This is an extensive study of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, try, and chastise. Through an exploration of a wide range of dramatic events and puzzling phenomena in which contemporaries detected the divine finger at work, it sheds fresh light on the reception, character, and broader cultural repercussions of the Protestant Reformation in England.

Peter Biller's innovative study challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He describes what medieval people 'thought' about population, studying the texts which constrained their thought, and examining the medieval realities which shaped it, such as birth, birth-control, sex-ratio, marriage ages, length of life, and the population of the Holy Land.

The Oxford Slavonic Papers contain original contributions and documents relating to the languages, literatures, culture, and history of Russia and other Slavonic countries.

Josh Morris privileges the voices of veterans to argue that returning soldiers need families, friends, and religious communities to listen to their stories with compassion to avoid amplifying the effects of moral injury. When society greets returning soldiers in ways that reinforce cultural norms that frame military service as heroic, rather than acknowledging its ambiguities and harmful effects, it exacerbates moral injury and keeps veterans from resolving inner conflicts and coping effectively with civilian life. Morris, a military chaplain and veteran who served in Afghanistan, knows these difficulties first hand. Using stories from other veterans, Morris helps us see how cultural assumptions about military service can complicate moral injury and a veteran's return home. Drawing from liberation theologies, ideology critique, and Antonio Gramsci's advocacy for the working class, the book suggests useful perspectives and spiritual care resources for military chaplains, religious leaders, caregivers, and concerned civilians. Morris argues that military chaplains are uniquely positioned to help returning soldiers resist the amplification of existing moral injury. Moving from "thank you for your service" to liberative solidarity can galvanize resistance and make change possible.

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture. There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles' Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone-in all kinds of contexts and languages-correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular "obsessions" have driven the author's thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific "undeadness" that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and "second death." The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone's statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the "unwritten law" she follows, tally with Antigone's universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family's misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?" Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupancic's absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles' Antigone illuminates the classical text's ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.

This book further qualifies the postcolonial thesis and shows its limits. To reach these goals, it links text analysis and political history on a global comparative scale. Focusing on imperial agents, their narratives of progress, and their political aims and strategies, it asks whether Enlightenment gave birth to a new colonialism between 1760 and 1820. Has Enlightenment provided the cultural and intellectual origins of modern colonialism? For decades, historians of political thought, philosophy, and literature have debated this question. On one side, many postcolonial authors believe that enlightened rationalism helped delegitimize non-European cultures. On the other side, some historians of ideas and literature are willing to defend at least some eighteenth-century philosophers whom they consider to have been "anti-colonialists". Surprisingly enough, both sides have focused on literary and philosophical texts, but have rarely taken political and social practice into account.

Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and building to a new reading of Milton's "Paradise Lost," author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.

This book deals with three key questions about communitarian ideas: how to distinguish what constitutes communitarian thinking; what lessons to take from the historical development of communitarian arguments; and why their practical implications are relevant in devising reforms at the local, national, and global levels. Each chapter covers a distinct period, with a critical exposition of the leading thinkers of that time who contributed to communitarian philosophy and politics. Beginning with an examination of the rise of proto-communitarian ideas in classical Western and Eastern thought, the book closes with a review of communitarian responses to the emergent social and technological changes in the 21st century. Readers will learn about the core features and significance of communitarian theories and practices in relation to morality, education, the economy, freedom and security, community development, and democratic governance; and how they compare and contrast with other ethical and intellectual outlooks.

The computer revolution of the 1960s ushered in a golden period of econometric model building. Lawrence Klein was constantly in the forefront of this development. He was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for this and other contributions to applied econometrics.The 20th century witnessed a great expansion of economics as a scholarly discipline. The editor has chosen a selection of papers which sparked his interest as a student, a teacher and a researcher. This key volume includes both classic articles as well as lesser known papers which Professor Klein judges will stand the test of time.

