This chapter provides the briefest overview of the ‘linguistic method’. It briefly gives an example of a truly ‘Eureka’ moment in the history of linguistics, with the discovery of laryngeals in the ancient Hittite language. The focus is on the pidgin language, Fanakalo of South Africa, a relatively simple means of communication that combined mainly Zulu words with mainly an English-like syntax. Until fairly recently, an oft-repeated claim was that the pidgin was likely to have originated on the plantations of Natal in the mid to late nineteenth century. The hypothesis was that incoming plantation workers from India who spoke a variety of not all mutually intelligible languages had to learn the main languages of the colony, English and Zulu, rapidly and under less-than-ideal conditions. In so doing, they would have – so the hypothesis went – come up with a simple mixture of Zulu and English. I recount how this hypothesis was disproved, first on the grounds of linguistic plausibility and secondly, and more decisively, on the grounds of the archival records, which showed the pidgin to be in existence well before the arrival of indentured Indian workers.

At some point, the necessary interpretation of vague, abstract, and nonspecific provisions in constitutions, including the United States Constitution, places appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court, in a jurisprudential position very similar to the one they occupy when engaged in traditional common law analysis and lawmaking. Working out the specific doctrinal meaning of constitutional phrases such as “free speech,” “establishment of religion,” and “equal protection” is a jurisprudential task not unlike working out the specific doctrinal meaning of “duty,” “breach,” or “causation” in the common law of negligence.

This means that as a practical judicial matter, the development of constitutional law is often very similar in nature to traditional common law lawmaking. Thus, a court such as the United States Supreme Court can accurately be thought of as often operating like a common law court, despite the relative paucity of federal common law.

This chapter takes advantage of this insight to apply the nature of the paradigm shift from formalism to instrumentalism, and its many consequences, to the area of constitutional law. More specifically, it offers an example of instrumentalist common law analysis applied to the constitutional law free speech doctrine of prior restraint.

This chapter engages with the seventeenth-century explosion of cheap print pocket maps in England: affordable, broadly accessible cartographic materials owned, used, and dreamt with by the mass of ordinary people often forgotten by the grand sweep of history, who carried them as travel aids as they worked to better their financial circumstances. Domestic English pocket maps first came to the market in 1590 and targeted an expansive public sphere that included the marginally literate. These cartographic affordances also rose to prominence over a century characterized by the nation’s rapid imperial expansion. I offer case studies of the first miniature maps printed in England depicting its early American colonies, which offered up the economic resources of its new territories to broad audiences invested in upward mobility and personal wealth. At a time when cheap print seminally redefined the knowledge of what was common to the colonial commonwealth, small-format cartography mapped the rhizomatic growth of an everyday empire grounded in commercial concerns and seeded with private interests, even as drama, poetry, and prose took up this spatial imaginary to celebrate the cornucopianism at the core of this populist geography.

This chapter covers the history of attention research and introduces the main issues that are being actively studied today. Key figures in the development of attention as a topic of scientific research are highlighted, including William James, Hermann von Helmholtz, Franciscus Donders, Colin Cherry, Donald Broadbent, Anne Treisman, and Michael Posner. The events leading up to the “cognitive revolution” are described and the initial studies of attention motivated by the “cocktail party phenomenon” are introduced. Classic paradigms to test the functions of attention are described, including the “shadowing task”, the Posner cuing paradigm, visual search tasks, the Eriksen flanker task, and the attention network task (ANT). The distinction between overt attention and covert attention is explained, and the link between attention and eye-movements is discussed. Important theories of attention are introduced, including the early versus late selection controversy, the spotlight and zoom-lens models of attention, the motor theory of attention, and feature integration theory. The relation of attention to consciousness is introduced and the concepts of distraction and mind-wandering are introduced.

The chapter provides a novel detailed analysis of one of the most discussed chapters in the Aristotelian corpus, namely An. 2.5. The central claim is that in An. 2.5 Aristotle lays down his programmatic definition of perception as a complete passive activity. He does so by classing the perceptive capacity with capacities that are already fulfilments (entelekheiai) of their subjects and by showing how this classification is compatible with perception being passive (i.e. a kind of being affected). By working out the concept of complete passive activity Aristotle fills in a conceptual gap left open elsewhere in the corpus (most strikingly in Metaphysics Θ.6), where both completeness and passivity are taken for granted but without showing how the two features can cohere. In An. 2.5, Aristotle, thus, succeeds in capturing how perception differs not only from manifestations of non-passive complete capacities (such as the art of house-building), but also from passive processes (as exhibited in the inexhaustibility of the perceptive capacity and the object-directedness of perception). His definition is programmatic in the sense that it analyses the explananda without, however, yet providing any explanantia.

The Conclusion sums up the main results of the study and their philosophical relevance. It focuses on the notion of complete passive activities; Aristotle’s integration of causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception; his dynamic account of perception, which defies the standard dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism; the central dilemma for Aristotle’s endeavour to explain perception, as well as the prospects of the homeostatic solution; and finally the promise of the present study to also provide the groundwork for a better understanding of Aristotle’s account of intellectual cognition.

