Bankers rely on sophisticated risk models when they place their bets, informed by what they understand to be the rational beliefs they and others hold about the world. In a financial crisis, however, on a moment’s notice those beliefs can morph into panics, revealing unacknowledged uncertainties that had existed all along (section 1). What bankers, traders, government officials, and many of us do all too rarely is to acknowledge the pervasiveness of an uncertain future that we may intuit but cannot know. Without firm knowledge about the future, actors are guided by confidence-instilling conventions. Social conventions, such as risk-management models, were widely believed in and adopted to control uncertainty. These models generated endogenously a systemic crisis (section 2). The complementarity of the small world of risk with the large world of uncertainty is reflected in economic practices such as accounting and arbitrage (section 3). The Federal Reserve has relied heavily on story-telling (section 4). Going beyond the analysis of finance this chapter ends by discussing the denial of the risk-uncertainty conundrum by the reigning theory in the field of international political economy (section 5).

Chapter 2 portrays the changing legal landscape addressing the legality – or lack thereof – of the cross-border movement and trade of cultural property. It starts by identifying the key features of legal divergence across national legal systems, concerning both private law and public law aspects, and discusses how this disparity poses a challenge for dealing not only with past actions but also with the current features of the global market for cultural objects. It then provides an overview of the evolution of international institutions and legal norms related to cultural property, such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,

1 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, Nov. 14, 1970, 823 U.N.T.S. 231

Hume criticized the idea that all legitimate government rests on consent of any sort, tacit or express. He did not deny that some governments originated that way, or that it was an admirable way. But he thought it absurd to claim that legitimate government authority is contingent upon each subject’s consent. To say that it is so is contrary to common opinion and, moreover, simply shifts the question to that of the bindingness of promises. That bindingness must rest on the idea of necessity, and so it is needlessly indirect to appeal to promises when government can be justified directly by its necessity to prosperous and secure society. Hume, however, also made a positive contribution to the social contract tradition. He described how a convention, or common practice, can coordinate expectations and behavior without the need for any express agreement or contract. Later theorists make use of Humean convention in order to connect the idea of hypothetical consent to the actual circumstances of life. In short, government is legitimate where there is a convention of conformance to a social contract that would, hypothetically, be approved by clear-minded individuals.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

This penultimate chapter turns to MacCormick’s institutional theory of law. This theory sought to answer questions about how law existed and how it was knowable. This chapter reads over four decades of this theory with character, doing so in two parts. In the first part, it explores the sense in which the very substance of the theory can be understood relationally, i.e., as underpinned by sensitivity to the dangers of domination, and a commitment to respect, decency, considerateness, and civility. The second part reads the institutional theory of law as a relational act in another sense, i.e., as mediating across what are otherwise often divisions or separations, such as between philosophy and sociology, or scholarship about law and the practice of law. The chapter tracks various changes in how MacCormick theorised law institutionally, from his early interest in law as institutional fact, to his later law as institutional normative order.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

A quick glance through history demonstrates that it has not always been an unbroken chain of human happiness, to put it mildly.Different individuals, groups and peoples have faced persecution for any number of reasons: where they came from, how they looked, their perceived (dis)ability, who or what they believed in, who they loved, how they identified, the family they were born into, or, in some cases, for no reason at all. It is against this backdrop that our current set of human rights has emerged. While this chapter focuses primarilyon children’s rights and their relationship with education and educator obligations, it is necessary to understand the history of rights in order to understand why human rights, and particularly children’s rights, are so important to the work we do as educators.

Rule combination can contribute to morphological simplicity. Synchronically, rule combinations (like word combinations) are sometimes stored as formulaic units, and this fact contributes to a morphological system’s processing simplicity, since accessing a stored rule combination directly is simpler than decomposing that combination into its component rules for separate lookup. Stored, formulaic rule combinations may also contribute to diachronic simplifications of a language’s morphology, since they are the locus of reanalyses that may eventuate in “affix telescoping,” the development of a rule combination into a simple rule. But affix telescoping is not a monolithic phenomenon; it involves the reduction of a rule combination’s combinatory transparency along at least four dimensions. Thus, it is possible to find rule combinations that are progressing toward reanalysis as simple rules without yet having reached the point of reanalysis.

In contrast to the small-scale we of shared action, this chapter analyses the large-scale and temporally prolonged we’s of communities governed by social norms. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone and of historicity, I distinguish between anonymous social normativity and historical social normativity. Anonymous social normativity provides a set of social norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected comportmental pattern that we assume to be a universal default. However, this kind of social normativity comes with only a minimal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin. Historical social normativity, on the other hand, implies a historical awareness in which social norms are disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable. For Heidegger, this leads to the proto-political possibility of what I call communal commitments—roughly, commitments in which a group of people commit themselves to sustain a particular set of social norms across generations.

This chapter discusses whether Heidegger’s holism – roughly, the view that the meaning of the parts (entities) depends on the whole (the world) – entails a vicious relativism. I argue that Heidegger is a holist because he is committed to both object externalism (the view that intentional states depend on environmental objects) and social externalism (the view that intentional states depend on other people). Whether his holism entails relativism depends on how we understand these two commitments. Discussing recent interpretations of Heidegger’s holism (Lafont, Dreyfus, Okrent, Carman), I argue that Heidegger’s holism entails a form of relativism only if we take his social externalism to be a function of social conventions. I then go on to challenge that this is the case by arguing that Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist according to whom intentional states do not depend solely on our relation to social conventions (or any other particular social formation such as language or tradition) but on our on-going social interaction broadly construed.

Chapter 6 examines Rousseau's claim that human societies are artificial and that recognizing this is crucial to understanding how theories of social pathology can ascribe non-arbitrary standards of healthy functioning to institutions. The most important sense in which society is made by us is expressed in the claim that institutions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of self-consciousness is intrinsic to social life, namely, collective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions, which, in the most fundamental institutions, includes a shared conception of the good that explains their "point," part of which consists in promoting the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance with such a conception is constitutive of activity in institutional life, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose activity those functions depend.

Chapter 3 marks the transition of Augustine’s argument in The City of God from politics to philosophy, by means of the civil religion of ancient Rome. In books VI and VII, Augustine endeavors to unmask counterfeits of virtuous humility – conventions propagated by civic and philosophic elites, including in some respects Varro and Seneca – and to exhort people to live and worship only in accord with their true dignity.

In the Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides offers innovative readings of biblical terms and narratives through which he reveals his philosophy. Since he does not compose a comprehensive commentary on the Bible, Maimonides includes biblical exegesis throughout his philosophic work by explaining philosophic issues within the biblical text, in an effort to resolve seeming contradictions between philosophy and a literal understanding of the Bible. In the Introduction to the Guide, Maimonides presents his dual objective: to explain obscure biblical terms and parables, or verses and passages that have an external (literal, conventional) and an internal (philosophic) meaning. Maimonides maintains that the Bible has an esoteric level of philosophic truth, accessible to the intellectually qualified, which he discusses in his Guide for the discernment of those capable of understanding. Influenced by Al-Farabi, Maimonides argues that religion defers to philosophy and the Bible presents educational myths in which images represent philosophical truths for the masses. According to Sara Klein-Braslavy, Maimonides views the Garden of Eden narrative as such a myth reflecting “philosophic anthropology rather than historical narrative.” In his discussion of the episode in the Garden of Eden, Maimonides explores the human condition before and after the transgression and fulfills both objectives of his philosophic work by explaining an equivocal term and the figurative meaning of the sin and sinners in the parable – an explanation that is critical for a correct philosophical understanding of the challenging narrative.