This collection addresses some of the injustices associated with modern European politics. It begins by addressing the evils of conquest, of Christian oppression and the crusades. Then follows a series of poems denouncing the human debasement and the immorality of slavery. Nationalism is decried. Some European defenders of peace and justice are cited, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, Fénelon, and Montesquieu. Their contribution to a more just history of humankind, described here as a natural history of humankind, is acknowledged. Prominent historical figures such as Vasco de Gama, Afonso de Albuquerque, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro are condemned for their acts of conquest. A model of perpetual peace based on universal fairness, humaneness, and active reason is put forward as an alternative to that offered by Kant. On this basis, several practical dispositions to peace are given. The damaging effects of a history based on illusions of progress are described, and, with James Burnett, Lord of Monboddo, as an example, a non-teleological history is promoted. The collection ends with an appeal to true Christianity, which is seen as dictating the good of all humanity.

For many readers, Hume’s lengthy analysis of the passions in Book 2 has questionable philosophical returns compared to the rest of the Treatise. This paper provides a guide to a philosophically rich reading of Book 2. Instead of a disconnected series of individual arguments, Book 2 is the second half of Hume’s theory of human cognition as started in Book 1. Guided by a comparison with Hume’s A Dissertation on the Passions, I argue that Hume is not merely applying Book 1 principles to the passions, but introducing new principles governing how feeling attends to and transfers between our perceptions. Employing his methodology of experimental reasoning, Hume identifies differences between ideas and impressions, and explores how their interactions impact the movement and quality of affectivity. This is a significant expansion on the associationism of Book 1 of the Treatise, providing more sophisticated explanations and predictions concerning mental life.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

Chapter 2 introduces the field site. It provides a historic overview of Heyang village and provides “a ‘guided tour’” of the village’s principal tourist area, the ancient heritage dwellings complex, guminju, a nationally recognized and protected heritage site. It takes a brief detour into the village’s history, stretching as far back as the Five Dynasties era (AD 907-960), the period in which the village was supposedly ‘founded’ by Zhu Qingyuan, a high-ranking gentry who fled the imperial court to avoid being embroiled in war. Revered as the apical ancestor of the Heyang Zhu Clan, the discussion of Zhu rejoins the twenty-first century, where these historic tales of ‘origins’ are told and sold as part of the ‘xiangchou Heyang’ tourism brand. The development of Heyang’s tourism industry is discussed to highlight its transformation from its fledgling grassroots iteration in the mid-1990s, to becoming a developmental priority for the county government in the 2010s.

Through reading this chapter, you will gain insights into Vygotsky’s cultural-historical conception of play and the range of contemporary models of play that have been informed by cultural-historical theory.

Frieze, an everyday woollen fabric of domestic manufacture, serves in the Afterword as an image of resilience. Setting the more familiar images of romantic ruin to one side, the book ends by arguing for an Irish romanticism that scripts its own terms and knows its own strength.

The years between about 1780 and 1850 can be understood as a meaningful period in the making of a romantic Ireland. Nestled within the cradle of that century, though, lie folds and divisions that lend a distinctive texture to the underlying political formations described. The introduction traces some of these textures while setting out the main phases and patterns through which Irish romantic culture can be analysed and understood.

Surveying a range of literary texts written in the vernacular languages of medieval Britain, this chapter is concerned with the ways in which the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales defined themselves in opposition to the dominant state power of England. Countering the Latin historical tradition which positioned British history as English history, writers working in Irish, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh constructed origin myths and literary traditions that worked to build local communities and regional identities. Though the territories clustered around England were far from united in their political structures, they came together as peoples to resist the imperial ambitions of the English state.

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

This book examines contemporary progress rhetoric and its history by focusing on medicine, a field that has become the touchstone of the focus on progress. In recent decades, the term progress has been used by a wide range of people, including politicians, scientists, engineers, physicians, and patients, to make sense of medicine’s past developments, current achievements, and desired future. Large, private companies such as Meta and Google, for example, link artificial intelligence research and genomic analysis to progress in medicine and praise their own contributions for that reason. Using a philosophically informed historical approach, this book argues that debates about progress in medicine are always political debates underpinned by different interests, which reflect distinct approaches to persons, health, and society. It draws on academic engagements with the history and philosophy of progress, as well as the insights of physicians, patients, and tech actors, to show how medical progress can hold multiple meanings simultaneously.