Let us begin by looking at a tragedy that is largely choral. Aeschylus’ Persians was staged at the Great Dionysia in 472, only one year after the Battle of Salamis, where the Athenian fleet had defeated Xerxes’ armada. The Great King had invaded continental Greece, and on reaching Athens had set fire to the Acropolis and destroyed the temple of its tutelary deity Athena, the Old Parthenon. Aeschylus’ choregos was none other than Pericles. Here we follow the dramatic – and choral – unfolding of this tragedy whose action takes place in Susa, the capital of Persia.

Popper wrote extensively on the quantum theory. In Logic der Forschung (LSD) he devoted a whole chapter to the topic, while the whole of Volume 3 of the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery is devoted to the quantum theory. This volume entitled Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (QTSP) incorporated a famous earlier essay, ‘Quantum Mechanics without “the Observer”’ (QM). In addition Popper’s development of the propensity interpretation of probability was much influenced by his views on the role of probability in quantum theory, and he also wrote an insightful critique of the 1936 paper of Birkhoff and von Neumann on nondistributive quantum logic1 (BNIQM).

The Conclusion delves into the strategic and legal legacies of the Seven Years’ War. It ties the Seven Years’ War and the unresolved tensions around maritime neutrality to the outbreak of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Spanish hostilities during the American War of Independence. It does so by examining the peace treaty of 1763 wherein no new significant arrangements were made about neutral rights between the Spanish and the British. The argument is made that the ambiguity of existing treaties left both governments room to continue negotiations whilst the Rule of the War of 1756 would provide an understanding of how British prize courts would treat neutral ships in future conflicts. The chapter examines the legacy of the Court of Prize Appeal and the thinking behind the rule. It discusses how the court and the rule were used in subsequent conflicts through the Napoleonic Wars and the role that individual judges took in making the rule a critical or underplayed element of British maritime strategic thinking. The rule loomed large in British maritime law for many wars after Hardwicke created it and it is, perhaps, one of the best illustrations of the link between law, sea power, and strategic thinking.

This chapter focuses on the court cases of the Dutch ships the Maria Theresa and the America. It analyses the legal arguments behind the condemnation of each ship as legal prize and how these arguments are connected to, and differ from, Anglo-Dutch negotiations over neutral rights and the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1674. The chapter demonstrates that the Anglo-Dutch negotiations at the governmental level were led by four key British figures: William Pitt, Lord Holdernesse, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Hardwicke. Their connections with their Dutch counterparts were largely managed through Joseph Yorke who was the British representative to the Dutch Republic. These negotiations were driven by maritime strategic considerations. In contrast, early decisions taken in the High Court of Admiralty created friction between the Dutch and British governments. The Dutch believed that the condemnation of their ships was arbitrary and an abuse of Dutch neutral rights. The chapter reveals that in order to resolve this tension, the British government determined to encourage the Dutch to appeal the decisions from the High Court of Admiralty and promised that the cases would be fairly determined in the Court of Prize Appeal where decisions could be influenced and shaped by Lord Hardwicke.

My point of departure in the book Meeting Needs was the conviction that the concept of needs has moral force, but the force has been dissipated and anyway made hard to see by multiple complications including but not confined to multiple abuses.1 I now think that is only half the problem.

This chapter provides further evidence of the uncertainty and unpredictability of innovation through a detailed description of the competitive process between airships and airplanes before the end of the 1930s. Both the airship and airplane were created by the imagination of entrepreneurs. While Count Zeppelin, the inventor of the airship, once predicted that the airplane would just be a footnote in the history of aviation, looking back more than 100 years later, contrary to his prediction, the airship became a footnote in aviation history. This is the most detailed and complete case study in the book and is extremely enlightening for understanding entrepreneurship and innovation.

Chapter 1 examines the Timurid-era tradition of ʿAlid devotion and its continuation under the early Shibanid dynasty. Tīmūr’s tombstone inscriptions leave no doubt regarding the ʿAlid orientation of the Timurids. The imagery of ʿAlī that links the Chingizid and Timurid genealogical trees in the tombstone suggests the preeminence of ʿAlī’s authority over the legacy of Chingiz Khan in the Timurid legitimation narrative. However, the decline of the Timurid dynasty in the early sixteenth century brought about large-scale religious and political turmoil in the Persianate world. The contest between the newly founded Shibanid and Safavid dynasties facilitated the Shibanids’ development of a self-conscious Sunni orientation in response to the militant Shiʿism promoted by the Safavids, thus furthering Sunni–Shiʿi antagonism.

In this paper I want to explore certain parallels between the logic of action and the logic of belief or, as it might otherwise be put, between practical and theoretical reasoning and rationality. The parallels will be seen to involve an ontological dimension as well as psychological and linguistic dimensions. It may help to begin by mentioning how I was drawn into an examination of these parallels. This was through becoming convinced of the correctness of an externalist account of reasons for action, having been persuaded of this by, amongst other things, arguments found in Jonathan Dancy’s recent book on the subject, Practical Reality.1 Externalism about reasons for action appeared to me to be, on reflection, the only view that one could plausibly adopt in conjunction with a libertarian account of free will—the latter being a position which I am now convinced is not only coherent but entirely defensible and indeed correct. Oddly enough, however, recent debates concerning internalist versus externalist accounts of reasons for action tend to have been dominated by moral philosophers, whereas those concerning compatibilist versus libertarian accounts of free will tend to have been dominated by philosophers of action. As a consequence of this, the two debates have been carried on relatively independently of each other—in my view, to the detriment of both. The present paper is part of a larger exercise of trying to bring them together.

The Introduction by Gabor Betegh and Voula Tsouna outlines the historical and philosophical objectives of the volume, identifies principal questions and challenges that the authors are invited to address, gives summaries of the individual chapters, and specifies the contribution of the volume to the history of scholarship and to contemporary philosophical thinking about concepts. Especially useful is the survey of the technical or quasi-technical terminology used by the ancient authors in order to talk about concepts and related notions. This terminology is rich and nuanced and, as the editors point out, sorting it out is not merely a lexical matter but an inextricable part of the analysis of substantive philosophical questions.