The book’s introduction explains the history of thought experiments in philosophy. It also describes Hans Christian Ørsted’s interactions with Kierkegaard and his influence on Kierkegaard’s concept of Tankeexperiment. The introduction outlines the ways in which thought experiments make thoughts meaningful by providing immediate presentations.

In two of Kierkegaard’s earliest works, The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, imaginary construction (i.e., thought experiment, or Experiment) is often characterized negatively. However, the three core features of thought experiment shared by Ørsted and Mach also begin to emerge, laying foundations for a more positive view in other works. Kierkegaard’s characterizations of thought experiment indicate that imaginary construction guides mental action. This focus contrasts with the standard emphasis in Kierkegaard scholarship on thought experiment as supplying the concreteness of (empirical) actuality. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard critiques irony as a retreat from reality but also shows it can be used to achieve new kinds of wholeheartedness and unity. In this chapter, I will argue that thought experiments can similarly lead the experimenter away from reality but, like irony, may also be a useful tool for self-development.

This chapter explores aspects of individual visions and visionaries that increase the traction to create social change. It begins by examining epistemic gaps – knowledge deficits that inspire visionary ideas – and the role of imagination in addressing these gaps. The chapter then focuses on compelling narratives, discussing the importance of storytelling, relatable characters and moral alignment in crafting transformative visions. It continues by discussing the factors that enable a vision to be spread, such as social identity and network positions that bridge social divides. The chapter also considers how visionary ideas interact with group dynamics and system attributes that facilitate or hinder change. Case studies of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Karl Marx are presented: transformative visions arise from unmet needs; are effective when they offer innovative social relationships; are marked by clear, moral narratives; are more likely to emerge in societies with diverse, autonomous subgroups; and spread via networks of higher trust.

Cas Wepener argues that there is a closer connection between liturgics and homiletics than one usually assumes. The proclamation of the Word has always been a crucial part of the Church’s liturgical services, but, maybe more significantly, it continues to co-shape the contexts in which its relevance can be shown and lived.

Much useful attention has been focused on Kant’s views of the relation between language and thought, as well as the relation between grammar and logic, asking especially whether Kant thinks that the activity of thinking depends on or involves linguistic phenomena – that is, whether Kant upholds the linguisticality of thinking. Here I focus instead on the relation between language and ‘the senses,’ and sensibility more generally. After sketching what such an interpretation might look like and providing some initial textual grounds for its support, I then turn to some of the details of accounts of the linguisticality of sensibility among Kant’s historical predecessors (Berkeley, Baumgarten), to help round out and deepen our understanding of what sorts of commitments might go into such a view, before returning to the closer examination of Kant’s own texts. I conclude that Kant does in fact maintain a fairly well-developed version of the linguisticality interpretation of sensibility, and raise some questions about what this means for the linguisticality of thought itself.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

Chapter 5 focuses on the narrative shaping of the sense of self and of the process of transforming it in psychotherapy. We can advance our understanding of the sources of rhetorical power of metaphor through some version of the constructs of myth and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative structures of the self and other produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily or existentially given in meaning. Metaphor links the narratives of myth and bodily experience through imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective quality space. Examples from contemporary psychotherapy illustrate how healing metaphors can transform sense of self and personhood. While this approach is most obviously applicable to psychotherapy and other talking cures, which use language to reconfigure experience, it captures a discursive level of sense-making that is an important part of all forms of symbolic healing, whether during ritual actions, as part of the prior construction of expectations, or in subsequent interpretation of outcomes.

Describe the development of imagination, creativity, and flexible thinking; understand how children express their creativity in their drawings, their imaginary worlds, and in what they are willing to believe; provide examples of how children’s imagination is grounded in their everyday experience.

