The miscellany was a crucially important mode of literature in this period, and particular reasons for this are set out in an early segment of the chapter. This was also the case for Swift and for Curll, although it served very different purposes over the duration of their lives. In fact, Swift founded his career (especially as a poet) largely on his presence in miscellanies, a form in which much of Curll’s output lay. His Miscellanies (1711) made up the earliest collection of his writings, but it had to displace a smaller grouping that Curll had assembled in the previous year. Soon afterwards the bookseller embarked on a long series of similar items, including fresh raids on Swift’s oeuvre. The form proved well suited to Curll’s needs, most of all in his efforts to cover up the sources of his material. The various interactions of the two men in this mode are analysed, and a section devoted to the question raised by Stephen Karian as to whether Curll’s activity can reasonably be considered as literary piracy.

As a basic phenomenological constraint, God is hidden to creation in virtue of being the creator. The conclusion identifies implications for the typical atheistic and the theistic responses to the problem of divine hiddenness. Against the atheist who holds than an all-loving God would always want to be in a relation with us, the conclusion argues that if God is in fact the hidden creator, our ultimate source, he would be uniquely the sort of thing we were implicitly always in relation to even if we were unaware of it. Against the theist who wants to explain divine hiddenness in terms of a moral defect of the one seeking, the conclusion argues that such resistance would only be detectable after the fact, in light of faith, and so would be an issue for theological, not philosophical explication.

Ross and Kendler argue that despite Nancy Krieger’s persuasive criticisms of the distal-versus-proximal framework, distinguishing between distal and proximal causes is still informative in medicine. They are especially concerned about viewing, by default, social causes of disease as distal and biological causes as proximal, showing that in some cases social causes occur in parallel with biological causes and in others social causes are more proximal than biological causes.

In one view, scientific explanation depends on laws, and generalizations in psychiatry let us explain the symptoms of individual patients. These generalizations might themselves be explained by being subsumed under further generalizations. Insofar as individual, idiosyncratic aspects of the patient’s behavior cannot be subsumed under laws, they cannot be scientifically explained. In contrast, though, the psychiatric interview, one of the basic data points for psychiatry, may include the therapist using idiosyncratic details of the patient’s delusions and working through the way in which one stage in the patient’s psychological history generated another. This involves understanding how one thing caused another, but there seems to be no subsumption under laws. Campbell proposes we think of causal explanation in psychiatry as not solely law based but as giving weight to the idea of the patient’s illness over time as a single construct, unfolding in accordance with general patterns. The role of generalizations in psychiatry is to define those constructs that develop over time. Nonetheless, the idiosyncratic detailed causal development of those progressions can be understood at a subjective level by the therapist following the patient’s line of thought and feeling as the disorder develops.