Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

This chapter explores the practical realities of what it is to perform Strozzi’s music in a twenty-first century context and the artistic possibilities those realities open up, the challenges they raise, and the potentialities they create. Combining personal experience, recent classical music industry research, and cross-genre artistic ideas and insights, this chapter suggests new ways in which Strozzi’s works might be made to sing, in multiple meanings of that word. Identifying barriers to performing Strozzi’s music, this chapter then turns to Strozzi’s working practices in search of tools with which to overcome or side-step those barriers. Through sharing the author’s methods for creating new performances of Strozzi’s works, inspired by Strozzi’s example, this chapter concludes with an invitation to readers to discover their own ways of singing Strozzi today.

Chapter 3 begins to elaborate a central theme of the book, which is that word meanings are not localized in just one part of the brain; instead, they have a widely distributed web-like layout that includes many different cortical areas and corresponding types of representation. This particular chapter focuses on the experiential (e.g., visual, auditory, and motor) features of word meanings. The key idea is that, in keeping with theories of grounded/embodied cognition, these concrete features are identical to some of the modality-specific representations that allow us to make sense of our nonlinguistic experiences involving the pertinent types of entities and events. For example, the word “scissors” denotes a kind of household tool with specifications for shape, motion, sound, and manipulation, and considerable research suggests that we store these features directly within some of the same cortical areas that are engaged when we see, hear, and use scissors. Such findings are exciting because they support the intuitive view that words are like instructions for neurally simulating experiences, albeit usually in an automatic, implicit manner. There’s still a great deal of debate, however, about the precise ways in which word meanings relate to perception and action.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

Divine Truthmaker Simplicity (DTS) avoids collapsing God into a metaphysical property by arguing that, to identify God with God’s wisdom, goodness (etc.) is not to identify God with a property, but rather to claim that God is the truthmaker for the predication “God is wise” (etc.). DTS has been the target of a number of recent objections. This chapter explains how Aquinas’s often overlooked distinction between two ways in which a thing can have a perfection – essentially and by participation – enables a response to these objections.

This chapter explores Pablo Neruda’s militant trajectory, asserting that his political commitment was not merely circumstantial but permeated his entire poetic oeuvre. Divided into two sections, the first section scrutinizes the political implications of his work, discernible from Residencia en la tierra onward, where societal issues arising from the crisis of capitalist modernity culminate in a robust Marxist commitment. The second part employs the Foucauldian concept of “parrhesia” to analyze Neruda’s actions and work, emphasizing his explicit commitment in Chile. There, he supported Allende’s socialist government and confronted the challenges of Pinochet’s subsequent neoliberal dictatorship. This analysis underscores the integral connection between Neruda’s political engagement and his lyrical creations, contributing to the recognition of the inseparable political dimension within his poetic work.

This chapter looks at Neruda’s memoirs as an attempt to find a whole in different parts of his self. He embraces his own contradictions, without falling into self-aggrandizement. Instead, the chapter argues, he presents a complex self, at times heroic, other times not at all. In Confieso que he vivido (I Confess I Have Lived), he admits that, as a human being, he is many Pablo Nerudas, and some of these have faults. He felt the need to clarify and correct the way in which the world saw him in human terms. In part, this reveals, of course, the profundity of his debt to the American poet Walt Whitman, who asked his readers to accept him with all his “contradictions.”

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.

This final chapter summarizes key arguments about how the neglect of decentralized property rights and markets as central elements of US environmental legislation can inform overall institutional formation. Although transaction cost efficiencies motivate private institutional change, they have not been major drivers in government policy. Rent-seeking dominates, with implications for institutional formation and human welfare.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.