This chapter shows how, contrary to modern assumptions, the Press distinguished between Historical and “Gothic” or Terror Fiction and how, contrary to what Romantic critics pretended, Minerva’s women authors ridiculed and dismissed Walpolean Gothic with its specters and clanking chains. Eliza Parsons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, Mary Meeke, Isabella Kelly, Agnes Mulgrave, Regina Maria Roche and anonymous others innovated, instead, by displacing the language of terror to the “unnatural” or criminal acts that families hid from public view – primarily husbands’ sadistic domestic abuse, incest, bigamy and fratricide – while inflecting “Gothic Romance” into the Mystery Story. They also imported and developed the “German” uncanny in a line leading straight to Collins, Bradden, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Poe, and taught readers to be skeptical both of names and of stories.

In early Chinese philosophy, the work done by concepts is not explained by appeal to abstract entities or mental representations but rather through the appropriate use of names. In this chapter, I attempt to follow the contours and coherence of early Chinese views centring on two key terms: míng 名 (names) and lèi 類 (categories/kinds). After introducing the key terms and general context, I develop a systematic account of names from the ‘Correcting Names’ chapter of the third-century BCE Confucian text the Xunzi. I then examine the more sceptical views found in the Zhuangzi. The last part of the chapter turns to debates about the proper categorization of things, particularly as they appear in later parts of the Mozi. Early Chinese discussions of the proper use of names tend to privilege social factors over epistemic ones, drawing attention to the ways in which concepts create social order and guide behaviour.

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.

In this chapter, I interpret Plato’s Cratylus as an ideal comedy and argue that Plato employs the comedic technique of parody in order to expose rival methodologies as sources of ridiculous self-ignorance. Socrates’ extended parody of etymology shows that words cannot be a guide to the nature of being, since we have no reason to think that their analysis can teach us anything about reality. Etymology is, in short, a source of laughable self-ignorance because it provides its practitioners with the illusion of wisdom. Parody generally involves the use of an imitation that exaggerates or distorts some feature of the original, often in order to undermine its claim to authority. In the case of etymology, Plato’s parody not only exposes etymology as a false path to wisdom, but it also articulates specific criticisms of etymology regarding its methodology, its scope and its alleged systematicity. The function and purpose of the very long etymological section has proved highly puzzling to interpreters who are generally unsure what to make of it, and my account reveals the etymologies to be playing a central, and previously unnoticed, role in the overall argument of the dialogue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

After a brief discussion of the nature of names and naming in general, the central sections of this chapter chart the history of given names (personal names), surnames and place-names from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain to the present day. Names formed in English and the naming practices of English society are foregrounded, but attention is necessarily paid to names and practices adopted from speakers of other languages. Matters of significance include the near-total loss of English-language given names, the rise of surnaming as a new practice, and the intimate link between place-naming and changes in land-use practices. English is now a global language, but discussion is mostly confined to naming practices in England.

This chapters argues that Plato’s notion of personal autonomy is closely linked to his understanding of the social dimension of rational deliberation. It begins with an assessment of Miranda Fricker’s influential account of epistemic authority and social power and raises some objections against the discursive notion of reason she develops. To substantiate these objections, it turns to Plato’s Cratylus and to Socrates’ analysis of logos as a language mediated form of rational deliberation. It argues that while Socrates suggests that the constitutive parts of language, the names (ta onomata), are ambivalent and deceptive, leaving discursive reason in doubt, Plato, at the same time, shows that it nevertheless can function to identify unwarranted claims of epistemic authority, as a form of codependent philosophical conversation. From this emerges a notion of Platonic autonomy closely tied to Plato’s analysis of the social dimension of rational deliberation and its embodiment in the Platonic dialogue.

This chapter explains what property covers and what interest it serves. Property is the field for legal and social relations for separable resources. And property serves an interest people have in acquiring and using separable resources for survival or flourishing. This chapter relies on work by James Penner and Neil MacCormick to introduce separability. This chapter studies property in body parts, names, identities, and slaves.

