Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

The standard trope is that evolution and religion are at war. Bishop Wilberforce against science professor Thomas Henry Huxley. John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching that humans evolved from apes. Many, however, welcomed evolution, bringing it into their religious world picture. This was particularly the case for those drawn to organicism, Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin in France, and Alfred North Whitehead, founder of process theology/philosophy in America. Evolution, Darwinism in particular, was now seen as a stimulating challenge rather than as a dire threat.

The chapter uses a discussion of Pirandello’s theoretical essay On Humor to place his idea on comic literature in the broader contexts of his career, of international comic literary traditions, and of thought on humor in relation to contemporary developments in psychology, philosophy, and literature studies. The essay approaches On Humor as both a declaration of a personal poetics and a sort of manifesto, describing its structure, content, and the way Pirandello uses it to position his own work within – and sometimes opposed to – literary traditions in Italy and, in particular, the rest of Europe. A central point that emerges from the essay is how deeply attuned Pirandello was to international advances in various fields, responding to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, even as he was particularly wedded to his Italian forebears.

This chapter analyzes Jalil Ziapour’s artistic works and the Fighting Rooster Association’s previous untranslated writings to examine Cubism in the Iranian context. Until recently, art historiography considered Ziapour’s works as belated imitations of European modernist art resulting from an artistic immaturity with regard to Western modernism. The Fighting Rooster Association (founded in 1948) and its artistic productions reveal that the first generation of modernist artists was already deeply invested in the creation of a specifically Iranian modernism. The artistic adaptation of French Cubism enabled Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association to elaborate a suitable visual vocabulary for the creation of an artistic subjectivity rooted in Iranian cultural heritage. In addition, it helped foster the Fighting Rooster’s political hopes and ambitions for Iran’s democratization and to proclaim an alternative national identity rooted in the country’s spiritual heritage to counter Iran’s adoption of modern Western rationality.

This chapter takes a broad view of evolutionary theory, exploring the divergent theories that abounded in the modernist period. The first section, ‘Tigers under Our Hats: Alternative Evolutionary Identities’, focuses on comparative anatomy, demonstrating that Between the Acts highlights the resemblances between human bodies and animal forms – and, in doing so, decentres a universalized upper-class, human identity. The second section, ‘“Embryo Lives”: Recapitulation Theory’, considers Woolf’s representations of individual development in The Waves, ‘On Being Ill’, and Orlando – specifically her focus on the continuity between the self and its hereditary past, and on the multiplicities of bodily identity. It demonstrates that the central conceit of Orlando can be linked to recapitulation theory; the novel is a biography of Vita Sackville-West which shows her to recapitulate the lives of her ancestors. The final section, ‘“Unacted Parts”: Creative Evolution’, highlights resonances between Flush and Henri Bergson’s evolutionary scheme, especially his argument that qualities lost over the course of evolutionary development still exist in a ‘latent’ state in the self. It concludes that, in Woolf’s later writing, engagement with the community is a means of recovering the ‘unacted part[s]’ that are lost over the course of a lifetime.

In his essay “The Golden Age: Time Past,” Ralph Ellison does not disguise his distaste either for bebop music or for “the sharp, ugly…rebellion” bop’s pioneers were waging against the formal conventions of folk jazz and the Blues. Rather than conclude, as Robert O’Meally does, that Ellison was “deaf to virtually all jazz beyond Basie and Ellington,” this chapter re-contextualizes Ellison’s criticism of bebop an extension of his philosophy of temporality. Ellison believed that one’s experience of time determined one’s understanding of history, and bebop, which formalizes a discontinuous sense of time, clashed with his durational view of the past and its bearing on the present.

I explore the possibility that the mark of genuine realism is not whether things remain ‘true’ in the absence of a subjective knower, but rather, a metaphysical continuity between all existences and the knowledge possessed by spirits. I argue that Western philosophical lineage, since Socrates, has called forth a metaphysical turn to the subject which is to be differentiated from the later epistemological turn to the subject, espoused by Kant, and I draw a connection between this claim and the question of dialetheism explored in the previous chapter.