Chapter 6 delineates certain new aesthetic categories for modernism in the subcontinent, drawing on the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and her minimalist artistic practice. In addition to her gridded drawings and black and white photography, this chapter focuses on her diaries, written sporadically throughout the 1960s to 1980s, capturing her time in Karachi, Pakistan; Rajasthan, India; and the Persian Gulf. The “diaries,” however, are composed of aphorisms, conceptual questions, and theoretical notes to self. “The world is raging a war outside and mine is an inner one.” Via the “notative,” the “asketic,” and the “micrographic,” this presentation argues for ways to “read” these texts, which were never intended to be read, and perhaps not written: as concept notes for an existential artistic practice, as an early example of desert/Gulf modernism, as a “situation” of the body and the female artist, and as generative of a new ethics of modernism based on erasure, dilution, perforation, and diminution.

Chapter 3 examines Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas and genius to address how works of genius can be judged. While Chapter 2 showed that judgments of perfection mediate between nonaesthetic properties and aesthetic evaluations, this applies only to works that are good examples of their kind. Works of genius resist this model because they transform or repudiate existing categories, so attempts to apply judgments of perfection are necessarily frustrated. These failures reveal the limits of existing concepts and the originality of the work, prompting a new approach. Current solutions either subsume such works under existing kinds, which undermines originality, or abstract from kinds entirely, which erases the contrast that makes originality intelligible. The chapter proposes two alternatives, concept expansion and concept repudiation, which preserve historical awareness while honoring innovation. Here, judgments of perfection play an indirect, heuristic role. Building on this insight, the chapter develops the notion of informed pure judgments of taste, which retain the concept-free character of aesthetic judgment while being enriched by historical and critical awareness.

Psychiatry has a core goal of understanding the mechanisms that produce, underlie, and maintain psychiatric disorders. But what is a mechanism? And how should the answer to that question be justified? In this chapter Craver defends a practice-first direction of fit, which involves building a notion of “mechanism” for psychiatry by charitably reconstructing what the term appears to mean from the functions it serves for psychiatrists and researchers. Taking this approach, many philosophical objections to mechanism (i.e., that it is at odds with a process metaphysics and that it is committed to reductionist obsession with detail) turn out to be predicated on misunderstandings. Some directions for a future mechanistic philosophy of psychiatry are sketched out.

Reading-induced abstraction processes take time but they are the foundation of what may be called abstract intelligence. Abstract intelligence is related to what often is called “out-of-the-box thinking”; seeing similarities and focusing on generalization enables thinking about something from a new perspective. Abstraction makes us more intelligent, which is one reason why reading makes us smart.

Chapter 3 concerns Hegel’s use of the term “the Concept” (der Begriff) in the Doctrine of the Concept. The chapter argues that the use of this term is closer to its ordinary philosophical meaning than is claimed by standard metaphysical readings of the Logic. In particular, the singular use of “the Concept” is a synecdoche for the structure of conceptual thought as exemplified in philosophy in general. Hegel argues that conceptual thought has a formal structure of universality, particularity, and singularity. However, in contrast to many interpretations, these are not treated as properties that all concepts must have to be concepts. Rather, these formal features are exhibited variously in different concepts, judgments, and syllogisms. Hegel’s discussion of the formal dimension of thought sets up his attempt to show that some structures of thought more perfectly exemplify the form of the Concept than others.

This chapter offers a survey of the views on concepts held by Greek philosophers from ca. 250 CE to 550 CE. The first section explores how late antique accounts of ordinary concepts are based on the Stoic view of common notions (koinai ennoiai) and how, for Neoplatonists, common notions are connected with Platonist recollection. The second section focuses on abstract concepts and universals. It is argued that Porphyry conceives of abstraction and universals along Peripatetic lines. Porphyry, however, supplements abstraction with Platonic innatism: the relation between abstractionism and innatism is problematic both for Porphyry and for later authors such as Hermias of Alexandria. The third section explores Plotinus’s view of innate concepts and recollection. These issues raise the question of how experience and innatism interact in Plotinus’s account of concept acquisition. The fourth section explores late Neoplatonist views of innate concepts as psychic forms, or logoi.

