Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

Chapter 6 digs deeper into the textual conventions deployed in many of the monumental inscriptions set up on restored structures. In particular, it points to how they responded to and influenced the experience of the inexorable degradation of time through a rhetoric of ruin and fragmentation that both naturalized and justified the form or extent of rebuilding and in late antiquity shifted to increasingly vivid, sensorially affective forms.

While French political discourse in the late Middle Ages had been based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), these ideas began to evolve in the 1570s. Although references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they were gradually overtaken by a focus on the good of the State (le bien de l’État). James B. Collins demonstrates how this evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court. By analyzing the language used in scores of local, regional and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General, Collins demonstrates how the growth was as much a bottom-up process as a top-down enforcement of royal power.

Disjunctivism is a much debated topic within present-day philosophy of perception. The pressing issue here is whether there is a fundamental difference in kind between perceptions and hallucinations. If a perception could counterfactually have been a hallucination with the same content, one can hardly claim that perceptions and hallucinations are fundamentally different in kind qua representational states. What determines whether a representation is a perception or a hallucination is then not what the mind is like but rather what the external world is like. However, singular marks in perception have double existence – both “intentional” existence in the perceptions themselves and “natural” existence in the perceived scene. Perceptions also come with possible perspectival transformations ad indefinitum, due to their informational link to their objects. On this basis, a disjunctivist position is ascribed to Kant. It is also argued that perceptions, unlike hallucinations, come with their own epistemic warrants, be it in humans or in non-rational animals.

Without counting, adult and infant humans and many other animals are able to compare amounts of solids, intensities of stimuli, and quantities of discrete objects or stimuli – if the sizes of the sets being compared differ by a large enough ratio. For example, an infant of a given age might be able to identify the larger of two sets, where one set consists of forty items and the other set ten items, so a ratio of 4:1. The same infant might not be able to recognize which was larger, a set of 10 items and a set of 5. The cognitive system that makes these > or < discriminations is called the analog magnitude system, or the approximate magnitude system (AMS). The principle neuropsychological substrate of this system is in the lateral segment of the intraparietal sulcus. This same region is activated when people compare social ranks.

In this chapter, I develop Arnauld’s account of God’s nature, focusing on his account of divine simplicity and whether God acts for reasons. I begin by arguing that Arnauld holds an account of divine simplicity according to which: (i) God and all of God’s attributes are identical; (ii) God, God’s action, and God’s attributes are merely conceptually distinct; and (iii) there are no conceptual priorities among God, God’s action, and God’s attributes. I then argue that Arnauld thinks that whether God has reasons in any sense is beyond the scope of rational knowledge for finite beings, but finite beings can know that, if God does have reasons, they are not practical reasons.

Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a rare neurodegenerative syndrome primarily affecting the parietal and occipital lobes. It is characterized by early deficits in visuospatial processing, numeracy, and literacy. The most common underlying pathology is Alzheimer’s disease (AD). PCA typically presents as a young onset form of dementia, with the majority of patients aged 50–65 years. The clinical presentation of PCA includes difficulties with visually and spatially complex tasks. Neuropsychological features include impairments in visuospatial and visuoperceptual processing. Neuroimaging studies show occipito-parietal atrophy and hypometabolism . There is limited evidence of a genetic component in PCAs. Pathologically, PCA is most commonly associated with AD. The consensus classification of PCA provides a framework for improved diagnosis and research. PCA shows overlap with other atypical AD presentations, and there is heterogeneity within the syndrome. The impact of PCA on everyday abilities and the subjective experience of individuals with PCA is not well understood. Management and support for PCA include pharmacological and nonpharmacological approaches .

This concluding chapter elaborates on the main themes that have run through this book. It argues for the unity of knowledge in the natural sciences, the arts and humanities, and the hard and soft social sciences (section 1); discusses eclecticism and experimentalism as a compelling intellectual response to navigating the risk-uncertainty conundrum (section 2); illustrates different forms of coping with the risk-uncertainty conundrum with the help of punditry, scenarios, and forecasts (section 3); draws out the implications of the complementarity of risk and uncertainty for moral luck, policy, and pragmatism (section 4); and, returning to worldviews, points to the affinities that science and religion share in our coping with the risk-uncertainty conundrum (section 5).

A distinction is made between the manifold of an object and manifolds of intuitions. The former is represented abstractly through judgments. But it can be given only in the form of manifolds of intuitions. By varying the perspective on an object of intuition, the perceiver can become acquainted with ever more details or aspects of the individual object or of the layout of the spatial scene. The details are “substantial parts,” i.e., spatial ones that can be arbitrarily rearranged, and the aspects are “qualitative parts,” or tropes. Perspectival shifts include zooming in, so as to access finer manifolds of intuition ad indefinitum. According to Kant, this is clarification of the perception. The possibility of this kind of clarification rests on the procedural containment of nested manifolds. It therefore requires an informational link to the perceived scene, or to a target object in the scene. By contrast, clarification of concepts is just conceptual analysis, and does not require any such link. Moreover, there are no fixed “pixels” from which a perception is composed. Perceptions are not compositional in any atomistic sense.

This chapter raises the principal mode of theatrical production during the global pandemic, usually called “Zoom theatre,” as a way to bring attitudes defining theatre and liveness into focus. For in asserting its distinctive performance form as a way of making theatre, Zoom theatre also represents theatre, and represents it both as dangerous and as passing. Undertaking an overview of the work of Zoom theatre, this chapter concludes with two pendant performances, both anticipating the concerns of Zoom theatre and the “theatreness” it promotes: Anne Washburn’s apocalyptic drama, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, and Samuel Beckett’s prefiguration of performing in the box of the screen: Not I.

In Chapter 7, I consider Arnauld’s modal metaphysics and his actualist view of possibility. Specifically, I argue that Arnauld endorses an essence-based modal actualism. Arnauld develops his view in correspondence with Gottfried Leibniz, so I begin the chapter with a discussion of the beginning of the correspondence, Leibniz’s account of the complete concept theory of substance as well as his account of modality. I then consider Arnauld’s response to Leibniz in three parts: his account of his own nature, his rejection of purely possible substances, and his positive account. I conclude by suggesting Arnauld’s modal metaphysics, with a few modifications, has much to be said for it and could be developed into a plausible view in its own right.

To conform equality matching, the most effective, frequent, intuitive, and widespread conformations consist of concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence. This may take the form of aligning things side by side, or doing rounds of “one for you, one for you, and one for you.” Starting together and then stopping at the same time assures temporal equality of labor. Piaget originally formulated the concept of concrete operations to describe what he inferred to be a stage of cognitive development in which children inferred equality between quantities. Humans have developed various technologies for doing concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence, such as ballots, pan balances, and placeholder items showing whose turn it is. It turns out that even infants recognize concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence, which they expect agents to use by default when distributing items between agents. Nonhuman animals have not been observed to do this.