Medication nonadherence directly correlates with poor patient outcomes and high avoidable healthcare expenses. Motivational interviewing (MI) was developed as a client-centered, nondirective therapeutic method aimed at helping patients overcome their ambivalence and commit to change. In the context of medication adherence, ample research has demonstrated that MI is efficacious in evoking the patient’s desires and commitment to adhere to psychiatric medications as opposed to less successful directive therapy techniques, which tend to provoke resistance. This chapter outlines an application of MI to the challenge of promoting medication adherence in the psychiatric setting.

This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the intentionality of desires. It argues that desires are complex intentional states that entail both axiological and conative characters in relations of founding. By explicating the intentionality of desires, the chapter demonstrates that desires are similar to emotions as well as volitions but also differ crucially from both. Whereas emotion can lack conative components, desires always posit some goals or other, and strive for their posited goals. Unlike full-fledged volitions, however, desires entail deeply affective axiological components. The first section of the chapter provides the basic conceptual tools that are needed for a phenomenological analyses of the intentionality of desires. The second section distinguishes intentional desires from pre-intentional drives, affections, and feelings. It thereby clarifies the type of object-directedness that is characteristic of desire. The third section then explicates the axiological and conative constituents of desires in the interest of distinguishing desires from both emotions and volitions. The final section throws light on the temporality of desires. It argues that the intentionality of desires provides them with a specific “temporal shape” and makes them future-orientated. At the same time, this gives them a strong interest in realities and prospects of realization.

We step inside a closed-door customs committee meeting in Brussels, following Louise and her colleagues his chapter offers a rare, immersive account of a customs committee working group, where twenty-seven member states, interpreters and Commission officials grapple with the minutiae of classifying consumer goods – from vacuum cleaner parts to decorative balloons – amidst a whirlwind of digital tools, linguistic compromises and political maneuvering.

Through vivid ethnographic detail, we reveal how EU law is crafted. Here, the classical diplomat – negotiator, mediator, generalist – confronts the realities of digital mediation. Through Louise’s eyes, and in rare ethnographic detail, we witness the labour of multilingual lawmaking: interpreters juggling languages and distractions, delegates scrolling for images to clarify a product’s classification and the relentless clicking of keyboards as twenty-seven member states haggle over every word, comma and image in a three-column Word document.

This chapter reveals how digital technologies, while promising efficiency and speed, also fragment attention and introduce new layers of complexity. The negotiation room becomes a microcosm of the EU’s ‘Brussels effect’ – its power to set global standards – where the mundane (classifying vacuum cleaner parts or decorative balloons) intersects with the monumental (shaping trade, safety, and environmental rules for 500 million citizens). As interpreters and diplomats alike rely on digital tools to bridge linguistic and political divides, the chapter asks: How is the craft of diplomacy transformed when screens and algorithms mediate human judgement? And what does this mean for the future of EU governance, as AI begins to reshape the invisible labor that keeps the Union running?

Ireland’s Jewish population experiences a hyphenated identity. At once insiders andoutsiders, and part of an ever-shrinking population, Irish Jews express a sense ofisolation and vulnerability, of being reduced to media stereotypes or expected toperform an essentialized Jewishness.  Parallels between the Irish and the Jews arefamously drawn in Ulysses, echoing a trope found elsewhere in Irish writing,whereby the two peoples find a shared history of oppression, migration, and exile. Such affinity on the page does not necessarily translate to lived experience on theground, however. Today, Irish Jews express an awareness of being othered, afeeling of conditional acceptance within an official Irish narrative of tolerance, whichthey connect with Irish perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The voices ofthe Jewish community in Ireland tell us something about the problematics (andpossibilities) of an ambivalent identity, the site of ongoing formation and negotiation.

This chapter explores the prehistory of ambivalence as an embodied emotion related to human survival by examining the ambivalent reactions to plague law in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Long before the word “ambivalence” appeared in English, Defoe depicts actions and thoughts that we now think of as “ambivalent.” In the face of a deadly plague that resulted in legal regulation enabling government surveillance, Defoe’s narrator shifts loyalties as restlessly as he shifts positions, ambivalently pivoting between loyalty to the larger community as represented by the law and pursuit of his own concerns. The chapter suggests that Defoe presents ambivalence as a mode of resistance to state surveillance and control that avoids the most extreme expression of resistance, that of suicide, or as eighteenth-century law construed it, “self-murder.” Ambivalence, often thought of as a self-defeating emotion, is represented as serving a protective function, creating space for individuals to resist legal authority, neither capitulating to state control nor exercising a fatal form of resistance.

Blander’s epilogue contextualizes Ezrahi’s current work within his previous research corpus as well as interweaving new concepts: depth skepticism, modest democracy, and the right to dream. Blander describes three spheres of democratic backsliding and the rise of populism: legal-institutional, social, and intellectual freedom. She suggests that Ezrahi introduces a deep explanation of these troubling trends. Blander introduces the concept of “Depth Skepticism,” which applies to philosophers, among them Ezrahi, who searched for deeper layers of the human experience in order to identify the causes of sociopolitical phenomena. The epilogue follows Ezrahi’s intellectual journey, identifying a connecting thread from his early work “The Descent of Icarus,” revealing the interaction between science, enlightenment, and democracy through “Imagined Democracies,” portraying the role of science in creating the epistemological foundations of modern democracy, to the current volume introducing the cosmological shift from Nature/Culture to a blurred “HumaNature” cosmology and how it affects democratic foundations. This shift calls for a “modest democracy” that accommodates reason, emotions, and ambivalence. It views democracy as a constructive utopia, allowing individuals and groups the “right to dream” within nonviolent pursuits. This democracy fosters compromise, balances power, and tolerates contradictions, embodying a constant state of becoming.

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

This chapter describes both the centrality of Morris’s work as a public lecturer and his feelings of ambivalence about speaking out in this way. It moves from Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the lectures as where Morris spoke as a ‘whole man’ to Thomas Carlyle’s mixed feelings about the form, poised as it was between conflicting ideas about preaching, about political life and about celebrity. It examines how Morris’s career as a lecturer was an aspect of his deepening engagement with public controversy from 1877, and was imagined as a duty that Morris was obliged to take up. It considers Morris’s resistance to rhetoric, which he connected to the deceiving modes of contemporary conventional politics. It argues that Morris’s own rhetoric was more compelling when he spoke at dramatic occasions, such as his Oxford lecture on ‘Art and Democracy’, rather than when he considered the lecture to be part of the grind of socialist agitation, where Morris sometimes worried about the capacities of his working-class audiences to understand his central message. The chapter ends by considering Morris’s speaking in Northumberland in 1887, as a temporary utopian moment when public speaking and the condition of the people were integrated and not separated.