This chapter begins with the families of Hannibal and Scipio. Hannibal’s mother is unknown; the name of Scipio’s abnormally pious mother, Pomponia, is preserved only in a Latin epic poem by Silius Italicus (first century CE). The older male relatives of both Hannibal and Scipio were distinguished soldiers. Hannibal married an Iberian woman; Scipio, a member of the Cornelian gens (group of families), married the daughter of another Roman aristocrat, from the Aemilian gens. Carthaginian and Roman naming habits are explained. Hannibal’s surname Barca is a family name, not an ‘ethnic’ – indicator of local origin – from the Greek city Barce. (A contrary argument is rejected in Appendix 2.1.) The childhood and youth of Hannibal and Scipio are discussed, including Hannibal’s famous oath in Iberia never to be friendly to the Romans, the events of the 230s and 220s are narrated, and pre−220 Roman and Carthaginian history and society are analysed.

‘Early Christian Philosophers on Concepts’ by George Karamanolis integrates some of the themes encountered in previous chapters into the broad theological perspective of the early Christian thinkers, according to which explorations in every area of philosophy are ultimately intended to reveal aspects of God’s relation to His creation. It is argued that the position of the early Christian philosophers on concepts is part of their perceptual realism and their stance against scepticism. Karamanolis examines three case studies: the theories of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa. In all three cases, he maintains, concepts are treated both as mental representations and semantic/linguistic items through which we grasp reality. Clement develops his view on concepts in the context of an anti-sceptical elaboration of his thesis that knowledge of the world is propositional and attainable by humans, while Origen and Gregory of Nyssa defend more sophisticated theories of concepts in connection with their respective epistemologies. In every case a theological question motivates the Christian author’s stance with regard to the nature and formation of concepts.

This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

The character of Cratylus in the Cratylus is puzzling. Initially he is portrayed as a teasingly mysterious figure, and he is silent for most of it. But he adopts a quite different demeanour when he joins the conversation towards its end. Now he functions as a mostly reasonable and altogether cooperative respondent, even if he takes rigid and extreme positions. I argue that Plato uses Cratylus first to sketch linguistic naturalism in the dogmatic and dialectically unelaborated form in which it was presented by its original author. Then after Socrates has made of it a full scale philosophical theory on his own account, he puts Cratylus to another use: as a proponent of a version of that original naturalist position which is now developed as the germ of a rival full-scale theory in miniature, incorporating semantic, epistemological, and ontological components, and constructed from paradoxical stances generated by a range of previous and contemporary philosophers, including notably Antisthenes: a construction of Plato’s own. Hence for Plato Cratylus’ fascination: in the end his strange doctrine forces engagement with an interconnected set of deeply serious philosophical issues.

What is a word? Are names (of people, places, gods, buildings, etc.) words? In antiquity spelling was not standardised, and gender, suffixation, and inflectional categories could also be variable: what kind of divergences indicate that a variant form found in an ancient source should be considered a distinct word from other related forms? Although such questions cannot be definitively answered, the approach taken in this book is clarified and justified by detailed comparison with other lexica.

Chapter 1 surveys contested meanings and experiences of multiraciality in French West and Equatorial Africa, with a focus on childhood and citizenship, from the late nineteenth century to the interwar years circa 1930 – years marked by the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. Two tropes – métis as child and métis as French citizen – influenced how métis and their maternal communities and French society grappled with the meaning of multiraciality. French colonial personnel, missionaries, settlers, jurists, and government officials in metropolitan France debated the meaning of "métis" and their social and legal status, as well as what resources should be provided for their upbringing and education by the French state and Catholic Church. People who described themselves (or children across French Africa) as métis used the term to assert their belonging and rights to French society, despite the colonial state highlighting their difference. In claiming to be French, métis individuals and kin articulated porous conceptions of race, culture, and legal status, even as the French tried to centralize colonial rule around rigid boundaries of race and culture, black and white, citizen and native.