This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of some key aspects of Sellarsian inferentialism, addressing two main problems. The first problem is the language–world relationship: if meaning is the use of an expression, how exactly are extra-linguistic objects relevant to the meaningfulness of expressions? The correct use of an expression entails its use in the appropriate non-linguistic circumstances, but the correlation between a linguistic predicate and an object, even when ostensible, must not be understood as a meaning relation.The second problem concerns the ontological status of Sellarsian linguistic notions, such as roles and functions. Given that Sellars is a nominalist, how can we avoid concluding that he introduces new kinds of universals: linguistic? Although inferentialism requires the ability to categorise expressions, categorisation can be successfully done using linguistic distributive sortals, which translate property and kind talk into the talk of linguistic tokens. Therefore, there is no need for Platonic or linguistic universals. Explanation through human practice is sufficient.

For financial and personal reasons, Eliot was keen that Adam Bede should be popular, but that aspiration necessarily brought the novel into competition both with popular culture and the popular fiction by women that Eliot had criticised in 1856. Adam Bede explicitly recognises the challenges of its publishing context, and seeks, whilst exploiting some of the interests of popular fiction, to educate its readers both about the responsibilities of the novelist and their fiction to practise a responsible form of realism, and the readers’ own capacity for more substantial fare. The overwhelming popularity of Mrs Poyser and her home-spun wisdom sites the novel’s popularity in the nostalgic appeal of country life, but primarily, as the reviewer Anne Mozley argues, in its developing the reader’s sympathy with ordinary people, and in establishing a link with the reader based in the harmonious creation of memories of familiar places and emotions.

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

The history of astronomy and the history of philosophy are inextricably fused. This chapter highlights some of the dramatic episodes when astronomy confronted philosophical issues in metaphysics – questions regarding the objects astronomy studies; in epistemology – what is the most fruitful way to acquire knowledge in astronomy? And finally the ultimate existential question – what kind of a science is astronomy? Is it even a natural science at all?

Philosophical problems infuse the theory and practice of astronomy, including metaphysical foundations and influences, the limits of reasoning as in black holes and the multiverse, the problematic nature of observation and inference ranging from the canals of Mars to dark matter and dark energy, the role of technology and science policy in our present understanding of the universe, and the epistemological status of astronomy and its central concepts, including space and time, life and intelligence. The conceptual and methodological foundations and challenges of astronomy have not received systematic attention as they have in other fields such as philosophy of physics and biology. Here we argue for a unified history and philosophy of astronomy to include not only classical astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology but also space science and astrobiology. Examining such influences is an important step toward scientific advance. In this volume, fifteen historians of science, ten philosophers of science, and five scientists combine to analyze these influences. In addition to being useful for astronomers, historians, and philosophers of science, for the first time a book on the philosophy of astronomy is written for a broad audience.

Chapter 8 addresses the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, and examines Swift’s definition of humans as animals merely capable of reason, not inherently rational. This definition is influenced by, and influences, international politics and thought. The parable of angelic horses and bestial humans remains the interpretive crux of Gulliver and Swift’s entire body of work. The international dimension contradicts the scholarly consensus that Swift’s Hobbesian view of human nature led him to seek refuge in a political ideology of absolutism and authoritarianism. Swift insists on the indispensable role of liberty and reason even in nature, thus differentiating the state of nature from the state of war. While he deflates revolutionary idealism and utopianism, and implicitly undermines schemes of “perpetual peace” and world government, he also hints at the benefits of social institutions that promote peace, good governance, and productivity.

This chapter analyzes Lane’s clever use of combinations of geographical, temporal and formal markers in his titles, alternative titles and subtitles to indicate to borrowers and buyers what kind of story a volume contained and explains how this book’s chapters follow and explore the taxonomy he designed. The second section describes the construction of Lane’s principal genres and the sophisticated methods of imitative writing used to compose them. These overlaid romance with realism and made repetition-with-difference a primary mode of communication to engender the Press’s characteristically innovative, modular and debating texts. The chapter concludes by using Clara Reeve’s arguments in The Progress of Romance (1785) to contrast the Aesthetics of Originality which we have inherited from the Romantics with the Aesthetics of Reuse which had been used since the Renaissance to notice and evaluate the “beauties” of imitative writing, and which ordinary readers still use today.

