This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.

The concepts of the sublime and wonder have a long and significant history in philosophy, literature and the arts, religion, and the history of science. These concepts identify kinds of human attitudes and responses to the natural world and to cultural practices and artifacts. This chapter will focus on the contemporary relevance of the sublime and wonder to questions and issues within the context of nature, environment, aesthetics, and religion. I begin with a brief, recent history of sublimity before examining the contemporary sublime in relation to environmental thought and “other-regarding attitudes” toward nature. I then consider recent cross-disciplinary discussions of the varieties of wonder and show how this attitude invites receptivity in relation to the more-than-human world. In the concluding section, I offer a comparison of the sublime and wonder to show, further, the different ways in which they may support sympathetic, ethical attitudes toward nature.

Distinguishing between kinds of anthropocentrism and of biocentrism helps to disclose that White’s critique of theistic religions as anthropocentric and despotic miscarries, as does the different critique on the part of Passmore of ‘Greco-Christian arrogance’. The longstanding stewardship tradition of Christianity, Judaism and Islam facilitates an eco-friendly approach to the environment, particularly in its biocentric versions, and can be defended against criticisms from Palmer and Lovelock. Southgate, who misunderstands biocentrism as synonymous with Deep Ecology, favours both co-creation and stewardship; these approaches can be combined with each other and with Bauckham’s theme of the community of God’s creatures. Northcott does well to trace back modern ecological problems to seventeenth-century anti-communal and possessive individualism and the attitudes and practices emerging therefrom, but his communitarian and nature-friendly approach, while rightly understanding humanity as ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre), needs to become more cosmopolitan if these global problems are to be solved.

The relationship between religion and concern for the environment has not always been an easy one. Theological ascription of ultimate value to God, rather than to creatures, has been said to underlie ecological destruction, exacerbated also by religious notions of human uniqueness. Conversely, some religious groups have feared that concern for nature will risk deflecting attention from God. Faced with such a stand-off, we turn to the idea of ‘participation’ – of partaking from, or sharing in – which offers common ground between these two domains, with its sense of dependence and derivation. From a theological perspective (here concentrating on the Christian tradition), particular emphasis will fall on the idea of creation as good gift, and on the derivation of all things from God, in all of their aspects. From the side of biology, themes of participation appear both in the form of ecological dependence in the present and of evolutionary relations of derivation and reception running down biological history. Approached in these terms, the theologian conviction that creation is not ultimate need not degrade it, nor need attention to creation stand in competition with religious devotion.

The oldest cave paintings yet discovered are in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The paintings depict other animals in symbolic forms as participant agents, alongside early humans. Such conceptions of co-agency endured throughout human history in indigenous religions, particularly culturally isolated groups dwelling in deserts, forests, islands, and mountains. This ‘original’ ontology was taken up from indigenous religions into world religious traditions first in the Vedas and then in ‘axial age’ traditions including those of classical Greece, Judaism and, under their influence, Christianity. However in Latin Christianity the cultural imaginary of participation in a shared realm of being declined in favour of a new religious narrative focused on human souls. The subsequent rise of Enlightenment rationalism and personalism conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominance in their agency of Earthly habitats in which they have progressively sought to eradicate the agency, and diversity, of the other beings. In this chapter I outline the original participative ontology in indigenous and world religious traditions; I examine the reasons for and impacts of its decline; and I discuss ways in which it may be recovered.

The non-agricultural economy of the ancient Greek world included crafts, trade, and services. Evidence for such, heavily biased towards Athens, is found via philosophical writing, comedy, forensic speeches, inscriptions, and archaeological finds. Elite attitudes, in which farming was the idealised citizen occupation, also impact the evidence. Nevertheless, at least 230 different terms for non-agricultural roles and occupations can be found in the sources (with many overlaps). Of these, fifty-three are for women. Workshops were generally small, with up to five or six craftsmen of low status, predominantly resident aliens (metics), freedmen or slaves. At least some rich citizens at Athens owned workshops, with a number of slaves perhaps able to live and work independently. Notable trades such as mining, marble-, bronze-, and metalwork, ceramics, and tanning seem to have clustered in common locations within cities and territories. Women’s non-agricultural economic roles seem to have been related mainly to textiles, retail of simple products, and provision of personal services.

In the Sophist, Plato asks how there can be false statements. A false statement (logos) says what is not. But a statement cannot say nothing – there must be something that it says. Plato tries to solve the puzzle by investigating the notion of not-being and the notion of a logos. To understand not-being, we must first understand being. That in turn requires understanding how something can be called by many different names. Plato’s solution to these problems rests on the distinction between what something is of itself and what it is because it is related to other things. It also rests on an understanding of the notion of difference. The class of not-beautiful things, for example, is a real group: they are different from the beautiful things. Similarly, not-beings are a real group. The upshot is this: “Theaetetus is flying” is false, in that flying is different from what is with reference to Theaetetus. Theaetetus has being. Flying has being. But “Theaetetus is flying” says with reference to him what is not.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

This chapter considers what we know about climate in ancient Greece and how this structures our thinking. The issue of very different local environments and interannual variation is observed, both its challenges but also the potential for exploitation. The question of whether and when climate can be related to history is then discussed –the case of 541 CE and the plague under Justinian is considered as an example of what we do and do not know – and some of the main climate proxy evidence available for ancient Greece are briefly reviewed. The Greek to Roman period is mainly notable for a relatively benign and stable climate regime over a number of centuries.

This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.