Chapter 4 retraces how oil infrastructural projects, technology transfers, and the social relations underpinning them turned the Ecuadorean Amazon into an agro-industrial landscape: The ecology of the forest became enmeshed with the economy of oil due to the large-scale extraction since the 1970s. The oil companies’ interest to develop the region converged with the national governments’ aspiration to incorporate the Amazon into the national territory through agricultural colonization. To realize these goals, Texaco set up an extensive network of transportation infrastructure in the rainforest. A multitude of subcontracting firms, however, did the actual work of constructing platforms, roads, pipelines, and camps. Far from being a linear success story, the technological conquest of the Amazon suffered constant setbacks caused by the geological, geographical, and tropical climatic conditions of the rainforest. The progress of technology and colonization also faced opposition from local communities. One such story of resistance against an access road built in the territory of the A’i Kofán is woven into a broader story of how the region underwent a profound material metamorphosis.

Reluctantly crowned the national poet of the nascent Jewish state at the beginning of the twentieth century, Haim Nahman Bialik – a poet, essayist, and editor who spent most of his life on the margins of the Russian Empire – wrote a series of influential poems of wrath in the prophetic mode famously read as the expression of a crisis of secularism. In Bialik’s most affecting prophetic poetry, the almost imperceptible “wobble” in his teacher Ahad Ha’am’s style turns into a great storm of doubt, rage, sorrow, fragmentation, and loss. If Ahad Ha’am tried to construct a strong prophetic spirit as an educational tool, Bialik paradoxically uses prophetic failure and weakness to summon and goad his audience into a new kind of subjectivity. Reading Bialik’s crisis of secularism in a new light, I argue for a weak prophecy common to both Bialik’s poems and the biblical text.

Chapter 5 argues that the identification of the form in the mind of the artisan with art amounts to ascribing it the role of efficient cause. As the chapter explains, the form in the mind of the artisan is responsible for both qualified and unqualified coming-to-be. Art is the only form that is an efficient cause, in contrast to the form inherent in the artefact. By resorting to Aristotle’s biological works, the chapter clarifies how artefacts come to lack an inner principle of their behaviour and how this is connected with their lack of an inner principle of unqualified coming-to-be. Two theses in particular are challenged. The first is that the form is transmitted from the mind to the object and, as a result, the form of an artefact is potential, because this is the status of the form in the mind in the artisan. The second thesis is that artefacts are not substances because their forms are not principles of changes. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relation between eternity and substantiality.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), was a reclusive, self-taught intellectual active in a small circle of Hebraists in early twentieth-century Odessa. Though born to a wealthy Hasidic family, he reinvented himself as a secular rationalist and modeled himself after a prophet-hero he identified in biblical, rabbinic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Ahad Ha’am’s monumental prophetic persona, though, carried within it demonic forces that he couldn’t shake: ever-present anger, despair, and failure. As Ahad Ha’am, then, takes up a Romantic prophetic figure to convey a strong nationalist ideal, his multivalent allusions to Jewish and European culture expose his personal anxieties and weaknesses – as well as those of the secular Hebrew culture he hoped to create. Ahad Ha’am draws on an eclectic array of sources to construct his heroic, seemingly indigenous, Jewish prophetic model: perhaps the most surprising is Thomas Carlyle’s Victorian portrait of Muhammad, which inadvertently introduces a (Scottish) Zionist Muhammad into early Hebrew literature.

Chapter 2 addresses Aristotle’s use of artefacts as counterexamples or central elements in counter-arguments against Plato and the Academy. The common opinion, within the Academy, that there cannot exist Ideas of artefacts is used by Aristotle to highlight the internal incoherence of the Platonic theory (Met. A 9, 990b8–15; Met. B 4, 999b15–20; Met. K 2, 1060b23–8). Moreover, the case of artefacts offers evidence that Ideas are either inert thus superflous (Met. A 9, 991b1–7; GC 2.9, 335b18–24), or even in contradiction with the coming-to-be of individual substances (Met. Z 8, 1033b19–24). The chapter shows that in these passages Aristotle is using artefacts dialectically against Plato’s separation of Ideas and concludes with a reflection on the notions of separation and substantiality.

This final chapter shows how further enquiry into artefacts’ metaphysics forces us to return to artefacts’ physics. At the same time, this further enquiry is in turn shown to fall outside the interests of a metaphysician and to be the task of a natural philosopher. For this reason, the chapter looks at artefacts as objects of inquiry and distinguishes between perspective of the natural scientist, the maker, and the user on the one hand, and the perspective of the metaphysician on the other. This discussion allows us to wrap up the results, to reassess the relationship between the Physics and the Metaphysics, and to evaluate the respective contributions of these works to Aristotle’s ontology of artefacts.

In order to understand the Romantic fascination with prophets, we begin with an influential eighteenth-century figure poised on the cusp of neoclassicism and Romanticism: the English biblical scholar Robert Lowth – also a medieval historian, a shrewd politician, and the author of a bestselling English grammar handbook, who was destined to become the Bishop of London. Lowth is a key figure in the creation of the modern “poetics of prophecy.” Taking an approach which would become known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as “the Bible as literature,” Lowth initiated and represents an important new way of regarding the Bible aesthetically, one which we encounter through his construction of Isaiah as a strong prophet. Yet examining the fissures in Lowth’s ideal Isaiah – who he reads as a perfect combination of elegance and sublimity – can also help us think more critically about the literary study of the Bible.