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.

I introduce, and describe in detail, the dynamical renormalization group, using the KPZ equation as an example. In addition to spelling out the mechanics of the technique in great detail, I also emphasize its philosophical importance, as the answer to Einstein’s famous question “Why is the universe intelligible?” and its role as a guide to the formulation of hydrodynamic theories.

The COVID-19 pandemic resurfaced and potentially exacerbated the issue of comorbidities in mental health, with anxiety and depression being a prominent example. The co-occurrence of these conditions may exceed 50%, while there is also an overlap in treatment options and challenges in treatment response. This is supported by evidence indicating similarities between mood and anxiety across multiple dimensions, including cognitive, behavioural, neurobiological, and intracellular mechanisms. Cognitive commonalities primarily refer to attentional and recollection biases towards threatening stimuli and negative information. Behavioural inhibition due to avoidance or reduced motivation is another similarity of anxiety and depression. Shared neurobiological mechanisms include amygdala hyper-reactivity and dysregulation of the HPA axis. At a cellular level, mitochondrial dysfunctions might be underlying stress response and the mechanisms responsible for stress adaptation and regulation. Novel therapeutics, such as photobiomodulation (PBM), have been informed by these mechanistic models.

William Morris has had many legacies: two of the most significant are in the fields of modern design and modern fantasy literature. In each, he had influential champions. The scholar Nikolaus Pevsner acclaimed Morris as a “pioneer of modern design” in 1936, and the fantasy author and critic Lin Carter lauded Morris as the progenitor of the “imaginary world” tradition of modern fantasy beginning in the 1960s. This chapter assesses their arguments through examinations of how modern design in interwar England came to be defined as an outgrowth of the Arts and Crafts movement, and how modern fantasy became associated in postwar North America with the creation of realistic yet autonomous “imaginary worlds” such as those found in Morris’s late prose romances. Morris’s fusion of medievalism and modernism assumed novel afterlives in each of these domains, as did his passion for world-building in actuality and in fiction.

This chapter offers a succinct introduction to Goethe and his work and gives an overview of the essays which make up the collection.

In his book General Psychopathology, first published in 1913, Jaspers presented a methodological framework for exploring the phenomenology of symptoms of psychiatric disorders as well as relating experimental psychology and nosology to phenomenology. This chapter briefly introduces the phenomenological approach to symptoms and how this has influenced symptom- as opposed to diagnostic criterion-based assessment instruments, such as those based on the diagnostic statistical manual. A transcultural and historical perspective is employed to identify relevant symptoms of mood disorders and their temporal course. Descriptions and definitions of classical symptoms are provided and extended based on modern evidence to include changes in self-imagery, moral emotions, self-blame-related action tendencies, as well as mood-congruent biases in the representation of the past and future. Lastly the contribution of psychopathology to future subsyndrome discovery, translational cognitive neuroscience, and network-based approaches to the psychopathology of mood disorders is discussed.

Chapter 5 concludes the book with an analysis of the Maieutic section of the dialogue. It heralds a new beginning in the conversation, in which Socrates, having received at last Alcibiades’ full allegiance in question and answer, finally reveals to him his own being so as to secure commitment to a love that strives to grasp the totality of all that is, the highest expression of which is none other than the contemplative life. Self-knowing emerges as the zealous pursuit of the ultimate desideratum in the philosophical life, a striving that is akin to self-cultivation. Reason heals the soul, collecting it out of its opinionative and passionate dispersion, only to recognize, in the end, its synthetic activity is done in light of a higher grade of reality that transcends it, a reality in which it finally longs to participate; it yearns to become intellect.

In the nineteenth century, French musical activity was mostly structured around opera. It is hard for us to imagine the extraordinary influence it exerted over composers, the press, and consumers of music and performance. It was everywhere, not just in the theatres dedicated to it, but also in concerts and salons, resulting in a truly operatic culture. Piano music, as demonstrated by Liszt, was deeply indebted to opera through reductions, transcriptions, fantasies, variations, and pots-pourris of all sorts. Vocal models also affected the performance and composition of instrumental melodies by many composers. In hyper-centralised France, the heart of this world was Paris in the handful of theatres devoted to opera, which produced most of the original works. The French operatic system functioned with a centre and periphery: there was a producer (the capital) and a multitude of receivers (the provincial towns). This chapter is devoted to Paris’s operatic institutions during Debussy’s lifetime. It broadly considers how they were financed, the ways in which they could make or break composers’ careers, and what was entailed in gaining access to their privileged stages. It also enumerates the differences between the operatic institutions.

Bipolar disorders (BD) are recurrent conditions and many clinical and social impairments persist even with optimal pharmacotherapy. This chapter explores the development of psychological treatments, from initial uncertainties about offering therapies for BD, and then following the tentative steps to offer support to individuals with BD and to their families. Much of the focus is on the rationale, evolution and testing of specific psychological treatments. As well as examining any added value attained from providing psychological treatments alongside medications, we also consider how therapies might be further developed in the future. For example, we discuss how network meta-analysis might shed light on active ingredients that are common to all successful therapies and consider if these components might herald the introduction of multi-modal interventions. The chapter ends by noting the progress being made regarding the mediators and moderators of therapeutic effects and highlighting the importance of continuing to undertake efficacy trials but also comparative effectiveness trials that will enable researchers, clinicians and patients to determine how best to deploy psychological treatments in the real world.

Developing an online media presence is of particular importance during a military conflict. Two motivations inform the need for doing so: legitimising the grievances underlying one’s participation in the conflict and delegitimising the opponent by demoralising it or by demonising it in the eyes of third-party observers. Between 2014 and 2018, around forty news sites were set up by the authorities of the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’. This chapter examines the content produced by four of these news sites. Three main narratives are identified: ‘business as usual’, ‘the cost of the war’, and ‘shaming the enemy’. News sites weaponised emotional discourse, with a focus on evoking fear and anger among their readers. A great deal of attention was paid to portraying Ukraine as a failed state, guilty of war crimes, which has no business continuing the war and which deliberately stymies all attempts at resolving the conflict peacefully. Conversely, ingroup identity was implicitly assumed rather than explored in detail; articles that evoked patriotism or addressed cultural events or local politics rarely explored why readers should identify with the Donbas ‘Republics’.

This chapter provides a summary of the prevalence rates, patterns of comorbidity, treatment rates and impact and consequences of mood disorder subtypes in adults and youth. The emergence of evidence of prevalence of mood disorders in community-based samples during the past decade demonstrates that BPS is far more common than earlier estimated. Recent studies of the BPS in youth indicate that the peak prevalence of BPS emerges in late adolescence and early adulthood. Comorbidity between both BPD and MDD with other mental disorders is pervasive, with the greatest co-occurrence for anxiety disorders and substance use disorders. Despite a large increase in the proportion of people with mood disorders who receive professional treatment, there is still a large gap between those with impairing mood disorders who remain untreated. The global burdens of both BPD and MDD are equivalent to that of many other common chronic diseases, and there is tremendous impact of both subtypes of mood disorders at both the individual and societal levels.

In this chapter, we first address the question of why groups are so much “better at” terrorism than individuals. Specifically, we argue that, when trying to explain terrorism, it makes more sense to consider people’s social identities than their personal identities, and thus to focus on the group rather than the individual. We present seven pieces of evidence for this idea. Subsequently, we describe studies in which we employ a new paradigm called “Bovenland” to study experimentally the role of multiple and ongoing threats to one’s social identity (in terms of exclusion) in explaining inaction, normative, and (extreme) nonnormative behavior. We conclude by articulating how and when threats to one’s social identity are associated with the need to restore one’s image by displaying violent behavior.