The motto of the Royal Society-Nullius in verba-was intended to highlight the members' rejection of received knowledge and the new place they afforded direct empirical evidence in their quest for genuine, useful knowledge about the world. But while many studies have raised questions about the construction, reception and authentication of knowledge, Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences is the first to examine the problem of evidence at this pivotal moment in European intellectual history. What constituted evidence-and for whom? Where might it be found? How should it be collected and organized? What is the relationship between evidence and proof? These are crucial questions, for what constitutes evidence determines how people interrogate the world and the kind of arguments they make about it. In this important new collection, Lancaster and Raiswell have assembled twelve studies that capture aspects of the debate over evidence in a variety of intellectual contexts. From law and theology to geography, medicine and experimental philosophy, the chapters highlight the great diversity of approaches to evidence-gathering that existed side by side in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, the volume makes an important addition to the literature on early science and knowledge formation, and will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students in these fields.

A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction challenges the prevailing view that 'psychology' explains the Gothic. Mighall offers original readings of familiar texts, from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle; but also a rich store of original sources, from European travelogues to sexological textbooks, from ecclesiastic histories to pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. The book aims to provide the first full-length historical survey of Victorian Gothic fiction.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of cultural history.

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory - the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement.

This book reassesses the impact of Aristotle's moral and political philosophy on medieval scholastic thought. It examines the relationship between the common good and the individual good, and between the authority of the Church and the authority of the temporal ruler. The result is a major reinterpretation of the emergence of a secular theory of the state in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

Historical Imagination defends a phenomenological and hermeneutical account of historical knowledge. The book's central questions are what is historical imagination, what is the relation between the imaginative and the empirical, in what sense is historical knowledge always already imaginative, how does such knowledge serve us, and what is the relation of historical understanding and self-understanding? Paul Fairfield revisits some familiar hermeneutical themes and endeavors to develop these further while examining two important periods in which historical reassessments or re-imaginings of the past occurred on a large scale. The conception of historical imagination that emerges seeks to advance beyond the debate between empiricists and postmodern constructivists while focusing on narrative as well as a more encompassing interpretation of who an historical people were, how things stood with them, and how this comes to be known. Fairfield supplements the philosophical argument with an historical examination of how and why during late antiquity, early Christian thinkers began to reimagine their Greek and Roman past, followed by how and why renaissance and later enlightenment figures reimagined their ancient and medieval past.

This book is the first study to engage with the relationship between cosmopolitan political thought and the history of global conflicts. Accompanied by visual material ranging from critical battle painting to the photographic representation of ruins, it showcases established as well as emerging interdisciplinary scholarship in global political thought and cultural history. Touching on the progressive globalization of conflicts between the eighteenth and the twentieth century, including the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic wars, the two World Wars, as well as seemingly 'internal' civil wars in eastern Europe's imperial frontiers, it shows how these conflicts produced new zones of cultural contact. The authors build on a rich foundation of unpublished sources drawn from public institutions as well as private archives, allowing them to shed new light on the British, Russian, German, Ottoman, American, and transnational history of international thought and political engagement.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the first modern philosophers and one of the most important. His contributions were often groundbreaking, and his impact remains in such fields as logic, mathematics, science, international law, and ethics. Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on Leibniz's philosophy, written work, teachers, contemporaries, and philosophers influenced by him. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Leibniz's Philosophy.

Far-Fetched Facts is an essay in the history of the literature of travel, real and imaginary, from classical times, via the early accounts of the New World, to the accounts of the South Sea islands that lay beyond. It follows continuities from the Odyssey to the twentieth century and traces the interplay of fact and fiction in a literature with a notorious tendency to deviate from the truth. The late medieval travels of the imaginary Mandeville and the real Marco Polo are explored, and the writings of Columbus as he struggled to reconcile what 'Mandeville' and Polo had written with what he found in the West Indies. The philosophical consequences of the discovery of the New World are followed in the works of Montaigne and Bacon, and the factual travels of Dampier are placed in relation to the fictional travels of Crusoe and Gulliver. The various accounts of the scientific voyages of Cook and Bougainville are examined and their revelation of a Tahiti more mythic than scientific, erotic as well as exotic. All the factual accounts of the mutiny on the Bounty are assessed, and also the fictions that came in its wake. The supposedly factual narrative that is Herman Melville's first novel is read in relation to other travellers' accounts of the South Seas, as are the factual and fictional writings of Loti, Stevenson, Malinowski, Mead, and the Hawaiian Visitors Bureau. Far-Fetched Facts is the first full account of the Western idea of the South Seas as it evolved from the lost paradises of biblical and classical literature to end in the false paradise found by the tourist.