Prior to their rediscovery of Aristotle’s De anima, philosophers in the Latin West developed theories of concepts by mining Aristotle’s logical treatises (especially the Categories and On Interpretation), as well as Platonically influenced works by Augustine, Boethius, and Porphyry. This resulted in several distinctive theories about the ontology of concepts (intellectus), the processes of concept formation, and the relationship between concepts and language. These early developments, however, were eclipsed in the thirteenth century by study of the De anima and Arabic commentaries on it. The intense interest in cognition generated a massive vocabulary for the discussion of concepts (conceptus, species, intentio, similitudo etc.). Comparison of theories of concepts before and after the reception of Aristotle’s De anima demonstrates the extent to which these theories played a dominant albeit shifting role in multiple areas of philosophical and theological discourse, including logic and philosophy of language.

The concept of concept emerged in classical Greece once philosophers began to reflect on their disagreements about the nature of things. Plato made a critical advance by distinguishing the content and object of thought. It is only with Aristotle, who has more to say about content, that we find the beginnings of a theory of concepts. On his view perception enables animals to distinguish between different types of particular, but cannot consider these types on their own abstractly, as we do in thought. This latter ability, together with the operations of combination and division, allows us to consider a much wider range of types than we encounter directly in perception. Abstraction is the ability to focus on certain features rather than attending to all. But the ability to create new concepts, by adding positive and negative qualifications, underwrites the productivity of language and the possibility of scientific investigation.

This chapter surveys the structure of the republican calendar and the ways that it was tied to actions. It also seeks to establish its relationship with various celestial phenomena, which has often been contested; this link will prove to be highly abstract, which was sometimes the case with other ancient calendars. The lack of an obvious tie between the calendar and the heavens has also obscured the degree to which Roman practice sought to link public and cultic activities to a range of abstract models of the celestial order, each of which was attached to a different priestly college.

Chapter 6 begins the work of examining why people expended so much time, effort, money and skill on reclaiming their lost possessions. It explores this question by looking to the rewards offered in ‘lost’ and ‘runaway’ notices and using them to investigate the different values at stake in possessions. It finds that ‘possessions’ such as watches, financial instruments, dogs and people held a range of values in the eighteenth century. Rather than marked by market values as the use of rewards might suggest, these ‘things’ were also valuable for the roles they fulfilled and the emotional or cultural importance they held. As with the previous chapter, by looking to the question of value, we begin to understand how ‘possessions’ were differentiated in this period. Such an insight becomes more apparent when the chapter explores not only the rewards offered, but also what they were offered for.

This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

This essay explores two movements that developed in reaction to naturalism and its mimetic logic of stage realism at the turn of the twentieth century. Symbolism sought to represent the unrepresentable essence of the human experience, turning to allegories, fables, and mystical images to conjure spirits from both the natural and supernatural realms. Expressionism likewise aimed at an alternative aesthetic for representing the unrepresentable but did so with an eye towards the epistemological uncertainty of knowing oneself in relation to the modern world. It featured an abstract palette of skewed lines and woodcut shadows to depict the anxious experience of unpredictability, ironically projecting movement as stasis onto an increasingly stylised mis-en-scène.

The chapter sets out a framework for understanding the manifold crisis of the human–planetary condition. It argues that this crisis condition goes far beyond the climate crisis. Most critics tend to focus on particular issues or measurable trends rather than the abnegations of human and planetary flourishing. More pointedly, the accumulating literature rarely addresses the grounding conditions of the crisis condition nor its broader consequences for being human. Rarely do commentators set out clear pathways to the alternative possibilities. Accordingly, this chapter explores three main processes as shifting the terms of the human condition: abstraction, reconstitution, and unsettling. First, it suggests that we are materially abstracting social life, fundamentally remaking relations between people, and between persons and their worlds. Second, we are reconstituting the elements of nature and culture, including our own nature and the dominant forms of social life. And third, we are relativising the deepest structures of human practice and meaning in such ways as to change the nature of our social being. This confluence adds up to a great unsettling of the human condition.