Chapter 5 focuses on two biographical compilations of Afro-Argentines who are considered role models for the community. These biographies not only present a written portrait of each individual but also include a corresponding visual portrait, a feature that enriches the compilations. They were an attempt to construct an Afro-Argentine memory and imaginary, and the construction of this collective memory implied affection, bonds of proximity, and even intimacy The inclusion of portraits shows how important images were to the promoters of the publication in their role as mentors of the community. On the one hand, the inclusion of engravings was a way of complying with the precepts of progress and civilization, given the growing development of illustrated publications at the time. On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and recognizing the faces of notable people implied an affective dimension of which Afro-Porteño intellectuals were aware. This was because, in addition to being individuals who enjoyed a certain prestige (to a greater or lesser extent) not only within the group but also in the rest of Buenos Aires society, the members of the community were in almost daily contact with them and their relatives, often as friends.

Chapter 6 focuses on the careers of four artists of African descent in the Rio de la Plata: Fermín Gayoso, Rosendo Mendizábal, Juan Blanco de Aguirre, and Bernardino Posadas. They work in different historical contexts, from the colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. The first was enslaved and was active in the early nineteenth century. Therefore, his trajectory differs from the rest. Mendizábal, on the other hand, was not only a painter but also a politician, maintaining ties to the Buenos Aires elite of the 1850s and 1860s. The historical and social context was quite different for Juan Blanco de Aguirre and Bernardino Posadas. These artists were active in the last quarter of the century, when the project of a racially and culturally homogeneous nation implemented by the dominant groups was in full swing. The analysis undertaken in this chapter provides a glimpse of the situation of Afro-Porteño intellectuals and especially of the few artists of whom we have information, as well as the tensions generated by the educational and promotion projects in which they were involved.

This chapter traces debates on progress and social justice as of the late 1980s. The critique of a medical marketplace, the perceived need to challenge an autonomy-based notion of progress, and a certain sociopolitical optimism all contributed to reimagining medical progress by placing left-wing sensibilities front and center. The rise of the health model underpinning this view of progress emphasized nonhealth factors – including income, education, and housing – that influence the health of communities. Effectively, the idea of health progress lost its narrower “medical” focus and became associated with ambitious projects for achieving social equality. But here too, a single-minded commitment to the notion of progress as health justice comes replete with trade-offs and unresolved tensions. I end the chapter with a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way in which it furthered a vision of health as occurring in a much larger ecosystem than previously thought, and corresponding ideas of progress as social justice.

This chapter begins by returning to a key moment for conceptions of medical progress in the context of civil rights movements when a new awareness of the insufficiencies of medical progress as “merely” scientific knowledge gains led to a sustained interest in knowledge that was empowering for patients. Amid the growing numbers of people who challenged the focus on scientific progress, many turned to freedom as a new concept for grounding progress in medicine. At times, this went together with more holistic views of personhood and health and the desire to put self-determination at the heart of theories of progress. Other, related trends acknowledged the potential contradictions between freedom and progress head-on and argued that taking individual freedom seriously implied challenging traditional, scientific/technological forms of medical progress. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of several recent instances, including personalized medicine, in which technological progress is presented as being highly compatible with individual empowerment and liberation.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

The epilogue considers one possible future incarnation of the idea of progress in medicine, namely progress as achieving sustainability. Despite the fact that environmental concerns have long been associated with reimagined ideas of progress, aspirations for sustainability remain underdeveloped in medicine. Nevertheless, this epilogue discusses the cases in which the concept of medical progress has been coupled with “sustainable” or “green” medicine. Visions of sustainable medical progress tend to presuppose a multidimensional concept of medical progress, call for expanding the time frame in which progress is assessed, and posit environmental limits as constraints on open-ended progress. At the same time, few of these visions engage with the pluralistic nature of medical progress, preferring to understand measures that support a robust natural environment as intrinsically good for the health of individuals and societies, and broadly aligned with the goals of conventional medicine.

This book examines contemporary progress rhetoric and its history by focusing on medicine, a field that has become the touchstone of the focus on progress. In recent decades, the term progress has been used by a wide range of people, including politicians, scientists, engineers, physicians, and patients, to make sense of medicine’s past developments, current achievements, and desired future. Large, private companies such as Meta and Google, for example, link artificial intelligence research and genomic analysis to progress in medicine and praise their own contributions for that reason. Using a philosophically informed historical approach, this book argues that debates about progress in medicine are always political debates underpinned by different interests, which reflect distinct approaches to persons, health, and society. It draws on academic engagements with the history and philosophy of progress, as well as the insights of physicians, patients, and tech actors, to show how medical progress can hold multiple meanings simultaneously.

