Chapter 11 summarises the arguments in the book. It concludes that, although the evidence is incomplete, there is little reason to believe that the severe disfigurement provision is inducing positive attitudinal or behavioural change, nor providing an effective remedy for people discriminated against because of the way they look. It concludes by noting that other social changes may bring this issue into sharper focus, and suggests some ways in which holes in the evidence could be filled.

Reinach understood the specific temporality as an important structural element of law. It requires its own phenomenological assessment, which distinguishes the being of law from that of physical and psychological, but also mathematical objects. For him, however, the foundations of the temporality of law do not lie in consciousness, as in the later phenomenological theory of law, but in the a priori nature of the forms of law themselves. This is reconstructed here for the first time from the scattered fragments of Reinach’s phenomenology of the temporality of law and contrasted with Gerhard Husserl’s theory of law and time, which can draw on his father Edmund’s phenomenology of inner time consciousness and Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Both make important contributions to a theory of the temporality of law.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

This chapter looks at the history of climate change, the failure to act, systemic thinking and truth.

By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

The introduction sets out how Mike came to write the book, why it is so important for us to face up to the challenges ahead for humanity, how dismally we have so far failed to do so, how the book is structured and what kind of future we can hope for.

Prediction science is likely to push on toward distinct reconceptualizations or the dismantling of the cornerstones of traditional cognitive science, away from rule-based symbol manipulation and toward a comprehensive systems prediction science, toward theoretical unification and simplicity, toward figuring out the pros and cons of the representation-light and representation-heavy, toward incorporating analog representations and common codes, toward proactive, probabilistic, mechanistic, and formalized theories, and computationally specified models of the predictive mind. The paradigm shift of the predictive revolution is no longer only emerging: it is continuing at an ever-increasing pace.

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.

Understanding the government’s role in achieving the nation’s fundamental political values provides a roadmap for appreciating why time after time, the country has expanded government sometimes in bunches and sometimes in smaller batches. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions, not of their doing. History establishes that the defenders of government have a good story to tell. But they must tell it. The future of the country depends on appreciating what the government does and why it does it because the government remains essential to achieving our nation and its values.

Clinicians and patients have varying degrees of comfort in discussing prognosis. Patients can swing between worry or understanding that death is near and hope or optimism that lets them live life. This prognostication awareness pendulum may require a clinician negotiate the discussion over time. The cognitive roadmap for prognosis discussion is ADAPT (Ask what they know about their medical condition, Discover what they want to know about prognosis, Anticipate ambivalence, Provide information about what to expect, and Track emotion and respond with empathy). Some patients want prognostic information, some don’t, and some are ambivalent. While respecting their wishes, exploring why in each of these scenarios may be helpful to understand their concerns and how best to address them. Be aware that patients and their family members may have different prognostic information needs. Having separate conversations (with permission) may be in order. When they are concerned about destroying hope or prognosis is uncertain, using the frame of “hope and worry” can be helpful. Finally, when patients or family members don’t believe our prognosis, be curious as to why and focus on the relationship.

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.

Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.