Every serious analyst of Britain’s role in global politics understood that the country’s decision to leave the European Union would have a significant – perhaps fundamental – effect on its standing in the wider world and the way it would henceforth pursue its foreign, defence and security policies. It was the biggest strategic reorientation in Britain’s external relations for over half a century; a shift for which the country was completely unprepared and in which the policy establishment was explicitly prevented from doing any contingency planning. With the shock of the Brexit decision in 2016, the prospects for British foreign affairs seemed to range from the excitingly uncertain to the simply dire. In the event, Britain’s standing in the world has both risen and sunk in the decade since, driven by challenges, events and responses only peripherally connected to Brexit issues as they arose at the time. ‘Brexit Britain’ certainly figures in the way the country is perceived internationally, but those perceptions are overlaid by more imperative judgements about how the country now positions itself in response to more fundamental challenges than were ever envisaged in Brexit debates at the time.

We are living through a period of growing global disorder. There are various causes, but one is the declining unity and efficacy of the political ‘West’ – the coalition of countries, including the UK and led by the United States, that came together after the Second World War to defend and promote liberal democracy at home and open markets abroad. For countries like ours, in a changed and changing geopolitical landscape, the challenge is not to build a single new world order, but instead to contribute to what the historian Adam Tooze calls ‘world ordering’. This means coalitions of the willing, on a range of issues, to meet the challenges that people and nations need to face together. This imperative makes Britain’s relationship with other European countries, and the EU, more important, not less. These countries, and the EU, have shared values and interests with the UK. We face a common threat from an increasingly anarchic form of ‘might makes right’ globalisation. So we need to renew our cooperation that was sabotaged by Brexit.

This chapter explores human cognition as a set of interconnected processes – perception, memory, attention, learning, reasoning, and executive function that allow us to adapt flexibly to complex environments. It contrasts human cognition with artificial intelligence, showing how neural networks and transformers borrow inspiration from the brain but lack intuition, context sensitivity, and self-awareness. Through examples from neuroscience and AI, the chapter highlights how both systems process information, learn, and make decisions. It argues that the future lies not in replacing human cognition but in building augmented cognition – partnerships where AI amplifies human thought and creativity rather than substituting for it.

The biggest problem that the vote threw up was precisely the lack of clarity about what would come next; what unexpected surprises were to come next? What would the UK’s departure mean for Britain and for the European Union; what, indeed, would it mean for countries in other parts of the world? Would Brexit start a domino effect in Europe; might it even start a chain reaction elsewhere too, as countries stepped back from international commitments and out of regional or global institutions – and turned their backs on former partners and allies? In the days after the vote, press commentaries around the world began to harden. On 24 June 2016, for example, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that it respected the results and hoped for early agreements between London and Brussels to help clear up uncertainty. Three weeks later, voices in Beijing had a better grasp on what had happened – and in particular realised that the promises given by Brexit’s chief cheerleaders were hopelessly naïve at best and downright dissimulations at worst.

This explores the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) as an example of entanglements of spirituality and psychopathology, and looks at ‘spiritually significant voices’ (identified by those who hear them as having spiritual/religious significance). Some have proposed making a differential diagnosis between ‘genuine’ spiritual experiences and mental illness, but the criteria for making such distinctions can be controversial and misleading, based on a false presupposition that the two are mutually exclusive. Research shows that patients identify some experiences as both part of an illness and spiritually significant. Patients with a psychiatric diagnosis are often subjected to epistemic injustice, wherein their claim to know things (e.g. spiritually) is discredited owing to prejudice associated with their diagnosis. A case study explores entanglement of spirituality with AVHs and considers implications for assessment/treatment. Voices of this kind may be meaningful for those who hear them, whether or not associated with a diagnosis, and affirmation of this and patients’ positive spiritual coping, where possible, can be a positive factor in promoting recovery.

This chapter argues that ‘belief’ is neither the only, nor the most appropriate, concept for understanding the mental and experiential dimensions of Greek religion. It argues that the dichotomy between ritualistic and belief-centred conceptions of religion that has long shaped the debate over Greek religion reflects an underlying dualism of mind and body. Under the influence of this dualism, the domain of religion has been divided into categories of ritual, which belongs to the body, and belief, which belongs to the mind. This chapter draws on recent work in anthropology that seeks to collapse this mind–body dualism to propose a concept of skilled perception as the basis of an alternative approach to religion in the lived experience of the Greeks. This approach is developed through a series of studies of normative and divergent acts of religious perceiving, via a close reading of Theophrastus’ ‘Superstitious Man’ (Characters 16) and a selection of episodes of divination and omen-perception in Herodotus and Xenophon. These studies suggest that we might view Greek religion less as a body of beliefs and rituals and more as a skill for living in a dynamic world.

Learners of a new language must acquire a new inventory of sound contrasts, new restrictions on where sounds may occur and new prosodic structures. The challenges facing researchers are to understand the characteristics of L2 speech and to explain how and why those characteristics arise. This chapter provides an overview of research on how speakers acquire the sound system of a new language, focusing on three major issues: (i) the extent to which L2 sound patterns are influenced by transfer from the first language and/or by linguistic universals; (ii) the level of representation (lexical, phonemic, phonetic, featural) at which L2 acquisition occurs; and (iii) the relationship between the perception and production of the sound system of a new language. These questions are explored with reference to the acquisition of segmental contrasts, restrictions on the occurrence of consonants in different syllabic positions and prosodic structures (tone, pitch accent, stress, and intonation). The chapter concludes with a discussion of recent advances in methodology and in grammar modeling, and outlines directions for future study.

Standard American English is not the same as varieties of English that have emerged from the complex system of the language. It is an institutional construct, to the extent that schools convey the idea of a standard and attempt to teach prescriptions about the language. Usage manuals do not agree about what issues to cover. Some kinds of standardization of language, like standard spelling, are useful for the purposes of electronic communication, and standardization may make it easier to communicate across time and distance. What is more important is the idea of standards, and how that idea plays a role in social relations.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

Chapter 6 considers the ‘perceptual’ version presented autobiographically by Peter van Inwagen but supported conceptually by figures such as David Brown and Mark Wynn. Here sainthood is understood in terms of providing an embodied source of religious experience, and evidence is understood in perceptual terms. More specifically, the perception of divine reality is indirect and materially mediated through the saintly source, and examples are provided from Christianity, Judaism, Sufi Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Japanese folk religion, and secular media. Unlike the propositional version presented in Chapter 5, the perceptual version is inter-religious and does not lead to any specific understanding of divinity.