The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

The 1810s saw a flurry of poems published in the Italianate form of ottava rima. This chapter focuses specifically on ottava rima poems that reflect on the role of expectation and anticipation in listening. This includes episodes of mishearing, which show how anticipation sometimes distorts perception. We hear what we expect or want to hear. The form of ottava rima, with its interlocking rhymes and closing couplet, presents an exaggerated example of the role of expectation at work in rhyme. The brief popularity of ottava rima in the 1810s also offers a neat marker for periodisation, which raises questions about how a given form was read at a given time and addresses the challenges of exemplarity and historical poetics.

Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

The naturalism of Alvar Aalto is set against the philosophy of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. There is a discussion of what a ‘thing’ is, prolonged by a foray into the concept of Mingei and its refinement and transformation in the hands of Theaster Gates. The chapter goes on to to discuss aesthetics, form and the philosophy of Amercian pragmatism, coupled to the ongoing debate between digital and analogue in media philosophy.

The short story is a young art’, Elizabeth Bowen declared in her introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Stories; ‘as we know it, it is the child of this century’. The contemporaneity of the short form allowed Bowen to argue that it was free from many of the conventions that tether more established literary modes – exposition, for instance, as well as unwieldy segues, and what she termed the ‘forced continuity’ of longer prose narratives. It also encouraged her to conceptualise the short story in relation to other types of writing, particularly poetry and the novel. This chapter explores Bowen’s aesthetics of short fiction through an analysis of a selection of her stories and non-fiction. In essence, she believed that the structural economy of the short form meant that stories are defined by obliquity and concision. She also considered the form – or rather, the forms – of short fiction to be productively uncertain, and understood that the same story can be simultaneously concise, expansive, and wonderfully strange. This chapter examines the complexities of this stance, and its implications for reading Bowen in the twenty-first century.

The conclusion examines more contemporary versions of anthropology’s dominant current of antiformalism. Tracing this pattern across diverse approaches – embodiment, assemblage thinking, infrastructure – it reveals how a certain sort of Wittgensteinian antiformalism has become orthodox. While scholarship focussed on form exists, it remains largely subordinate to an implicit picture that finds ethnographic facts ‘unanalysable, specific, indefinable’. By contextualzing this stance, the conclusion suggests holding commitments – formalist or antiformalist – more lightly in order to recover explanatory power without sacrificing reflexivity.

This chapter introduces the book’s central argument about the parallel development of ideas about context in anthropology and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It situates both within broader ‘cultures of context’ in twentieth-century thought, while establishing key themes about form and formlessness. The introduction argues that anthropology’s current antiformalist stance represents not progress but a particular historical development that deserves examination. It outlines how the book will trace shifts from logic to language to life as models of context in both Wittgenstein and anthropology.

This chapter analyses Wittgenstein’s transitional period and his shift from logical to linguistic models of context. Centred on his work in early 1930s and on his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, it shows how Wittgenstein moved from seeing context as singular logic to viewing it as multiple ‘logical spaces’ or ‘grammars’. This shift prefigures later anthropological moves away from formal systems while retaining some commitment to structure through language as model.

Paradiso I and II present, in compressed form, the procession of All from the Highest, and the soul’s ascent back to the perfection of the First Cause. Yet Dante also highlights the valley between the peaks, our world of multitude, difference, and limit. Like the Bible, Paradiso has two beginnings: Canto I from the divine perspective, Canto II from the human.

The latter reflects the inequality that follows from the “power to swerve” with which reason endows us. It grants broad latitude regarding how to live, making us differ from one another more than other beings – a difference so significant as to question whether Dante’s happiness could be shared by all.

These Cantos depict, in counterpoint to difference overcome, the multiplicity, error, and cognitive limits that make the Comedy possible. The “matter” of Dante’s “song” points beyond terrestrial existence, but the Comedy’s charm binds readers to it; Dante’s deed conflicts with his words. He thus introduces alternative views of happiness, inviting us to weigh the transhumanizing good, secured only by “The glory of him who moves all things,” against that “perfection of our nature,” achievable in this world by a relative few. This choice provides Paradiso a fitting “prologue.”

