to have much to say to one another. I here argue that Thomism fits very well with at least one school of thought in contemporary epistemology: commonsensism. I prosecute my case by arguing that Étienne Gilson’s dismissal of commonsense philosophy as incompatible with Thomistic realism is a mistake. I begin by outlining commonsensism. I then proceed to a discussion of Gilson’s rejection of commonsense philosophy. I finish by arguing that Gilson’s criticisms fail and that Thomists should be commonsense epistemologists.

A key figure in establishing a “black musical idiom” and an American musical identity, pianist-composer Florence Price was groundbreaking in her efforts to create a compositional style that incorporated Black vernacular songs. This chapter focuses on her two fantasies in G minor (1933) and F♯ minor (1949) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952) in the context of Price’s cultural network and context, with specific attention given to her contemporary Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960) and to Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1957), the dedicatee of Price’s second violin concerto.

Whether taken as literal phenomena or as loose semantic suggestions, ghosts make their mark on virtually every piece of Bowen’s writing. This chapter focuses on the more suggestive ghostliness that spans her oeuvre by way of the threat and realities of a haunting dispossession. Her treatment of dispossession uncannily exposes a relation between the social and the physical or the public and the private. Embodied, subjectively lived experience conjoins with the forces of history, ideas, and conventions. In forging these relationships, the always unsettling crises of modern dispossession at the heart of Bowen’s work articulate her astute theory of historical change and the problem of historical accountability in the aftermath of traumatic events. This essay proposes two ideas – claustrophobia and flight – for thinking about ghostly dispossession in her short stories and novels. The unviable past makes itself known through an unsettling claustrophobia, and those who have been dispossessed and find no workable alternative haunt in their turn, projecting ghostliness into the future via the urge to flee. No one escapes the effects of dispossession, making it, for Bowen, the condition of twentieth-century modernity.

Coase or Pigou? Economic property rights and decentralized bargaining or centralized regulation and potential rent-seeking in the political arena in confronting externalities? What are the tradeoffs if rent-seeking, not efficiency determine environmental regulation. That is the question for this volume.

This essay assesses Bowen’s relationship to the English author D. H. Lawrence, and suggests that in view of the chronological overlap in their careers, the latter was effectively a contemporary as well as a forerunner. Bowen regarded Lawrence as a major author but also identified with him as an ‘outsider’ to cosmopolitan English literary circles. Both novelists are transitional figures, comfortable with the novelistic legacies of nineteenth-century fictional realism but moving towards formal experimentation, while tuning their work to modernist preoccupations with psychology and sexuality. Their interests aligned in the exploration of female subjectivity and the shifting gender politics of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s landmark novel Women in Love, with its programmatic positioning of two sisters caught between the inherited shapes of English Victorian romance and the pull of a modern European independence, provides a persuasive template for Bowen in her structured pairings of women across several works, including an unpublished story titled ‘Women in Love’. The two writers are linked, finally, by their respective responses to the world at war, with Bowen hailing Lawrence as a guide to her literary navigation of wartime London.

Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

Chapter 1 opens with the question of how to achieve normative legitimacy of the state (legitimation). How does the state become accepted and expected by a population to be the arbitrator of their collective life? The chapter reviews legitimation crises in Iraq at four key historical junctures: the foundational moment in 1921, the 1958 revolutionary coup d’etat, and the 1990s in the lead-up to the post-2003 state. Drawing on the work of Iraqi sociologist and public intellectual Ali al-Wardi, this chapter argues that legitimation of a state’s ruling principles (normative legitimation) is linked to a state’s ability to address social injustice. Furthermore, social injustice is intrinsic to any state order. A robust democracy is the only reliable mechanism through which to uncover the nature of injustice – and ways of addressing it – at any given time and space, and thereby avoid a legitimation crisis.

Despite being a generation apart and thus unlikely to have ever met, both Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1654) and Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), frequented, and were celebrated by, a close-knit network of Venetian poets, librettists, musicians, artists, collectors, and patrons closely linked to the infamous Accademia degli Incogniti. The Incogniti valued wit, improvisation, performance, and ribald humor, and were particularly fascinated with in the so-called “questione della donna,” which examined, often irreverently, the status of women in ancient and modern society. This chapter explores what can be gleaned about the interactions between artists, musicians, collectors and painters in little-studied years that Gentileschi spent in Venice (1626-1629?), such as the lawyer, letterato, and collector and Giacomo Pighetti, the writer Giovan Francesco Loredan, and the painter Alessandro Varorari, known as Il Padovanino. These connections, I propose, help elucidate the works Artemisia painted in these years, even if many of them are lost or unidentified.

This chapter examines the tenure of British Consul William Dougal Christie who sought to settle territorial disputes over the Mosquito Shore with rival Central American republics and attempted to establish unchallenged British authority over the Nicaragua Canal route by shifting the capital of the Mosquito Kingdom to the harbor of San Juan del Norte (renamed Greytown). Nicaraguan officials challenged the British position by arguing that the Mosquito Kingdom was a fiction erected by the British. As the possibility of a Nicaraguan Canal loomed ahead, competing sovereign powers of Britain and Nicaragua converged on the authenticity of the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Kingdom as the linchpin around which to settle their territorial dispute over the San Juan delta.