Nearly a thousand years before the life and times of Rammohan Roy, another writer and polymath of Bengali origin wrote a play about the various disputes between members of different religions in the kingdom of Kashmir, under the sovereign of King Shankar Varman (r. 883–902 CE). Little is known about the author, Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, besides his Brahmin lineage as well as surviving commentaries on grammar and scriptures. Of his many writings about religion, his play Much Ado about Religion, likely written in the late ninth century CE, serves as a reminder of the deeply embedded nature of political thought on questions of religious pluralism and the various ways of assessing truths, potentials, and values inherent in different positions on religion.

The play features the leading man in the name of Sankarshana, a young graduate (snatak) of the orthodox Mimamsa school of philosophy and an ardent believer in the Vedas. He seeks out constant battles against those who oppose his viewpoints. In the first act, he debates a Buddhist monk, arguing against “universal momentariness” and “consciousness as the only reality.” He declares that Buddhists must stop deceiving themselves in the belief of a better afterlife, as the actions of Buddhists threaten the social order in India at the time. In the second act, he faces and argues against the positions of a Jain mendicant, though he does not consider them a threat to the social order.

Origen makes sense of the Gospel traditions by receiving them as if the Evangelists were themselves figurative readers of the life of Jesus. Advancing this thesis one stage further, this final chapter discovers Origen locating the inspiration for the Gospels’ literary form in the figure of Jesus himself. That is, Origen believes that the canonical records of Jesus’s life indicate that he also was a “spiritual reader” of this particular epoch in the history of Israel and, ultimately, the role of his own life therein. For an archetypal expression of Jesus’s figurative mode of discourse, no series of passages more clearly establishes Origen’s view – that Jesus himself “intended to teach what he perceived in his own understanding by way of figures” – than his interpretation of Jesus’s prophetic Son of Man sayings. Here, I show that one can take up the whole matrix of first principles developed in the preceding chapters on the nature of the Gospel narratives and may, with startling immediacy, transpose them into a distillate of the nature of Jesus’s own discourses.

Belgium has a strong beer culture and enormously diverse beer production with many unique styles. This chapter discusses Belgian beer, beer culture, and beer law. This includes topics such as the Abbey and Trappist beers, and the strong tradition of pairing beers with specific beer glasses – both of them topics characterized by litigation.

Kierkegaard and Ørsted were not just contemporaries but personally knew each other. In this chapter, I argue that Kierkegaard probably learned the term Tankeexperiment from Ørsted. This chapter contextualizes Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary construction” (Experiment) in his work as a whole, including his well-known uses of paradoxes. I will show how the core elements of Ørsted’s account – thought experiment as a method of variation, the need for free and active constitution, and the use of thought experiments for facilitating genuine thought – are echoed in Kierkegaard’s discussions. Along the way, I will describe some decisions on how to translate Experiment and Tankeexperiment that are unfortunate in some ways and fortuitous in others, as I will explain. In these ways, Kierkegaard indirectly takes up Kant’s proposal that “construction” (i.e., Experiment in Danish) is a means of achieving cognition.

Chapter 6 focuses on the political structure of a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right, by handing the bulk of the state’s political power to unelected agents, Hegel is in effect compromising the reconciliation of particular and collective interests he regards as essential to a rational political order. However, his wariness of democracy is more than a mere relapse into some pre-modern, reactionary standpoint. This chapter argues that Hegel is right to denounce the atomism favoured by mass electoral systems, which tend to reduce the citizens’ political identity to that of individual voters, but that he is wrong to dismiss mass democracy altogether. His critique is overly severe because his conception of democracy presupposes the liberal logic of civil society, which he attempts to sublate in a strictly political manner. As this chapter seeks to show, the atomism he argues against is best avoided not by limiting democracy, but by extending it to the economic sphere. In a democracy that is both political and economic, individuals are no longer mere atoms, but part of collective social units organized around commonly held goals.

This chapter explores the impact of the 1707 Union between England and Scotland on the public law of both nations, specifically the extent to which the Acts of Union can be seen to have unified the public law of the newly created Kingdom of Great Britain by extending English law to Scotland. In so doing, this chapter presents a new and original hypothesis of the Acts of Union which provides a more coherent understanding of the post-Union constitution and the role of English and Scots public law therein. It shows that the Acts of Union, by necessary implication of the creation of Britain-wide institutions, unified public law throughout England and Scotland in relation to those institutions, thus creating a new but partial body of British common law. In other areas of public law, variation between England and Scotland remains possible.

