Normative ethics is divided between ethical theory and practical ethics. Three families of ethical theories are consequentialism, virtue ethics, and Kantianism. Consequentialism is the view that consequences determine what we ought to do. Virtue ethics is the view that right actions should be understood in terms of virtuous agents and their character. Kantianism’s central concern is with how rational agents ought to relate to themselves and to each other. Ethical theory is difficult to disentangle from practical ethics, which is concerned with what we ought to do in particular situations, which – along with the question “How should I live?” – is the most important topic in ethics and perhaps all of philosophy.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

The German Liberal theology against which Barth rebelled – Barth’s critique of Kant.

Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher’s view of Christianity as the highest form of the religious sense.

Barth’s critique of Harnack, as subordinating faith to culture.

Contra Barth, The search for truth in religion is not wilful, but a great human good.

Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Chapter 22 introduces the concept of morphology, the study of form which attends to both the uniqueness of individual manifestations of life and the invariable laws which underpin them. Rather than forming a single theory, Goethe’s extensive reflections on morphology emerged in different contexts and run throughout his oeuvre. The chapter examines the most significant stages in Goethe’s engagement with morphology, from his search for the Urpflanze (primeval plant) in Sicily to his development of Anschauung (intuition) as a method, and positions him in relation to other thinkers, above all Wolff and Kant.

Chapter 20 reflects on Goethe’s unique way of thinking and his persistent challenges to orthodoxy. It builds on Goethe’s own assertion that he was ‘not naturally equipped to do philosophy in its proper sense’, and argues that his thought engages the figurative power of ‘improper’ (that is, poetic) language to do philosophical work. The chapter notes his criticism of the modes of, among others, Kant and Hegel, and highlights places in Goethe’s oeuvre, including in his literary works, where we can see new and unconventional pathways for thought being built.

Chapter 19 examines Goethe’s relationship to philosophy, which throughout his life was one of both interest and guarded distance. It considers the transformations which philosophy as a discipline underwent during his lifetime, details Goethe’s attitudes to intellectual developments in his own time, above all the work of Kant, and devotes particular attention to Spinoza, without whose inspiration Goethe’s work is unthinkable, even if it cannot be reduced to a Spinozist position. The chapter also emphasises the singularity of Goethe’s own thought, which was forever transforming any influences that it received, becoming a source of inspiration and critical reflection for contemporary and succeeding generations of philosophers.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.