In Chapter 2, vehicle it-narrators in the form of carriages, carts, coaches, and sedan chairs provide a unique perspective from which to explore the spectrum of inadvertent movement. In eighteenth-century legal cases involving wanton driving, British judges took for granted that awareness was a broad spectrum across which many forms of causality and blame could be plotted. This chapter analyzes vehicle-narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – including Peacham’s Coach and Sedan (1636) and the anonymous works Travels of Monsieur Le Post-Chaise (1753) and Adventures of a Hackney-Coach (1781) – alongside a rare example from the 1990s: Latour’s Aramis (1992), about a sentient Parisian transport system. Vehicle-narrators challenge the supposed dominance of reading for deep inner character or central plot because their wanton redoundings of agency tend to externalize morality and disperse it across assemblages of actants or even entire cities. Vehicle-narratives thereby create a model of culpability without a static moral core.

‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is Berlin’s best-known publication. This chapter has three main sections. The first sets the essay in the context of the Cold War and Berlin’s personal background and commitments. The second section reviews the main themes and arguments of the essay, which include the distinction between negative and positive liberty, Berlin’s association of the negative idea with liberal democracy and the positive idea with authoritarian politics, the relation between liberty and national identity, and the tracing of totalitarian thought to a foundation in moral monism, to which Berlin responds with his concept of value pluralism. The final section engages with some of the critical issues raised by ‘Two Concepts’. Is the essay too limited by Berlin’s Cold-War context? Is he too hostile to positive liberty and too uncritical of negative liberty? Is his account of identity too narrowly focused on nationalism, or is it an open-ended invitation to the excesses of identity politics? Is his value pluralism compatible with liberalism? I argue that in all these respects, Berlin’s position has problems, but also that he gives us the tools to respond to those problems.

Chapter 4 deals with private sector digital currencies, focussing especially on synthetic CBDCs, private digital currencies that are fully backed by riskless central bank currency. Synthetics have various advantages for users compared to CBDCs: synthetics allow the private sector and the central bank to play to their strengths; synthetics avoid central bank conflicts of interest that arise when the central bank regulates firms that it also competes against; synthetics avoid drawbacks of monopoly provision; synthetics avoid negative seigniorage for the issuer; and synthetics tend to stabilise the financial system.

Market evidence indicates that the public are very enthusiastic about synthetics and stablecoins. Stablecoin market cap grew from under $1 million at the start of 2016 to $242 billion by January 2025 and most of these stablecoins are dollar ones. Yet the success of stablecoins pales in comparison to the success of private sector digital currencies more generally. By a big margin, the most successful money in the world is Chinese private digital currency. There is also the astonishing growth of private digital currencies in Africa and Asia to consider, the number of active mobile money accounts globally having grown from 13 million in 2010 to more than 640 million in 2023.

Synthetics and stablecoins have many advantages over CBDCs and there are no circumstances in which one would rationally prefer a CBDC to either.

Under Muslim rule of what they called al-Andalus, the caliphate of Córdoba became one of the premier centers of the Islamic world. Islam tolerated other People of the Book, as they called Christians and Jews, but with restrictions. Over the eight centuries in which Muslim forces held sway in Iberia, the various cultures and languages of the peninsula developed and blended to a certain extent, which came to be called convivencia (lit., living together). Nonetheless, Christian forces began a reconquest of the land from the Muslims, beginning in the north and moving in stages toward the south. They benefited from the fragmentation of rule in the Muslim areas and the frequent disruptions caused by successive invasions from North Africa. As Christian forces captured territory, they formed various kingdoms in Portugal, Castile-León, and Aragón. Loyal supporters received grants of land from grateful monarchs and thus became a landed aristocracy. By the end of the thirteenth century, what would be known as the Christian Reconquest was virtually complete.

I review the period of the Upper Paleolithic when populations consisting largely of clans or extended family groups engaged in hunting-gathering likely developed group minds modeled on animals they hunted, admired, or learned from. These group minds became embodied in clan totems, for example.

