The book concludes by commenting on what can be said about the traditions that Cyril and Julian represent (Christianity and Hellenism) based on the focused analysis of the particular arguments of these two figures. Demonstrating narrative conflict between two individuals does not yet prove incommensurability between their traditions, and this concluding chapter points to how that larger question would need to be broached.

This chapter presents evidence that some of the merchants under study either were actually ennobled or otherwise lived “nobly,” easily socializing with the lower nobility in German-speaking Europe and sometimes with the high nobility. Despite many historians’ claims otherwise, such merchants did not leave trade; nor did they marry “out of” the mercantile class, even if some of their wives bore names indicating noble status. The chapter also presents evidence assembled by other scholars that demonstrates the same patterns: merchants often lived as “city nobles” (Stadtadel) even while continuing their work in commerce.

Kant argues that sensible signs are necessary for thinking and considers only audible words adequate signs. For, since the sense of hearing does not immediately lead to specific images, only audible words express the generality of conceptual representations and have such a constitutive role in thought that deafness from birth constitutes an impediment to thinking. Words have this role because they are arbitrary and associated signs that serve to memorize the logical essence of concepts and function as mere characterizations that ‘mean nothing,’ unlike symbols, which provide images. Kant considers symbolic script a symptom of the lack of general concepts and banishes symbolic language from the core of his philosophy which he requires to provide acroamatic proofs that grant nothing to images. However, he not only recognizes the relevance of symbolic language in poetry and as a means of sensualizing abstract concepts, but appreciates its importance when he develops an interest in a heuristic methodology not based only on chance or luck, and in whose preliminary stages he recommends investigating metaphors, etymologies, and synonyms, and even rehabilitates topics, as heuristic tools to obtain insights that help formulate hypotheses to solve problems.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful tool to process huge volumes of data generated in scientific research and extract enlightening insights to drive further explorations. The recent trend of human-in-loop AI has promoted the paradigm shift in scientific research by enabling the interactive collaboration between AI models and human experts. Inspired by these advancements, this chapter explores the transformative role of AI in accelerating scientific discovery across various disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and life sciences. It provides a comprehensive overview of how AI is reshaping the scientific research – enabling more efficient data analysis, enhancing predictive modeling, and automating experimental processes. Through the examination of case studies and recent developments, this chapter underscores AI’s potential to revolutionize scientific discovery, providing insights into current applications and future directions. It also addresses the ethical challenges associated with AI in science. Through this comprehensive analysis, the chapter aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how AI is facilitating scientific discovery and its potential to accelerate innovations while maintaining rigorous ethical standards.

At the end of the historical section, Katharine E. Harmon bridges the gap between the past and the present, inasmuch as she discusses what the Liturgical Movement brought about. This international and ecumenical movement promoted a deeper understanding of the liturgy as well as revisions and reforms it deemed necessary or desirable. Today, many scholars and church leaders are greatly indebted to the Liturgical Movement.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, human–AI interaction and collaboration have become important topics in the field of contemporary technology. The capabilities of AI have gradually expanded from basic task automation to complex decision support, content creation, and intelligent collaboration in high-risk scenarios. This technological evolution has provided unprecedented opportunities for industries in different fields, but also brought challenges, such as privacy protection, credibility issues, and the ethical and legal relationship between AI and humans. This book explores the role and potential of AI in human–AI interaction and collaboration from multiple dimensions and analyzes AI’s performance in privacy and credibility, knowledge sharing, search interaction, false information processing, and high-risk application scenarios in detail through different chapters.