In this study, Dr Azar Gat shows how the theories of mechanized war in the air and on land developed throughout the industrial world in the first decades of the 20th century. He examines how the most famous pioneers of these theories were asssociated with proto-fascism and fascism, and goes on to drastically re-evaluate B. Liddell Hart's contribution to military theory, overturning much of the criticism recently levelled against him. Gat shows how, in the wake of the trauma of World War I, and in response to the Axis challenge, Liddell Hart developed the theory of the tactical "cold war", years before nuclear weapons became a military reality. Gat reveals Hart as a pioneer of the modern western liberal way in warfare. This book is intended for scholars and students of 20th-century military history, fascism, and international relations.

James Van Cleve here shows why Thomas Reid (1710-96) deserves a place alongside the other canonical figures of modern philosophy. He expounds Reidas positions and arguments on a wide range of topics, taking interpretive stands on points where his meaning is disputed and assessing the value of his contributions to issues philosophers are discussing today. Among the topics Van Cleve explores are Reid's account of perception and its relation to sensation, conception, and belief; his nativist account of the origin of the concepts of space and power; his attempt to clear the way for the belief that the things we directly perceive are external things, not ideas in our minds; his stand on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; his account of "acquired perception," whereby we come to stand in a quasi-perceptual relation to qualities not originally perceived; his claim that visual space is non-Euclidean; his answers to the questions why we see the world right side up with inverted retinal images and whether a newly sighted person would recognize by sight the shapes he previously knew by touch; whether memory, like perception, is a form of direct awareness; and how we manage to conceive of things that are utterly nonexistent. Also examined are Reid's account of human knowledge by means of "first principles," his externalist reply to philosophical skepticism, his volitional theory of action, his use of the distinction between event causation and agent causation to understand freedom of the will, and his criticism of Hume and anticipation of Moore on the analysis of moral judgment. The most comprehensive work on Reid in a quarter century, this book will be welcomed by students of early modern philosophy, epistemology, the philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of action.

A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are "political animals" to Aquinas' invocation of "natural law," it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from "natural" to "good." The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.

The work of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) has a variety of meanings for different interpreters. Some attribute to him a new 'scientific method' of drawing conclusions from practical or historical experience in order to form rules for successful political behaviour, with its emphasis on man's behavioural patterns rather than on moral precepts as a basis for politics. Others attribute to him a belief in the autonomy of the state - that the state is a structure governed by its own laws of development and that it finds its justification only in terms of its success. Others again emphasise his republicanism and see him as a theorist of the modern state. [Some believe his first name is the proper basis of an appellation of the Devil.] Although a lucid writer in many respects, the metaphorical way in which Machiavelli expressed some of his key concepts and his preference for working through examples rather that elaborating principles has given much scope for debate about his actual intentions. These volumes present in chronological order the most significant articles on Machiavelli written in the 20th century and offer a representative selection of the numerous interpretations of his work.

In the wake of the new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of global narratives of progress, and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes or at least starting to fundamentally mutate. This provides us with a roughly fifty-year cycle with which to re-assess the rise and potential fall of neoliberalism. Using 1968 as one of the inaugural moments of this history, this interdisciplinary collection seeks to reassess the significance and legacy of the global 1968 uprisings from today's vantage point. While these uprisings arguably helped bring an end to a number of forms of oppression, the period following them also saw the re-entrenchment of class power to a level not seen since the 1920s. Without drawing any simple or direct lines of causation, the sequence of the past fifty years reflects what could be termed a double bind or "lose-lose" scenario. Yet, particularly given the present-day indicators of a crisis of neoliberal hegemony, this volume argues that returning to 1968 today may offer critical and comparative resources for thinking a way out of our current impasse.