To begin, I draw a parallel between why it is challenging for philosophers to define open concepts such as art and why it is difficult for scientists to study artistic encounters and aesthetic experience, noting that only exceptional cases of neuroaesthetics attempt to locate what is salient about particular artworks as a function of medium, style, culture, and era, thus placing the natural sciences in a more robust dialogue with the humanities. Next, I introduce the second-order method of natural philosophy, which engages in theory construction via bidirectional influence between the empirical and the conceptual to better understand a shared first-order object such as art. This approach suggests that naturalized aesthetics ought to decentre art as a perceptual ‘stimulus’ and instead draw attention to the imagination, affect, embodiment, and aesthetic pleasure. Finally, I argue that what might seem to be the particular challenges of cognition and the arts are actually challenges for cognitive science generally. This is because the first-order topic of cognition—like art—is not a natural kind that exists apart from human understanding. Further, the second-order, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science—like naturalized aesthetics—is a historically contingent natural philosophy that has the potential to be reimagined.

This chapter traces trajectories of counterrevolutions following six revolutions, which exhibit the full range of counterrevolutionary outcomes and offer useful comparisons to Egypt. First, it examines two revolutions that never experienced counterrevolutions: Tunisia’s and Libya’s 2011 revolutions. Both occurred in the same Arab Spring wave as Egypt’s revolution, but in Tunisia the new government faced a military whose interests were not deeply threatened by civilian rule and in Libya the coercive capacity of the former regime was largely destroyed in the brief civil war. Next, it examines two Latin American revolutions that demonstrate the two ways in which revolutionaries can maintain their capacity and defeat counterrevolutionary threats. Following Cuba’s 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro’s regime put down multiple counterrevolutions using its loyal revolutionary army. In Venezuela, following the 1958 democratic revolution, the government enjoyed none of these coercive resources, yet managed to thwart multiple counterrevolutionary coup attempts through a preservation of revolutionary unity and a return to mass mobilization. Finally, in two cases that are otherwise quite different to Egypt – Thailand’s 1973 democratic uprising and Hungary’s 1919 communist revolution – a very similar set of mechanisms undermined the capacity of the new governments and created opportunities for counterrevolutionaries to return to power.

In this chapter, I observe that some cognitive film theorists appear to have uncritically accepted basic emotions theory in their approach to cinematic expressive depiction. Instead, I argue that the theory of constructed emotion, in which emotional concepts are socially constructed categorizations of affect, better fits the available empirical data and presents greater opportunities for productive interdisciplinary synthesis. First, I draw the relevant distinctions between the two theories, noting that the former posits that each basic emotion has a distinct neurophysiological signature and a facial/vocal expression that is universally recognized, whereas the latter permits more complex relationships among brain states, physiological signs, facial movements, and their meaning. Second, I review evidence regarding the brain basis of emotion, cross-cultural research on emotional recognition, and the roles of concepts and words, noting opportunities to place the cognitive neuroscience of emotion in dialogue with philosophy of film. Third, I observe an opportunity for robust interdisciplinary triangulation in the Kuleshov effect, a phenomenon of film editing in which the meaning of a facial expression is thought to change in the context of a montage. Overall, the theory of constructed emotion might draw greater attention of experimentalists to questions of cultural relativity and historical specificity.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

The book concludes with a brief epilogue that recapitulates the exploration of cognition and the arts.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.