My aim in this chapter is to contribute to what the volume calls the ‘third move’ in International Relations norm studies, which explicitly addresses the legitimacy of the norm being studied as well as its influence on practice. I build on the work of those who point to the relevance of classical American Pragmatism, which considers how we know that what we are doing is appropriate once we realise that norms are the product of social and historical practices rather than abstract moral foundations. I trace the Pragmatist’s commitment to deliberative inquiry through the ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey and relate it to Antje Wiener’s arguments that normativity is sustained through proactive contestation. While there are overlaps between the two approaches, I argue that Deweyan Pragmatism can help us understand when it is appropriate to defend a norm against contestation. It does this by drawing on what Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’, understood as the background knowledge that has epistemic authority because it is the product of a deliberative and inclusive process of inquiry. I develop this with reference to debates within Pragmatist philosophy before applying it to offer a preliminary assessment of global health norms.

This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

The chapter defends a particular philosophical engagement with medicine (i.e., normative philosophy of medicine) that is directly connected to the problem of determining the nature of philosophical inquiry. It starts with the discontinuity view, notably advocated by Pellegrino (1986; 2001), suggesting philosophy and science are discrete. Two primary arguments support the discontinuity view: science is empirical while philosophy is conceptual (Dummett 2010), and science is descriptive while philosophy is normative (Thomasson 2015; 2017). The chapter critically examines and ultimately rejects these claims, introducing the continuity view as an alternative, positing a close relationship between philosophical inquiry and science. Building on the works of Sober (2008), Kaiser (2019), and Kitcher (2011), a normative philosophy of science approach is proposed, distinguishing three levels of analysis (aims, nature, and key concepts), which mirror the types of questions posed by modern medical challenges. The chapter concludes by endorsing philosophy of medicine as a legitimate subdiscipline of philosophy of science, and arguing for the comprehensive value of this approach over conventional perspectives.

As seemingly cognate sub-genres of history, the history of sexuality and women’s history have a complicated relationship. Both tell 1970s origins stories from global north liberation movements, despite the scholarly scrutiny of sexuality and women in earlier historical periods. Core journals and publications reveal these sub-fields’ distinctive, sometimes incommensurate development trajectories. Perhaps due to their recent advent, presentism is clear in both, with the corollary of a marked post-1800 skew of most research and publications. Women’s history tracks women, in all their subdivisions, of necessity with focus upon sexualities in many registers, while seeking address of race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and international and global foci. Alternatively, the history of sexuality prioritizes sexual minorities and erotic alterities, welcoming studies of identities, expression, and representation. Key themes are transgressive resistance against repression and heteronormativity, entailing special concentration on same-sex history. Women figure within these themes, while innovative feminists are influential historians of sexuality. Nonetheless, women’s history and feminist analysis of sexualities have no default standing for the history of sexuality. In short, intellectual, methodological, and political properties prove less reciprocal than might be presumed. These exciting areas of history should evolve, to illuminate crucial topics for both, for instance reproduction. As both pursue aims to incorporate all historical periods and regions, their interconnections may become stronger.

Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

This chapter introduces some of the dominant institutional structures through which sexuality in Britain was interpreted. It surveys the relationship between lexicography and the law via buggery and sodomy, perhaps the words most familiarly associated with same-sex intercourse in pre-1900 English. The chapter defamiliarizes them by comparing the diverse explanations given to them across hard-word and general dictionaries, law lexicons, and legal treatises. Lexicographers constructed buggery and sodomy as crimes beyond the bounds of human law, as well as the natural and divine laws on which it was meant to be based; in so doing, they also built for their readers a contrastive model of lawful erotic behaviour. However, the scaffolding of sexual normativity was unstable. Dictionaries ascribed conflicting polysemies to buggery and sodomy, which were variably said to include ‘copulation’ between men, between women, between woman and man ‘unnaturally’, or between man or woman and beast. At the same time, buggery and sodomy were often rendered not only illegal but incoherent, as cross-sex-specific definitions of copulation itself precluded the possibility of same-sex activity.

This book explores how the language of sexuality was codified in English dictionaries from 1604 to 1933, surveying the centuries before the coining of identity terms such as queer and heterosexual and then the decades when they had just begun entering wider currency. The introduction explains the temporal and spatial scope of the book and its understanding of sexuality and dictionary. It places the ideological histories of these two concepts in parallel, tracing how both became subject to the scientific spirit of the late nineteenth century—sexuality under the medical lens of sexology, lexicography under the empirical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary. Though prior studies that bring together lexicography and sexuality have been conducted within a range of disciplines, these have often occurred in isolation from each other. In an effort to bridge the divide between dictionary scholarship and queer linguistics in particular, the introduction puts forward an analytical framework which builds on the strengths of both research traditions. This is followed by an outline of how the discussion will be structured across the rest of the book.

The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

The “crisis of evangelicalism” that arose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, who was supported by 80 percent of American evangelicals, provides a case study in the challenge of determining who counts as a “true evangelical” or a “true Christian.” The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to Christianity helps to clarify much of the controversy. The anxieties of modernity have forced all Christians, liberal and conservative, to explore new approaches to prescriptivism.

Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on the purported “normativity” of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the “finiteness” of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as “normative.”

Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language argues that there are no facts about what anyone means by their words, so meaning is a fiction. But some fictions are useful, and Chapter 3 explains why this one is. One side-effect of that explanation is supposed to be the “Private and solitary language argument,” which says that we cannot, or at least cannot usefully, ascribe meaning to an individual “considered in isolation”; it thereby reveals something essentially communitarian about meaning.

This chapter briefly defends that fictionalist reading of Kripke’s great work before arguing at more length that no communitarian conclusion follows. Even if semantic ascriptions are all false, they may still be useful, even when made by, or applied to, or addressed by, an individual “considered in isolation”– whatever exactly this turns out to mean.

Engaging in normative discussions about the characteristics and requirements of a good life in a good society, Political Philosophy has a long-standing history in identifying the economic, political and social requirements for turning waged work into a practice that contributes to human flourishing. Meanwhile, a widely shared scepticism towards meaningful work under capitalism is another powerful theme in the field, arguing that the alienating nature of waged work cannot be overcome. This chapter argues that contributions to meaningful work in the realm of Political Philosophy have a strong tendency to incorporate both positions, presenting an ambivalent understanding of wage labour as activity that is burdensome and alienating for the many and emancipatory and meaningful for the few. Discussing two of the most significant schools of thought in this field, virtue ethics and political materialist contributions, the chapter identifies and compares their ontological understandings of work and its nature under capitalism, the conceptualisation of labour agency and the guiding principles of meaningful work that they promote.

Chapter three engages in the investigation of the meaning and role of natural selection, teleology and chance in evolutionary processes. From Aristotle and Aquinas, through Darwin and the twentieth-century evolutionary synthesis, to the most current philosophy of evolutionary biology, the fate of the notion of goal-directedness is traced and it is defended as indispensable and intrinsically related to chance in processes that affect the fittingness of organisms, which is tested by natural selection.

This final chapter of Part I provides a conceptual framework for identified issues within the international investment regulation. The analysis in the preceding chapter has referred to a number of tensions existing within the field to paint the picture of reform challenges. In this chapter, these aspects are placed into the conceptual framework of legitimacy and the rule of law, with an aim of conceptualising systemic problems of ISDS relevant to its reform.