This chapter focuses on the aesthetic appeal of inanimate nature, plants, and animals. Hegel’s ontological privileging of living beings, and especially of animal bodies, comes hand in hand with their aesthetic privileging, and so particular focus is given to the beauty of animateness, and especially to that of animal bodies. It is argued that, while most appearances of animal life serve to disclose their finitude, and so their ontological dependency, there are striking moments in which their remarkable animateness stands out as such. And given that Hegel gives us good reason to think of life, in its ontology, as an essentially infinite and autonomous movement, this conspicuousness of animation provides us with an ephemeral glimpse of a more profound beauty. As the various dimensions of animation and its ways of appearing are explored in some detail, the chapter comes to argue, somewhat counter to Hegel though for Hegelian reasons, that it is particularly in animal movement – as opposed to the more static shape of the animal body, which is largely Hegel’s focus – that the full splendor of animateness is revealed.

This chapter introduces the fundamental idea of The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel: the notion that we can only make sense of autonomy by returning to the concept of life. This return is needed to understand fully the genesis, the form, and the reality of human freedom. Such an account can be developed by means of a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of freedom. As we can learn from Kant’s account, the notion of autonomy is threatened by the paradox of self-legislation and an opposition of freedom and nature that makes the reality of freedom unintelligible. As Kant already indicates and Hegel goes on to develop, we can overcome these problems by reconceiving of autonomy as a form of life. The chapter outlines the reading of Kant and Hegel supporting this view, situates the resulting systematic position in current debates on the sources of normativity and the nature of human freedom, and defines its relation to other approaches norm and nature (ethical naturalism, forms of life, and biopolitics).

In this chapter I respond to two claims about unborn human beings: first that they have no rights because they have no interests; second that they have no rights because they are not persons.

An overview of what is known about the life and times of Hipparchus. Ancient testimony shows that he was born in Nicaea in Asia Minor, and worked latterly in Rhodes, but other details of his life can only be inferred from considerations of the intellectual milieu of his time, together with an examination of his astronomical observations, as detailed by Ptolemy. From these a possible timeline of his life is sketched out.

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.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.

This chapter examines the debate among neo-Kantian thinkers about the origin, function, and reach of concepts. Neo-Kantianism inherits from Kant a series of dualisms, and that between concept and intuition attracted especially intense critical scrutiny. Cohen, Rickert and Cassirer can be understood as proposing a ‘functionalization’ of cognitive concepts that avoids a sharp and static distinction between ‘concept’ and ‘intuition’, and defending Kant’s transcendental project against naturalization and psychologization. The temporalization of concepts, in their constitutive role for experience, is thereby accentuated in different ways. This functionalization of concepts must, however, be situated against the emergence of the notion of value and the question raised by Nietzsche of the value of concepts, or knowledge, for life. The relation between concepts and values points to their historical and cultural embeddedness with reference to different worldviews, and hence reveals the relation between concepts, the unity of a world, and forms of life.

“The Poet” is what Adorno calls a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Chapter 8 focuses on Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”; his theory that language “is fossil poetry”; and the proto-pragmatic picture of language in his statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Other topics treated are the place of what Kant calls “unbounded” ideas in Emerson’s account of poetry, thinking as a mixture of reception and activity, and the connections and differences of “Experience” and “The Poet.”

The right to life is the preeminent human right - without it, all other rights are nugatory. Yet, the scope of the protection afforded by the right is contested, particularly the extent to which States are obligated to protect life. This chapter examines the protection which the common law and the ECHR affords to the right to life, noting that under the common law, the courts have tended towards a recognition of the value or sanctity of life, as distinct from a right to life. In contrast, Article 2 ECHR very clearly enshrines a right to life and imposes obligations on States to ensure its protection. There is a considerable corpus of case law concerning the scope of the right in Article 2 including a number of cases from UK courts which centre on the jurisdictional reach of the right and its enforceability under the Human Rights Act 1998. This chapter considers the protective potential of the right to life in specific contexts including in response to climate change and domestic abuse. A separate chapter examines specific issues surrounding STATE regulation of the beginning and end of life.

Regulation of the beginning and end of life raises myriad medical, legal, philosophical, moral and ethical issues. It also implicates a range of rights, most notably the right to life, freedom from ill-treatment and the right to private life. This chapter considers the ways in which State regulation of abortion, withdrawal/refusal of medical treatment and assisted dying engage rights protected by the ECHR. In particular, this chapter examines when life begins for the purposes of Article 2 (right to life) and whether the right to life precludes or, indeed, requires that States enable access to assistance in dying. Domestic law is considered, demonstrating the ways in which the margin of appreciation operates to confer a significant degree of latitude on States to regulate the beginning and end of life.

Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.