This chapter critically interrogates the incommensurability thesis in contemporary debates on decolonization in higher education, showing how, despite its important political interventions, it can inadvertently generate new binaries – such as decolonization versus anti-racism, or land versus epistemology – that fracture possibilities for solidarity. The chapter advances a both/and approach that takes contextual specificity seriously: in settler-colonial contexts, land, sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination remain irreducible, while in other sites decolonial struggle may center racial capitalism, language, labor, migration, or resource extraction. Rather than treating these orientations as mutually exclusive, the chapter theorizes conditions for anticolonial synergy, including relational accountability, non-substitution (refusing to collapse or displace Indigenous land claims), intersectional and historically grounded analysis, and coalitional politics built around shared campaigns such as alliances between Indigenous land struggles and abolitionist movements. The analysis supports the book’s proposal for a coalitional framework that bridges decolonial and social justice politics through anticolonial solidarity.

Valuation through willingness to pay (WTP) faces serious objections that complicate its role in markets and regulation. People often suffer from “miswanting,” desiring goods that fail to enhance welfare while neglecting those that would. Behavioral biases, including optimism, present bias, loss aversion, limited attention, and reliance on the availability heuristic can distort judgments and lead to systematic errors in monetization. Adaptive preferences further undermine WTP, as individuals adjust to deprivation or risk in ways that conceal genuine welfare losses. These failures raise concerns for both welfare-based and autonomy-based defenses of WTP. Societies also exhibit “behavioral market failures,” where biases yield unreliable valuations. Broader philosophical objections highlight issues of inalienability, commodification, inequality, and incommensurability, raising the question of whether monetization corrodes the moral or communal meaning of certain goods. While WTP remains valuable in many easy cases, it runs into powerful objections.

The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

In this chapter I present the Core Argument for why intending death is always wrong. The argument gives reason to hold a sanctity-of-life view but does not depend on such a view.

This chapter introduces philosophies of science based on the notion that science functions within structures of theories, where some theories are fundamental and protected from falsification. A short piece of fiction illustrates this notion. Building on this story, Kuhn’s paradigms are introduced, including the concepts of scientific revolutions, paradigm shifts and incommensurability between paradigms. Some problematic aspects of paradigms are mentioned, such as the seeming lack of real scientific revolutions historically and whether progress and preservation of knowledge in science are really possible given the incommensurability between paradigms that replace each other. It is acknowledged that paradigm thinking has had a strong lasting role both within science and in society, but not always in a way Kuhn would have recognised. Lakatos’ research programmes are introduced as a similar but different approach, and the ‘new experimentalism’ is mentioned as a quite different way of dealing with theory-dependence and theory structures in science.

Chapter 1 begins with a selective history of Christian–Hellenic intellectual engagement (including a detailed introduction to Julian and Cyril) in order to show simultaneously (1) the historical uniqueness (thus significance) of Julian’s and Cyril’s polemical projects and (2) the fitness of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights for making sense of their engagement. The second half of the chapter presents MacIntyre’s analysis of the dynamics when “two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement,” with Julian and Cyril in mind. What I call “narrative conflict” is only one part of the theory that emerges from his argument, the complete scope of which pushes us also to consider whether traditions so engaged might have non-intersecting forms of reasoning. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what Julian’s and Cyril’s “narrative conflict” might contribute to how we think about religious and philosophical argument in late antiquity.

The book concludes by commenting on what can be said about the traditions that Cyril and Julian represent (Christianity and Hellenism) based on the focused analysis of the particular arguments of these two figures. Demonstrating narrative conflict between two individuals does not yet prove incommensurability between their traditions, and this concluding chapter points to how that larger question would need to be broached.

This chapter examines how the history of science became a resource for the development and defense of important alternatives to logical empiricist views of scientific theory and the growth of scientific knowledge. The chapter also examines the different meanings attached to scientific paradigms in Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific change and different notions of incommensurability implicated in his account. Like other postpositivist thinkers, Kuhn rejects the logical empiricist idea of separating observational and theoretical language, arguing instead that observation is theory-laden. The history of science plays an important but distinct role in Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programs, which aims to represent the rationality of scientific thought. The chapter concludes by examining Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, which appears to cast doubt on the prospects for providing a systematic account of scientific rationality. Are Feyerabend’s views as extreme as their expression suggests, or is there another way to understand his provocations?

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

Normal science is one of the core concepts in Kuhn’s philosophy, and its implications have been the target of both critical approaches and friendly attempts at analytic elucidation. This chapter aims to clarify the role of normal science in Kuhn’s philosophy, showing that some basic features of normal science, such as problem solving and the lack of criticism toward basic commitments, lead to a successful explanation of scientific progress. To do this, the chapter examines normal science, emphasizing the main features of the concept, the role it plays in the notion of science defended by Kuhn, and how it allows us to articulate the social and cognitive dimensions of scientific practice.

This chapter points to a dilemma at the heart of the judicial role. How can courts robustly review legislation for compliance with rights without exceeding the limits of the judicial role? And how can they pay respect to the democratically elected branches of government without ceding their obligations to uphold rights? Presenting courts as a form of constitutional ‘quality control’, this chapter argues they solve this dilemma by engaging in calibrated constitutional review. This requires judges to carefully calibrate the grounds and intensity of review depending on a complex analysis of legal and institutional concerns.

This chapter provides a broad overview of existing anthropological work on exemplars and proposes a new relational way of understanding exemplarity. Most existing philosophical and anthropological work on exemplarity has taken an explicitly functionalist approach. Academics have often valued exemplars because of their ‘articulatory power’ to connect the world of things with the world of ideas. This chapter advances this conversation by examining exemplarity as a relationship between persons and things rather than an attribute of either. In doing so, the chapter explores the social effort that is required to stabilize exemplars in the world, and it shows how the creation of exemplars always goes hand in hand with scepticism and critique. Finally, the chapter investigates whether the modern world has been overcome by scepticism towards exemplars such that we now face a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which only ‘everyday exemplars’ can be recognized.

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

This chapter explores the value of and bases for police legitimacy. In doing so, it distinguishes between descriptive (or perceived, popular) legitimacy, and normative legitimacy, ultimately arguing that the latter is the natural ground of democratic policing and the more critical of the two, given policing’s commitment to practical, substantive justice. One of the principal hazards of descriptive legitimacy is its ability to yield a popular perception of policing’s legitimate authority that can sanction populist sentiments, ones that do not necessarily protect minority rights or honor a commitment to pluralism. Legitimacy is critical in the police pursuit of cooperation, especially in times of epistemic uncertainty, and the argument here is that the careful pursuit of substantive justice that conforms to the requirements of normative legitimacy will yield descriptive legitimacy across a substantial part of the community, and especially among its more marginalized or vulnerable members.