In the late eighteenth century, Johann David Michaelis criticized Moses Mendelssohn for bringing what Michaelis termed his native Jewish tradition into his thinking on universal matters. Yet leaning on Jewish sources had been a key feature of European natural law thinking from the onset of modernity. In this article, the author reads Mendelssohn’s natural law theory as conversant with early modern legal thought that was scrutinized in the enlightenment, shedding new light on Mendelssohn’s innovations and on what Mendelssohn was up against when he offered natural law foundations for toleration. The author finds that arguments for and against toleration of the Jews from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth were tied to the question of whether Judaism contained universal laws or laws particular to the Jews, and suggests that Mendelssohn’s approach, while rejected from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, may be newly relevant today.

Can we formulate a moral theory that captures the moral significance of patterns of group behaviour we cannot affect through our own action while at the same time avoiding the so-called ‘Ideal Worlds’ objection? In a recent article, Caleb Perl has argued that we can. Specifically, Perl claims that one view that does so is his Patterned View: roughly, you ought to act only in accordance with that set of sufficiently general rules that has optimal moral value (Perl 2021: 98). The Patterned View undoubtedly constitutes a welcome contribution to our existing set of moral theories. However, does it avoid the Ideal Worlds objection? In this article, I argue ‘no’.

This article focuses on the 1952 visit to the Jingjiang Flood Diversion Project, the first large-scale water infrastructure built on the Yangzi river after the founding of the People's Republic of China, by a foreign delegation from the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference. Serving as a form of technology diplomacy, this trip advanced two main purposes for the newly established country – to build up closer ties with ‘foreign friends’ who advocated international peace in the context of the Korean War, and to demonstrate China's own technical capabilities and achievements as part of the national campaign of ‘peaceful construction’ of the early 1950s. I argue that vernacular technologies, which were grounded in indigenous knowledge and practices for water control in the mid-Yangzi region, were essential in shaping China's self-reliant modernization and China's public diplomacy, which targeted individuals without scientific or technical backgrounds.

This study discusses the processes of increasing social malaise and an “oppositional mood” in the Cape Verdean island of Santo Antão, where growing frustration between 1975 and 1990 led to the building of massive political opposition against the single-party regime in the archipelago. Early scrutiny of the shortcomings of independent administration, anger about the installation of a new police force, resettlement schemes, a failed agrarian reform, regime violence to achieve that reform, and a generalised mood of decline in the second half of the 1980s, constitute different elements explaining the unrest in that island. Based on newly available, local archives as an innovative source, the interpretation of a remote Cape Verdean opposition island also addresses the potential of studying opposition against “winning parties” and regimes after independence in wider regional frameworks, referring to discontent and “oppositional mood” elsewhere in postcolonial (Lusophone) Africa.

Derek Parfit’s view of ‘personal identity’ raises questions about whether advance decisions refusing life-saving treatment should be honored in cases where a patient loses psychological continuity; it implies that these advance decisions would not be self-determining at all. Part I of this paper argues that this assessment of personal identity undermines the distinction between suicide and homicide. However, rather than accept that an unknown metaphysical ‘further fact’ underpins agential unity, one can accept Parfit’s view but offer a different account of what it implies morally: that the social and legal bases for ascribing a persisting ‘personal identity’ maintain the distinction between homicide and suicide.

In this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994.