This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and its model of logical context. Against readings that see it as purely anti-contextualist, the chapter shows how logic functions as a form of context in early Wittgenstein. Through biographical and historical context, it demonstrates how the Tractatus emerged from and responded to specific intellectual environments, while setting up the book’s broader argument about parallel developments in anthropology and philosophy.

In this chapter, we outline the unique advantages of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to describe spoken and written discourse in texts and provide a strong foundation for English language learners to produce their own stretches of spoken and written discourse. We also provide practical applications of SFL theory through example activities based on a genre-based approach to language teaching using a teaching-learning cycle, which builds on Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development and Bruner’s notion of scaffolding. SFL is a comprehensive and at the same time fully appliable linguistics. Learning a second language involves making meanings about the world, making meanings to interact with others in the world, and creating cohesive and coherent texts, all at the same time. Making choices from the language system is fundamental. By combining a social semiotic view of language with socially oriented theories of language learning involving semiotic mediation through scaffolding, second language teachers can be explicit about the linguistic properties of texts in context and offer the right kinds of support and guidance through cycles of language learning and teaching.

Chapter 4 examines how Augustine’s theology of the righteousness of faith also becomes more Christological, that is, uniquely shaped by having Christ as its object. This chapter begins with the fundamental contrast between pride and humility. Augustine sees pride as the love of the delusional thought that one is the center of reality, and faith in Christ as the healing remedy which restores the soul’s relationship to God, the true center. Returning to confessiones (Confessions), Augustine understands faith in Christ as more than just an ascent to God. Instead, it initiates a double movement in which the soul is first humbled by its recognition in faith of Christ’s humble humanity and then exalted by its reception of his divinity. Finally, the chapter turns to de trinitate (The Trinity), in which Augustine explains how, because sacraments present eternal realities through temporal signs, Christ as sacrament makes the humility of God accessible to faith.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.

Aristotle’s understanding of natural objects as matter-form compounds raises important questions about how this hylomorphic view applies to living beings. More specifically:

1. (1) Is the form of living compounds ‘pure,’ that is essentially independent of matter, or ‘true-gritty,’ that is, essentially matter-involving?

2. (2) In his standard view, the form is prior to matter and the compound. But how can the form of living compounds meet this priority requirement if it is ‘true-gritty’?

3. (3) If, by contrast, the form of living compounds is ‘pure,’ how can it be the principle of material and changeable living compounds?

I argue that in De Partibus Animalium (PA), too, forms of living compounds are ‘true-gritty.’ They are also, however, prior to living compounds and their matter. PA offers evidence for a distinction between the type of matter that is essential to form and that of living compounds, which is not essential to but posterior to the form.

Matthew Boyle relates Kant’s account of cognition to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of substance. On Aristotle’s view, the form of a substance is the ground of its existence. To know this form is to know those of its properties without which it cannot exist. These characterize the substance as it is in itself. Such knowledge of form amounts to knowledge of a thing in itself, and the view that such knowledge is possible for us might be called formal realism. Kant thinks that this requires a type of mind human beings do not have: a non-discursive intellect. Boyle argues that Kant transposes Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework from a formal-realist to a formal-idealist register, and so “internalizes” the form-matter contrast. Instead of speaking of forms of being qua being Kant speaks of forms of objects insofar as they are knowable by a finite intellect. For Kant, just as for Aristotle, the form of a thing is its essence (and thereby the ground of its intelligibility). But for things whose form is ideal – appearances – knowledge of form cannot amount to knowledge of the ground of their existence. It can only amount to knowledge of the ground of their knowability.

This chapter focuses on the core issues concerning the doctrine of creation that were debated by early scholastic theologians. These include the view that God brought the world into being from nothing; that God created everything, all at once; and that creation occurred at the beginning of time.