Lane ignored Perrault in favor of repeatedly publishing and repurposing his rival seventeenth-century French conteuses, most notably Mme D’Aulnoy. While addressing many of the same domestic and political issues as Minerva Terror Fiction and Minerva Historicals, these contes de fée unsentimentally performed their promise, “Whatever you wish you shall have,” while warning readers to be careful what they wished for. The second section considers novel Minerva fictions that preempted nineteenth-century realism by infusing magical fairy-tale materials into novels conducted in the real world.

I theorize that a state’s foreign policy objectives depend on a combination of its intrinsic foreign policy motives—which I call a principle—and its historical context. States can prioritize different principles, such as nationalism, security, or prestige. Depending on the principle, the specific issues a state cares about most depend on its historical context. For example, states intrinsically motivated by nationalist projects prioritize territories they historically controlled, whereas status seekers may prioritize colonies. I develop a structured way to study how an observer’s threat perceptions form and change when a rival holds these more complex preferences and the observer has some information about the rival’s historical context. I show that rationalist threat perceptions change unevenly in response to a rival’s costly military actions through a novel mechanism that I call “qualitative inferences.” This mechanism is qualitative because states rely on historical information about how a rival’s specific demands serve particular principles (e.g., Hitler’s demand for Austria held historical significance, whereas Uganda would not), rather than on the scope of those demands or rates of militarization (e.g., 1/2, not 3/4, of Austria).

I test my predictions about the timing of competition and peace through a medium-N analysis of the universe of great power cases since 1850. My central hypothesis is that great power relations devolve into competition shortly after an emerging power takes actions that contradict its declared principles. I otherwise expect peace following a period of hedging. This holds even when the emerging threat makes territorial demands and militarizes in support of a limited principle. The analysis supports this prediction: in 12 of 14 cases, competition emerges within two years of the emerging power’s first inconsistent action, outperforming key predictions of realism and power transition theory. Through four case vignettes—Hitler’s rise, Prussian unification, Anglo-American relations circa 1900, and Anglo-German relations circa 1900—I demonstrate how my theory applies across diverse historical and cultural contexts. This approach contributes to explaining patterns of competition and peace by providing deeper insight into cases that existing power-based theories struggle to address.

Researchers expect that the origins of great power rivalries are especially conflict-prone because emerging threats must militarize to pursue their core interests, and status quo powers are uncertain about their rivals’ strategic intentions. These researchers are puzzled because historical great powers often avoided conflict entirely (e.g., Anglo–American relations circa 1900), or for years, even as one state rapidly militarized and took territory (Anglo–German relations circa 1940). I review the strategic challenges emphasized in the two main theoretical approaches used to study this setting, and the remaining puzzles each approach reckons with: the trust problem studied by realists and the commitment problem studied by power transition scholars. I argue that important insights are gained by studying the interaction of these two strategic problems. I develop a new formal model that produces the interactive trust and commitment problems commonly observed in historical cases of great power rivalry, affording a structured way for future scholars to study them.

The concept of “scale” has become central to environmental debate. The challenge is that issues of a planetary nature resist being treated adequately, or even sometimes perceived, at the individual, national, or regional levels on which human thought, attention, and politics almost always operate or “make sense.” Such scalar dilemmas, practical, cognitive, and ethical and political, have been the focus of a small field of “scale critique” (Woods, 2014) and “scalar literacy” (Horton, 2019) studying how underexamined supposed norms of scale determine or pre-structure so many issues. In a literary context it is notions of realism and of genre that are most in question. Various literary exercises in scale are considered – poetry by Gillian Clarke, Gary Snyder, and Evelyn Reilly, novels by Jeff VanderMeer, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. The issues resist reduction to the dogma of there being one “right scale” at which to approach the complexity of environmental scenarios. Questions of scale have even a trickster element, best received as a spur to debate, against evasion, whether intellectual, political, or moral.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

