Brandom gives two inconsistent accounts of the prehistory of his inferentialism: that Kant only contributed its concept–>judgment component, which was not taken up again until Frege vs. that Kant also contributed its judgment–>inference component, which was already taken up by Hegel. This chapter supports a version of the latter account. It argues against Brandom both that by 1790 Kant, like Brandom, espoused an inferentialist position incorporating a ‘linguistic turn’ and that Kant’s inferentialism is superior to Brandom’s (by providing better arguments for its concept–>judgment component and a necessary limitation of its judgment–>inference component thanks to the analytic/synthetic distinction). The chapter also argues that Kant’s inferentialism led him to the additional project of a “transcendental grammar.” Finally, it pursues the influence of this whole Kantian version on successors: Hegel did indeed take over Kant’s inferentialism, but whereas Brandom detects this in Hegel’s Phenomenology, it is even more evident in Hegel’s Logic, and whereas Brandom leaves it at that, for Hegel inferentialism was only the beginning of a more original and daring project. Not only did Kant’s inferentialism motivate Humboldt’s holistic conception of language, but in addition Kant’s project of a “transcendental grammar” inspired Humboldt to the same.

This chapter argues that naturalization, the process of transforming aliens into subjects through law, was a crucial process in eighteenth-century law and literature. The attempted passage of several naturalization bills across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generated conflicting accounts about whether nationality could be a fictional process. Samuel Richardson and Maria Edgeworth take up these conflicting accounts in their novels. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Richardson upholds the traditional view, which considered naturalization to be part of a return to an original common human nature expressed in natural law. In Harrington (1817), by contrast, Maria Edgeworth endorses a newer, Lockean, contractual and voluntarist approach: the idea that naturalization could be achieved through a Parliamentary statute without the necessity of natural law. These case studies reveal how novelists responded and contributed to naturalization’s transformation from a supposedly natural process to an explicitly fictional process.

Outer space has been declared the common heritage of humankind. Chapter 14 explains that, rather than treating outer space as common heritage, states have been treating as an open access resource; they have consistently failed to remove their disused satellites and rockets from space, resulting in the accumulation of space debris (i.e., space junk), which greatly pollutes outer space. This chapter explores how the race for space dominance and the militarization of space have undermined the sustainable use of outer space. We analyze the treaties that have been adopted for management of outer space, such as the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Agreement. While states claim to abide by these treaties, they have adopted laws and entered into agreements that seem to contravene the principle that outer space is the common heritage of humankind. Spacefaring nations are more interested in extracting and appropriating the metals and minerals expected to be found in the moon and asteroids rather than treating such resources as common heritage resources. The mentality of appropriation is based on an understanding that the state that will dominate outer space will dictate the global rules for the management of its resources that could exclude other states.

In the first, introductory part of this chapter I explain the tension inherent in these dual beliefs by examining the rules that Leibniz set forth for the reform of the philosophical lexicon as well as the attempts to apply these rules made by two key figures prior to Kant, namely, Christian Wolff and Christian August Crusius. In the second part of the chapter, I show how this tension is explicitly discussed and presented as a central problem facing metaphysics in the writings of Johann Nicolaus Tetens, who exerted a profound influence on Kant’s intellectual development in the years leading up to the Critique of Pure Reason. In the last section of the chapter, I explain what I take to be Kant’s solution to this tension by examining hither-to ignored passages in the first and especially the second Critique. The key thesis I defend is that Kant proposes to overcome the above-mentioned tension regarding philosophical terminology using the same, revolutionary conception of systematicity that lies at the basis of his transcendental philosophy.

This chapter is the last of the statute-focused chapters. It concentrates on how reversion rights have developed across the European Union. It briefly examines historical laws that reflect the incentive and reward concerns of subsequent reversion rights, before providing an overview of prominent types of reversion mechanisms in force in the EU as of 2020. This provides valuable context for an analysis of the most recent reversion development in the EU, the implementation of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (which required Member States to implement, at minimum, a right to end grants of rights where there was a ‘lack of exploitation’). The chapter demonstrates, however, that this provision, and many of its implementations in the domestic laws of Member States, also suffers from the problems identified in the US and UK chapters – poor design, ineffective triggers and the ability of rightsholders to undermine it, for example by contracting out of the scheme’s intended effect.

Chapter 1 establishes the local context of the introduction of liberated Africans to Grenada and outlines the emergence of a plantation society built on unfree African labour. By emancipation in 1838, the formerly enslaved Africans had become a peasantry closely associated with Roman Catholicism and had developed Creole French, the Nation Dance, obeah, and saraka from their multiple African heritages and experiences in the Americas. They had survived and resisted enslavement through practising those cultures and by withdrawing fully or partially from plantation work, cultivating provision grounds, acquiring land, and forming villages; some of them migrated to Trinidad. These strategies and cultural practices were drawn upon by liberated Africans to refashion their own lives and cultures.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians operated within an increasingly hybrid system of media politics. Media became a mass phenomenon, gained commercial and journalistic independence, and assertively claimed to represent public opinion. This chapter sets the scene by describing this diversifying media environment in which politicians operated. It highlights the technological advances that enabled ‘mass’ media; censorship and freedom of the press; media landscapes including political and religious newspapers, as well as regional, national, and transnational news flows; the commercialization of media; and changing journalistic cultures. These developments interconnected with social changes such as increasing literacy and urbanization; democratization and a bolstered notion of public opinion; and a reflexive modernity. Media became increasingly hybrid in terms of interacting media technologies and formats, political and commercial newspapers, and their social and political functions. This media hybridity defined the new transnational system of media politics that political figures inhabited around 1900.

Marianne Moyaert tackles the timely issue of the encounter between Christian liturgy and the world’s religions. She puts forward the idea that there is no way back to a time before the dialogical turn. Even more so, the dialogue should not refrain from ritual and liturgical aspects. In that respect, comparative theologians are inevitable and evident partners for liturgical scholars.

States have adopted measures to protect their environment and they have used those measures to cancel foreign investments. Investors have brought such measures before international arbitral tribunals claiming that the cancellation of their prospective investment constitutes direct or indirect expropriation. The tribunals, which have decided these cases, have been far from unanimous on the threshold at which a state’s legitimate right to regulate its internal affairs, including the protection of the environment, constitutes expropriation of an investment. This has generated much uncertainty for investors and host states. By the late 2010s, though, states started to drastically change the nature of investor-state dispute settlement by increasingly adopting a new generation of international investment agreements that limit significantly the discretion of international arbitral tribunals, and recognize the importance of states’ regulatory space in matters such as the protection of the environment, labor rights, and human rights.

The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.