We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.

Chapter 2 addresses Aristotle’s use of artefacts as counterexamples or central elements in counter-arguments against Plato and the Academy. The common opinion, within the Academy, that there cannot exist Ideas of artefacts is used by Aristotle to highlight the internal incoherence of the Platonic theory (Met. A 9, 990b8–15; Met. B 4, 999b15–20; Met. K 2, 1060b23–8). Moreover, the case of artefacts offers evidence that Ideas are either inert thus superflous (Met. A 9, 991b1–7; GC 2.9, 335b18–24), or even in contradiction with the coming-to-be of individual substances (Met. Z 8, 1033b19–24). The chapter shows that in these passages Aristotle is using artefacts dialectically against Plato’s separation of Ideas and concludes with a reflection on the notions of separation and substantiality.

Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems. Relevant conceptual and methodological solutions are needed to make alternative futures possible. This chapter outlines a broad position from which the subsequent contributions to this edited volume depart: one that recognises the urgency of agency and the value of cultural-historical perspectives in breaking away from problematic notions that frame agency as a matter of individuals pitted against the social, or in which individual actions lose their social contingency. Elaborating agency as a matter of struggle where individual and social are in dialectic relations, the chapter focusses on motives, mediation and motion. Within a broader and still-evolving cultural-historical framework, these motifs offer a distinctive way to deal with the challenges of conceptualising and facilitating agency, one which brings alternative futures into the realm of the possible by linking agency with learning and development.

This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

The conclusion tackles the dialectics of state–society relations in the Arab worlds in the longue duree. Neo-imperialism in Yemen, mercenaries, and the Sudanese and Algerian revolutions are discussed in light of the earlier history, a possible return of latent citizenship. The legacies of the three facets of representation are at play in the 2019 revolutions of Sudan and Algeria, with recent military coups undermining democratic channels of participation.

This chapter examines the criteria exposed by Stephen Jay Gould’s original paper on just-so stories to sustain such a charge. I show that Gould’s concerns were neither directed to narrative explanations nor were they ineluctably linked to their narrative quality. Then I analyse how advocates of narrative science have met the challenge. I identify two basic defensive approaches: the vindication of explanatory narratives in cases where the historical, contingent and causally complex nature of the phenomena demand a narrative approach and an unveiling strategy showing how there’s a narrative behind each law-like generalization or nomological explanatory formula. The chapter’s concentration on the argumentative moves of the discussants helps clarify their positions. Moreover, the argumentative quality of their object of study (scientific reason-giving practices) is also emphasized. I claim that the dialectical requirement of openness to collective survey and discussion is what may prevent just-so charges for any kind of explanatory model.

Margaret Cavendish was a natural philosopher and feminist who between 1653 and 1671 wrote some twenty-six works, including fourteen scientific books about atoms, matter and motion, butterflies, fleas, magnifying glasses, distant worlds, and infinity. Her vitalist–materialist view held that human beings are matter in motion who think. She argued that her age had produced many feminine writers, rulers, actors, and preachers and was perhaps a feminine reign. Cavendish was a pioneer, both as a feminist and a natural philosopher. While standing up for the rights and intellectual abilities of women, she attempted to address the most fundamental ontological and epistemological questions of philosophy. She also anticipated and articulated ideas associated with future philosophers, such as Spinoza’s pantheism, Leibniz’s vitalism, Hegel’s dialectics, and Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism. In synthesizing ideas into her own system of a vitalistic dialectical form of materialism, she paved the way both for the “new science” and the “new philosophy” that emerged during the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.

The chapter engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language used in the media reporting of the most recent prime ministerial elections in Israel, in 2019. It draws on the tradition of Cultural-Historical and Activity Theory to highlight the impact of the wider historical context of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the media reporting of events in the region. It is a comparative study of the BBC’s and Al Jazeera’s reporting of the elections, examining a period from August 2019 (the pre-election period) through to October 2019 (the immediate post-election period). The data collected consists of six and nine online reports by the BBC and Al Jazeera, respectively. An overriding aim is an examination of the impact and the role of the history of the region in reporting on significant events. The work aims to contribute to other studies on the Israel–Palestine conflict which have argued that media is a contested space, and the news is not a neutral product.

The brechtian tragic is inconceivable without the brechtian comic. Virtually no brecht play lacks a strong comic dimension, covering the whole range of the genre (parody, commedia, slapstick, clown etc.). Brechtian tragi-comedies call for special attention in this context, and this chapter contains detailed analyses of the resistible rise of arturo ui as well as the fragmentary, aristophanes-inspired pluto revue.

