This chapter returns to the conception of philosophy as the thought of the illimitable object from which Marx began. It then considers how, in the here and now, the actualization of philosophy can be conceived as the actualization of a resurgent absolute idealism. This actualization shows the question of the ‘applicability’ of philosophy to the world to be misplaced: philosophy, being human thought as such, and philosophy actualized the actualization of that, our human thinking life is already its own application to the ‘real’ world. This is brought out by considering that there are, in and around us, pockets of communism—actual, not merely potential.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

The introduction describes the scholastic Latin debate over the relation between the soul and its powers in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. It shows that this debate concerned the question of how a living being’s natural kind, which is determined by its soul, and its kind-specific powers are related. Is a living being’s soul the very same thing as its kind-specific powers, or is its soul perhaps something more basic upon which its kind-specific powers depend? The introduction shows that there were two overarching answers to this question in the thirteenth and fourteenth century: the identity theory, according to which the soul and its powers are identical, and the distinction theory, according to which the soul is distinct from its powers. The introduction first highlights that the debate between identity and distinction theorists already arose in the twelfth century in response to Augustine’s doctrine of the image of the Trinity. It then traces, in broad strokes, the development of the debate from the twelfth century until 1250. Finally, it discusses the phase between 1250 and 1320 focusing on the reception of Aristotle’s theory of the soul in the Latin West.

This text of Bonaventure’s gives a nice indication of how Aristotle begins to influence the debate about the relation between the soul and its powers in the Latin West around the 1250s. In this text, Bonaventure is still very much in dialogue with the earlier debate. He recounts the early twelfth-century identity theory and earlier versions of the distinction theory, and he argues in favor of the version of the distinction theory defended by early Franciscans like Alexander of Hales. As Bonaventure states this latter theory, the soul and its powers are one “in substance” but differ “in essence”, the essential difference having to do with the fact that the powers of the soul, unlike the soul itself, are relations. But Bonaventure also introduces a philosophical innovation into this theory—one that draws on Aristotle. He argues that the powers of the soul, despite being relations, are special types of substances, namely, substances “by a tracing back” (per reductionem). He understands by “substances by a tracing back” imperfect occupants of the category of substance.

Throughout this book, we have suggested that the notion of choruses offers a metaphor through which these diverse collectives can be understood. Granted, this metaphor is not a typical concept that historians ordinarily use to describe community life, such as the association or the network, which seem at first sight to offer a more stable descriptive framework. We nevertheless argue that the choral reference makes it possible to obtain fine-grained knowledge of the modulations of the Athenian city in 404/3, since it is anchored in Greek thought and social practices. Indeed, viewed through the lens of chorality, the Athenian community landscape appears in a new light, defined by plurality and contingency. Legal status is no longer a fixed barrier assigning place to individuals once and for all: Divergent temporalities constantly overlap and weave together the polyrhythmic fabric of the city. The question that guides the whole of our investigation is ultimately about the choral essence of the city. Is it possible to see the Athenian polis, and all the groups of which it is composed, as a choral song? Illustrating the scope of the Athenian social space does not consist only in describing its polyphony, but also in listening to the harmonics, be they consonant or dissonant, which cut across it.

The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.

All his life, Hopkins was either student or teacher of the Classics. School, university, teaching posts, and finally a professorship in Dublin meant that he was engaged professionally with Latin and Greek almost without intermission. There are subjects, topics, or words in his writings which obviously derive directly from those studies, and there are approaches which were plainly learned from his experience. Specific examples of influence are betrayed by words and ideas, but the influence is perhaps more general; in word order, for example, or in the idea of poetry as speech, which connects with his discovery and use of Sprung Rhythm. His understanding of rhythm is the most important thing which his classical studies nurtured. In his university training and in his own teaching rhythm was a central concern. The Classics gave him models to follow, but they also freed him from some conventions of English poetry, which allowed him to write in an original style.

The cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century saw the establishment of physics and astronomy as autonomous spheres. The Ptolemaic universe was a hierarchy of dignity – sun and stars above, lowly earth at the bottom – supported by a hierarchy of disciplines that set theology and metaphysics at the apex of intellectual life. The advancing belief in heliocentrism that undid the first was paralleled by challenges to the second, starting with the humanist celebration of rhetoric and moral philosophy and carried further by Copernicus’s exaltation of astronomy, hitherto assigned the lowly place of a mere computational aid, as a source of truth. The authority of the Church was often restricted by political and cultural divisions, so that many heretical ideas could not be stamped out, and Galileo long found support from Jesuits and even the pope. As he lost it, he sought backing in a wider audience, publishing his writings in Italian rather than Latin, and in a popular style. Newton and his followers would similarly seek to substitute horizontal connections for the vertical ones around which intellectual life had long been organized, demonstrating elements of their theories to popular audiences and explicitly describing the kind of science they favored as “public.”

The Church’s victory in the “Investiture Controversy,” throwing off the domination achieved over it by secular powers following the death of Charlemagne, made it the first domain to successfully assert the right to manage its activities in accord with its own principles. But victory was only partial, leaving spiritual and secular powers facing each other across a field of constantly shifting relationships, giving heterodoxy more room to survive than elsewhere. An early example was the contrast between European universities, established as associations of teachers and students formed to assert autonomy from town authorities, and Islamic madrasas subject to direction by their elite patrons. When the corpus of Aristotelian texts became available, first in Arabic and later in Latin, it was first greeted with enthusiasm by readers of both, followed by suspicion because Greek materialism posed threats to religious doctrines. In Muslim lands, this led to a widespread rejection of philosophical inquiry as a path to truth; in Europe, attempts to impose similar restrictions failed, because university faculties resisted the claims of churchly conservatives to limit what could be taught. In this situation, scholastic speculation generated radical ideas about cosmology and physics, foreshadowing the break with traditional cosmology two centuries later.

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

Since the Greeks, our world has been understood in terms of one of two root metaphors – the world as an organism (“organicism”) and the world as a machine (“mechanism”). With the coming of evolutionary ideas in the eighteenth century, we see that there are interpretations in terms of both metaphors.

In this treatise Bartolus applies the Aristotelian schema of constitutions to the city republics of his own day and argues that for the smallest such cities, such as Perugia, where Bartolus lived and worked, the most appropriate form of government is ‘government by the people’ or regimen ad populum. He argues that aristocracy is preferable in larger cities such as Venice and Florence, and then corrects Giles of Rome’s universal endorsement of monarchy as the best constitution by limiting it to much larger political organizations which hold sway over other peoples. He argues that where monarchy is appropriate at all, elective monarchy is superior to hereditary, and established by law for the Roman empire and for the church. Bartolus uses Roman constitutional development as presented in the Roman law to exemplify the different systems of rule brought into being by the growth in numbers and influence of a people. He casts his treatise in part as a lawyer’s version of the Aristotelian constitutional analysis made popular by the theologian Giles of Rome. The concept of the common good is central to Bartolus’s treatment.

Bartolus analyses the problem of tyranny according to biblical, Aristotelian, and legal authority. Starting from Pope Gregory the Great’s definition of the tyrant as one who rules without right in the commonwealth, Bartolus distinguishes between a tryant for want of just title, and a tyrant who possesses such just title but is tyrannical in his exercise of power. He is particularly interested in the validity or otherwise of legal transactions conducted by tyrants, and by those living under tyranny, and in how to prove by convincing legal means that a tyranny is or was in existence. The concept of fear, which invalidates certain legal agreements if proved, plays a major role in his argument here. He is especially interested in ‘veiled’ or covert tyrants, who have satisfied the legal formalities for legitimate government but are nonetheless tyrants. This leads him to explore the mechanics of popular election. Bartolus complicates the matter by noting that even legitimate governments need to behave in ways defined as tyrannical by Aristotle, and uses the concept of the common good as the ultimate criterion between legitimate and tyrannical rule.