This chapter argues that beliefs are causally effective representational states. They admit of two main kinds: episodic and semantic forms of memory. These are argued to be distinct, although they have overlapping origins. The chapter also discusses the states often described as beliefs that result from one making up one’s mind (forming a judgment), but many of which are really commitments (a type of intention). The relations between episodic memory and imagination are also discussed. The chapter then examines the idea that moral judgments can be directly motivating, showing that it contains an element of truth. Finally, the chapter critiques a claim that has become popular among armchair-philosophers, that knowledge is a basic kind of intrinsically factive mental state.

This chapter considers what mental actions are, and how they are best explained. Mental actions are shown to include mental rehearsal of actions, prospective imagining, inner speech, attention, memory search, and (perhaps surprisingly) the spontaneous thoughts that occur while mind-wandering, as well as creative ideas that seemingly occur to one “out of the blue.” The chapter also discusses how controlled sequences of mental action can be explained, and discusses events like judgments and decisions that armchair-philosophers have been apt to claim are mental actions, but really are not.

Having shown how conflict belongs to the goodness of creaturely life and can be generative of human social flourishing, this chapter revisits the question of political community. “Agonistic community,” as I delineate it, incorporates the creative use of conflict in order to forge collectivity across difference, thereby reconceptualizing political community and difference in mutually constitutive terms. I begin the chapter by considering two neglected figures in the history of Christian political thought: the early modern Calvinist Johannes Althusius and the twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Both Althusius and Simon, I show, approach politics by theorizing the distinct features of creaturely action and relation, and so center the work of politics on the activities of shared judgment and action. The remainder of the chapter takes up the subject of democratic judgment, showing how agonistic democracy generates shared judgment and action without transcending or effacing conflict and difference. I conclude by examining the community organizing practices of the Industrial Areas Foundation as an instance of agonistic democratic community.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments concerning the influence of polarization and the fracturing of norms on the judicial process, and also its remedial suggestions.

This chapter argues that because judging inevitably requires the exercise of judgment, one of our most critical concerns should be ensuring that the people we select as judges have good judgment. It explores what good judgment might mean and draws on work in both law and philosophy exploring the nature of judicial character. It further explores two components of judicial character, specifically practical wisdom and intellectual humility, and in the case of the latter, surveys a growing body of work in philosophy and psychology that investigates humility’s nature and benefits. It briefly outlines ways in which a renewed emphasis on judicial character might be implemented.

Introduces the book through a discussion of two cases. The first is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and in which the dissenting justices suggested that the majority’s decision to do so was unwise. The second is Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the Court concluded that courts lack the capacity to resolve claims concerning excessive partisanship in gerrymandering. Together, the cases help illustrate the book’s themes: the inescapable role of judgment in judicial decision-making and the accumulation of ways in which changes in courts, the legal profession, and the culture more broadly have come to undermine judgment’s role.

One of Isaiah’s most forceful messages concerns justice, and the sociopolitical conditions necessary to support it. In “The Ethical and Political Vision of Isaiah,” M. Daniel Carroll R. looks at the fundamental themes and vocabulary of the book’s moral vision and surveys approaches that seek to better understand the socioeconomic injustice and politics it condemns. These sins include the greed and malfeasance of governing elites in ancient Judahite society, systemic socioeconomic abuses of agricultural and trade systems, and decisions leading to catastrophic war. At the same time, this prophetic text looks forward to a messianic age of justice and peace under a Spirit-filled king/servant. In closing, Carroll R. looks at how Isaiah’s ethical messages have been received (and resisted) in the pursuit of justice, peace, and ecology.

Diplomacy skills matter, and the widespread perception that anyone with common sense can be trusted with a diplomatic position, even without proper qualifications, is misguided and dangerous. Diplomacy is a serious business. The matters that diplomats deal with are too important to be left to amateurs. There are careers that do not require a new hire to possess any special skills on day one; diplomacy is not such a profession. Diplomats must have most basic skills so that they can hit the ground running. In fact, they are expected to have them before joining a diplomatic service, because most governments do not provide much substantive training to new officers. Although different career tracks–political, economic, consular, management and public diplomacy–require some specialized knowledge and abilities, most diplomatic skill sets are universal. This chapter covers the key aspects of diplomatic tradecraft, on which the rest of the book will elaborate and expound.

Truth and content are theoretically prior in Frege to the act of judgment. Wittgenstein takes the opposite view, maintaining that truth is fundamentally correctness in judgment and that a content is fundamentally something to be judged. At Tractatus 4.063, Wittgenstein gives an argument against the Fregean position. Judgment can aim internally at truth, Wittgenstein holds, only if it is internal to truth that it is correctness in judgment.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to the conception of propositions as pictures in the Tractatus. In this conception, modality is not the subject matter of theorizing but an ineluctable aspect of picturing of reality whose showing forth Wittgenstein aims to help us see by operationalizing the construction of propositions.

The Coda sketches how the distinctive tradition of uncertainty in nineteenth-century literature and culture changes with the rise of literary modernism. Uncertainty remains of vital interest to writers like Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Yet a more self-conscious embrace of chance, contingency, and randomness, alongside a more thoroughgoing skepticism, disengages this writing from the earlier literature’s concerns. Further valences acquired by the concept of uncertainty in the early twentieth century – as radical indeterminacy in physics and contrast class to risk in economics – both intensify cultural interest in the topic and disarticulate its nineteenth-century framework. In a reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1914), I argue that his emphasis on the value of momentary judgments, on knowledge as mercurial and provisional, and on the role of accident in literary plots all reprise Victorian tactics.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument about how novels in nineteenth-century Britain (by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy) represented modes of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty. It also offers a synopsis of key intellectual contexts: (1) the history of probability in logic and mathematics into the Victorian era, the parallel rise of statistics, and the novelistic importance of probability as a dual concept, geared to both the aleatory and the epistemic, to objective frequencies and subjective degrees of belief; (2) the school of thought known as associationism, which was related to mathematical probability and remained influential in the nineteenth century, underwriting the embodied account of mental function and volition in physiological psychology, and representations of deliberation and action in novels; (3) the place of uncertainty in treatises of rhetoric, law, and grammar, where considerations of evidence were inflected by probability’s epistemological transformation; and (4) the resultant shifts in literary probability (and related concepts like mimesis and verisimilitude) from Victorian novel theory to structuralist narratology, where understandings of probability as a dual concept were tacitly incorporated.

This chapter argues that the indictment of idolatry and immorality in Romans 1:18–32 is not limited to gentile sins but instead, building on biblical prophetic declarations that Israel has effectively “gentilized,” systematically includes Israel as having broken the two great commands by engaging in the behaviors condemned throughout the passage, effectively breaking down any distinction between Israel and the nations. The first chapter of Romans thereby sets up the rhetorical shift in Rom 2, which argues that Jews and gentiles alike are subject to God’s impartial judgment.