H. Patrick Glenn, Professor of Law and former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, passed away in 2014. For the past decades, he had been a central figure of legal scholarship, especially in the global discourse on comparative law. This chapter is the introduction to a collection that intends to honour Professor Glenn’s intellectual legacy by engaging critically with his ideas, especially focusing on his visions of a ‘cosmopolitan state’ and of law conceptualized as ‘tradition’. To this end, the collection brings together an international group of leading scholars in comparative law, legal philosophy, legal sociology, and legal history. This introductory chapter situates Glenn’s work within the context of his trajectory as a scholar of comparative law and reflects critically, in particular, on Glenn’s concept of ‘tradition’.

The first brief essay argues that although the body of Richard Wright's works, his legacy, retains a special relevance in multiple discourses about human and civil rights, systemic racism, and transnational efforts to address global social injustice, it is dangerous, both in traditional scholarship and in non-academic commentary, to incarcerate his works within a single ideology or within the framework of current ideologies that give special credibility to #BlackLivesMatter. Indeed, such a framing of legacies may lead critics to be complicit in producing confusion and error which serve to undermine the primal strength of Wright's legacy: the exceptional value of asking questions that provoke pragmatic responses rather than seemingly definitive answers. We ought not abandon the dialectics of the concrete and the dialogic of the imaginary as we argue for the value of Wright's legacy in temporal evolutions. The essay draws special attention to the vexed efforts of Christopher J. Lebron to explain the origins of #BlackLivesMatter. Dealing adequately with Wright's legacy involves a willingness to engage the problematic of what Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange propose is thick solidarity, the willingness to respect the layering of " interpersonal empathy with historical analysis, political acumen, and a willingness to be led by those most directly impacted as the subjects and the objects of history. The second essay tentatively concludes that we continue to examine and re-examine Wright's legacy inside of and outside of #BlackLivesMatter. Richard Wright’s class-conscious writings of the 1930s-1940s makes use of Marxism to help us think through the relationship between the individual and the social totality; race and class; “black lives” and “all lives.” In what sense is Bigger Thomas a “native son”? How do the hands in “I Have Seen Black Hands” relate to the laboring hands of the rest of the working class? Wright’s revolutionary communist standpoint, mediating between the particular and the general, what is and what can be, requires us to think dialectically past the limitations of a reformist politics of redistribution and inclusion.

This chapter focuses on Proclus’ use of a theological notion of harmony, which is designed to reveal the essence, intelligible relations, and causality of the soul by taking its harmonic structure as a starting point. The fact that the soul is made of specific means and proportions paves the way to the claim that the soul’s essence consists of a logos. This represents neither just an exegetical remark related to Plato’s divisio animae nor the mere use of an image: Proclus regards Plato’s account of the soul’s harmonic structure as a specific key to access theology. By analysing the harmonic component within Proclus’ iconic theology, a clear analysis of both the “theological” implications of Proclus’ study of the harmonic structure of the Platonic world-soul and of the metaphysical-theological function of the ambivalent notion of logos emerges.

Most readers agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are romanticized, if not grotesquely stereotypical; the author himself readily admitted that he “made them up.” Indeed, neither Faulkner nor his critics seem able to conceive of his Indian as anything more than a static, romantic, obsolete trope, despite the fact that Natives appeared frequently and suggestively at the margins of his world, and that they reappeared in his fiction as self-buttressing concepts sited uncannily between reality and fantasy - an imaginary supplement or alter ego that presents a compensatory and destabilizing fiction for the white southern subject. This chapter argues that we need to acknowledge how very intimate and “real” this Indian is in order to fully appreciate the significance of their symbolic transubstantiations. There are Indians hidden in plain sight throughout Faulkner’s career in ways we have hardly begun to notice, and their “disappearance” is the product of an unspoken collusion between Faulkner’s stated method and our symptomatic critical misprision. His Indians are finally there and not-there at the same time, mirroring an uncanny vacancy in the white southern ego that both desires and rejects their supplemental knowledge.

The style of the various editions of the Institutes is directly related to the audience for which the book was written, for Calvin was convinced that any book had to be accommodated to the capacities of its intended audience. John Calvin originally wrote the Institutes to be a catechism for the pious evangelicals in France, who had come to faith in the Gospel but who needed to have their faith built up and strengthened. “My purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness.” Because the audience was ordinary believers who needed to be edified, Calvin adopted a style that was accommodated to their capacities. “The book itself witnesses that this was my intention, adapted as it is to a simple and, you might say, elementary form of teaching.”1 As many scholars have noted, the format of Luther’s Small Catechism is clearly evident in the form of the first edition of the Institutes, as it is structured along the lines of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, followed by an extended discussion of the sacraments.