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.

The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. The focus is not just on what the plays represent but on what they do and how they inspire and unsettle the political imaginations of their audiences. The Introduction sets out the intellectual heritage underpinning this approach, including the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou). It thereby establishes a negative political theology that challenges the official (or positive) political theology that sacralises power. By outlining “the disruptive spirit of negativity”, it shifts critical focus from the mimetic to the affective and opens new and more nuanced readings. The approach builds on the work of critics such as Annabel Patterson, Andrew Hadfield, and Chris Fitter, who have highlighted the anti-monarchical or popular political forces at play during the period. In the via negativia, however, it explores a very different origin and mode of egalitarianism. It focuses on the way negativity and unsettlement imaginatively transform political thought and relations. Shakespeare’s drama opens up visions of something other, including radical experiences of the “perhaps” or “what if”, that deepen the audience’s political thought.

On the standard “Wollheimian” reading of Collingwood’s aesthetics, Collingwood held that something is art in the true sense of the word when it involves an act of “expression” – understood in a particular way – on the part of the artist, and that artworks in all art-forms are “ideal” entities that, while externalizable, exist first and foremost in the mind of the expressive artist. I begin by providing a fuller account of the Wollheimian reading. I then survey challenges to and defenses of this reading, identifying residual difficulties confronting anyone who seeks to defend Collingwood. I attempt to resolve these difficulties by developing the idea that we take at face value Collingwood’s (overlooked) claim that the work of art is identical to the expressive activity of the artist rather than being identical to the expressive product of that activity, reading this claim in light of Collingwood’s talk about the painter as one who “paints imaginatively.”

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

In this chapter, I present findings from interpretive analyses of the data as they relate to the multiliteracies and translanguaging practices engaged in by six Black Caribbean immigrant English-speaking youth across their Bahamian and Jamaican Caribbean home countries and the US. Specifically, I contextualize these findings within (decolonizing) interpretive analyses that clarify the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies informing students’ multiliteracies and translanguaging practices. This chapter shows how the literacies of Black immigrant youth are enacted holistically by adeptly illustrating the languaging associated with these literacies and the ideologies influencing these literacies. Based on these findings, I propose and discuss the framework of semiolingual innocence for understanding how elements of multiliteracies and translanguaging practices as well as the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies intersected to clarify the literacies leveraged by Black Caribbean immigrant youth. In turn, through semiolingual innocence emerging from transracialization of the Black immigrant as an analytical prism, I invite a reinscribing of the innocence of Black youth, whose ancestors have for centuries leveraged semiolingually, sans white gaze, their multiliteracies and semiotics for agentively reading and writing themselves into the world. Moreover, I argue for a semiolingual innocence of all youth, made possible through the cultivation of translanguaging and transsemiotizing imaginary presents and futures.

J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.

This chapter discusses psychic contemplation as our participation in the contemplation of the World Soul, who creates the sensible world and time. As a result, we see the world as becoming alive and we transcend time by finding in ourselves the peace and rest of Nature, the lower power of the World Soul. The main faculty in ourselves which participates in Nature is imagination (and memory), although Nature herself doesn’t entertain perception, imagination, or memory. When we ascend to this level, we begin to live in the present, mindfully awake to our sensible experience, but also having a sense that we are something different from it. Sensible experience no longer deceives us because we see the sensible world in and through its archetypes, which are the logoi in Nature. Like a geometer who sees the intelligible structure of the square in squared sensible shapes, we intuitively see the essence of things (“what it is”) revealed to us through their qualities (“what it is like”).

This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

The Conclusion draws together the themes of the book, and expands on how the foregoing discussions of art relate to ordinary life and love. Expanding the categories of ‘finding’ and ‘making’ by that of ‘receiving’, it sketches a constructive vision of the theological imagination.