This chapter is concerned with the decline of Greek and Roman poetry and the rise of European culture in the Middle Ages. The decisive difference between the ancients and the moderns concerns poetry in the widest sense, that is, the culture of beauty. A number of fragments address this difference. The significance of Christian hymns and the Psalms for the European nations is discussed, with particular attention to national traditions in music, language, and the sciences. A distinction is made between the way the northern and southern European traditions use tone and alliteration. The culture of Arabic is seen as a strong influence on the culture of medieval Europe, passing through Spain by way of the troubadours. The difficulties in defining national character or national poetry are discussed, and the value of medieval poetic arts in Europe is described as an awakening of independent thinking and unencumbered judgement. This makes the medieval poetic arts of Europe a gay science, an expansion of the fields of science, and a general unification of the nations.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

This chapter discusses the work of twelfth-century theologians in Paris who laid the foundations for the development of theology as a discipline in the university. These thinkers explored the characteristics and limits of the discourse on God in theological treatises and summae, which employed increasingly sophisticated technical terminology drawn in part from grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

This chapter establishes that the Gospel and Epistles of John do not share a common author, highlighting differences in their reception histories, linguistic features, and ideas.

The chapter examines the extensive parallels between the Gospel and Epistles of John, concluding that these connections result from deliberate literary borrowing. It also presents evidence that each of these works was written by a different author and that they were written in the following order: John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John.

Chapter 6 makes it clear that definitions, categories and expertise have not ended interpretive issues. Definitions are disembodied. All forms of violence and suffering, their definition and recognition remain relational in reality, born out of a labyrinthine complexity – in terms of how they are constructed, communicated, filtered and understood. Preconceptions of who is deserving of recognition, the requisites for social identification, moral commitment or collective empathy reveal this to be the case. Social science takes suffering to be (inescapably) intersubjectively, textually and sensorially understood – so judicial determinations must also go beyond the technical and doctrinal. The chapter’s discussion on temporality continues the theme of sensing. It examines temporal registers in the recognition of torture – exploring the questions: how does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture? This discussion on time adds to the kaleidoscopic catalogue of sense-centric registers and reasoning operating in the anti-torture field – illustrating it to be a device of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter takes its departure from the views expressed by Newtonian humanism, post-Newtonianism, and para-humanism that shape different conceptualizations of power as an instrument of calculable control in small worlds and as a source of incalculable protean power in large ones (section 1). By way of summary, it shows how both kinds of power have operated in the domains of risk and uncertainty in finance, nuclear crisis, and global warming/AI discussed in chapters 4–6 (section 2) and in another ten cases. As the main source of the modern conception of control power Thomas Hobbes articulates a rigid, authoritarian theory of language that fits into a Newtonianism formalized about forty years after Hobbes had published Leviathan. Niels Bohr’s post-Newtonian perspective and its permissive core construct of complementarity differ profoundly from Hobbes’s insistence on the necessity of a sovereign’s total control of language. During the last half century updates of these two positions by social theorist Michel Foucault and physicist-feminist Karen Barad have clarified further the yawning gap that separates them (section 3). The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortuna and the potentialities of protean power (section 4).

This chapter sorts out how we can distinguish small worlds and conditions of risk from large worlds and conditions of uncertainty along three dimensions (section 1). Unnoticed by students of world politics, in many domains of knowledge the twentieth century saw an important collective shift in terminological resources from Newtonian humanism to post-Newtonianism and para-humanism. These two worldviews are therefore discussed (in sections 2 and 3). Both engage uncertainty more openly than Newtonian humanism does. In any field of study, including world politics, “speaking differently” in a new conceptual language can make distinct contributions to understanding – contributions that can be as important as “arguing well” by relying on conventional terminology. In this case, speaking differently helps us rethink the risk-uncertainty conundrum.

This book is designed for readers interested in the rise of absolutism in seventeenth-century France, as well as those interested in language and political discourse of this period. It demonstrates how the political discourse in the late Middle Ages, based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), began to evolve in the 1570s. Though references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they began to be overtaken by the language of the State (le bien de l’État). This evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court, and they accompanied the rise of absolutism in France, as the book demonstrates by analyzing scores of local, regiona,l and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General.

The manipulation of risk and uncertainty by decision makers who are more or less rational and are experiencing more or less fear offers a first cut of the crisis (section 1). A second cut enriches the individual-level analysis by attending to organizational malfunctioning as a potential cause of inadvertent nuclear war. In this analysis political agency is widely dispersed across many layers of the American and Russian militaries (section 2). A symposium on nuclear politics refers briefly to “very innovative” work on nuclear issues without engaging with work in science and technology studies (STS) (section 3). Exemplifying large world thinking, it does away with dualities such as rational and irrational, politics and technology, risk and uncertainty. It integrates human agency, organizational functioning and malfunctioning, and politics across all levels. And embedding the observer fully in a world that does not exist “out there,” it acknowledges the importance of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. In the politics of the crisis, its meaning for different actors, and its effect on shaping the complementarity of risk and uncertainty language matters hugely (section 4). The analysis of nuclear politics has shaped profoundly a widely accepted rational model of war (section 5). And the conclusion illustrates the evolution of a crazy nuclear politics (section 6).

A singularity condition is elaborated. It is discussed how perception can anchor or ground singular judgments. Without a link to perception, there would not be any knowledge of individual objects, since mere concepts cannot secure reference. This fact is also reflected in language. For ‘This F’ in a singular judgment ‘This F is G’ about the perceived scene cannot be divorced from an intuition of that scene. The use of demonstratives like “This” and “That” for direct reference are supplemented with non-conceptual content that comes from outer intuition, with in-built spatial orientation. By way of intuition and attention, there is mental demonstration of particulars, which may or may not be accompanied by overt demonstrations as well, like pointing gestures. Thus, the perceived scene is contained within a demonstrative space, as outlined by all possible embodied orientations of the perceiver in some fixed location or other. Intuition cuts in a perspectival manner from such a demonstrative space, and attention cuts even more finely.

This chapter offers, first, some how-to tips for close analysis of documents and other texts to uncover a greater range and depth of meaning. Examining the choice of words, the grammatical structures, and the leaps of logic within metaphors and other figures of speech can yield fresh insight into the assumptions, the categories of analysis, and the overt as well as the less conscious agendas of historical actors. Cadence, inflection, repetition, and even silences can in this sense “speak.xy4 Physical presentation, cultural practices, and personal behaviors can suggest how leaders oriented themselves toward others and their likely intents. Second, this chapter explains how historians can read sources for evidence of the interplay between more emotional and more rational modes of thinking. Historians studying the emotions do not need training in neuroscience or psychology. Rather, they need to read texts carefully and evaluate such evidence as discussion of emotion, words signifying emotion, emotion-provoking tropes, and bodily actions triggered by emotion. Also significant is language evidencing excited behaviors, ironies, silences – and the cultural milieus of these and other expressions. Like all historical evidence, such signs of emotion should be interpreted and contextualized rather than taken at face value.