The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

Elizabeth Anscombe has called the part of the Tractatus dealing with the relation between the will and the world “obviously wrong.” To understand and assess this view, I look at what Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, and Anscombe say about the will. She is right to reject the view of the will that she calls wrong, but it is possible that Wittgenstein intends his readers to reject it too. Recent work by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Eli Friedlander, Modesto Gómez-Alonso, and Michael Kremer helps us to see this, and to understand Wittgenstein’s views on ethics as well. The will, conceived as something distinct from our actions in the world, is indeed a chimaera, as Anscombe argues. Will belongs to what we do. And it is not, as such, something that we can or should reject. If we are to reject anything in this neighbourhood, it is idle wishing that the world would change.

The author explores how consent functions as commitment, content, and constitution for international agreements. He argues that consent constructs all forms of international commitment. Consent elucidates an agreement’s contents – what the agreement ‘is’ in terms of scope and substance. Consent can also function as a constitution – delimiting not only ‘primary’ rules encapsulated by an agreement’s existence and contents, but ‘secondary rules’ determining who can make agreements, how they must do so, and ways to recognize, adjust, and end them. For all these functions, consent remains an under-examined and undifferentiated concept. Today, almost any of consent’s functions can be established by almost any formal or informal means. Alongside existing proposals (presumptions/defaults and content-based criteria), this chapter proposes that international law should pursue more – and different – formalities for consent. Having different forms of consent follow its different functions may, according to the author, improve the efficacy of consent and with it the efficacy of international agreements overall.

The author argues that ‘will’ and ‘consent’ are different. According to him, no State’s will is entirely free. However, this does not preclude its consent from being valid. State consent displays different shades of will: while unilateral acts are the epitome of ‘willing consent’, the degree of willingness required when accepting a treaty is weaker, until it almost disappears in the case of custom, or general principles of law. The author argues that opinio iuris and consent are also different notions: you may feel legally bound even if consent is very remote. However, whatever role ‘will’ plays in the formation of rules, once the rules exist, States are, according to the author, bound and their will is trapped. The author makes the argument that, if neither will nor consent explain the basis of a State’s obligation when it is no longer willing to implement it, they nonetheless have a stabilizing and legitimizing role. He argues that consent makes the acceptability of the obligation stronger, by comforting its legitimacy, which also makes its implementation more effective.

Chapter 4 explains how in traditional liberalism, autonomy as the ability to reason has been recognised as the foundation for personhood, thereby excluding adults with cognitive disability. Interpretations of Article 12 that require the abolition of decision-making by substitutes refashion autonomy from being marked by rationality and independence to being marked by shared personhood and interdependence so as to include adults with cognitive disability. I argue that these refashionings ultimately fail because despite avowals to the contrary, they perpetuate the privileging of rationality and of the bounded, independent individual. They also fail to recognise the interdependency of Article 12 with other rights in the CRPD, especially socio-economic rights. I argue that a concept of autonomy as achievement, as the development of autonomy competencies, as demanding the availability of a range of options and as demanding recognition of the indivisibility of human rights is the autonomy underpinning Article 12 and the CRPD.

Chapter 2 explains the historical and contemporary policy, legal and human rights contexts for decision-making by, with and for adults with cognitive disability. It describes the dominant narrative in the literature as depicting a journey from paternalism to autonomy, from exclusion to inclusion, and from discrimination to equality, aligned with three widely recognised models of disability – the charity, medical and social models. It explains that the book’s interpretation of Article 12 is founded on the acceptance of a social model of disability that acknowledges the residual impacts of impairment. The chapter explains the limitations of arguments favouring an interpretation of Article 12 as requiring that decision-making by substitutes be abolished. Such arguments privilege autonomy at the expense of other important human rights values and privilege the civil and political right to legal capacity over other civil, economic, political, social and cultural human rights.

