Japanese society is subject to centrifugal forces that tend to promote diversification in structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations, while a range of centripetal forces drives it towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society, focusing on five key areas.

The first four investigate various aspects of centrifugal forces: the fragmentation of social relations, a significant development affecting the foundations of Japanese society over the past few decades; the rise of social movements in the 2010s despite this trend; the quiet growth of volunteer activities and the role of NPOs and NGOs as a backdrop for dissenting protests, and the shifting landscape of interest groups overall; and the viability of an emic notion similar to citizenship in analyzing the Japanese context.

The final section aims to establish an analytical framework for various forms of centripetal control and to synthesize their diverse characteristics as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ permeating Japanese society.

Considers what the book covers and what it does not. Provides historiographical context about food cultures among the enslaved, many of which focused on what people ate, whether they were “well-fed” and “Mammies” within domestic spaces. Instead, this book centers everyday routines of food distribution, preparation, and consumption among the enslaved, stressing the vital role played by women who cooked for the quarters within slavery’s wider capitalistic development. Explores Black feminist epistemologies offering alternative methodologies where archival evidence is lacking. Questions dominant modes of feminist thinking. Rather than defining homes and kitchens as prisons, they can be refuges from a racist outside world, a “homeplace.” Examines the duality of cooking as a monotonous chore and an expression of love, and the key concept of “othermothering.” Explains how I utilize the terms “nurses” and “age” and my contribution to methodological discussions of primary sources, including WPA narratives, published autobiographies, travel accounts, enslavers’ records (especially postbellum), and archaeological evidence. Elaborates on regionality and temporality within the research.

This chapter motivates the project of the book by arguing against the decompositional picture of action. It is argued that this picture alienates agents from their own actions, by restricting their role to merely providing goals and plans while delegating execution to sub-personal mechanisms. Through analysis of agential control – the distinctive guidance agents exercise over their intentional actions – the chapter demonstrates that standard approaches fail to capture genuine agent involvement. Special attention is given to contemporary reliability-based accounts of control, as well as to approaches that appeal to knowledge-how. Neither approach, it is argued, suffices to avoid the problems with the decompositional picture. The chapter concludes that an alternative account is needed, where the mind is genuinely embodied in overt action. As part of clearing the ground for the arguments that follow, the chapter provides responses to recent, empirically motivated scepticism about the concept of intentional action, and suggests that agential control is the ‘mark’ of intentional action.

This book develops and defends a novel ‘knowledge-first’ theory of intentional action that places knowledge at its core. The project is motivated by problems with the dominant ‘decompositional picture’ of action. The decompositional view treats actions as composed of two separate components: external bodily movements and internal mental states (intentions, desires, beliefs). Such views, it is argued, fail to accommodate a central feature of intentional action: namely, the fact that intentional actions are characteristically actions that are controlled, or guided, by their agents. As a result, the decompositional picture threatens to radically alienate us from our own bodily actions. Building on ideas from Elizabeth Anscombe, this book argues for a non-decompositional account of intentional action that places a certain kind of knowledge – practical knowledge – at its centre. Along the way, a number of related topics are discussed, such as the nature of agential control, skill, and an ontology of actions as hylomorhically structured particulars.

This chapter develops an account of agential control as a capacity for practical knowledge, departing from traditional decompositional approaches that separate mental planning from bodily execution. Drawing on ideas from George Wilson and Elizabeth Anscombe, among others, the chapter argues that exercising control over action consists in knowingly implementing ways of acting, where such knowledge is practical rather than theoretical. Practical knowledge in the relevant sense is not pre-existing knowledge how to do something that is applied in action, but knowledge of what you are currently doing that is manifested in keeping your ongoing action on track. On the proposed view, agents’ epistemic engagement with their own intentional actions constitutes rather than merely accompanies their exercise of control. This non-reductive, knowledge-first account of agential control is defended against objections arising from the gradability of control and from the possibility of unreflective but skilled action. Accounts of skill and knowledge-how are also sketched.

‘Democratic representation’ seems to have no explanatory power for the current structure and operation of universal IOs and a weak justificatory value for upcoming political reforms of these IOs. However, under the benefit of a renewed approach to universal IOs functions and deliberation, which is one of their meta-functions, the creation of new subsidiary bodies designed to accommodate delegates from Non-State Actors (NSAs) and enable, or even compel, intergovernmental bodies to take into account other interests and perspectives appears to be both necessary and feasible, without any reference to contentious criteria of representativeness based on a fragile principle of democratic legitimacy in IL. The alternative to ‘democratic representation’ consists in amplifying diffuse attempts to redesign the institutional architecture of universal IOs and harnessing the potential of international institutional law, implied powers and privileges and immunities regimes for the sake of a genuinely international, transnational and transgenerational deliberation. Concretely, people speaking for sub-state communities (e.g. from the Global South), future generations or natural entities for instance should be given an institutional role within consultative subsidiary bodies, in combination with state representatives or scientific experts, or not – depending on what is necessary for the fulfilment of the IOs functions. The current context of exacerbated competition between more democratic and less democratic states, some of them obviously being authoritarian, also pleads for a modest approach to IOs political reform leaving the concept of democracy unaltered.

