In ‘The Place of Concepts in Socratic Inquiry’, Terence Irwin examines Socrates’ question ‘What is F?’, which is often taken to be a request for some sort of definition or account of what F is. When Socrates asks, ‘What is courage?’, ‘What is piety?’, ‘What is temperance?’, does his discovery that everyone, including himself, cannot answer such questions in a satisfactory manner imply that these answerers do not know what the words mean? If one cannot answer the ‘What is F?’ question, does it follow that one lacks the concept of F? Irwin argues that conceptual argument has an indispensable role in the arguments that lead to Socratic definitions, but it will not take us all the way to them. To understand Socratic definitions, Irwin compares them with Aristotelian real definitions, and with Epictetus’ views on the articulation of preconceptions.

The view of evidence, defeat, and suspension put forth here delivers the result that paradigmatic scepticism about knowledge and justification is an instance of resistance to evidence. This chapter argues that this result is correct. In order to do that, I look at extant neo-Moorean responses to purported instances of failure of knowledge closure (Pryor 2004, Williamson 2007) and warrant transmission and argue that they are either too weak – in that they concede too much to the sceptic – or too strong – in that they cannot accommodate the intuition of reasonableness surrounding sceptical arguments. I propose a novel neo-Moorean explanation of the data, relying on my preferred account of defeat and permissible suspension, on which the sceptic is in impermissible suspension but in fulfilment of their contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations.

This book aims at transcending the dichotomy between deontology and consequentialism by accounting for reasons, obligation, and value in an integrated normative framework. In that framework, the consequences of our actions include more than what we caused by acting, and the main focus of deliberation is conduct. Deliberation should take account of the moral value our conduct realizes. That in turn may have intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue. The importance of moral value is illustrated and shown to be central for deontological ethics but also of major importance for the view – consequencism – that the overall consequences of our conduct, organically understood, provides the widest and deepest moral standard. Consequencism is neither purely deontological nor purely consequentialist; it is pluralistic and accommodates all three dimensions of value; it incorporates the virtue-theoretic requirement on moral motivation; and its normative demand is a preferential standard stronger than satisficing but weaker than maximization.

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s assertion that the short story must be read in a “single sitting,” short story theory has focused on the importance of endings as a hallmark of the form. This crystallized, in the 1980s and 1990s, in the rise of closure studies, a critical field that sought to taxonomize the ways stories end and its effects on the reader. This essay examines a feminist countertradition of short story writing that uses grammar as a tool to disrupt the form’s inbuilt narrative teleology. By interrogating the short story’s narrative temporality, writers such as Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, and Lorrie Moore use grammar to situate themselves, in distinctly gendered ways, in and against broader systems of time. Through a close examination of these writers, the essay explores how grammar offers a way of assessing not only the short story’s closures but also its various expansions and radical possibilities.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.

This chapter places Elizabeth Bishop’s work within the cross currents of the aesthetic and poetic movements that constituted modernism. While it might be expected that Bishop and her contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell would form part of the generation that would inherit the sensibilities of modernism, what quickly becomes clear, particularly in relation to Bishop, is both her reticence at being identified with any one particular school or movement and her agility in moving between the definitions produced by, and for, modernism. In part her singular position on the peripheries of modernism was a self-selected one, Bishop is happier to stand apart from the categorizing and theorizing impulses of her time. In addition, the fact that she was a gay woman

In letters to friends and in interviews later in life, Elizabeth Bishop repeatedly made clear her low opinion of critical writing. At the same time, much of her own criticism and review work is audacious, original and witty, particularly the long essays she completed as an undergraduate student at Vassar. She also admired the work of contemporary poet-critics like William Empson and Randall Jarrell and once pitched for the job as poetry reviewer of The New Yorker. Close analysis of her own prose and poetry demonstrates the extent to which her own writing was itself a form of informal criticism. She engaged with and incorporated the ideas and words of literary critics into her poetry throughout her career, rebuffing reductive assessments of her writing as “calm” and “modest.”