The Introduction frames the central question of the book: Is philosophy a technē, and what would it mean if it were? The concept of technē – a rational, teachable, and practice-based form of expertise – is central to Plato’s philosophical vocabulary and deployed across discussions in ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy. The Introduction outlines the book’s structure and introduces key terms. Plato’s identification of philosophy as a technē entails a reevaluation of intellectual labor, aligning philosophers with cobblers and doctors rather than with poets and politicians. This reframing has implications for how we understand Plato’s critique of sophistry, his vision of philosopher-rulers, and the broader relationship between expertise and democratic politics.

The Introduction combines a contextual introduction to disability in Kinshasa with an outline of the research problem as the tension between exceptionality and normality in a city that has long defined itself as in ‘crisis’. The interlocutors, their city, the times in which they lived, and their livelihood activities were all subject to ambiguous judgements as to whether they stood out as a negative or positive example, or if they were better viewed as simply part of the general experience of life in the wider community. The Introduction thus outlines the focus on mobility-impaired people in the grey area between work and welfare, where ‘crisis’ (mpiaka) opens a discursive space for experimentation, critique, and evaluation. The unpredictability that marks life in Kinshasa, in this respect, leads people to constantly reckon their social and economic value projects in relation to time. The Introduction introduces how crisis confronts people with choices of realising the short-term values of ‘fending for yourself’ or the long-term values of cultivating dependent relationships.

Completing the arc from the desire to assert membership and rights as an handicapé, the final chapter considers how disabled Kinois turned away from this identity to pursue one of becoming a responsable, someone ‘responsible [for others]’. While controversial, begging and brokering gave access to hard-won economic resources that made it possible to have and care for children. Aspiring to such responsibilities, disabled people showed that integrating economic and social values was both means and ends. By successfully fulfilling the responsibilities of parenthood – the comparatively stable, higher value of social respectability that was once considered impossible for disabled people to achieve – they sought to become ‘valuable people’ (batu ya valeur). Claiming full adult personhood, they both conformed to and transformed the measurement of this highest regime of personhood, enjoining a debate over whether it is good to have many or fewer, well-supported children. Between action and aspiration, a testing and critiquing disposition towards value demonstrates how the extraordinary livelihood strategies of disabled people in the margins of urban society may be a most productive stage from which to examine the emerging debates about what is, or should be, good in society.

Rydenfelt begins by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

This chapter begins with the Phenomenology’s brief critique of Kantian moral theory. Hegel credits Kant with reconciling the objective validity of rational criteria with their status as self-authored, while failing to make good on his own insight. Since, on Hegel’s diagnosis, Kant’s conception of the will is a reified abstraction from social ‘actuality’, he assigns it a spurious self-sufficiency, leading to an unsatisfactory picture of the nature of practical reason. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s strategy for undoing this conception, namely by traveling the two paths Kant opened up but did not take. Taking the first path means appreciating that rational criteria cannot have their basis in features of the individual agent considered in isolation; instead, criteria must be those agents can act upon in institutional actuality while still recognising themselves as their authors. Taking the second entails seeing resistance and alienation as productive phenomena, symptoms not of structural deficits of the human will, but of conflicts between what freedom seems to demand at a given socio-historical juncture and what it really does. Taking both paths, therefore, entails a recognition that what counts as respectively internal and external to free subjectivity is subject to both synchronic and diachronic variation.

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s thinking about theodicy and explains the fundamental shifts in his attitude towards the project. It begins by examining his pre-critical sketch for a theodicy that remains firmly within the Leibnizian mould while repairing its structural inconsistencies and gaps. At the heart of his reparative measures is a different conception of divine freedom, one that Kant will retain throughout his critical period. The chapter ends with a consideration of his late essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy of 1791, in which he rejects the entire tradition of rationalist theodicy, whilst still maintaining the importance of an ‘authentic’ alternative. The basis of his rejection of previous theodicies is moral: the very pursuit of such a theodicy involves sacrificing individual freedom and rejecting an autonomous stance. Accordingly, the central sections of the chapter explain Kant’s critical concept of autonomy and how the theory of normativity it entails is fundamentally incompatible with a rationalist conception of value.

Philosophy is not only about beliefs but also decisions and desires. This chapter explores Pascal’s ideas about the human condition, how our desires can make us miserable even when they are satisfied, and how this condition leads us to seek distractions that only make us more miserable. Again we find Pascal’s views and prescriptions stem from the heart, as our fallen state is the source of this sad situation. At the same time, by thinking well about it we can arrive at the conclusion that life could be great, and that the fact that it is not so great confirms the theology of the Fall (and doesn’t confirm other religions, which do not predict our actual predicament). The heart, then, is the key to all of our engagement with the world: not only our beliefs about it but also our desires and happiness. Remarkably, some of the problems Pascal wrote so eloquently about seem especially applicable today, as his descriptions of the need to display a fake identity predict and diagnose TikTok culture, and his rejection of the project to “find your true self,” “love yourself,” and “go with your heart” challenges the typical self-help advice one finds today.

The introduction outlines the historical problem central to this book. Namely, the question of what it meant to possess. The question loomed large in the eighteenth century because more people owned more things (particularly moveable property), the social function of movable property was shifting and in the commercial age, the law was often uncertain as to what could be owned and how. The introduction shows how the book seeks to explore the problem of what it meant to possess by examining how people responded to the loss of possessions.

This chapter explores different strands of the theory of two-player zero-sum games and equilibrium concepts for general multiplayer games. The conventional viewpoint is that equilibrium is an extension of the concept of value (and its associated optimal strategies) to non-zero-sum games, and the value is just a special case of an equilibrium payoff. However, it is argued that a number of important concepts apply only to one of these concepts.

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.

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 reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.