This chapter introduces the reader to the basic structure and history of the international legal system, including the relationship between law and politics and the nature of the international legal order. It is intended to put the reader in a position to understand the role played by international law within the system of international relations. The historical development of international law from its early origins in, for example, the ancient Middle East, through Roman law and the concept of the jus gentium (law of peoples), and the Renaissance to the founders of modern international law, such as Vittoria and Grotius, and onto the nineteenth century and later is surveyed. The chapter refers to the concepts of positivism and naturalism and looks at communist theories of international law in Russia and China. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of the role and position of Developing Countries (Third World; Global South).

Until recently, Wilfrid Sellars’s connection to pragmatism was seen mostly as tangential by analytic pragmatists influenced by him and by anti-analytic ‘classicalist’ pragmatists alike. Recent scholarship in the history of pragmatism, however, has begun to recover him as a genuine member of that tradition. Similarly, John Dewey, whom no one would challenge as a genuine pragmatist, is often seen by classicalists as fundamentally opposed to the kind of analytic philosophy that Sellars represents and by analytic pragmatists as having some good ideas but not very successfully bringing them to fruition. This too is conventional wisdom best overturned. A fresh-eyed interpretation of Dewey’s work shows that Dewey is a major influence on the development of Sellars’s pragmatism, namely that Sellars’s account of conceptual intentionality in nature is both a critical reaction to and development of Dewey’s naturalistic view of conceptual meanings. In particular, Sellars’s account of rule-following behavior and pattern-governed behavior builds upon Dewey’s account of the relationship between conceptual activity in reasoned discourse and intelligent habits of action in ordinary affairs. By illuminating this influence of Dewey on Sellars, we see that Sellars and Dewey are in the same pragmatist tradition of thought about mind in nature. Further, appreciating this influence shows that Sellars’ view departs from an important tenet of Dewey’s pragmatism, and in doing so makes his view vulnerable to an objection that Dewey’s is not.

The austere scientific naturalism that gained ascendancy during the twentieth century led many philosophers to embrace error theory about morality; others lapsed into what Sidney Hook called “the new failure of nerve,” fleeing into supernaturalism. Sellars formulates his own theory of practical reasoning to be consistent with his austere naturalism. His Kantian view is that to be a practical rational agent implies – as a conceptual matter – membership in the community of moral agents (SM Ch 7 §144). Thus, Sellars attempts to show that to act on moral requirements is to act autonomously. However, Sellars rejects Kant’s individualistic conception of reason in favor of an understanding of reason as social. Further, Sellars attempts to situate reason within a purely naturalistic framework. For Sellars, understanding morality and autonomy as related in this way solves a variety of deep problems in moral theory – such as reconciling the existence of moral imperatives with an austere scientific naturalism; explaining the categorical validity of such imperatives; and explaining how moral reasons have their own original authority, not reducible to reasons of prudence. This is Sellars’s reply to the challenge of naturalism – and his path to avoiding the “new failure of nerve.”

This chapter raises the question of whether in Kant’s view there is a psychological mechanism or entity that renders an individual’s virtuous moral character or Gesinnung abiding and stable. Several recent Aristotelian interpretations of Kant that aim to identify a parallel between Kant and Aristotle in this regard are being discussed. These readings seek to identify psychological structures inherent in a person’s empirical character that render support to a person’s good Gesinnung. The readings are challenged on the grounds that such psychological structures cannot provide support, either as necessary and sufficient conditions or as enabling conditions, for excellent moral choice in Kant. What results from this is a picture of human moral identity as fundamentally precarious and exposed to uncertainty which is radically unlike the Aristotelian conception. The chapter closes by showing how this Kantian picture naturally opens up a space for divine grace to intervene in human moral life.

Deals with divine actions: are events in the world caused by divine interventions or by laws of nature? If both, which dominates? While some Jewish thinkers maintain that God is the only cause of anything, and that belief in other causes is a form of paganism or idolatry, others surprisingly endorse some form of naturalism (the idea that events in the world are brought about by natural causes). In the chapter I explore, through Jewish texts reasons that have been used to ground a theistic naturalist position.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

The primary significance of scientific theories, laws, models, etc. lies in how they enable prediction and control of some part of the world that interests us. Pragmatists see this as the whole story with science; science is problem-solving inquiry that helps us when our habitual anticipations and practices fail us. What scientific inquiry delivers is new modes of prediction and control that resolve such problematic situations. Further talk of “pure” science, of the role of “explanatory virtues” beyond the empirical and practical, the pragmatist is wont to dismiss as “quasi-religious” and metaphysical claptrap. All of this is right, except the dismissiveness and the epithet “claptrap.” There is a perfectly pragmatic account to be given of this other (genuine and important) element of science, and it depends on taking seriously the social and personal role of religion and mythos. We may need science to play a key role in this secular age: providing synoptic understanding of the place of humanity in the universe and the meaning of it all. This suggests complex criteria for the synthetic and visionary parts of science that can fulfill this role.

This chapter chronicles the wide range of theatrical styles at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to the melodrama, farce, and pantomime popular throughout the century, the period saw the development of more experimental forms such as the well-made play and Naturalism. Michael Field as dramatists were both inspired and confounded by this range of theatrical possibility. While their prose drama A Question of Memory was performed by J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society, the majority of their dramatic work – written in intricate verse, historically rich, and often requiring elaborate staging – proved unperformable during their lifetimes. The chapter argues that in this Michael Field were representative of late-Victorian women dramatists more broadly: while many of the plays associated with the New Drama told women’s stories, the act of telling remained the prerogative of men.

This chapter explores an anticolonial critique of emerging postwar international jurisprudence particularly as it pertains to war, using the dissenting opinion of Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal during the Tokyo Trials as a case study. Pal’s critique of Allied uses of sovereignty and international law reflected a larger concern with the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the postwar era, with Pal’s concern being that both continuities and discontinuities in international law continued to maintain unequal relations of power that shape the international order. Pal challenged the conclusions of the other judges at the Tokyo Trials by asserting that the world had not yet become an international society that could truly adopt international criminal law in a just sense. While Pal’s approach to sovereignty and international law contains various challenges and is not a simple prescription that could be easily applied, his dynamic and ambitious vision aimed to equalize the world and therefore represents an aspirational anticolonialism that was lost in subsequent generations of Third World lawyering.

This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

This chapter takes up Zola’s self-portrait as Saint Thomas in the wake of his much-commented visit to Lourdes in 1892. The novel he went on to write about the Pyrenean shrine, ‘that divine land of dreams’, was largely based on those supposedly miraculous events he had witnessed, and about which he remained sceptical. This chapter looks to Zola’s Lourdes (1894), in conjunction with the heated polemic it provoked, to better understand the stakes of the author’s divisive foray into matters of Catholic practice and dogma. More than an expression of Zola’s anti-clericalism, the novel aroused debates that were aesthetic as much as ideological, as adversaries argued over questions of representation, proofs, facts, documents, and faithfulness. The chapter reads a set of material penned by Catholic detractors, who were determined to defend the divine status of the miracle, casting Zola’s naturalism as an illegitimate, unbelievable – even, à la limite, idealist – aesthetic mode.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.