This chapter further situates my Kantian account of thought experiments among competing views. I identify problems for contemporary accounts and contrast epistemological questions (How do thought experiments justify?), which guide most of the current scholarship, with Kant’s emphasis on cognition [Erkenntnis] (What makes concepts meaningful?). I note that metaphilosophical questions on the relationship between conceivability and possibility are not relevant for thought experiments if they are an apparatus for cognition, which is neutral toward the truth or actuality of the objects of cognition. Contemporary accounts that begin with Kuhn’s epistemological question differ on what the basis of knowledge might be. Leading approaches appeal to logic, stored knowledge, and intellectual intuition. I will briefly sketch here some of the basic approaches.

There has never been a time when the life of Jesus has not presented some occasion for scandal. Although the primordial scandal of the Christian Gospel unfolded around the figure of a crucified Messiah, this book takes as its principal subject a derivative scandal: the scandal of the Christian Gospels; namely, the impediments – even offenses – to literary, historical, and logical sense that only seem to multiply in proportion to one’s intimacy with the narratives of the four Evangelists. The suggestion of such things will itself be scandalous to some.

This chapter situates itself between the untheorizable singularities of specific case studies and the unsustainable generalities that usually result from attempts at broad historical characterization.  By looking at everything from a late fifteenth-century image of Jews making music in a Prague synagogue to armies of wooden klezmer musicians in a twenty-first-century store window, and from a nineteenth-century Jewish musical caricature to a bit of concentration-camp ephemera involving Hebrew words spelled with musical notes, this chapter endeavors to give some of the flavor of the Czech Jewish musical experience.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

The signing of the instrument popularly known as the ‘Anglo Irish Treaty’ in December 1921 paved the way for the creation of the Irish Free State in December 1922. The draft constitution of the Irish Free State, created in Dublin in early 1922, was taken to London for a confidential preview in May of that year. The British government insisted that the draft constitution had effectively ignored the provisions of the 1921 Treaty and demanded major revisions. For a brief period, the collapse of the entire settlement agreed in 1921 appeared to be a real possibility. This disaster was only averted when both sides agreed to redraft substantial portions of the draft constitution in early June 1922. This chapter examines the negotiating strategies developed in Dublin and London before and during the radical redrafting of the future constitution of the Irish Free State.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hegel’s critique of liberalism. It starts by discussing the preface to the Philosophy of Right in order to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is averse to robust social criticism. Afterwards, the chapter considers two main causes for the limited recognition of his work’s critical dimension. The first is the tendency to read Hegel’s book as a horizontal progression, fuelled by the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. This kind of approach misrepresents the qualitative transformation that is at stake in the transition from civil society to the state, which only a vertical reading can adequately convey. Second, the Philosophy of Right’s critical import has also been obfuscated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of the state remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. As the chapter seeks to show, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must synthesize the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian.

Cyril of Alexandria was a central figure in many of the theological developments and religious conflicts that challenged the stability of the fifth-century eastern Roman Empire. Crucial moments during his episcopacy (412–44) marking wider and more complex developments may be seen with sharp clarity in the outbreaks of overt violence between Christians and Jews and between Christians and “pagans” in the metropolis of Alexandria during the first years of his episcopal career. Moreover, roughly halfway through his tenure as bishop, he would involve himself in a doctrinal dispute underway in the eastern capital of Constantinople, opposing its bishop Nestorius because he believed the truth of the gospel was dangerously undermined by what he took to be Nestorius’ errant Christology. Through the savvy manipulation of ecclesiastical and imperial politics, Cyril succeeded in having Nestorius deposed by the Council of Ephesus in 431, though it took eighteenth months of negotiations to restore communion between the warring factions.

This article explores the role that notions of plot play in Shakespeare source study. Drawing on three moments of scholarly engagement with the sources for Romeo and Juliet, the article shows how plot structures critical inquiry by enabling some kinds of questions while precluding others.