The genre of Islamic juristic opinions (fatāwā or nawāzil) provides a fascinating window into how Muslim jurists—both medieval and modern—have applied theoretical sharī‘a guidelines to actual problems facing their communities. Because Muslim practitioners have historically sought fatāwā (sing. fatwā) on matters ranging from the legal to the ethical to the ritual, these juristic opinions allow us to trace not only the concerns of believers in different Muslim societies over time, but also the moral imagination of the jurists as they grappled with those concerns. In this article, I present a close reading of a fatwā by the late modern Moroccan jurist al-Mahdī b. Muḥammad al-Wazzānī (1849–19231) on the moral value of polygamy versus monogamy. I show how his legal opinion can be fruitfully read in the context of larger debates across the Middle East and Muslim societies over marriage law and ethics. I suggest that al-Wazzānī’s fatwā represents a traditionalist reaction to the wave of modernist-feminist religious reform that was sweeping through the region at the turn of and into the twentieth century, and that sought to discredit the traditional Islamic practice of polygamy in favor of monogamy.

This article argues that the regulation of rents in eighteenth-century Turin played a central role in shaping the city’s social fabric. Focusing on the first half of the century, it examines the process of rent formation culminating in a 1749 edict that condemned excessive increases and introduced new procedures for regulation. By analysing both the causes of rising rents and the criteria used to define fair rents, the article shows how rent-setting operated as a site of clash and negotiation among the competing interests of institutions, landlords and tenants. The procedures and solutions adopted reveal a system of values through which access to the city was defined. In this sense, the rental market emerges not merely as an economic mechanism but as a key arena in which the production, appropriation and transformation of urban space were negotiated and redefined.

Within nationality studies, the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is typically presented as the founding father of liberal-nationalism because of his warning that liberal democratic institutions need to be embedded within the framework of a mononational state. However, the leading Mill scholar in the field, Georgios Varouxakis, has long challenged this designation. Indeed, in the absence of any attempt by other scholars to refute his claim that Mill should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan patriot instead, he has raised the question of whether the conventional view is little more than a disciplinary dogma. This article defends the conventional view through two key moves. First, to counter Varouxakis’ principal objections, we show that Mill’s account of the emergence of nationalities, as a historically progressive phenomenon grounded in an expansion of human sympathies, implies that his concerns about nationalistic indifference or hostility to foreigners do not translate into objections to nationality as such. Second, to counter Varouxakis’ presentation of the cosmopolitan patriot interpretation as a viable alternative to the liberal-nationalist one, we argue that Mill’s ethical and political cosmopolitanism is insufficient to support a liberal-postnationalist interpretation and is instead best understood as an integral component of his liberal nationalism.

This article examines the activism of far-right women who, beginning in the late 1970s, produced the magazine Eowyn. It reconstructs the foundational principles of far-right feminist thought in Italy, which these women self-identified as personalising feminism, situating this framework within the broader currents of contemporary feminist discourse and its cultural referents. The essay further explores the reception of Eowyn by Marxist feminists and far-right male actors, illuminating the tensions and dialogues that shaped the movement. A distinct feminist typology emerges – one that neither repudiates an organicist conception of society nor reduces women’s history to narratives of oppression, while remaining sensitive to the risks of the massification and masculinisation of the female figure. This approach advocates for women’s equal opportunities while offering a sustained critique of a society and state perceived as retrograde, highlighting the complex intersections of gender, ideology, and political culture in late twentieth-century Italy.

This article examines Yujin Nagasawa’s claim that the problem of evil challenges atheists as well as theists. Nagasawa says many atheists hold a ‘modest optimism’ about life, but this optimism clashes with how the world really is if nature is systemically tied to suffering. I explore this ‘axiological expectation mismatch’ through engagement with two short stories: H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. Both stories imagine universes in which there really seems to be an epistemic, emotive, and pragmatic problem of evil for atheists. These stories help test common objections to Nagasawa and suggest there can be a threshold of badness beyond which local gratitude and optimism become hard to sustain. I further argue that common presentations of the evolutionary problem of evil for theists indeed require portraying animal lives and our environment in highly negative terms, leading to the problem of evil for atheists. This supports Nagasawa’s contention that there is some symmetry between theism and atheism on the problem of evil. The comparison with the imagined worlds of Lovecraft and Le Guin highlights how our engagement with literature can advance philosophical discussion, much like thought experiments.