Summarising how economists have historically studied families from the nineteenth century to the present, we recall that economists developed methodologies in response to how they imagined and constituted the problem of family poverty in different periods. In contemporary times, concerns for poverty-alleviation have increasingly featured concerns for justice across gender, race, and ethnicity. We also recall how family economists prioritised some social and political problems over others, leaving significant injustices uncontested. These findings encourage reflection on how we define the social problems of families today. Describing the small body of economics on the relation between family behaviour and a sustainable biosphere, the book closes with a provocation. If each period of family economics has relied on an act of imagination to formulate the family-relevant social problems worthy of consideration, how might we constitute the problem of family poverty today, consistent with justice across gender, race, and ethnicity, while also tackling the very urgent need for a biosphere capable of supporting human life? How might we imagine living well and dying well today, on a damaged planet undergoing ecosystem collapse? And how might economists assist families to tackle this problem, today?

This chapter argues that beliefs are causally effective representational states. They admit of two main kinds: episodic and semantic forms of memory. These are argued to be distinct, although they have overlapping origins. The chapter also discusses the states often described as beliefs that result from one making up one’s mind (forming a judgment), but many of which are really commitments (a type of intention). The relations between episodic memory and imagination are also discussed. The chapter then examines the idea that moral judgments can be directly motivating, showing that it contains an element of truth. Finally, the chapter critiques a claim that has become popular among armchair-philosophers, that knowledge is a basic kind of intrinsically factive mental state.

This chapter explores the merchant houses of the port city of Rander, which were built by families involved in major colonial enterprises from cotton to shipping, to sugar and oil production, across an Indian Ocean geography from Durban to Rangoon. The continued attachment of these families to the old port, despite their residence in places across the Indian Ocean, suggests the significance of domestic space to wider colonial economic markets, ideas of family, and historic belonging in Gujarat. The chapter centers themes of travel, work, friendship, loss, celebration, and dwelling, as well as the impact of the 1857 rebellion and Muslim reformist movements on the built space of the port. The chapter also engages with contemporary merchant families and their relationships to their homes as sites of Indian Ocean pasts. In exploring the port’s homes and the itineraries that they orient, the chapter presents a nuanced interpretation of how the past is inhabited by port residents and the histories preserved through their efforts.

Chapter 3 opens with the haveli of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) in the Gujarati city of Navsari to explore entanglements of home spaces, local libraries, and histories related to the Parsis. Turning from the colonial archive to the vernacular library and reading room, the chapter examines the nexus between the homes of Parsi capitalists who migrated to Bombay, merchant-sponsored libraries, and Parsi histories authored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These texts (community histories, genealogies, and city histories) were occupied by questions of place, settlement, and community. The chapter argues that the late eighteenth-century relocation of Parsis down the Indian Ocean coastline from old Gujarati ports to British colonial Bombay was a key dimension of this literature. The publication of these texts, the new views of gendered belonging they hold within them, and the creation of libraries in old ports indicate the archival energy generated by colonial capitalism. The chapter places Parsi vernacular historical production within a broader context of colonial thinking on race and gender.

This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.

In this chapter, Ezrahi analyzes the influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau, as well as the Federalists, on the shift from a medieval monistic cosmology based on God to a modern dualistic cosmology, emphasizing dynamic Nature and human agency. These thinkers played a pivotal role in shaping a political order and obedience independent of divine authority, turning to Nature as the source of laws and a check on human actions. This transformation led to the emergence of new concepts, such as the state, freedom, and equality, despite their being imaginative. Hobbes pioneered the use of metaphors and empirical sciences in civic affairs. Spinoza adopted a detached scientific perspective, viewing human emotions and drives as natural phenomena. Locke presented empiricism and probability to inform political decisions through an understanding of human judgment. Vico proclaimed that political systems are based on collective political imagination, facilitating the construction of institutions and political processes rooted in commonsense. Rousseau further developed the dichotomy of Nature/Culture, highlighting its impact on politics, education, and ethics. The American Revolution marked the merging of objective Nature and human agency, giving rise to the idea of employing science to manipulate Nature.