Castile and Aragón stayed amalgamated under the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, which reigned for two centuries. Early on, Spaniards conquered the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas, and huge transatlantic merchant fleets connected Spain with its growing American Empire. After unprecedented silver deposits were discovered in both North and South America, Spanish silver and other treasure contributed to growth and inflation around the globe. The long-sought return route eastward from Asia to the Americas allowed transpacific trade to begin in 1565, while conquest of the Philippines made Spain’s composite monarchy, as it is often called, truly global. Spanish power declined in the late seventeenth century, the victim of overextension and continual warfare. When the Habsburgs died out in 1700, a Bourbon prince had the best dynastic claim to become king of Spain. As Felipe V, he fought most of Europe to remain on the throne and would father three successive kings, whose reigns saw Spain’s global empire reach its greatest extent. Thereafter, the French Revolution and a Napoleonic invasion would shatter Spain and end the early modern period.

This Chapter deals with cross-linguistic variation in interrogatives. We look at both yes/no questions and wh-questions. Since the use of question particles, grammatical morphemes whose function is to mark (or type) the clause as interrogative, is by far the commonest way of marking clauses as interrogative across languages, we focus to a large extent on these elements.

Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Russia, twenty-five years after his family left in 1920 to settle in England, happened by chance. Yet in those heady months, it was the friendships he formed with two great poets, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, that took him to the soul of Russia, for they were meetings that ‘affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook’. There was a shorter return visit in 1956, in a relative lull in the Cold War, and a reunion with Akhmatova in Oxford in 1965. ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’ was indeed impressionistic. That was a Berlin characteristic. It was also unusually personal, full of love and warmth and tolerance for a difficult country and for its unpredictable, troubled, immensely gifted people. He had two special talents: for human sympathy, and for what it means to entertain visions of how life should be. But this chapter will suggest that he became especially aware of his gift for the history of ideas when he visited Russia. That uniquely passionate, tortured culture, steeped in values for art and intuition, and producing extraordinary characters and magnificent poetry, needed him to tell its story fittingly.

I argue that that the “current era” involves a revolutionary transformation in group mind phenomena as we add AI superintelligent machines to the things that (when they cooperate with humans) very likely generate group minds. The AI–human hybrid cooperatives are also facilitating what I argue (along with many other scholars) is a major evolutionary transition into a global group mind that encompasses the entire globe. I consider the impact that developments in superintelligent AI will have on group mind phenomena. I discuss, in particular, multi-agent AI systems that are capable of cooperating with other AI agents and with humans. AI–human hybrids will produce new forms of group mind phenomena characterized in part by techno-biotic forms of cognition.

This chapter will discuss Berlin’s account of the nature and purpose of philosophy in ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’. The first part will focus on his suggestion that philosophical questions cannot be answered inductively or deductively and that there are no experts who can be referred to as ‘possessing unquestionable authority or knowledge in these matters’. For Berlin, this is not to deny the existence of truth and knowledge in philosophy. This leads to a second question: What is Berlin’s philosophical methodology? The task of philosophy, he claims, is to ‘extricate and bring to light the hidden categories and models in terms of which human beings think’. This approach will be contrasted favourably with Kant’s philosophical methodology. The third and final question to be discussed is: What is the practical significance of Berlin’s idea that the goal of philosophy is ‘to assist men to understand themselves’? It will be suggested that the self-understanding that philosophy makes possible is philosophically and politically emancipatory and that Berlin’s philosophy is a form of what might be described as ‘liberation philosophy’.

I look at dysfunctions in group mind content such as hearing voices and felt presences.

I link the emergence of the divine kings (examined in Chapter 6 initially), who dominated many human groups for the last ten thousand years or so, to the development of group minds in politics. The kings were thought to have two bodies: a flesh-and-blood body subject to death, and then a second one that embodied the spirit of the people he ruled over and was the group mind of that people. That group mind did not die even if the king died. I discuss the theories in international relations that nation-states exhibit group minds that significantly determine some of their international diplomatic interactions. I also look into the role that the internet, blockchain technologies, and cryptocurrencies might have on group mind phenomena in relation to sources of political power in the current era.