While there are many different interpretations of critical pedagogy (Wink, 2011), at its heart is a genuine connection with learner lives and lifeworlds. In an era of increased standardisation, and calls for ‘back to basics’ education, critical pedagogy engages both learners and educators in working together as powerful creators of knowledge. In the process, the constructed nature of knowledge is made explicit (Lankshear, 1997). Learners whose ‘virtual schoolbags’ (Thomson, 2002), which are the rich knowledge and experience gained through social and cultural lifeworlds, are typically not invited into the classroom and therefore risk a life of disengagement from formal schooling. It is these learners who are most clearly poised to benefit from a critical pedagogic approach.

This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

Forensic psychiatry, of all the specialties in medicine, needs its own strong academic core. Academic forensic psychiatry is founded in scientific research, with its systematic approach to making and recording observations, formulating hypotheses from them, testing those hypotheses with new observations and accumulating the most comprehensive picture possible in a way that is transparent and replicable. An academic approach supports application of scientific principles as strongly in the individual case as in developing relevant collective knowledge, is able to make links between them and can communicate all this effectively within and outside the specialty. This requires highly developed and defined specialist training. Academic forensic psychiatry in this sense is the business of all forensic psychiatrists. In order for forensic psychiatry to thrive, however, it is vital that some forensic psychiatrists further specialise in academic work in terms of additional training, time and immersion in skills that support accurate scientific questioning and testing and, ultimately, the capacity to innovate and keep this cycle active.

The chapter delves into the question of whether medicine is a science, examining arguments that suggest medicine is not a science due to differing aims, progress criteria, and moral commitments (as proposed by Munson 1981; Pellegrino 1998; Miller and Miller 2014). The chapter counters these arguments by challenging assumptions about science’s aims. Rather than simply increasing knowledge, the chapter defends the "Understanding Thesis" (informed by debates in epistemology and philosophy of science with reference to authors such as Kitcher 2001; 2008; 2011; Kvanvig 2003; Bird 2007; 2019a; 2019b; Douglas 2009; Pritchard 2010; Grimm 2014; Potochnik 2017), which holds that science’s aim is understanding, making the world more transparent. This aim is inherently practical, driven by our interest in manipulating the environment and bolstering our agency, thus making scientific inquiry responsive to promoting human agency and autonomy. As such, science, like medicine, is a moral enterprise, and there is no significant difference in terms of aims, progress criteria, or moral commitments that would disqualify medicine from being considered a science. It concludes by discussing the implications of this for scientists’ responsibilities.

Chapter 5 concludes the book with an analysis of the Maieutic section of the dialogue. It heralds a new beginning in the conversation, in which Socrates, having received at last Alcibiades’ full allegiance in question and answer, finally reveals to him his own being so as to secure commitment to a love that strives to grasp the totality of all that is, the highest expression of which is none other than the contemplative life. Self-knowing emerges as the zealous pursuit of the ultimate desideratum in the philosophical life, a striving that is akin to self-cultivation. Reason heals the soul, collecting it out of its opinionative and passionate dispersion, only to recognize, in the end, its synthetic activity is done in light of a higher grade of reality that transcends it, a reality in which it finally longs to participate; it yearns to become intellect.

Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.

Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

In ‘Aristotle on the Stages of Cognitive Development’, Thomas Kjeller Johansen examines Aristotle’s contributions to our thinking about concepts from a different perspective, namely in connection to Aristotle’s psychology. He revisits Aristotle’s account of how we acquire universal concepts mainly on the basis of Metaphysics A.1, Posterior Analytics 1.31 and 2.19, and the De Anima. The chapter begins by articulating the following puzzle. On the one hand, Aristotle points out (An. Post. 1.31, 2.19) that we perceive the universal in the particular. On the other, he suggests (Metaph. A.1) that it is only when we have craft and science that we grasp the universal, while perception, memory, and experience all are concerned with the particular. Building on the widespread view that, according to Aristotle, the universal grasped in craft and science is the universal cause, Johansen argues that we should understand perception, memory, and experience teleologically, as stages in the ordering of perceptual information that allows this causal concept to emerge.