The final chapter entitled Conclusions contains a summary of the findings of the study, explaining the key motivations and claims behind the Galenic understanding of bodily unity.

This chapter looks at the ways in which Galen posits the theoretical unity among the discrete physiological system, especially with a reference to tripartition. Unlike Platonic, the tripartition that is motivated by psychological conflict, Galen’s tripartition of physiological domains shows the three domains to be highly cooperative and co-dependent on each other. The respective material fluxes they control are together necessary for continued functioning. The chapter looks at Galen’s adoption of the popular philosophical idea that identity persists because of the form, and at his analysis of different causes, strongly influenced by the ideas of his contemporary Middle Platonists. While more popular analyses of causes explain that the body is unified in its design, it is the notion of cohesive cause, the chapter argues, that accounts for unified physiological functioning.

Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125-7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed voyages that would change the face of the known world forever. Travellers crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, undertook journeys to Mecca and the Holy Land, to the Near and Far East, to Europe and Africa. In 1492, the New World was discovered when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and in 1500 Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese by a fleet heading for India commanded by the diplomat Pedro Álvares Cabral. Travel writers from Iberia departed from a place with a fluid geographical and cultural identity in its own right. Playing host over the course of its history to people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages, Iberia has always been a place of cultural interchange and political flux. Travel writing is also a key part of medieval Iberia’s rich narrative tradition in which it presents universal and particular experiences which are contingent on the delicate relationship between fact and fiction.

That Jesus Christ is sinless is utterly uncontroversial within orthodox Christianity. But the modality of that sinlessness (whether it is necessary that Christ was without sin) and the explanation of that sinlessness (why it is the case that Christ did not sin, and perhaps even could not have sinned) have been the objects of intense christological controversy. This chapter considers and evaluates multiple explanatory models for Christ’s sinlessness, which lead to different accounts of whether and why Christ is impeccable.

Unlike rabbinic literature or medieval Jewish philosophy, travel writing has rarely been considered part of the Jewish canon and, as a result, has merited little discussion and analysis by modern scholars until fairly recently. Hebrew travel writing as a literary genre, broadly defined, first emerged in the context of the crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean also facilitated a renewed Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places in the Levant. The fact that the social context of this genre was the medieval European pilgrimage movement is the reason that most of its authors turned to Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic, which was the preferred written language of Jews in the Islamicate world. It also explains the closeness in form and some of the content between these Hebrew travel accounts and contemporaneous Christian-authored texts, such as the itinerarium or peregrinatio. At the same time, medieval Hebrew travel writings include place-specific information and lore similarly known from Arabic (Muslim-authored) literature of travel and geography.

Research in political science, economics, and public policy has primarily examined two types of government housing programs. The first involves low-income public housing in advanced industrialized nations like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, where beneficiaries receive subsidized rental housing or housing benefits without property rights. In contrast, research from cities in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia has focused on policies that grant land titles to residents of slums and informal settlements, providing property rights without additional housing benefits. I focus on a third type of program, understudied yet prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, including India: subsidized homeownership. It is theoretically distinct from rental programs or those accommodating informal settlements because it involves a large in-kind transfer and property rights. I argue that these initiatives uniquely influence how citizens invest in the future, escape poverty, develop agency (or what I call dignity) in social relationships, and wield power in local politics. To support this theory, I outline a multi-method study across three different programs.

This chapter outlines the different ways in which theologians of the Reformation received earlier medieval traditions. Luther himself, and both the Reformed tradition and most parts of the Catholic tradition, accepted the standard medieval view that the human nature hypostatically depends on the divine person. Dominicans followed Aquinas in supposing that the human nature comes to share in the eternal esse of the divine Son. And later Lutherans adopted the homo assumptus view of Augustine and the early Western Church.

Social adaptation requires humans to respond to others’ nonverbal emotional cues by selecting and executing adaptive motor responses. In this chapter, we provide a general overview of how visual perception of others’ emotional expressions, particularly threatening faces and bodies, promotes rapid processing and elaboration of multiple opportunities for action, at different levels of complexity. Notably, we will highlight how subcortical and cortical neural pathways interact to flexibly orchestrate our social behavior in response to threatening expressions, ranging from simple stimulus-driven reactions to more elaborated goal-directed actions. We will review recent findings from research on humans and other animals and discuss clinical implications, as well as future challenges and perspectives.

Galen employs several different taxonomies of body parts, dividing the body up in various ways. This chapter looks at some of the more prominent ones, especially those that either define parthood or shed light on Galen’s theorization of parthood in other ways. The central question guiding this discussion arises from claims about (in)expendability of various parts: why is it the case that, according to him, the loss of a bone leads to a complete loss of activity the bone supports (voluntary motion in a limb), but the loss of the stomach does not lead to the loss of the activity of nutrition. One of the key preoccupations emerging from various ways in which Galen differentiates bodily parts is the proper activity of parts, which shape his understanding of the role of parts and their significance relative to each other. The final sections of the chapter sketch out the difference between normative and functional understandings of a parthood.

From his 1982 conviction for killing a police officer and death sentence to the 2010 commutation of that sentence to life-in-prison-without-parole, Mumia Abu-Jamal has experienced and studied mass incarceration intimately as a political prisoner. At the local level, Mumia’s case is a microcosm of the period of the 1970s and 1980s in Philadelphia – the highpoint of rogue white supremacy within the city’s police department and the District Attorney’s office. At the macro level, the period of his incarceration spans the decades of exponential carceral expansion in the US that began in the 1980s. In the more than four decades since his 1982 conviction, the Abu-Jamal has penned thirteen books and thousands of short radio commentaries from prison, most notably Live from Death Row, which features harrowing, first-hand accounts of aging men and their struggles for medical care in the face of physical illness, younger men who are psychically and spiritually pulverized by guard brutality, barbarous conditions, humiliating body cavity strip searches, and the unnatural social isolation of death row imprisonment.