Chapter 8 focuses on the imperial state level to examine the legal and political logic informing the final adjudication of the case in 1799, a decision that constituted a shift in the decisions the Council of the Indies and colonial tribunals had been taking in the 1780s. The chapter examines the political reasons related to mining utility and security that informed the shift and the juridical basis imperial jurists used to ground the case’s outcome. Ultimately, the Bourbon Crown ruled in favor of the cobreros but attached caveats related to Indian law to their collective freedom. The chapter ventures into the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Edict of 1800 to examine the challenges that emerged in the colony regarding the actualization of the decreed emancipation. It also interrogates the possibility of compensation or reparations to the cobreros for their wrongful enslavement.

Chapter 5 turns to the law in action and the politics of litigation involving adjudication and interpretations of the law. The chapter opens with an examination of the Council of the Indies’ initial judgment in September 1784 on the plaintiffs’ case. Based on a narrow reading of slave law and on pro-slavery policies, the ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ controversial claim to collective freedom and to the criteria of freedom presented by the plaintiffs’ brief but allowed hearings to determine ambiguous cases and stipulated the criteria to be utilized by colonial courts in those cases. The ruling gave way to a cascade of hearings and legal actions in lower-level colonial courts and to a conflict of interpretation over the imperial ruling. Ordinary enslaved and fugitive cobreros dispersed throughout the island became direct participants in the judicial arena at this point as they directly engaged in the politics of litigation for freedom in colonial courts. The chapter shows the way imperial and colonial authorities centralized and controlled judicial outcomes but also the room for maneuvering available in some cases.

This chapter focuses on Haiti’s twentieth-century periodicals, and more specifically on the literary magazine. By bringing to light the complex stories of literary revue culture during key historical moments I show how these specific forms of publications, which played a major role in Caribbean countries, have influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. At its core, this chapter addresses the tension between the aesthetics and politics of several literary revues by highlighting, first, literary and/or socially engaged magazines predominantly concerned with the development of Haiti’s literature and culture, and, second, those with a clear political agenda, some of which were infused with an explicit objective: the forging of a Haitian national voice.

Human reasoning and feeling influence what one takes to be revelation.

Barth thinks that revelation is purely God-given, but revelation calls for a mutual interplay of human and divine

Contra Barth, divine forgiveness is not unmerited, but requires repentance and obedience.

Barth is a compatibilist, holding that predestination and human freedom co-exist. This is a metaphysical, not a clear Biblical, thesis.

For Barth, freedom is not a choice between alternatives. This makes the existence of evil hard to explain.

Three Barthian incoherences - God determines all and condemns all; all religions are faithless and one is true; only Jesus gives divine grace and Torah did so.

Barth says all attempts to know God are futile, but also that some other religions know God.

If God reveals Godself, then God is not ‘wholly other’.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

The freedman Gregorio Cosme Osorio’s extant letters from Madrid in 1795 are the focus of Chapter 6. They provide a direct perspective of a cobrero leader’s legal culture, his views on the case, and his activities as liaison between Madrid and El Cobre (including an alleged meeting with the king). Cosme’s missives from the royal court, which high colonial officials considered subversive, critiqued politics of the law in the colony and kept the cobreros abreast of the imperial edicts issued in Madrid in their favor which colonial authorities ignored. His liaison role during fifteen years was crucial to keep the case alive in the royal court.

This chapter discusses the first level of contemplation, namely, psychic contemplation. The point of departure is Plotinus’ view of perception as a multi-level activity and his claim that we perceive external things by virtue of internal images. In the realm of affective experience, we also co-create our emotions rather than receive them passively. The fall is a distortion of the states of knowing (perceptions) and the states of loving (affects) as well as of the sense of the body, the world, and the self. In the first phases of contemplative ascent, virtues purify our experience of the self, and we begin to overcome the sense of the world as external and our emotional enslavement to it. The result is peace and freedom. The analysis of perception and affective experience shows that for Plotinus contemplation is a natural state of our soul. It is not adding something which is not there but recovering our awareness of what is already going on when we perceive experience affects or relate to our body.

Chapter 2 examines the local context of the pueblo of El Cobre and its members’ response to the privatization of the mining estate and their ensuing enslavement. It probes the unorthodox character of this community and the villagers’ vernacular collective self-identification as “cobreros,” or natives of El Cobre, an identification that they pressed on the court to counter their captivity and make other claims. The bonds of pueblo towered over and above possible internal cleavages along formal free or slave status, class, race, and gender. The cobreros’ collective action was possible precisely because of their social bonds and (informal) organization as a pueblo. The community empowered Gregorio Cosme Osorio, one of their own, to be their apoderado or legal representative in the royal court in Madrid, a rare liaison position for a colonial racialized man and another extraordinary aspect of the case. The chapter then turns trans-local as it traces Cosme’s journey and the networks he created from El Cobre to Madrid to litigate collective freedom. The chapter also examines the financial, administrative, political, and social challenges that these colonial litigants faced in accessing the judicial arena, particularly at the imperial level.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

In this chapter, we are interested in how AI may enhance our well-being – or do the opposite. A defintion of well-being and promotion of core vlaues will be discussed. It will then survey AI technologies and assess whether they enhance or diminish human well-being, using the different meanings of well-being

This chapter is about Greek culture, but there is a political aspect too: Hannibal promised freedom to Italian Greeks, but not all welcomed him, nor were his promises kept. Scipio at Syracuse enjoyed Greek lifestyle, including attending the gymnasium, an institution suspect among Romans for perceived immorality; but it had a paramilitary function, especially in Sicily. Scipio’s promotion of south Italian Greeks is illustrated by the career of Sextus Digitius from Paestum. Hannibal’s command of Greek is discussed (also in Appendix 13.1, on Greek ‘letters’, taught him by Spartan Sosylus). After enduring an Athenian philosopher lecturing at Ephesus on generalship he expressed impatience in frank if inelegant Greek. Religious and cultural hellenism at Rome and Carthage is explored, with special attention to Livius Andronicus’ invention of a Latin literature, and the Carthaginian philosopher Hasdrubal, self-reinvented as ‘Clitomachus’. Barcid Iberian city foundations are assessed, Hannibal’s in Asia Minor postponed to Chapter 17.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.