A fictional covenant is established to inquire into humanity. Benjamin Franklin’s writings help define the tasks of the covenant. The fragmentation of the German nation is lamented. Frederick the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire is cited at length to provide insight into the problems facing a monarch confronted with German disunity, war, and the ideal of Humanity. The personal and political failures of Emperor Joseph II are the subject of discussion, introduce by Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock’s ode to Joseph. Contemporary German poetry is described in prophetic terms, but it fails to address contemporary political issues. The chapter closes with Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg’s Ode to the Crown Prince of Denmark.

The concept of Humanity is defined as the character of the human species, and it is distinguished from other similar concepts: humankind, humanness, human rights, human obligations, human dignity, and human mutual love. Humanity encompasses the spirit of general reason, and Marcus Aurelius is cited as a prime example of this spirit. The purpose of social and state institutions, of the arts and sciences is to humanize. This is borne out by Lucretius, Homer, Shaftesbury, Lessing, Diderot, and Swift, and citations of their works are given as testimony. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti is read as an example of how morality is realized in the theatre. The chapter closes with a poem by Ludwig Gleim as an example of human goodness.

Throughout the third Critique Kant repeatedly stresses the importance of communication for human sociability, but he does not link communication to any particular view of language, making it uncertain how he thought of it and its importance for our cognition, rationality, and ethical sensibility. Against such uncertainty, my aim here is to show that there is at least one important form of linguistic expression – the poetic one – that is of paramount importance for Kant’s overall view of humanity’s progress towards the kingdom of ends. In developing my account, I start by explicating the importance of communication in Kant’s overall system, and I then focus on poetic expression, understood as a particular kind of communication. The emerging view of the centrality of the particular poetic expression generated by genius grounds Kant’s aesthetic cognitivism and brings to the fore the two main functions of poetic expression: the one related to development of human cognitive and moral capacities, and the one related to the role of poetry, and aesthetic judgments regarding poetry, in promoting our humanity.

Chapter 8 examines the instruments of the violin family in the cultural imagination, addressing why they captivated so many people, what associations became attached to both the instrument and the person who handled it, and the underlying social currents those associations suggest. Two main topics are treated: the veneration around the instruments of Stradivari and others from the Cremonese School and the concomitant idealization of old artisanal craftsmanship; and how contemporary writers and illustrators sought to understand the instruments’ allure for players, especially women. The discussion assesses the idealization of old instruments in the context of industrialized violin making and broader social anxieties about the modernizing world. Building on scholarship about the gendering and sexualization of stringed instruments, the chapter also considers depictions of people’s responses to them through the lens of sensory and sensual perception, arguing that the prevalence of such material reflects attempts to make sense of the violin family’s powerful hold on British society.

Chapter 1 introduces the instrument doctrine in Aquinas’s thought and explores its foundations in Scripture, focusing on Aquinas’s biblical commentaries. In his commentaries on Romans and 1 Corinthians, among others, Aquinas argues that the logic of scriptural teaching suggests that Christs’ humanity causes divine effects as instrument of the divinity, including our resurrection. The chapter shows how Aquinas interpreted the Scriptures as coherent with the Catholic tradition, especially the conciliar teaching on Christ in the early ecumenical councils. Aquinas thinks that the doctrine should be understood within the conceptual matrix of these early councils’ teaching on Christ.

The introduction states the biblical premise of the book’s argument. In Scripture, God saves human beings through the actions and sufferings of Christ in the flesh. St. Thomas Aquinas developed a theological account of the Incarnation that attempts to account for the way Scripture speaks, namely, that Christ’s humanity is the instrumental cause of salvation, or as the book calls it, "the instrument doctrine." The introduction then gives an overview of the book’s argument: this doctrine best accounts for how Jesus Christ saves Christians in virtue of his humanity. It outlines the argument of the seven following chapters.

This chapter is the heart of the book’s analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s humanity as the instrument of the divinity. It explores the various details of Aquinas’s account, outlining it in five synthetic propositions. These propositions, taken together, form the instrument doctrine as St. Thomas conceives of it. Various ambiguities in Aquinas’s account are presented for consideration, and the chapter makes some judgments about how best to understand Aquinas in his mature works. The chapter concludes with a section on the relationship of language to reality in Christology and why reduplicative propositions, used in a standard mode of theological analysis in the thirteenth century, can clarify how to understand the instrument doctrine.

Chapter 3 is a close reading of several documents and transcripts of the Case of Duch of the Cambodia Tribunal. Interestingly, notions of humanity and inhumanity were used by several parties: prosecutors, attorneys for civil parties but also the defendant’s lawyer and Duch himself declared that the latter was dehumanised. In a second move, these findings will be put in a philosophical context by bringing them in conversation with the work of Hannah Arendt, thus showing the structure of dehumanisation and rehumanisation.

The epilogue brings together a number of themes of the book and sketches some avenues for further research.

The introduction serves a threefold purpose. First, it aims to sensitise the reader to the all-pervasiveness of humanity in international criminal justice, more in particular in the discourse on the atrocity crimes. This part of the introduction argues that the concept of humanity provokes more questions than it is meant to solve. Second, it outlines the book’s methodology to the reader. Third, the introduction sketches the main argument of the book through an overview of the chapters.

In conclusion, Mike acknowledges the enormity of the challenges ahead and the potential struggles the future holds. He also shares what gives him hope and that effective action on climate and other key issues could be just around the corner. The chapter finishes with a checklist of what the reader can do on an individual level, in many areas of their lives, to be part of the change that is so urgently needed.

This chapter develops a critique of the “safe third country” concept, its legality, and its implications for understanding the nature and purpose of international refugee law. It does so, in part, on a different plane of analysis than has predominated the literature thus far. While most scholars have criticized the safe third country concept as undermining individual rights protection, this author argues that it is implicated in a preceding and more foundational harm: It deforms the possibility of democratic responsibility. We would do well to see the violations of refugee rights in question as more than privatized harms inflicted on an individual. They are relational and structural wrongs that concern the objective relationships guaranteed by domestic constitutional and administrative law. Perceiving this harm illuminates not only how the safe third country concept has corrupted international refugee law, but also why international human rights should be understood, more broadly, to protect the political agency of democratic citizens. This conclusion yields an important analytic shift, in which we see commitments to international human rights and humanitarian ideals to align, constructively and in new form, with the public integrity of democratic states.

This chapter critically evaluates, from the standpoint of the capability approach and the human development paradigm, the reliance on market-driven forces and mechanisms in the vaccine development and distribution pillar of ACT-A (COVAX), and the significance of complementary (or supplementary) developments such as the establishment of mRNA technology transfer hubs and the waiver of certain provisions of the international intellectual property (IP) regime. In hope of regaining some ground lost in global health equity, this chapter highlights the need to appropriately situate IP rights, not by maintaining the status quo but to advance deeper relationality in terms of the technological capability of health systems, particularly those of the "Global South."