The method proposed in the Tractatus is to find a perspicuous logic of our language. It thus seems to conform to Russell’s ideal of a scientific method in philosophy. Language, though, is for Wittgenstein essentially the language of the first person. This means that the central issues in the Tractatus, such as ‘What is a sentence?’ and ‘What is a judgement?’, have to be approached by means of a first-person method. Perhaps surprisingly, this method is less vulnerable to psychologism than Russell’s method. How are we to understand the use of the first-person indexical in the Tractatus? It is not used as a referring term: it does not stand for the author, a world-soul, or a transcendental subject. Its function is rather to engage the reader in applying the first-person method when aiming to understand the Tractatus.

This chapter explores the concept of virtue (de) in Confucianism and Daoism, which are the two prominent indigenous traditions in ancient China. It is argued that virtue, from an ancient Chinese paradigm, is essentially about moral excellence and influence. In the Confucian traditions, virtue is manifested in the exaltation of moral goodness and ethical charisma of exemplary persons. In the Daoist traditions, virtue is encapsulated in the emptying of one’s heart-mind and in noncoercive action. Chinese ethics in the ancient past stress the utmost importance of (inter)personal cultivation of virtues and role-modeling. School leaders, teachers, students, and other educational stakeholders should develop themselves and others morally so as to collectively achieve dao (the Way), which is a shared vision of human excellence.

Critics have long argued over Beatrice Cenci’s guilt and moral responsibility in relation to her murder of her father and rapist, as Shelley himself anticipated they would. Far less attention has been paid, however, to Count Cenci’s program for corrupting his daughter and turning her, at least in part, into a mirror version of himself. Count Cenci engineers a perverse kind of empathic identification, one that Shelley calls, in Prometheus Unbound, “loathsome sympathy.” This chapter presents “loathsome” sympathy in turn as an extreme or inverted form of the sympathy that plays so crucial a role in Shelley’s poetic and ethical theories, theories he develops from passages in various eighteenth-century moral philosophers including Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Adam Smith. Twenty-first-century research on empathy and “mirror neurons” provides a number of partial and provocative analogies with eighteenth-century sympathy theory that are used heuristically to provide a novel perspective on the tradition that leads from Hume to Shelley. The chapter looks especially at how mirror neuron research emphasizes the embodied, visual, intersubjective, and unconscious workings of empathy. Shelley, the chapter argues, develops a comparable sense of sympathy, one that, in its “perverse” version, informs The Cenci.

In Chapter 5, I confront the moral demandingness problem: Namely, the demandingness of our positive interpersonal obligations to severely poor people may require us to violate our moral integrity since we are always required to act in order to help others. I argue that we may fulfill our obligations to our severely poor neighbors and also exercise proper self-regard and regard toward our special relations. Thus, affluent people are morally obligated to help the severely poor. But affluent people are simultaneously obligated to violate neither our own moral status nor our own moral integrity. Therefore, we are permitted to form special relations and to pursue our personal projects, which are part of our rational life plans. Affluent people are morally obligated, however, to scrutinize the personal prerogatives we have taken up unchecked and to locate these self-regarding activities against the demands of aiding the severely poor.

Building on Derrida’s celebrated analysis of the term ‘supplement’, this chapter investigates the fundamental ambivalence of supplementary means of treaty interpretation. While the general philosophy of the Vienna Convention interpretive regime rests on the assumption of a hierarchy between the primary means set forth in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention and the supplementary means of Article 32, qualifying certain means as supplementary presumes that the primary interpretive means are somewhat lacking and in need of a complement. The chapter also focuses on the ‘danger’ of such supplement that has been highlighted in practice, namely, that supplementary means themselves need to be interpreted before they can be used in an interpretive inquiry, reinforcing the larger point made in the book that it is impossible to get an unmediated access to any signified. The chapter argues that since supplementary means are not comprehensively listed in the treaty interpretation regime, a virtually endless number of materials can be made relevant in treaty interpretation discourse through the channel of supplementary means.

I argue that the sensibility/understanding distinction announced at the end of Kant’s Introduction to the Critique can be justified via pure apperception. I first defend an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction, arguing that analytic judgments articulate intellectual grounds of truth. Synthetic judgments, then, are based on nonintellectual grounds of truth. This provides Kant’s “baseline conception” of receptive intuition as a capacity for representing nonintellectual grounds of truth. This is a “top-down” approach to intuition: a characterization of intuition not in terms of its intrinsic properties but in terms of a prior account of the intellect and its cognitive needs. I then argue that this version of the analytic/synthetic distinction follows from the idea that judgment must track the truth – an idea that is available to us via pure apperception. Thus, Kant’s baseline conception of intuition, as expressed in the sensibility/understanding distinction, can be justified via pure apperception.

Locating Wagner’s views about sexuality and social mores in the context of his time, this chapter moves from the opposing arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft towards the end of the eighteenth century, through the idealisation of women in the Biedermeier era and the coterminous radical tendencies critical of such moral codes, to nineteenth-century representations in literature (notably the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or Bourgeois Tragedy) and, at the end of the century, visual art (women as devils, vampires, castrators, or killers).

Documented sexual experience of the time is discussed, as are the grossly exaggerated aspects of Wagner’s own sexual career. Criticism of Wagner for failing, in his works, to abandon the phallocentric matrix of his time is unhistorical, it is argued. And indeed many of Wagner’s heroines exhibit elements of autonomy, agency, or self-determination with the potential for radical change.

The third chapter looks at the Western reception of Dionysius the Areopagite in the early Middle Ages and the channelling of thinking on theosis through Dionysius into the Western mystical tradition. This tradition is examined from Bernard and Bonaventure to the Rhineland mystics and Nicholas of Cusa, revealing a constant concern to integrate the intellectual ascent to the vision of God with experiential participation in the Word by faith.

The main goal of this chapter is to examine the role of cultural carriers (means through which culture is propagated) and other mechanisms that serve to sustain continuity of behavior across revolutions. These mechanisms result in deep-level similarity in behavior before and after regime change. Revolutions bring enormous varieties of surface changes, such as the titles of leaders, the names of places, clothing, and all varieties of speech. But these surface-level changes can hide deeper continuities, such as continuity in style of leader–follower relations. Most obviously, an anti-dictator revolution results in regime change, but a new dictator with a new title comes to power and the dictatorship continues with a new face – as happened after revolutions in France, Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, and a number of other important cases (the American Revolution is excluded, because it is interpreted as rebellion against a foreign power). The power of cultural carriers arises from them being woven into the fabric of everyday life, seemingly beyond politics.

Perhaps the most curious sort of Lucretian pleasure is that which the spectator, safe on the shore, derives from watching the shipwreck. At the start of the second book of De rerum natura, Lucretius explains:

Though this moment is later revealed to be a sort of metaphor for the pleasurable relief the philosopher experiences in contemplating the meanderings of the less educated, it is instructive and intriguing in and of itself. The moment of observation is quite specific: the spectator is positioned on firm and stable land, while upon the sea the rough waters are whipped into turbulence by the winds. The great struggles (magnum … laborem) of the other, the unfortunate soul upon the water, constitute the pleasurable object. Sweetness (suave) inheres in the moment because of a perceived distance, both literal and metaphorical, between the observer and the struggler. In a literal sense, the distance is optical, of a kind with what a museum patron experiences in examining a painting (of a shipwreck, say); in a metaphorical sense, the distance underlines the difference between the safe and the toiling, the solid and the fluid, the known and the uncertain.