Up to this point, Part II has considered Origen’s approach to particular Gospel passages without invoking parallel narratives from more than one Gospel. In the process, it has become clear that Origen’s view of the figurative nature of the Gospels does not originate merely in noticing discrepancies among the four received Gospels. Having established this more fundamental point, we may now attend to the occasions where his reading does proceed by way of comparative reading of parallel pericopes. The cluster of narratives surrounding Jesus’s ascent(s) to Jerusalem provides an especially textured model of Origen’s approach to Gospel difference. Here, Origen does not simply exhibit an inchoate awareness of the various critical difficulties that arise when one reads the four Gospels synoptically; he engages these challenges in great detail and develops a sophisticated account of the Gospels’ literary formation in light of them. Still, whatever differences or discord one discovers among the Gospels on the level of history, narrative, and even in their very ideas of Jesus, there remains, for Origen, a more fundamental agreement – a harmony of spirit – among the four Evangelists’ visions.

This book addresses two interrelated problems regarding the legal nature of international organizations in public international law. The first problem concerns whether and why these institutions can be thought of as legally distinct from their members. The second problem pertains to the content of international organizations’ legal personality, meaning their capacities, rights, and obligations, assuming that they are legally distinct from their members. To address these two problems, this book embarks on a philosophical investigation of the nature of corporate existence itself. It argues that we cannot adequately theorize the existence of any corporate entity, including international organizations, without first making up our minds as to how and why the existence of its members is possible to begin with. Thus, this book revisits deeply entrenched doctrinal assumptions about international organizations as well as their members, including, most prominently, states. Rather than dwell on how international organizations may compare to or differ from their members, this book draws emphasis on the fact that all these entities represent potentialities of communal planning and organization. The outcome is a legal theory of ‘institutional genealogy’. I coin this term to signify that both international organizations and their members ultimately rise from the same root: the capacity of an organized community of human beings to self-describe.

Kierkegaard’s book Repetition, along with his descriptions of the book in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, offer a more positive characterization of thought experiments than we find in earlier works. This chapter argues that imaginary construction has a positive aim of identifying underlying continuities. I identify some similarities between Ørsted’s pursuit of invariants and Kierkegaard’s. One new addition in Kierkegaard’s discussions is the role of exceptions. An exception is a case that falls outside a rule without breaking it. Exceptions can neither establish a rule nor refute its necessity, but they can turn attention to the principles and their limits as well as further determine their scope and content. A further similarity between Kierkegaard’s work and Ørsted’s is the fact that variation must be active and free.

This chapter explains why cognition (Erkenntnis) is its own kind of cognitive good, apart from questions of justification. I argue against reducing the work of thought experiments to their epistemological results, such as their potential to provide prima facie justification. As an apparatus for cognition, a thought experiment enacts the three core elements of Ørsted’s Kantian account: (1) it is a tool for variation; (2) it proceeds from concepts, and (3) its goal is the genuine activation or reactivation of mental processes. Cognition has two components: givenness and thought. I will show in this chapter how givenness and thought are both achieved through thought experiments.

Part II of this study finds itself advantaged by Origen’s presence near the epicenter of another epochal seism in the history of Gospel criticism: the controversy surrounding Gotthold E. Lessing’s editing and publication of “fragments” from Hermann S. Reimarus’s previously unpublished “Apology or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God.” In the midst of publishing (and defending the publication of) the seminal sixth and seventh extracts, Lessing composed “On the proof of the spirit and of power” (1777) – an essay that has proved, in its own way, at least equally iconic for the emergence of modern historical consciousness.

We study the structure and utility of the category formed by small categories and retrofunctors. We analyze key properties of this category, such as limits, colimits, and factorizations, and explain how these structures support various forms of composition and interaction. The chapter delves into the cofree comonoid construction, exploring how it connects to familiar concepts in category theory, and extends our understanding of state-based systems. We also discuss applications of retrofunctors and demonstrate how they can be used to model complex processes in a structured way.

Britain and Ireland are nations of beer drinkers. Beer has been part of their national identity despite it being regarded both positively as a dietary staple or necessity and negatively as the root cause of drunkenness and debauchery. There are many cultural traditions associated with beer drinking in Britain and Ireland. Contrary to popular belief, British ales are not served warm. Another tradition is ‘buying a round’. Since British pubs are traditionally small and crowded, getting to the bar was difficult, so one group member would ‘buy a round’. The famous Guinness story has kept Ireland on the beer map of the world. The Irish government even had to change its harp symbol to face in the other direction because Sir Arthur Guinness had trademarked the Irish harp for the Guinness Brewery. Finally, the traditional pub provides a community hub where locals and visitors alike can catch up, debate the issues of the day, and enjoy the regular Sunday roast. Long may these traditions continue.