Throughout the Commentaries, Blackstone repeatedly availed himself of comparative legal history. Comparison allowed him to detect the invariable principles of legal experience and organise his systematic exposition of English law around them. This method proved crucial in Blackstone’s treatment of custom, as it allowed him to present the chief source of English common law by addressing the main questions concerning the nature of custom that had been raised earlier by Western jurisprudence. The paper will explore the depth of Blackstone’s engagement with such traditions. In doing so, it will investigate whether custom was understood differently on the two sides of the Channel.

The chapters in this volume focus on what may appear to be a narrow domain: comparative studies of early complex societies using archaeological data. But this topic is a crucial part of a broad and far-reaching theme in the human sciences. Many institutions of modern society were largely created by the Urban Revolution; that is, by the transformations of farming villages into agrarian states many millennia ago. Chronologically myopic scholars who think that Medieval Europe constituted the deep, dark, and ancient past of modern society may disagree with this claim, but anthropologists and historians who examine the broad sweep of human history will recognize its value. For when we consider that 99 percent of human history was taken up by small hunting bands and tribal farming villages, the Urban Revolution emerges as the single most momentous social transition on the road to the modern era of states, empires, and global processes (M. E. Smith 2009).

Research on the origins of early complex societies – chiefdoms and states – has long been a staple of fieldwork and comparative analysis within anthropological archaeology (e.g., Adams 1966; Childe 1950; Liu 2009; Wright 1977). Nevertheless, the results of this research have had relatively little impact on thinking in comparative history and the social sciences outside of archaeology and anthropology. Indeed, some economists and political scientists, recognizing the importance of the Urban Revolution for human history, have felt free to construct theoretical models of the process unencumbered by empirical data (e.g., Barzel 2002). Not surprisingly, these models tend to be at odds with the archaeological and historical data on early chiefdoms and states.

Adam Smith is often described as a member of ‘the Scottish historical school’ and as the author of a science of man that was framed and focused by a distinctive theory of history. But what sort of historian was he? Smith always thought of ‘history’ in conventional terms, as the study of political and military events, their causes and consequences. Like William Robertson, however, he believed that such an enterprise had philosophic potential. He thought that Tacitus had transformed the traditional scope of history by paying attention to ‘the temper and internall disposition of the severall actors who had shaped events’ and had shown that history was of value to ‘a science no less usefull, to wit, the knowledge of the motives by which men act.’ But although history studied in this Tacitean fashion could yield up information about the minds of statesmen and generals and the secret causes of particular policies, Smith was more interested in a history which explained the hidden causes of civilisation's progress from its barbarous to its polished states in terms of changes in the means of subsistence and the distribution of property. It was a move which heralded the appearance of that celebrated stadial theory of history which Dugald Stewart, somewhat opaquely described as ‘conjectural history’ and which remains one of the intellectual glories of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Chapter 6 discusses ways in which scientists, activists, journalists, policy makers, and others concerned about global heating can most persuasively communicate climate science findings to the general public.

Metaphor has traditionally been considered antithetical to science. Metaphorical speech, which is commonly associated with the creative wordplay of poetry and fiction, would seem after all to be at cross-purpose to scientists’ efforts to articulate clear, rigorously precise, and objective statements of fact about reality. Aside from a tendency toward obscurity, the greater problem is that metaphorical expressions are typically false, literally speaking. Shakespeare’s Juliet is not literally the sun, time does not literally flow, and the genome is not a literal blueprint, book, or program. It is principally for this reason that scientists and philosophers of science have been, until rather recently, very critical of the suggestion that metaphor might play a legitimate role in the scientific process. In the early modern period, philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, who were enthusiastic advocates of the new scientific approach to understanding the world so brilliantly illustrated by the likes of Hooke, Boyle, and Newton, made withering criticism of metaphor as productive of nothing but falsehood and misdirection.

Summarizing some stages in the history of the western world view, and in particular the development of modern science, the chapter points to some of the iniquities of our perspective, in particular its reductionist and fragmented aspects. By placing these in a historical context, the way is opened for a different approach.

Analogies

I was asked to write about the ‘Evolution of Science’. This is an enormous subject and would take a historian to do it justice. I am not a historian. I am a scientist with a smattering of knowledge about history. I prefer to write about things I know. Here, I tell stories rather than digging deep into the sources of historical truth. I write about astronomy, which is one little corner of science, and about recent events with which I am familiar. I use the recent history of astronomy to illustrate some evolutionary themes, which may or may not be valid when extended to earlier periods or to other areas of science.

My approach to evolution is based on analogies between biology, astronomy and history. I begin with biology. The chief agents of biological evolution are speciation and symbiosis. In the world of biology these words have a familiar meaning. Life has evolved by a process of successive refinement and subdivision of form and function; that is to say, by speciation, punctuated by a process of bringing together alien and genetically distant species into a single organism, i.e. symbiosis. As a result of the work of the biologist Lynn Margulis and other pioneers, the formerly heretical view, that symbiosis has been the mechanism for major steps in the evolution of life, has now become orthodox. When we view the evolution of life with an ecological rather than an anatomical perspective, the importance of symbiosis relative to speciation becomes even greater.

As a physical scientist, I am struck by the fact that the borrowing of concepts from biology into astronomy is valid on two levels.

Chapter 1 provides the background in the philosophy of science. The goal is twofold. First, I aim to provide the reader with a firm grasp of the general idea of scientific underdetermination. For this purpose, I start with some examples to illustrate the phenomenon, ranging from everyday situations to physics to other domains of science. Then, I introduce the two main progenitors of the idea, Pierre Duhem and W. V. O. Quine. Second, I provide a more systematic overview of two issues that inform the later discussion in ethics. On the one hand, I introduce the main argumentative strategies that have been employed to argue for underdetermination in science, i.e., the inductive, the holistic, and the algorithmic strategies. On the other hand, I make a number of distinctions between different versions of underdetermination to provide a picture of the various forms that underdetermination can take. These distinctions are: existence vs. non-uniqueness vs. egalitarian, local vs. global, permanent vs. transient vs. recurrent, and deductive vs. ampliative.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, underfunded and underregulated systems of public care injured young people. Reflecting on evidence from Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, this chapter outlines some of the injuries that survivors experience(d). As a result of their injurious histories, survivor populations are now sharply disadvantaged. Not only do survivors’ multifaceted injuries spur a complex range of redress demands, their resultant disadvantages create accessibility barriers that redress programmes must overcome.

We live in a populist age; it threatens vital elements of American democracy; it encourages us to reconsider fundamental political principles; some scholars should relate to those principles in their work, and some political scientists should do that by focusing especially on the destructive side of creative destruction.

We explain science, both the idealised version to which scientists aspire, and the real version that involves actual human beings. If you are a cosmic revolutionary, who wants to replace the prevailing big bang theory with their own ideas, we explain the importance of mathematical models, publishing, peer review and presentation of your ideas. In particular, we show how to make scientist's human motivations work in your favour.