Informal caregivers such as family members or friends provide much care to people with physical or cognitive impairment. To address challenges in care, caregivers often seek information online via social media platforms for their health information wants (HIWs), the types of care-related information that caregivers wish to have. Some efforts have been made to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand caregivers’ information behaviors on social media. In this chapter, we present achievements of research with a human–AI collaboration approach in identifying caregivers’ HIWs, focusing on dementia caregivers as one example. Through this collaboration, AI techniques such as large language models (LLMs) can be used to extract health-related domain knowledge for building classification models, while human experts can benefit from the help of AI to further understand caregivers’ HIWs. Our approach has implications for the caregiving of various groups. The outcomes of human–AI collaboration can provide smart interventions to help caregivers and patients.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on clusters of re-narrated episodes in Cyril’s response to Julian. Chapter 5 is organized by one of Julian’s own categories: the “gifts of the gods” which, he had argued, were given in surpassing quality and quantity to the Hellenic people. This chapter groups Julian’s various iterations of gifts and Cyril’s sprawling responses in three, interrelated categories: exemplary characters, intellectual superiority, and military and political domination. In Cyril’s responses, Minos was no legendary hero but rather imitated the fallen angels’ lust for domination; the Attic language itself (not to mention the convention of writing) derived from proto-Christian sources; and the Jewish people’s turbulent history and the present ascendance of Roman superiority equally reflect the Christian God’s management of the cosmos.

Chapter 11 revisits the key themes of this book’s chapters in light of questions about what should and could be done to make land use in the United States racially just. Even though the book begins with the intransigence of deeply embedded racial inequities in American land use, this last chapter turns to themes of hope and potential for a racial-justice transformation. First, the history of grassroots anti-racism activism is instructive for how the next generations of activists can work effectively for transformative change in the land use systems. Second, a substantive anti-subordination theory of the law can make a difference if it influences not only legal doctrines adopted by the courts but also the restructuring of land-use institutions, including private-market systems. Third, public policy reforms must be multi-faceted and aimed at systemic change, supported by evidence and advocacy. The chapter concludes with hopeful thoughts about how a Third Reconstruction could change the trajectory of “the monstrous and evil story” of “racism, power, wealth, and land throughout the nation’s history.”

How the Shepherd conceives of human–spirit relations leads me to examine two examples of the consequences of this entanglement of spirit possession and enslavement. I point first to how the holy spirit in the Shepherd functions similarly to the Roman enslaved overseer (vilicus) who represents the physically absent enslaver and surveils other enslaved persons. The Shepherd solves the problem that despotic writers (e.g., Cato, Columella) lament regarding how to guarantee that the vilicus is not mistaken for the absentee enslaver: God becomes both the enslaver and the vilicus, the ever-present surveillance over the enslaved through spirit possession. I also focus on one tricky passage in the Shepherd, a parable about an enslaved person working on a vineyard and its complex layers of interpretations offered by the Shepherd (Similitude 5), to better understand how the Shepherd conceptualizes the relationship between the holy spirit and the flesh that it treats as a vessel. I show how the Shepherd views enslavement to the holy spirit as a necessary risk for the enslaver, since the spirit can be polluted and defiled if the enslaved body in which it dwells is not constantly maintained.

Although all these men were Christian, only five of the six who lived during the Reformation (among the eight men who are the central focus of the book) converted to Protestantism. Each represented their religious commitments differently, however, and the single merchant who did not convert (Fürer) spent much of his later career as a vigorous critic of Luther. The chapter also explores the religious commitments of other merchants who left Selbstzeugnisse during the period, some of whom provided richer evidence of their spiritual life and their support of ecclesiastical and charitable institutions.

This chapter surveys economic perspectives of supply chain management and discusses their practical implications. It compares Adam Smith’s view of self-functioning supply chains with Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm that leads to supply chain management being perceived as a factor of production. Supply chain management dominated by Coase’s perspectives suffers from misguided investments, network externalities, myopic monetary policies, and incomplete market analysis. This chapter argues that supply chain management must be at the center of economic policies to create wealth for nations. It shows how Switzerland prioritized supply chain management and became one of the wealthiest and most innovative countries in the world.

This chapter discusses the extent to which these merchants defined themselves via their membership in their lineage, but then turns to the extensive evidence they provided about their marriages and their children, in effect their role as patriarchs of the nuclear households they founded. The men appear to have taken their familial responsibilities seriously and, even as they demonstrated their power over wives and children, they did not present themselves as harsh or unfeeling husbands and fathers.

This chapter examines how Islamist dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s in Türkiye, Iran, and the United States mobilized race and religion in their comparative critiques of authoritarian modernization and, in so doing, transformed Islamism into a critical interlocutor on racial justice.