This chapter will examine the notion of theology as a science in some summae from the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century, exploring the works written both by secular masters and members of the religious orders.

Chapter 3 focuses on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s theorization of maṣlaḥa, one of the two core features of his legal philosophy. I first sketch the evolution of maṣlaḥa in the Shāfiʿī school in the centuries before Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and then analyze his own theory of maṣlaḥa, its underlying moral philosophy, its legal normativity, and its debt to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s Khurasani Shāfiʿī predecessors. The chapter also considers the challenges to the law’s rationality and morality in the Damascene milieu that likely motivated Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s development of his theory of maṣlaḥa.

This chapter outlines the basic principles of qualitative research in the context of mental health. We begin by discussing the philosophy of reality and knowledge production, demonstrating how these discussions filter through to every aspect of qualitative research. We then explain the fundamental elements of qualitative research, including how to formulate a research question, different methodological approaches, the application of qualitative methods in clinical trials, data collection, sampling, and analysis. This chapter also focuses on how qualitative research can make a change, providing unique insights on how to influence policy and engage government. We devote a substantial part of the chapter to research ethics and reflexivity, summarising not only basic bioethical principles, but thinking about ethics from an anti-colonial perspective. We end the chapter by exploring what constitutes high quality qualitative research, laying out some guiding principles and practices for promoting quality. Our aim with this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account of qualitative research, rather to offer guidance and inspiration to fledgling researchers who would like to find out more.

This chapter analyses the epistemological overhaul of genres and ideas of textuality that took place in Ethiopia between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and that prepared the grounds for the rise of Amharic print culture. Gäbrä-Əgziabher Gila-Maryam is generally credited with producing the first Amharic newspaper. His poetic newssheets readapted the genre of the awaj, or imperial proclamation. Most of these newssheets were handwritten, but Gäbrä-Əgziabher also pioneered the use of print to clandestinely circulate a longer type of awaj in prose. Through an analysis of Gäbrä-Əgziabher’s genre innovations, the chapter argues that the emergence of print in Ethiopia should be understood as part of a broader transformation of the oral/written interface – itself a result of the resignification of notions of ‘the public’ in the context of the new global dimension of politics.

In this chapter, I endorse phenomenal conservatism as an epistemic theory of justification and I defend that we are justified in believing that the direction of time is primitive because it seems to us to be primitive, unless there were defeaters for having such a belief. This is what I call the “Argument From Appearances.” I then analyse one of the most powerful arguments against this argument, the “Time-Reversal Argument,” and claim that it relies on supplementary premises that can be challenged. Therefore, it is rendered harmless and does not qualify as a solid defeater against the Argument from Appearances.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

Chapter 3 introduces the nature of the information we think about and how that affects what we might conceptualise as ‘knowledge’, thus addressing the book’s titular perspective. Specifically, the nature of epistemology is discussed, alongside its relationship with reflective judgment. These concepts are explored through examples pertaining to the nature of theory, proof, certainty and falsification.

Plato’s Socratic dialogues depict Socrates as advocating for two conflicting requirements. Socrates sometimes says that a non-expert is required to retain autonomy and to think for herself. On other occasions he suggests that the non-expert is required to defer to the expert’s opinion. This paper offers a way to resolve the tension between these requirements. For Socrates, both intellectual requirements are dependent on the one’s intellectual aim. Socrates thinks that one is required to think independently if one’s aim is to acquire the expertise that the interlocutor professes to have. However, if one’s aim is simply to make a correct decision in a particular situation, one is required to defer to an expert opinion. If one’s epistemic aim determines which requirement one should comply with, then, for Socrates, what counts as a reason for belief is sometimes dependent on one’s (epistemic) aim.

Humans have historically devised, and continue to devise, various strategies to make their gods present in the mortal realm. The introduction explains how technologies should be understood as one such strategy employed in ancient Greek religion to solve the ‘problem of divine presence’. Key terms including technology, mechanics, art, and technē are explained, and the relationship between these terms is discussed. Various themes important to the book are also introduced: theoretical frameworks to access the agency of technological objects which conditioned ancient religious experience (including a reassessment of Alfred Gell’s theory of art objects); what we should make of apparently conflicting epistemologies in a topic such as this which combines ‘rational’ scientific knowledge and sacred experience; and how concepts of play and the playful were crucial both to religion and to technology in Classical antiquity.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

This chapter aims at raising a sense of reflectiveness regarding the use of the concept of “infrastructure” in the analysis of finance, through addressing different, if interconnected, problematizations of financial infrastructural reason. First, infrastructures are problematized as a modernist social imaginary that reproduces functionalist reasoning about society, thereby systematically effacing asymmetries and exclusions enabled by infrastructures. Second, infrastructural thinking is tightly coupled to conceptions of sovereignty and governability of populations, territories, and resources, thus inviting security thinking. Third, infrastructural reason in finance reproduces a globalist view on the international political economy together with a realist imaginary of international relations, modeled after a zero-sum game. Fourth, infrastructural reason in finance sidelines important political-economic critiques of the global financial economy, effectively correcting the imagery of the relationship between production base and financial economy. In conclusion, when using infrastructural reason to diagnose the present condition of the finance economies, it seems worthwhile to view infrastructures not so much as fungible, smoothly operating, and only in exceptional cases failing systems, but rather as leaky networks through which shocks, disruptions, and exclusions are disseminated.