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, while useful for moving past the ecological limitations of the standard reading, is limited insofar as it focuses on individual actors—consumers, citizens, and politicians in particular. Kant’s ethical thought emphasizes individual humans rather than economic and political systems, and his teleological thought appears scientifically outdated. This chapter asks whether these aspects of Kant’s thought need revision. It begins by placing Kant in dialogue with Darwin and Marx, pursuing a critical discussion on the human species and political systems in the context of the Anthropocene. The Kantian reply, I suggest, encourages us to reconsider Kant’s philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology. Kant’s ideas are significant for the climate crisis insofar as they enjoin normative reflection on the human species globally and in the long term. I conclude with critical reflections on Kant’s racism and sexism as obstacles to reading Kant in the Anthropocene.

This chapter describes the excitement surrounding scientific progress as a driver of medical progress in the Cold War and subsequent theoretical and practical challenges. Medicine, for skeptical theories, was a powerful example that there is no such thing as knowledge that continually approaches the truth, that even the body is historical, and that knowledge is always a tool of the powerful. From the medical side, some respondents were adamant that scientific knowledge about the body is “real” and that medicine is uniquely immune to uncertainties inherent in relativistic accounts of knowledge. The chapter concludes by analyzing two recent examples, evidence-based medicine and health artificial intelligence, which have been praised as objective examples of a particular kind of medical knowledge progress. Throughout, I show the implications for medical progress of larger debates about the progress of knowledge, as well as how an excessive focus on biomedical knowledge gains neglects other, important dimensions of progress.

We return to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to emphasize the core feature of human rights: Human rights are defined, envisaged, and enshrined in international law as a universal and inalienable rights. Systematic and scientific academic research is essential for understanding where and why human rights are violated, and to be able to predict and to prevent abuse in the future. The growing body of empirical research of the academic community provides an increasingly detailed and expansive knowledge base grounded in real-world observations, shedding light on why so many individuals are denied their human rights and, consequently, their ability to live in dignity. In many places, public debates and political decisions become more polarized, playing out different groups against each other, and attempting to deny some people their basic rights and their humanity

Taking E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf as case studies, this chapter examines the relationships – both clear and opaque – among their lives, their writings, and social progress. From a bird’s-eye view, these interrelations seem clear and linear: sexual tolerance and freedom have expanded since Bloomsbury’s time, signal forms of progress to which these authors’ unconventional loves and sensitive writings contributed. But seen from more intimate angles, these interrelations betray lacunae and discontinuities worthy of modernism. Their lives and writings were often not in sync: they wrote about things they had not experienced (Forster on sexual intimacy), feared things that did not befall them (Woolf foreseeing marriage as a catastrophe), avoided taboo topics (Forster on homosexuality), or failed – due to their lack of vocabulary – to describe avant-garde lifestyles they were enjoying (Woolf on urban tribes, Forster on polyamory). For all their articulateness, it would require later generations, including Bloomsbury’s respondents such as Angelica Bell and Michael Cunningham, to clarify how Woolf and Forster contributed – for good or ill – to the ever-evolving phenomena of intimacy.

China’s property law framework is underpinned by a series of fundamental laws and statutory reforms that define the ownership, usage and transfer of both urban and rural property. These statutes not only reflect the evolution of property law in China but also highlight the country’s ongoing efforts to balance state control with private property rights, aiming to foster economic development while ensuring social stability and equity. The dynamic nature of China’s property law framework continues to evolve in response to domestic and international economic pressures, requiring continuous analysis and adaptation. Notwithstanding the ongoing signs of progress, Chinese property law faces several challenges that stem from rapid economic development, urbanization, ideological inertia and the legal complexities of transitioning to a market-oriented economy. Rather than a linear transition to private ownership, China’s institutional reform of rural land markets is more complex than orthodoxy economic theory, law and development theory suggests.

In his sermons, Augustine applies his more theoretical considerations of God’s impact on human willing to the concrete, day-to-day challenges of his flock. As he seeks to spur his congregation on in its mundane struggles of will, Augustine develops an account of God’s grace and our willing that is at once starkly realistic about human limitations and hopeful about what God can do in and for the faithful, even in this life. While Augustine frankly forecasts that ongoing wrongful desires, painful curative procedures, and inner turmoil will be the norm, he also emphasizes that love eases these burdens, enabling genuine progress and human contributions. The resulting vision carries, rather than dissipates, the energy generated by the biblical friction between such realistic and optimistic assessments of God’s mercy at work in human life. In this sense, Augustine’s preaching on God’s grace and our willing is charged, never neutral.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.