Chapter 3 considers the dramas of Gertrude Stein, especially Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), revealing how her works test the limits of secular knowledge. It follows Stein’s pursuit of knowing something wondrously, in a sudden rush of revelation, an experience she believed was especially available to spectators in the theater. This experience entangles with the presence in her dramas of what she calls “religion,” in that the characters that instantiate wondrous knowledge are often called “saints” or “religions.” I explore what such religion means to Stein, tracing how her works limn the boundary between secular rationality and wondrous enchantment, bodying forth the plural forms of understanding that circulate in modernity. Particularly in Doctor Faustus, Stein presents wonder as a sensuous mode of knowing that unsettles the programmatic character of knowledge as it is apparently fixed within a secular-scientific paradigm. Her drama thus remakes religion in and for modernity.

Relativity plays an important role in the skeptical outlooks of the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus and of his predecessor Aenesidemus. But in the evidence concerning the earliest phase of Pyrrhonism, that of Pyrrho himself and his disciple Timon, there is no explicit mention of relativity. Nevertheless, there is good reason to suppose that it played an important role in their thinking. This is suggested both by the remarks at the opening of Diogenes Laertius’ life of Pyrrho, and by the summary by the Peripatetic Aristocles of an account by Timon of the early Pyrrhonist outlook. There is much about both these texts that is in dispute: whether they express a metaphysical view or epistemological reservations, whether the view applies only to questions of value or is global in character, and, on the Aristocles passage, how much of it represents Pyrrho’s ideas and how much just Timon’s. But on any plausible reading of these passages, there is a clearly implied emphasis on the variable ways in which things strike us, and this suggests a fundamental interest in relativity, even if it never surfaces explicitly.

This chapter discusses the importance of the phenomenon of epistemic relativity for Plato’s metaphysics and conception of truth. The argument from epistemic relativity, applied to attributes in the phenomenal world, is Plato’s favored strategy to highlight the need for a separate ontological domain of intelligible essences exempt from relativity. It is also a starting point for his metaphysical conception of truth. After a general discussion of the Platonic perspective on relative attributes, I introduce a set of terminological distinctions that help to categorize his various uses of the truth terminology. I then turn to the Phaedo, as it is the first dialogue to provide a broad exposition of Plato’s new metaphysical vision. I trace the various characteristic aspects of his truth terminology, as they emerge throughout this dialogue, and link them to his idea of philosophy and the underlying metaphysical conception. The last section discusses how a passage in the final proof of immortality qualifies the stark metaphysical dichotomy of truth and appearance by pointing to the possibility of certain kinds of determinate truth pertaining to objects in the phenomenal world.

This volume offers the first collection of Critical Evidence scholarship. By using the moniker, “Critical Evidence,” we mean to denote a school of thought that is quite broad but shares certain features. First, Critical Evidence scholars maintain that social conditions matter to what an ideal system of evidence will look like. The quality, depth, and breadth of knowledge inputs affect the quality of the knowledge produced through the application of rules in an adjudicative process. Critical Evidence thus questions one fundamental assumption of the rationalist tradition in evidence, namely, that the system generally achieves “rectitude of decision through correct application of valid substantive laws” and “rational weighing of evidence” by an “impartial decisionmaker.”

Chapter 9 brings together the rich terrain of perspectives on change, revealing how our underlying assumptions shape what we see, how we act, and what strategies we favour. It challenges the idea of a ‘best’ perspective, instead encouraging a flexible, context-sensitive approach. With an emphasis on self-awareness and reflexivity, the chapter shows how recognising – and experimenting with – different viewpoints can open new paths for collaboration and problem-solving. But it also comes with a warning: clinging too tightly to one way of seeing can obscure the bigger picture. At its core, this chapter is a call for intellectual agility, urging change leaders to stay curious, balanced, and aware of the lenses they – and others – bring to the table.

This chapter sets the stage by offering a general account of Aquinas’s understanding of scientia as a good habit of mind that has as its proper act the act of demonstrating. While the emphasis this chapter places on the psychological status of science and demonstration is somewhat novel vis-à-vis the secondary literature, the core claims it makes concerning scientia, quia demonstration, and propter quid demonstration are not.

The Introduction raises the question of what the task, job, or purpose of metaphysics is and, by extension, what the metaphysician should aspire to do. It then canvasses different conceptions of metaphysics that answer these questions in different ways, noting how some answers are bolder and more ambitious than others. Among the boldest and most ambitious of these conceptions of metaphysics is that of Thomas Aquinas, who held both that metaphysics studies everything and that it can do so in such a way as to produce rigorous knowledge of the highest sort – what Aristotle would call unqualified episteme.

