This chapter introduces the topic of Moral Imagination with reference to the 1999 volume “Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making.” It opens with context setting and some cases of interest to the topic. These cases include McDonald’s in Russia, the Boeing Company and its problems with the 737 MAX; British Petroleum and the Deepwater Horizon Well disaster. Within this discussion the contents of the rest of the book are summarized in advance of reading.

The chapter examines how North African fiction in French has engaged with gaps in official history by foregrounding the stories of and about erased or forgotten events and actors, thus seeking to fill the factual and experiential lacunae of archival records. It first provides an overview of different generations of writers from the anti-colonial group who leveraged the symbolic powers of fiction to pave the way for independence to post-independence authors such as those who in the 1980s self-identified as “Beur” (first-generation French citizens born of parents who immigrated from North Africa) and the following generation of “banlieue” writers who emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel L’Amour, la fantasia as a work that both exemplifies and exceeds the ethical stance and the aesthetic potential of the archival novel insofar as it mobilizes all the genre’s strategies of research, recovery, and representation while also questioning the very project of restoring the archive and thus revoking its presumed authority. The chapter admits to its own incompleteness, unknowing and linguistic partiality as it does not purport to account for the rich literary production in other languages such as Arabic, Tamazight, and English.

The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

This chapter challenges the conventional wisdom of how users of social media platforms such as Instagram, X, or TikTok pay for service access. It argues that rather than merely exchanging data for services, users unknowingly barter their attention, emotions, and cognitive resources – mental goods that corporations exploit through technologically managed systems like targeted advertising and habit-forming design. The chapter explores how these transactions are facilitated not by legal contracts but by code, which allows social media companies to extract value in ways that traditional legal conceptual frameworks cannot capture. It further highlights the negative externalities of these exchanges, such as cognitive impairments and mental health issues, framing them as pollution byproducts of the attention economy. By examining both the visible and hidden dimensions of this technologically mediated exchange, the chapter calls for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that govern our interactions with digital platforms rather than rushing to propose new legal solutions.

In this chapter, I show how Plato’s conception of and norms for comedy provide a framework for understanding the Euthydemus as an ideal comedy, and I argue that Plato employs techniques of comedic characterization, in particular borrowing from Aristophanes’ Clouds, in order to portray the enemies of philosophy as ridiculous and self-ignorant. In particular, I argue that he portrays the sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as imposters, who wrongly believe that they possess deep and important wisdom because of their skill in eristic argumentation, that is, argument that uses any means necessary to win. Socrates inhabits the role of the ironist, who ironically praises his interlocutors and then ultimately exposes them as ridiculous and self-ignorant. My analysis of the dialogue in terms of the interplay of these comedic character types not only allows us to see the nature, scope and function of Socratic irony in a new light, but it also shows how the dialogue’s overt concern with fallacy and argument ultimately is a question of character and virtue. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal comedy articulated in Chapter 1.

An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

When Cheikh Anta Diop suggested, in 1951, that ancient Egypt had been a black civilization, this was the start of a lifelong commitment to researching, arguing, and defending this idea. His work has since opened up and provided contexts for discussions dating back to antiquity, controversially pushing back against long-held, sometimes wrong-headed imperial notions such as that Western philosophy began in Greece. He seeks to recenter and restore meaning to an Africa uniquely severed from precolonial origins.

The conclusion summarises the findings of the book, using two case studies of composite local priests in 900 and 1050 to bring out some of the key changes that had taken place over this period in how the Church functioned at the local level. It considers the causes that lay behind these changes and explores the historiographical implications of these findings.

The chapter explores the archive as a literary form in African literature that addresses civil strife. It emphasizes the fascination with the archive in fictional narratives that respond to mass violence in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. These conflict contexts and the literatures they have inspired provide some of the most thought-provoking yet challenging examples of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African literary engagements with the archives and examinations of the enduring cultural character of colonial and postcolonial archival productions. The literary fascination with the archive takes on two primary forms. Firstly, there is an examination of colonial archives to comprehend the structural preconditions of postcolonial violence. Secondly, there is a desire to create a new postcolonial archive that bears witness to mass atrocities, mobilizes robust aesthetic techniques to cultivate empathy and ethical reasoning, and deepens our understanding of civil strife in the post-independence era as an ongoing work of imperialism. By highlighting the archival impulse that permeates African literature about civil strife, the chapter underscores the underlying artistic anxieties and concerns over historical and cultural amnesia following mass violence.

In practice, a radiating source is most commonly placed close to a surface or multiple interfaces. Examples are antennas mounted over ground or molecules placed on dielectric surfaces or waveguides. The topic has a long history dating back to Arnold Sommerfeld’s paper in 1909. To derive the fields of an arbitrary oriented dipole over a layered medium we have to find the corresponding Green function. We start by decomposing the free-space dyadic Green function into $s$ and $p$ polarized parts and then evaluate reflection and transmission for the two polarizations separately. Once the Green function of the layered reference system is found, we proceed to derive the radiated power and the far-fields of the dipole. We analyze the radiation patterns and the modes into which the energy is most effectively coupled. For dipoles over dielectric half-spaces, we find that evanescent field components couple predominantly into supercritical angles, giving rise to what is termed “forbidden light.” We discuss how recorded radiation patterns can be used to determine the orientation of the radiating dipole, such as the orientation of molecules fluorescing near a dielectric surface. The chapter concludes by reviewing the image dipole method and discussing its validity.

The day-to-day decisions of technologists have a profound role in shaping people’s interactions with the world. As many philosophers of technology have argued, every technological decision can also be seen as an ethical one. The shape and affordances of technologies determine what people can do with them, and how social systems evolve around them. Most technologists generally have positive intentions and strive to do good, but the ethical outcomes of their work can be particularly complex and unpredictable. Adverse consequences can often arise not from malice but from failure to appreciate the full implications of technological advancements amidst the delicate interplay between technology, human behavior, and social dynamics.

In our roles at Google, we have heard a strong desire to reshape technology development processes to explicitly incorporate ethical and social considerations.

This chapter focuses on the figures of Antonio Genovesi, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. It begins by exploring the similarities and differences in their biographies and historical-intellectual contexts. Next, it examines the influence of Genovesi’s and Smith’s philosophies on Kant. Lastly, it provides a critical and selective review of the secondary literature regarding these authors’ perspectives on the morality of commercial life.