This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. Insurance practices and related metaphors began expanding rapidly from a European base some 500 years ago. The simultaneous emergence of the modern state was hardly coincidental. Increasingly complex societies energized by market economies required protection from risks of various kinds. This required mobilizing and organizing private capital to achieve common goals. The deepening of markets and development of financial technologies now increases demands for protection beyond conventional borders. But where the fiscal power of the modern state underpinned national insurance and reinsurance systems, the absence of a global fiscal authority is exposed by rising cross-border, systemic, and global risks. That the background condition for necessary innovation in governance is uncertainty has also become undeniable.

By revisiting the works of the eclectic and controversial thinker Giovanni Papini, the chapter shows how pragmatism was much more than an original American product. It was a transnational philosophical approach involving many people on both sides of the Atlantic enmeshed in a kaleidoscope of different philosophical traditions, whether voluntarist, immanentist, or historicist. By framing the pragmatist tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, I show that Vico’s intellectual resurrection in the early twentieth century and the parallel success of pragmatism in the same period are somewhat linked. They both resulted from a widely felt obsession with human action and an uncompromising contempt for all kinds of barren intellectualism.

Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.

This chapter begins by acknowledging the value of the classical model of scientific discovery with its commitment to isolating variables and cancelling out noise to give us a sense of significance in the numerical results produced. But the 20 chapters in this book amply demonstrate that in the real world of discovery things are messy, unpredictable, and highly differentiated within and across disciplines. Such enduring principles of discovery, emerging from the work of scientists and scholars, are identified not only for their intellectual value but also for their practical guidance for those engaged in advanced research.

This book introduces a normative theory of property. Property laws and social norms are justified by whether and how well they secure natural rights. The natural rights are justified by run-of-the-mill principles of natural law, which evaluate human action by whether it helps people survive or flourish rationally. The book studies how natural rights legitimate property law in general and in specific doctrines. It also studies the main topics in property law and policy – ownership, public commons, the appropriate design of property rights, rights less sweeping than rights of ownership, property torts, regulatory takings, and eminent domain. The book studies in particular the phenomenon of practical reasoning, the sphere of moral reasoning that converts fundamental moral goals into specific laws and policies to enforce in practice. A theory of natural rights contributes importantly to normative theory beyond the theories most respected today – egalitarian or progressive theories, law and economics, and approaches the book calls pragmatic.

Arndt Emmerich and Alyaa Ebbiary explore the evolution of scholarship on Salafi Islamic movements, highlighting how the field has matured over time. The chapter emphasizes recent research that recognizes the agency exhibited by Salafi women in engaging with their faith. These women adhere to the core rulings while negotiating secondary ones to ensure they can live fulfilling lives while respecting tradition.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

While there are affinities between Collingwood’s views and pragmatism, their shared considerations of the socio-historical dimensions of scientific knowledge have not been explored thus far. This chapter aims to fill this gap by comparing Collingwood’s views from An Essay on Metaphysics with pragmatist stances in contemporary philosophy of science by Philip Kitcher and Hasok Chang. In addition to similarities regarding the importance of the purposes of inquiry and framing knowledge in relation to a system of practice, there are disagreements between Collingwood and this strand of pragmatism regarding truth, propositional knowledge, and drawing out political implications. I argue that Collingwood’s approach can supply tools that can assist the pragmatist goals of improving scientific practice, mainly through analyzing cases from the history of science. This warrants mapping Collingwood’s place in twentieth-century philosophy as a precursor to recent attempts to overcome the clash between logical and historical approaches to scientific knowledge.

The British tended to deny that Darwinism had anything to say to philosophy, epistemology, or ethics. The Americans were far more appreciative of Darwinism, which supported strongly their approach to epistemology – Pragmatism. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are enthusiasts for a Darwin-influenced philosophy, for instance one promoting a naturalistic Kantianism in epistemology and ethical nonrealism in moral discourse.

My aim in this chapter is to contribute to what the volume calls the ‘third move’ in International Relations norm studies, which explicitly addresses the legitimacy of the norm being studied as well as its influence on practice. I build on the work of those who point to the relevance of classical American Pragmatism, which considers how we know that what we are doing is appropriate once we realise that norms are the product of social and historical practices rather than abstract moral foundations. I trace the Pragmatist’s commitment to deliberative inquiry through the ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey and relate it to Antje Wiener’s arguments that normativity is sustained through proactive contestation. While there are overlaps between the two approaches, I argue that Deweyan Pragmatism can help us understand when it is appropriate to defend a norm against contestation. It does this by drawing on what Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’, understood as the background knowledge that has epistemic authority because it is the product of a deliberative and inclusive process of inquiry. I develop this with reference to debates within Pragmatist philosophy before applying it to offer a preliminary assessment of global health norms.

This chapter explores how biblical law is treated in the gospels, in Paul, and in other New Testament texts. It shows how recent scholarship has demonstrated that Jesus and Paul treat the law in more positive fashion than they are usually given credit for.