There is a real danger, in approaching the topic of the history of mechanics in antiquity, of becoming entangled in modern terminology. E. J. Dijksterhuis, in his 1961 classic study The Mechanization of the World Picture, approached the ancient antecedents to his topic by looking at the history of atomist thought; it could be equally misleading to suppose that the history of mechanics in antiquity coincides with the development of mathematical laws to describe the motion of heavy bodies. If we look instead at the history of the body of technology that the ancient Greeks called ‘mechanics’ – ta mêchanika or hê mêchanikê technê – and the theories evolved to explain their workings, we would be tracing a different story. That is the topic of this chapter.

Recent studies have revived interest in the early Greek philosophers as both scientists and philosophers. This chapter explores the relation between these kinds of activity, suggesting that early Greek interests in the possibility of human knowledge and in science support each other. The early philosophers’ analyses of knowledge included developing new views about the nature of human intellect and of divinity, making room for human knowledge about the world that is independent of the traditional divine inspiration or warrant.

When William Wordsworth published his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, he disparaged many things that had come to seem the signal attributes of poetry: elevated diction, personifications of abstract ideas and ‘phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets’ (LB 101). His aim in his poems, he said, was to justify his conviction that poetry could do without such elegances, and to describe ‘incidents and situations from common life. … In a selection of the language really used by men’ (97). He wrote in the conviction that poetry needed to tap into the most fundamental sources of pleasure, rather than the most refined, and identified his own writing more with the perceptions of rustic people than with those of professional poets. In particular, he singled out ‘the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’, which he instanced as ‘the life of our ordinary conversation’ (111). Conversation itself – what one person might actually say to another in the process of exchanging remarks in their different voices – might provide an example and a standard for poetry. Comparing lines from the ‘Babes in the Wood’ with some that Samuel Johnson had written in order to mock poetry using ‘language that closely resembles that of life and nature’ (113), he implicitly drew a distinction. Dr Johnson’s lines do not rise to the level of good poetry, because they do not rise to the level of conversation, something that one person might actually feel impelled to tell another.

This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment religious liberty cases to show how the judiciary has come to terms with the disputes that arise over religious liberty. The religion clauses are often seen as upholding the concept of individual rights and defending religious liberty against religious majoritarianism. However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the religion clauses often belies this perception. This chapter demonstrates that the religion clauses largely epitomize majoritarianism. That is, rather than protecting religious minorities, the scope and protection of the religion clauses reflect both the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s broader constitutional rights jurisprudence, as well as the wider political landscape, both as it relates to judicial politics as well as contemporary social discourse.

Due in part to the influence of Michael McConnell, free exercise exemptionism is generally thought to be compatible with, if not dictated by, the founders’ church-state political philosophy. This article rejects that position, arguing instead that America’s constitutional tradition offers two distinct conceptions of religious liberty: the founders’ natural rights free exercise and modern moral autonomy exemptionism. The chapter aims to distinguish these two approaches by clarifying how they are grounded upon divergent philosophical understandings of human freedom and by explaining how they advance different views of what religious liberty is, how it is threatened, and, accordingly, how it is best protected. The article also attempts to demonstrate how our modern approach expands the protection for religious liberty in some ways but limits it in others.

From the early nineteenth century onwards, there was a canon of British Romanticism taking shape in the colonies, which mirrored that of nineteenth-century Britain, and in turn generated responses from indigenous intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The indigenous response to British Romanticism was, naturally, shaped by the British and colonial Romantic canon: lots of Byron, Burns, Scott, and Hemans, some Shelley, no Blake and only a little Keats. It was this version of Romanticism that settler and colonising populations took around the world and that became embedded in the new print cultures, libraries and school curricula of diasporic British communities across the globe. From those cultural sites, Romantic literature was then introduced to indigenous peoples, whose assimilation into a Western-style education system, sometimes voluntary but often forced, brought them into contact with the colonists’ favourite texts.

From the row of first editions in The Jerwood Centre at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, the curator, lovingly takes down one of his favourite items. It is not much to look at, a slim volume still in its original card covers; cheap stained covers that should have been removed and thrown away when it was bound in leather to match the designs of a gentleman’s library. The curator tells the paradoxical tale of an object so ordinary that it has become a rarity; the book whose pages remain untrimmed; the book that can never be read: a first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). But Lyrical Ballads has always been a volume of paradoxes, from its contradictory title, to the tensions between poems and prose, to the variable accounts by its two authors of its aims and origins, to the difficulty readers have with grasping how such slight poems can be accorded such high status. Perhaps it is just this sense of it – as something unable to be quite pinned down – that has made this unassuming volume such a major, lasting work of British Romanticism.

Philosophy, like politics or ecology, is a constant presence in the poems of Lyrical Ballads. As Wordsworth and Coleridge openly state in the ‘Advertisement’, some of the poems are written in direct reaction to their contemporaries’ engagement with philosophical thought: ‘the lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’ (LB 4). Other poems that position themselves in direct reference to questions of epistemology, ontology or the status of truth are ‘We Are Seven’ or ‘Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing how the practice of Lying may be taught,’ to mention two of the most obvious examples. In both cases the question revolves around what Andrew Bennett has termed the ‘poetics of ignorance’ of the collection.1 Throughout, Lyrical Ballads has some form of conceptual ambition. Yet that ambition is not clear at all, and that is where the story (or, for others, the trouble) of poetry and philosophy begins in the text.

The sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment have generated voluminous and vociferous scholarly interpretations. These controversies strike at the heart of the role of religion in American public life. How are we to decide which interpretation of the First Amendment is correct? Answers to this question have been laden with presuppositions. This chapter is an interdisciplinary analysis of recent historical, political, legal, and philosophical writing on the First Amendment to illustrate how key presuppositions inform the approach to arguments about the meaning, scope, and intent of the First Amendment. The chapter will first outline the contextual and philosophical problems of interpreting the First Amendment. It will then evaluate the providentialist, secular, and pragmatic presuppositions that have guided scholarly interpretations. Ultimately, the chapter will argue that there has not been a single understanding of the relationship between church and state in America, but that investigating these presuppositions can help us better appreciate the dynamic nature of religion, politics, and jurisprudence in America.

That the language of ‘domestic affections’ and ‘home’ has a much wider register, and ideological reverberation, than a reference to any immediate domicile and family is reflected everywhere in Lyrical Ballads, localised in rural districts though its poetry and prefaces may be. In 1790, Edmund Burke excoriated the French Revolution’s degradation of home and domestic affections in historical and national terms. He celebrated the antithesis to new France in traditional England, where ‘conservation’, ‘transmission’ and ‘inheritance’ of ‘property’ operate on one ‘principle’, founded on the ‘method’ and ‘pattern of nature’. The Burkean state endures as a family settlement, ‘a permanent body composed of transitory parts’, a home for national domestic affection beating ‘in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’.

The First Amendment’s religious clauses-“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof”-were adopted, somewhat begrudgingly, as an accommodation to the concerns of vocal religious minorities. Yet they also embodied a set of shared principles about church, state, and rights of conscience that had taken firm root in revolutionary America. Whereas “free exercise” had connoted limited grants to specific groups in particular areas, the term now referred to a broad freedom to assemble and preach. There was less consensus about what an establishment of religion entailed. However, the tide had clearly turned against exclusionary privileges. If the resulting constitutional language seemed somewhat ambiguous, it nonetheless clearly encompassed both an enlarged conception of religion and an unequivocal endorsement of liberty.