This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.

Chapter 4 explores the normative challenge of the experience of dehumanisation. It starts from a paradigmatic case of dehumanisation, as it was described from a first-person perspective: the torture of Jean Améry. This description offers a phenomenology of dehumanisation. In order to deepen the analysis, the experience of dehumanisation is subsequently confronted with recent work on alienation. This opens up the critical potential of the experience of dehumanisation challenging important concepts that figure prominently in debates on (the aftermath of) atrocities.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.

This chapter of the handbook discusses the role of mind perception in the categorization of individuals as moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are defined as individuals that can commit morally wrong actions; moral patients are defined as individuals that can be morally wronged. It is generally agreed that the attribution of moral agency and moral patiency is linked to the attribution of mental capacities and traits. The chapter surveys a variety of models of mind perception, some of which focus on the representation of mental capacities, some of which focus on the representation of mental traits. The dominant model of mind perception in moral psychology is the experience-agency model, which divides the space of mindedness into experiential capacities like sentience and self-awareness, and agentic capacities like deliberative reasoning and self-control. Reviewing the empirical literature on moral categorization, the author argues that neither the experience-agency model nor any of the major alternatives to it captures all the factors to which everyday attributions of moral agency and moral patiency are sensitive.

“Ars” came to be laden with specific meaning in the intellectual culture of late-Republican Rome, with some artes being regarded as intellectually and socially worthier than others. These “higher artes” were distinguished by several features that would form the premises for the scientific culture of the artes in the early Roman Empire. These premises were established in Rome by the reception of Greek notions of technê (τέχνη) but were elaborated independently and joined for the first time into a unified conception of specialized knowledge by Roman thinkers, including Cicero and Varro. The higher artes are logically organized and systematically presented, hence systematic. They are related to one another in their principles and methods, hence interdisciplinary. They entail explanatory knowledge of their methods in terms of causes in nature, and are hence explanatory. And they balance experience and practical know-how with theoretical knowledge, and are hence balanced.

Of Celsus’ Artes (early first century AD), which originally handled agriculture, medicine, the art of war, rhetoric, and philosophy, only the eight books on medicine survive. Celsus’ work attests to the vibrant interdisciplinary culture of the early Imperial artes. The books De medicina in particular reveal a distinctive conceptualization of specialized knowledge that bears the hallmarks of the scientific culture of the artes but contrasts sharply with the approaches of Vitruvius and Columella. Celsus’ theory of the medical ars self-consciously appropriates but also develops and expands key methodological terms from the Greek medical tradition, including reason, experience, cause, and nature. These terms set the parameters for Celsus’ exposition of medicine, as exemplified in discussions of bloodletting, fevers, and fractures. Celsus’ more reserved attitude toward the kind of knowledge of nature required for expertise does not ignore the central preoccupations of the scientific culture of the artes, but instead pragmatically inflects them for medical practice.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is integrated into the fabric of his system. We absorb into our thinking the concepts and relationships that have survived the successes and failures of experience (Phenomenology). Through disciplined thought we articulate the internal logic of those concepts (Logic). By working out what the world beyond thought would be like, seeing how the world instantiates those expectations, and then building those discoveries into our next ventures, we develop a systematic picture of the stages of natural complexity and human functioning (Philosophies of Nature and Spirit). Since Hegel’s time, however, we have discovered that nature has a history; time and space are no longer absolutes; the discoveries of science have expanded in both breadth and detail; and our comprehensive explanations for the way the world functions are continually being falsified by the discovery of new facts. A philosophy of nature, then, needs to reshape the way reason functions. Adopting the strategies we use to solve problems and that science uses to develop and test hypotheses, we broaden our perspective to cover multiple domains in nature and search for patterns that show how and why they fit together as they do.

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.