The chapter reviews the essentials of Seneca’s positions in moral psychology as compared to those of earlier Stoics whose works he might have studied. On the material nature of the mind (or soul); on the mechanisms of thought, belief, and action; and on the nature and management of the emotions, Seneca’s views are consonant with those of his Stoic predecessors; however, his knowledge of the system is not necessarily complete, and his emphases are sometimes different. Thus, he shows some awareness of earlier discussions of phantasia (impressions) but does not explore the topic deeply; on the other hand, he gives assent and impulse the same kind of significance in ethics as Chrysippus had. Contrary to some earlier studies, this chapter does not find Seneca to be innovative as concerns volition (voluntas) or the will. Likewise, his analysis of the emotions and of involuntary emotional response finds parallel in earlier texts. For the good emotions (eupatheiai) of the Stoic sage, he seems to know only that part of the analysis that concerns joy, to which he assigns an important role in his own ethics.

Robert Wicks examines the question of whether the thing-in-itself can be accurately described as “will.”Schopenhauer admits that, although our inner experience of our body as will leads us to generalize the will as the in-itself of other phenomena, this is not yet an accurate depiction of the thing-in-itself, as it is still subject to the form of time. Yet he persistently describes the in-itself of reality as “will,” and it is hard to see how anything other than an endlessly striving will could underwrite his pessimism. Wicks argues that Schopenhauer’s use of Christianity appears in his vocabulary of universal guilt, which is key to understanding how suffering is universal.However, a Christian interpretation of the mystical experience would push Schopenhauer in the direction of saying there is more to the thing-in-itself than will, since the mystical experience is experience of something, and if will is negated something must remain to be experienced. Wicks, however, argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is incompatible with any interpretation of the thing-in-itself that denies it to be will; this puts him in touch with a more Buddhist form of mysticism, and explains the enthusiasm with which he accepted Buddhism when he finally encountered it.

Alistair Welchman argues that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. This interpretation of Schopenhauer’s epistemology sheds light on two difficulties elsewhere in his thought. The first is in his theory of compassion. Schopenhauer’s official view is that in compassion we see through the veil of maya into our essential identity with all other beings as will. Many commentators find this extravagant and suggest a psychological account instead, in which we imagine ourselves into the situation of the other. However this is contradicted by Schopenhauer’s own account of a similar contemporary theory, in which he appears to suggest that we directly perceive the Other’s emotions. But there is another advantage to this view: Schopenhauer is also a direct realist about perception of meaning, and this has repercussions for his (late) view that his metaphysics is hermeneutic in nature.

Bernard Reginster provides a different perspective on some of these themes, deepening our understanding of Schopenhauer's pessimism. This is rooted in the idea that there is something systematically delusive about desire, since fulfilling our desires does not give the lasting satisfaction we would want. But Schopenhauer holds out the possibility that we can detach from our desires through resignation. How is such detachment possible?Reginster confronts the same problem we saw in Chapter 1, that the act of denial of the will cannot itself be an act of will; but he looks to a solution Janaway rejected, namely, Schopenhauer’s appeal to a secularized version of the Christian concept of grace. In probing the structure of resignation, Reginster argues that it must involve some “incentive” in the form of cognitive insight into “the will's inner conflict and its essential nothingness,” (WWR 1, 68, 424–470) which leads one to voluntary asceticism, that is, mortification of the will, which in turn leads to resignation. He shows that Schopenhauer provides two mechanisms for this, plausible by the standards of contemporary psychology: hedonic adaptation (i.e. “getting used to” deprivation) and physical weakening of the body, which, as objectified will, weakens the will.

Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and science. Poorly received on its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers, and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of nonscholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously, to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship as well as the enduring relevance of this beautifully written text.

Chris Janaway argues that Schopenhauer's theory of negation of the will is problematic: How can you will not to will?If will is the basis of all reality, who would remain to experience the satisfaction that negation of the will supposedly generates? Janaway argues that negation of the will is best thought of as negation specifically of the will to life, and that this is compatible with the existence of other kinds of willing. Will to life is egoistic willing; and the negation of this kind of willing is consistent with nonegoistic willing and, in particular, moral action. This more constrained interpretation of the doctrine of negation of the will not only makes more sense of the text when Schopenhauer distinguishes between self- and other-directed willing; it helps clarify Schopenhauer’s account of the relation between virtue and holiness. The morally righteous person has other-directed desires at least some of the time, but not necessarily all of the time, while the saint no longer has any self-directed desires at all. Finally, Janaway shows that this interpretation of negation of the will has the virtue of bringing Schopenhauer closer to the Buddhist models he cites in support of his theory.