This chapter revolves around cultures of the novel: When, how, and why did the novel, a genre without deep roots in African cultures and literary traditions, come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? Arriving late in the colonial period, the novel created new parameters for the African imagination and provided an opening for thinking about colonial modernity and its postcolonial consequences. The chapter discusses how the social functions of the novel came to be defined by two ostensibly contradictory functions. Through the invocation of realism, the novel would be celebrated as the medium of representing what were assumed to be the realities of African history, life, and subjectivity deracinated by colonial violence or misrepresented by colonialist fiction and criticism. At the same time, romantic tropes would be deployed to imagine alternative worlds and to promote the ideals of decolonization. Realism and romance would be wedded to invent national communities as counterpoints to colonial domination.

This chapter explores how fashion journalism shaped the development of the realist novel in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on scholarship that explores the interdependence of these forms of writing, it notes that both fashion journalists and novelists including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola seek to create what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect” – in which the inclusion of particular details generates in the reader the sense that a text describes the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, the fantasy of fashion lies at the heart of the fantasy of realism as a way of representing the word, from fictional depictions of the values and mores of different social worlds to attempts to capture the experience of urban modernity. Hence fashion and femininity – though often dismissed or diminished by male realist novels – are at the heart of their literary innovations.

In the course of its three versions (October 1926 – February 1927 and November 1927 – January 1928), Lady Chatterley’s Lover gradually morphed into a more mythic casting of the state of the world and its future. The third version is bathed in the afterglow of Lawrence’s Etruscan essays of mid-1927, Sketches of Etruscan Places, and partly conditioned by his short stories and essays of 1927. For Lawrence, it was a matter of developing his imaginative vectors – the obdurate industrial and social circumstances of the Midlands on the one hand, which a visit home in 1926 had tempted him to come to grips with, and a future of tenderness on the other – and then deploying them to see what they might yield in the performative writing event. Realism, a response to the working-class settings, slowly gave way to celebration of the ‘eternity of the naïve moment’, coming from before Plato and available in the present if only love-idealism and sentiment could be overthrown.

After finishing Sons and Lovers Lawrence wrote a ‘Foreword’ in which he tried, in an elusive, oracular mode, to clarify, for his own and Edward Garnett’s benefit, the broader cultural, almost cosmological directions that he understood the novel to have pinpointed. This document initiated a series of remarkable philosophical excursuses on Lawrence’s part in the 1910s responding at first to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and, after mid-1914, the Italian Futurists. In these essays the cosmological would be wrestled into commerce with the everyday. The space thereby opened up for fiction gave Lawrence the opportunity to render the inner movements of deep and unacknowledged urges rather than externally dramatising them in the clear air of realism. His stories of mid-1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, as well as earlier ones revised in mid-1914 for the Prussian Officer collection, demonstrate the development. A performative habit of pushing emotions and states of being to clarifying end-points emerged, nowhere more compellingly than in the revised versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.

This chapter examines the foreign policies of the Gulf states, including members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iraq and Iran. It systematically evaluates three primary contextual dimensions that exert influence on the formulation of foreign policy within the Gulf region, namely the domestic, regional and international arenas. Furthermore, this chapter delves into the application of key international relations theories, including realism, neorealism, liberalism and constructivism, as frameworks for explaining the external behaviour of Gulf states. While realist and neorealist perspectives offer valuable insights into the Gulf states’ behaviour, particularly regarding threat perceptions and power dynamics, alternative theoretical paradigms offer different analyses that contribute to our understanding of Gulf politics. Since their inception, the Gulf states adopted diverse strategies aimed at ensuring their survival, including strategic hedging, omni-balancing and bandwagoning. Therefore, this chapter explains the evolution of Gulf states’ foreign policies, tracing their progress from the reliance on external powers, mainly the US, to having greater autonomy and confidence in the pursuit of their own interests.