Many contemporary international organizations (IOs) are empowered to adopt international law that claims to bind their Member States (and, directly or indirectly, their peoples). Certain IOs have also become members of other Ios or, at least, active participants in international lawmaking processes that claim to bind those IOs and their Member States (and their peoples).Generally speaking IOs play a central role in contemporary international lawmaking: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today, be it through international conferences, international courts, or as IO secondary law. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those Ios may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States’ peoples and, accordingly, under which the international law they have the right or discretion to adopt inside and outside of IO organs and processes may claim to bind those peoples legitimately.

What might entitle agents or agencies that are not sponsored by the state, only by some other social group or organization, to represent their people in an international forum. A state-centred approach would deny that they ever have a title to such a role, while an individual-centred approach would hold that they have as good a title as the state. Both approaches have problems and the paper presents a third, more satisfying alternative. On this approach, such bodies may claim to represent their people insofar as the state enjoys standby control over their proposals, being able to oppose them, should it wish to do so, with a radical veto or a moderate refusal to be bound. Ideally, however, the state with such standby control will be required to allow the proposals to be publicized domestically and to provide reasons for opposing them, if that is what it chooses to do. Under the arrangement proposed, state-independent representatives will be able to explore innovative ideas collaboratively with their counterparts from elsewhere, to identify imaginative solutions to common problems, and to have the opportunity to persuade their own states, under domestic pressure, to fall in line.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ equivocal position within the American literary canon, examining both the institutional challenges to his inclusion and the theoretical strategies scholars have used to argue for his legitimacy. Sean Bolton traces critical attempts to align Burroughs with modernism, postmodernism, and even a proposed “amodernist” tradition, while also acknowledging the persistent difficulty of assimilating his work into stable frameworks of interpretation. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s aesthetics of canonicity, poststructuralist theory, and his own concept of “narrative revolution,” Bolton contends that Burroughs’ formal innovations – particularly the cut-up method and fragmented subjectivities – both exemplify and exceed existing literary categories. Ultimately, the chapter questions whether Burroughs needs the canon at all, suggesting that his enduring cultural influence may rest precisely on his resistance to assimilation. For readers and scholars alike, Burroughs remains an outsider by design, a figure whose work continues to provoke, disturb, and inspire on its own uncompromising terms.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Polina Mackay and James Mackay argue that Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. The chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control. While his metaphoric conflation of disease and power reveals the limits of postwar biopolitics, it also risks collapsing critical inquiry into conspiracy. Ultimately, Burroughs’ viral imagination oscillates between incisive cultural diagnosis and reactionary anxiety, offering a vision of medicine as both metaphor and battleground.

Burroughs’ writing is widely interpreted to depict existence in terms of universal addiction, and a fight against it. This chapter shows the extent to which drug use in his life and work lies outside this simplistic model. His ‘Algebra of Need’ polemics are shown to belong to a specific period, and an account of his career with drugs outlines his opiate use; his excursion into hallucinogens, notably yagé, as psychic exploration; and his chosen literary precursors, notably De Quincey. Burroughs became more comfortable with his dependency in later life, and he finally emphasizes drug use, particularly in an American historical context, as a libertarian political issue. The chapter notes his depiction of drug experience as a potentially valuable subjective space, together with nostalgia and dreaming, and suggests that a common denominator throughout his changing stances on drugs is freedom: not only from addiction, but from the body, and from social control.

The foundation of the chapter is the distinction between regulation and control, and the link between them. The distinction is exemplified by the regulation of body temperature by means of control actions;for example, shivering, sweating, and changing the relation with the environment. The latter reflects motivation. The discussion then goes on to document a number of phenomena that also illustrate regulation and control: non-suicidal self-injury, hair pulling, skin picking, addictions of various sorts, and borderline personality disorder.

The development of new therapeutic methods for intervening in brain function has the potential to influence aspects of a person’s agency, including their autonomy and authenticity. To determine whether or not this is the case, we need an assay that can measure aspects of agency before and after neurointervention. This chapter introduces a framework for thinking about agency as a multidimensional construct, and describes a research project aimed at measuring agency. The authors develop an Agency Assessment Tool (AAT) using survey methods and present preliminary results from the project that shows that the AAT can characterize control and patient groups along several dimensions with a factor analysis; the results show some interesting patterns among putative conceptual dimensions with network analysis. Although the data do not go so far as to include interventions to help understand causal relations, the authors discuss the prospects for using data-driven tools to come up with ontologies of agency.

This chapter explores how psychology and human–AI interaction (HAI) principles shape successful AI products. Using failures like McDonald’s ill-fated AI drive-thru as cautionary tales, it shows how neglecting user needs such as control, trust, and comprehension can cause reputational and product damage. Drawing on human-centered design, cognitive psychology, and UX research, the authors argue that great AI experiences depend on anticipating how humans think, feel, and decide. They outline strategies for embedding empathy, transparency, and explainability into AI, highlighting that these lessons extend beyond engineering teams to anyone influencing AI adoption.

Chapter 12 FROM PUZZLES OF CONTROL, LEARNING, AND FLEXIBILITY TO A THEORY OF SKILLS contends that in order to account for what makes skills distinctive, skills must involve standing knowledge states. I lay out a novel solution to the puzzle of learning by doing, which offers additional reasons to reject the doctrine of essentially intentional actions.

Chapter 2 SKILLS in ACTION argues that skills are keys to understanding crucial notions in action theory, such as intentional action. The idea that intentional actions are constitutively the employment of skills is an attractive thought, and yet, the view has fallen in disrepute. This chapter resuscitates it: I argue that no other capacity—from instincts to habits or talents, to innate general-purpose faculties—can figure as centrally in action theory.