Western approaches to knowledge production in archaeology have primarily been framed on the ‘artefact’ and how the information around it aggregates to the ‘feature’, ‘structure’, ‘site’, and the spatial spread of such evidence in the landscape and its transformation over time. The deep history of Africa shows how this framing of knowledge in non-Western societies has been framed and internalized into ‘prehistory’, seriously impacting the methodology and theory necessary to understand contexts beyond the Global North. I argue here that if approaches to rewriting the African pasts are to effectively challenge this disaggregation and fragmentation of knowledge in archaeology, new knowledge must provide meanings to material culture and contexts that align with the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. Archaeology then becomes a discipline not only focused on the study of the past but also on how the past connects with the present and helps address the contemporary human condition.

This chapter explores the powerful role of music in regulating emotions and enhancing well-being. It delves into the science of how music affects our mood, highlighting its ability to evoke specific emotions and induce physiological changes. The author provides practical strategies for utilizing music as ’emotional first aid’, helping individuals cope with stress, anxiety, and negative emotions. The chapter also discusses the importance of self-regulation and offers guidance on using music to interrupt negative emotional spirals. It emphasizes the significance of creating personalized playlists tailored to specific emotional needs, promoting a proactive approach to emotional well-being through music. Additionally, the chapter explores the concept of ’mood repair’, showcasing how music can shift our emotional state from negative to positive. It provides insights into the diverse ways individuals can harness the power of music to cultivate joy, resilience, and overall emotional balance.

This chapter explores the US Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” the growing number of emergency orders and summary decisions that lack the transparency and consistency of cases granted and decided on their merits. It examines the Court’s practices in the shadow docket through the lens of the modern classic, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, which itself adapted and adopted many concepts from the ancient Western rhetorical tradition. It then applies this lens to Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a 2020 shadow-docket case relating to state restrictions on religious gatherings during COVID.

Designed as a trusted resource for my children, friends, and myself, this emergency guide has been meticulously refined based on first-hand experiences with overcoming challenges. If these strategies can even spark positive change in my life – a life brimming with challenges and my own stubborn resistance – they’re bound to work for you too. While some recommendations may appear unconventional or daunting, I encourage you to embrace them. Regular practice will rewire your brain, creating and fortifying new neural pathways, thereby making this approach progressively easier and more effective over time.

This chapter compares two very different authors separated by almost four centuries on the problem of women’s social position. Mary Astell, one of the earliest English feminists, examined these questions in 1694 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She believed that women were not living up to their intellectual potential and were relegated to the realm of trivia and frivolity by the social norms of the period. In 2019, the American Bar Association published a report entitled Walking Out the Door: The Facts, Figures, and Future of Experienced Women Lawyers in Private Practice. Focusing on America’s 350 largest law firms, the report found that women with more than fifteen years of experience are leaving law firms in droves. Like Astell, the report attributed this failure to thrive to male-created cultural norms. Although the two authors agree that women should be able to thrive in a man’s world but aren’t doing so, they rhetorically engage the problem very differently.

In this essay, I will share some of the perspectives that emerged from my recent experience writing a commentary on the book of Jonah (OTL, Westminster John Knox, 2024) that may offer some insight into what knowledge production entails in my field of biblical interpretation. The numerous incongruities, complexities, and uncertainties associated with this enigmatic book have yielded some interesting interpretations, with interpreters returning again and again to these strange aspects of the text to generate new insights into old problems.

The Introduction articulates the central question about the nature of perception and sets it within the explanatory project of Aristotle’s De Anima. What makes Aristotle’s account attractive, I argue, is that it strives to accommodate causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception. A central insight of Aristotle’s account is captured under the notion of perception as a complete passive activity, but that notion has, since late antiquity, appeared paradoxical to readers of De Anima and was, thus, systematically disregarded. The Introduction analyses the historical and philosophical reasons for this disregard. It further articulates the key dilemma pertaining to Aristotle’s view of the role played in perception by the soul: it should be the primary cause of an essentially passive and receptive activity, but it should itself remain unmoved and impassive; how can that be? Although this question has received relatively little attention among recent scholars, it is argued to be more crucial than the much-discussed issue of what happens in the perceiver’s sense organs. The final section of the Introduction outlines the argument of the entire book.

From Virchow to Allende, social medicine had been intertwined with left-wing or socialist political thought for over a century. While the prominence or significance of this connection ebbed and flowed in Western Europe and North America, the basic tenets underpinning social medicine gained new purchase in the “Global East” with the rise of state socialism and the emergence of a socialist world. Ideas around the role of social, environmental, and economic factors in health, coupled with revolutionary aims of new socialist regimes. What constituted “socialist medicine” and in what way did this, ideologically based concept prevalent in the East relate to ideas of “social medicine” in the West during the Cold War? Through and Eastern European lens, this chapter traces connections between socialist politics and health in emerging practices and ideas to map divergences and overlaps in what became a key issue in the Cold War that, at least in its rhetoric, set apart East and West.