This chapter analyzes Aquinas’s account of the principles of metaphysics – both the causal principles of common being and the scientific principles (i.e., the per se nota propositions) from which metaphysical reasoning proceeds. Because the subject-matter of Aquinas’s metaphysics has real efficient, formal, and final causes, it is possible to formulate corresponding real causal definitions of that subject, which can, in turn, serve as terms used to construct the primitive principles of metaphysical science. This means is that it is possible for Aquinas’s metaphysics to be “scientific” in the strongest sense in which he understood the word – that is, that Aquinas’s metaphysics can meet even the most rigorous standards of Aristotelian episteme.

This chapter motivates the central problem of the book from within the broadly Aristotelian tradition. Every Aristotelian science must have (1) a clearly delineated subject-matter about which its inquiry proceeds, (2) identifiable properties that can be demonstrated to belong to that subject-matter, and (3) principles to which the science’s practitioner can appeal in demonstrating that those properties belong to that subject. But even a cursory glance at the Peripatetic tradition shows that it is no easy task to state what metaphysics is about, what properties should count as metaphysical, or what principles metaphysicians should invoke when doing their work – let alone to make those answers harmonize.

From the late 1960s and 1970s, psychiatrists have become increasingly reliant on psychotropic drugs as the central treatment for their patients. This reflects and reinforces the biologically reductionistic turn that psychiatry has taken in its understanding of mental illness and treatment. This chapter plots the historical emergence, evolution, and consequences of biological reductionism in psychiatry. The chapter concludes with considerations for the psychiatrist to recognize and address this problem in their everyday work, which involves a re-envisioning of the psychiatrist as healer rather than prescriber.

This chapter examines several individuals and groups associated with the court of the Sasanian king Khusrō I (r. 531–79), detailing their respective religious and philosophical orientations, and the historical connections among them. The people in focus include, among others, Burzōy, author of the Vorlage for Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīla and Dimna, the Neoplatonists who supposedly left the Academy at Athens for the Sasanian court, and Khusrō I himself. While it is unlikely that the commonalities among these thinkers’ views are rooted in a shared debt or adherence to a specific tradition or school, they do attest to a broader philosophical and more specifically epistemological ferment in the later Sasanian empire, which continued into the time of Muslim rule.

Martin Amis’s prose style has been profoundly influential, and so has the consistency with which he foregrounded questions of style in his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter discusses what Amis meant when he spoke about style. It also discusses what it might be possible to say about style as such and argues that we can only really argue about a given style. It goes on to anatomise Martin Amis’s prose style using the tools of close reading, quoting from his novels Money and Time’s Arrow as well as his memoir Experience and his short story ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’. It discusses Amis’s style as a hybrid of postmodern and liberal-humanist insights into the nature of the world; as essentially urban; as positing style as a dandified response to British post-imperial decline; and, finally, as intrinsically comic.

Astrobiology, the search for life in the universe, raises critical philosophical questions concerning conceptual vagueness and epistemic uncertainty. The philosophy of astrobiology can be defined as the systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning the potential existence and detection of extraterrestrial life. This chapter explores the philosophical foundations of astrobiology, focusing on how we conceptualize and seek knowledge about life and intelligence beyond Earth. It examines the challenges of defining ‘life’ and ‘intelligence’ in ways that are not constrained by Earth-centric assumptions, emphasizing the problems of analogy, universality, and the limitations of having only one known biosphere. Epistemological issues arise from the difficulty of interpreting ambiguous data, the theory-ladenness of observation, and the risk of misattributing signs of life or intelligence. Astrobiology is above all a cognitive challenge of the terrestrial bio-culturally evolved human mind.

The history of astronomy and the history of philosophy are inextricably fused. This chapter highlights some of the dramatic episodes when astronomy confronted philosophical issues in metaphysics – questions regarding the objects astronomy studies; in epistemology – what is the most fruitful way to acquire knowledge in astronomy? And finally the ultimate existential question – what kind of a science is astronomy? Is it even a natural science at all?

Philosophical problems infuse the theory and practice of astronomy, including metaphysical foundations and influences, the limits of reasoning as in black holes and the multiverse, the problematic nature of observation and inference ranging from the canals of Mars to dark matter and dark energy, the role of technology and science policy in our present understanding of the universe, and the epistemological status of astronomy and its central concepts, including space and time, life and intelligence. The conceptual and methodological foundations and challenges of astronomy have not received systematic attention as they have in other fields such as philosophy of physics and biology. Here we argue for a unified history and philosophy of astronomy to include not only classical astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology but also space science and astrobiology. Examining such influences is an important step toward scientific advance. In this volume, fifteen historians of science, ten philosophers of science, and five scientists combine to analyze these influences. In addition to being useful for astronomers, historians, and philosophers of science, for the first time a book on the philosophy of astronomy is written for a broad audience.