Chapter 3 argues that the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon started with the successful exploration activities by Texaco between the 1960s and 1980s. Starting from the assumption that oil as a resource does not simply exist out there awaiting its extraction but is the result of a process of social construction, the chapter explores how discourses, policies, technologies, and material infrastructures intersected to transform the Amazon into a “resource environment.” This involved a process of making sense of, systematizing, and appropriating nature – both physically and mentally. The combination of exploration technologies with geophysical knowledge and indigenous guides enabled Texaco to locate oil reserves in its concession area. Exploration changed forever how the region was perceived: the Amazon was reduced to the prospect of oil through different processes of abstraction, such as the issuing of concessions. These early confrontations of the oil business with the rainforest also caused temporary and long-term environmental impacts beyond the conceptual metamorphosis of the Amazon.

Chapter 2 explores the Ecuadorean rainforest landscape, its inhabitants, and their first interactions with the oil industry before large-scale oil extraction started in the late 1960s. It starts by looking back at the millennia of gradual changes when the history of crude oil and the tropical rainforest environment started to intersect. An exploration of the geographical properties of the Amazon landscapes, as well as their flora and fauna including human inhabitants, visualizes the lively environment encountered by the first oilmen visiting the area in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Two multinational oil companies, the Leonard Exploration Company and Shell, undertook major efforts to discover petroleum reserves in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Even though their exploration programs failed in the end, their pioneering work of mapping and surveying the rainforest and its subsoil laid the foundation for large-scale petroleum extraction decades later.

Chapter 4 provides the theoretical framework for suspects’ invocations for counsel in the book’s corpus. The analysis will focus on the discursive features of suspects’ invocations for counsel during custodial interrogation, as well as the sequences of talk that follow the suspects’ invocations. This part of the analysis will use applied game theory, specifically hypergame theory, to describe police-suspect exchanges after a suspect invokes counsel. The model of the invocation game of police interrogation extends signal analysis from simple signaling games into extended conversations based on strategic objectives. This application of game theory to the invocation stage of an interrogation shows how an interrogator can manipulate a custodial suspect to change their preference to invoke counsel due to the ambiguities created by case law, which designates interrogators as arbiters of what constitutes an unequivocal invocation of the right to counsel, and stylized by formal training that encourages interrogators to engage in strategic discourse with suspects to maintain the possibility of obtaining statements.

This chapter outlines Plato’s metaphysics of artefacts on the basis of his explicit references to Ideas of artefacts in the Cratylus and Republic X, his discussion of the eidetic cosmos presented in the Parmenides and the description of the material world as a product of the divine artisan in the Timaeus. The second section presents the shortcomings of Plato’s account detected by Aristotle and addressed through artefacts: these are Plato’s failure to recognise final causes and the concept of imitation. The third section outlines the metaphysical intuitions upon which Aristotle builds by taking artefacts into account. The roots of certain metaphysical problems are not explicitly identified as Platonic, but they are arguably to be found in the Platonic corpus. These problems concern the range of things that have a form, the separation between axiology and metaphysics, the concept of real kinds and the relation between parts and whole.

The metaphysics of artefacts is increasingly gaining the attention of contemporary metaphysicians, particularly among supporters of hylomorphism, who all refer to or draw on Aristotle. However, there is no consensus about the place of artefacts in Aristotle’s ontology. Not only that, but there is no consensus as to whether Aristotle even has a single coherent account of artefacts in the first place. This book has shown that Aristotle does present a coherent and detailed account of artefacts. I shall now summarise the conclusions that have been reached in a manner that is sensitive to currently discussed issues, so as to provide a guide for the contemporary (Neo)-Aristotelian debate.

Chapter 5 provides a statistical analysis of the legal rulings that comprise the book’s corpus. The analysis looks at the possible relationships between the variables that make up the corpus, including types of invocations for counsel, types of suspects (e.g., juveniles, L2 speakers), and the judges’ presidential appointments, among an array of other legal and linguistic factors, and the judges’ rulings on the legal standing of the suspects’ invocations for counsel. To frame the discussion and understand the seeming disconnect between suspects’ invocations for counsel and the application of the law, the chapter provides a description of the corpus, the entry and selection of variables, and the research questions posed. The findings of the analysis provide further evidence of the effect of judicial rulings on the suspects/defendants’ legal journey. Given the potential significant role of suspects’ statements in the conviction of a crime, this chapter also includes a discussion on whether a ruling that suppresses such statements is enough to reverse a lower court’s ruling on the use of such statements and/or its content in court.

For Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. He portrays Ezekiel as denigrated, deceitful, and weak – the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. Yet the carefully constructed scholarly story Wellhausen tells about ancient Israel is structured through fanciful Romantic dichotomies; he maligns scribal culture while evoking a nostalgia for an imaginary oral culture. Wellhausen was deeply influenced by the orientalist fantasies of writers like Goethe and Herder; furthermore, their melancholia about European writing culture continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. Moving away from Wellhausen, I ask how we could read Ezekiel’s weakness, specifically through his face-turning prophecies – not as “diminished” gestures of once-powerful mantic acts, but as creative, rhizomatic acts which expand the possibilities of the prophetic genre?

William Blake’s literary prophecies constantly unsettle symmetries, “pulling the rug out” from under the harmony and balance neoclassical readers were trained to expect in a text or a painting. Blake’s prophecies have long been read through the teleological system of Ezekiel’s “merkabah” (chariot) vision. Each biblical allusion in Blake’s work seems to build to a greater whole, or can be explained through the prophetic “system.” However, what if Blake’s prophecies were refracted through Isaiah’s more dim vision? In the multiple versions of Isaiah’s initiation in Blake’s work, we encounter a prophecy of stutter, glitch, and weakness, and a flickering, partial vision. Rather than presenting a single bombastic image as a method to unlock a biblical allegory, Blake offers Isaiah’s prophetic walking as a figure for the interpretation of the difficult, irregular biblical text. From the perspective of the walker, the biblical text is full of hardened surfaces, desolate rocks, and irregular encounters, which must be read “with the feet,” topologically – not typologically – before the poet-prophet-walker can arrive at their destination.