A brief review of the major offerings of the book is discussed in this chapter.

Building on research into US government archives, Pahlavi propaganda texts, Islamist sermons, and print media from US allies, including Iran’s common comparand, Türkiye, this chapter demonstrates how State Department officials, CIA researchers, and public intellectuals used representations of Empress Farah to link beauty to modernization theory and mobilized comparative critiques of both on aesthetic grounds. Examining these depictions alongside the Empress’s own views on her appearance and political role offers new insights into the gendered limits of nation-branding and soft power.

Chapter 3 examines the regulatory approaches outlined in the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) concerning Emotion Recognition Systems (ERS). As the first legislation specifically addressing ERS, the EU’s AI Act employs a multilayered framework that classifies these systems as both limited and high-risk AI technologies. By categorising all ERS as limited risk, the AIA aims to eliminate the practice of inferring emotions or intentions from individuals without their awareness. Additionally, all ERS must adhere to the stringent requirements set for high-risk AI systems. The use of AI systems for inferring emotions in workplace and educational settings is classified as an unacceptable risk and thus prohibited. Considering the broader context, the regulation of ERS represents a nuanced effort by legislators to balance the promotion of innovation with the necessity of imposing rigorous safeguards. However, this book contends that the AIA should not be seen as the ultimate regulation of MDTs. Instead, it serves as a general framework or baseline that requires further legal measures, including additional restrictions or prohibitions through sector-specific legislation.

How do conservatives and the Christian right view beloved classics by authors such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley? Challenging what they disparage as politicized mainstream academia and “decadent” literary criticism, right-wing scholars and commentators in the United States are developing an entirely separate literary ecosystem ranging from publishers to book series to podcasts. This chapter explores how the Ignatius Critical Editions, founded by a scholar whose dissertation was directed by Joseph Ratizinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, are used as a platform to promote reactionary legal and political ideas to schoolchildren and college students. With an interpretive framework akin to selective originalism, the critical introductions to and essays in recent editions of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Frankenstein cast subjective views of reproductive politics, gender and class norms, and more as eternal truths. The chapter also examines the “Great Books” podcast developed by National Review magazine and scholars from Hillsdale College, showing how the episodes seek to cultivate a nostalgic view of the past through commentary on Austen’s and Shelley’s works.

Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by Julian and Cyril at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments. Intellectual impasses on particular topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.

According to Cassirer, Kant’s Critique achieves a new look at the dichotomy between “consciousness and actuality, the I-world and the world of things.” Indeed, the Critique of Reason “sets out a new positive concept of subjectivity and objectivity […]. The world of the subject and objects no longer stands as two opposing halves of one absolute being; rather, being constitutes one and the same realm of spiritual functions through which we obtain the content of both […]. This abstract result was introduced by Humboldt, through the mediation of language in the concrete consideration of spiritual life.” Humboldt seizes on a possibility indicated in the first Critique and builds his philosophy of language as a mediation of the subjective and the objective. This is an original way of understanding Humboldt. Understanding Humboldt’s philosophy of language in light of Kant will constitutes the first part of this chapter. In the second part, I spell out what this Humboldtian interpretation of language means for Cassirer. Cassirer sees Humboldt as a precursor to his own work on language. My chapter sheds light on a possibility regarding language indicated by Kant, worked out by Humboldt, and then exploited by Cassirer.

If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of characters and the trajectories of plots. The pursuit of whale oil, for example, motivates the events of Moby-Dick, just as ivory and opium shape those of Heart of Darkness and Sea of Poppies, respectively. Yet whether commodities appear as background details or as protagonists in their own right, their presence invites us to connect the desires and domestic intimacies detailed in the text to the wider networks of production and circulation that frame them.

One-fifth of recaptives landing between 1836 and 1837 were involuntarily enlisted in the West Indian Regiment in Trinidad. The rest of the recaptives were required to sign contracts of indentureship, most commonly on sugar and cocoa plantations. The contractual obligations of indentured Africans were shaped by the same terms of apprenticeship imposed on formerly enslaved peoples following emancipation, and their survival and resistance strategies similarly recalled those previously enacted by African Grenadians. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the various indentureship schemes on the island, including the experiences of the recaptured at reception depots and their contractual requirements. It also explains the preference for African as opposed to South Asian labourers, and how the ideas about civilising Africans informed the campaigns and arguments of both supporters and opponents of the scheme.

While the previous chapters paid attention to the Christian West, Alexander Alexopoulos introduces the wealth, beauty, and variety of Eastern Christian traditions. They comprise not only immensely diverse geographical areas, from Armenia to Ethiopia and from Lebanon to India, but also intriguing histories and denominational differences.