This paper puts forward a novel argument for realism about corporate agents. We begin with the observation that philosophical theories of trust generally require that any putative trustee is a moral agent. We then consider sources of evidence from practice that suggest that people speak, behave, and theorise as-if they trust corporations. This amounts to taking a realist view about corporate moral agency. Corporations can thus be conceived as agents that emerge from, among other things, the individuals, rules, and the internal organisational complexity that constitutes them. Our methodological approach throughout involves arguing that our behaviour and our theorising about a particular kind of entity (the corporation) can be used to justify a position in social metaphysics.

I argue against John, Millum and Wasserman’s position that telic prioritarianism justifies morally acceptable discrimination against persons with disabilities. I propose alternative considerations that explain why disability discrimination in the lifesaving cases JMW discuss is morally problematic.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is a powerful technology that has vast potential to support various aspects of second language acquisition (SLA). Given GenAI’s capabilities, it is particularly relevant for the teaching and learning of second language (L2) writing. Despite its potential, there are also clear hazards and a range of potentially negative side effects, many of which have yet to be explored. Building on existing research, in this piece, I propose a series of six future research tasks that may prove useful for further understanding the affordances and limitations of GenAI for L2 writing. These six research tasks are organized into three interrelated themes, which cover 1) learning processes and outcomes, 2) student use and interactions, and 3) teaching. For each theme, two research tasks are proposed. Each task includes a discussion of what research is needed, why it is needed, along with how scholars might investigate that research task by adopting quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. The goal of this piece is to provide potential research ideas for graduate students and faculty and, ultimately, to foster research–pedagogy connections involving GenAI, L2 writing, and SLA.

Social scientists have paid significant attention to the study of ethnic and religious minorities in Europe, and yet one group that evaded such scrutiny is the Tatars residing in modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland, who are unique in being Europe’s only Muslim community that survived under Catholic rule since the late medieval period. While Muslims in medieval and early modern France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated through a mix of mass expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres, Lithuanian-Polish Tatars survived over six centuries. This article examines this unique case to understand the comparative political dynamics of persecution and toleration across medieval and early modern Europe. The article argues that the interstate and societal configuration of power explains the Tatars’ exceptional survival. The interstate and domestic dynamics are linked in that Lithuanian rulers successfully resisted forced conversion and eventually adopted Christianity on their own terms, which allowed for the preservation and perpetuation of religious sectarian diversity backed up by multiple political stakeholders. In the domestic struggle between monarchs, Papal allies, the Catholic nobility, and non-Catholics, none of the religious sectarian factions could achieve a hegemonic majority, let alone monopolistic control of political and military power, necessary for a coercive religious sectarian homogenization.

Śrīvidyā is a Tantric tradition which includes a form of religious initiation into an esoteric practice. Descriptions of initiation allude to and often describe the initiator sharing an experience with the initiand. In this article, we will suggest that such experiences can be understood in terms of a ‘shared token experience’. To make a case for taking such an experience into account, we use an argument for the epistemic value of religious experience. Our defence of the sharing of token experience across subjects also opens up questions as to the limits of consciousness or subjecthood. The phenomenon of Śrīvidyā initiatory experience also undermines two assumptions regarding what it means to be a subject. The first assumption is that each conscious subject is a unified whole insofar as its different experiential parts are mereologically connected to one subject. The second assumption is that each subject’s experiential field is bounded to one subject such that no two subjects can share the same experiential field. We argue that these assumptions do not necessarily preclude the possibility of a shared token experience.

In the years following independence, history-writing increasingly became a strategic instrument of nation-building and a means of constructing a “usable past.” Using the South African writer Bloke Modisane’s research on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania as its point of departure, this article examines how newly independent African states navigated the politics of historical production in the early postindependence period. Although deeply invested in African history, Modisane was not a formally trained historian and remained on the margins of the emerging Dar es Salaam School of History. His uneasy reception in Tanzania not only underscores the tension between Pan-African ideals and national imperatives, but the challenges faced by intellectuals working outside official or institutional structures. While he never completed his research to the point of publication, revisiting his experience reminds us that the history of African history was also shaped by incomplete, interrupted, and forgotten efforts to write the past.