The opening chapter outlines how reflective narratives can elucidate and extend existing conceptualisations of transitional justice goals. It traces the characteristics of historical, legal and creative narratives about the war and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the different meanings these narratives have given to violence and its aftermath. Here reflective narratives – produced slowly in and through the arts and law – emerge as stories that imagine or help imagine futures different to the present. The chapter introduces the entanglement of the methods of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ in this book. It also locates the arts and law in the field of transitional justice, arguing for the need to understand core goals from new perspectives that account for the interdisciplinarity of the field and for the inclusion of non-participatory arts in knowledge production. The chapter closes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter documents the almost entirely unexplored scientific biography of MacDonald, who found himself, in his Scottish education, at the forefront of Victorian innovation in science and science education. It resituates MacDonald’s writing within the contested debates and paradigm shifts in Victorian science, which attempted to redefine what science was and who got to participate in it – notions that changed drastically throughout MacDonald’s long life. It shows with which voices and views MacDonald aligned himself and into which discussions he actively sought to intervene, including on how Victorians envisioned its application especially in the ‘improvement’ of society. MacDonald’s fiction, and indeed fantastic literature in general, can be read as a foremost medium of engagement with and communication of scientific ideas. The final section of the chapter reads Lilith in this light – as MacDonald’s reflections on the place of science within society and the importance of it being unified with the imagination.

Phillis demonstrated an extraordinary degree of agency in the creation and distribution of her writings. Her letter to Whitefield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, reflects her under-appreciated skill as a rhetorician in prose. She had written enough poems by early 1772 to propose publishing a book, which appeared in London in 1773 as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Phillis spent six weeks in London to help promote the upcoming publication of her Poems. There she met Benjamin Franklin, among other socially and politically prominent men and women. The elaborate format of her Poems would have been remarkable even for a well-known author. The nature of the “critical examination” Phillis supposedly underwent remains disputed. Poems demonstrates Phillis’s skills in a variety of poetic forms. The year 1773 was pivotal in Phillis’s professional and personal lives. Her future looked promising.

Rowan Williams has an acute sense of how serious political debates hinge on different and deep conceptions of the person. His theological anthropology is self-consciously “multi-dimensional”, and while he shares with William Temple, Jacques Maritain, and John Paul II an understanding of the material, relational and gift-oriented nature of the human person, he also places a consistent and fresh emphasis on both the essentially communicative nature of the person, and on the final unknowability of personhood. Building on this, he shares others’ convictions that human personality is best formed and shaped in the ‘first-level’ communities in and through which people learn to communicate, relate, create, imagine, and give. However, he is also less antagonistic to the welfare state (certainly than John Paul II), and happier to grant it a direct role in securing “a safety net of public welfare provision” and “a basic level of protection of human dignity”. Hence the idea of the welfare state as a “referee” for first-level communities is ultimately inadequate for him, as it ignores the more direct and morally freighted role in ensuring the welfare of citizens that is proper to the state.

This chapter argues that Hobbes’s appreciation of Galileo’s principles of motion occurred in stages by focusing on a principle that Hobbes introduces in Leviathan 2.1 to explain the imagination: “when a thing lies still, unlesse somewhat els stirre it, it will lye still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat els stay it, though the reason be the same, namely, (that nothing can change itself) is not so easily assented to.” Although there is evidence that Hobbes became aware of the importance of this principle in early criticisms of Thomas White and in early notes for De corpore, he did not incorporate it into his account of the imagination in Elements of Law (1640). However, in later works, such as the English and Latin versions of Leviathan and De corpore, conceiving of unhindered motion as continuing eternally provided Hobbes with the ability to explain more aspects of human cognition related to the imagination. Furthermore, thinking of the passion "curiosity" as an infinite endeavor enabled Hobbes to explain why human scientific endeavors can persist even in the face of failure or apparent uselessness.

I start this chapter by briefly describing three possibilities for the future of capitalism and economic inequality. The first is that the rich continue to get richer; the second is a polar opposite approach that seeks to create economic equality at all costs; and the third involves the possibility of multiple forms of capitalism. Each possibility is explored in the next three chapters. In the remainder of this chapter, I explain why it is important to chart possibilities: doing so helps us understand potential paths forward and can meaningfully guide us toward the forms most congruent with our wishes. This world-making approach to psychology draws on theorizing around the psychology of imagination, which I develop here. I also return to value pluralism to help frame our understanding of the three futures that comprise Part III.

Sociocultural psychology of the lifecourse, which examines the development of the persons in their changing environments, offers here the frame for our exploration of development in older age. Although it has largely addressed the development of children, youth and adults, it has only recently started to approach the specificities of developing with age. This chapter retraces the ontological and epistemological foundation of this approach. It then further explores three sets of concepts of foremost importance when approaching development in the lifecourse into older age: those related to dynamics of distancing and imagining, core when examining semiotic processes in human development; those of interests and engagements, which emphasise sense-making and affects; and what regards the domains of conduct in which people engage. The chapter then sketches the specificities of development in older age within people’s material, social and symbolic environment.

Many interpreters of Kant accept the idea that our knowledge depends on an a priori synthesis of the pure manifolds of space and time exercised by the “transcendental imagination.” This chapter argues that although we can find that Kant suggests such a view, it is incoherent and unnecessary. Even though all cognition requires synthesis of spatial and/or temporal manifolds, and such synthesis requires the imagination as Kant defines it, namely, the ability to represent objects not currently present to us, “pure space” and “pure time” (and for that matter “pure apperception”) are not objects of any kind, but only forms of objects. Synthesis must take place in accordance with the pure forms of intuition, with the categories, and with the schematized versions of the categories necessary to apply their logical meaning to spatio-temporal manifolds, but such synthesis, even in the case of mathematical construction in pure intuition, is carried out by the imagination in accordance with a priori forms or rules; but synthesis itself is never a priori, thus there is no call for such a thing as “transcendental imagination.” Or, there is a transcendental role for the imagination, but not for a transcendental imagination.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.

In this introduction to Pragmatism Revisited, Robert Lane summarizes the book’s fifteen chapters. Those chapters apply classical and newer pragmatist ideas to a wide range of issues, including the imagination, conceptual change, ignorance, religious fundamentalism, truth in political discourse, authoritarian populism, academic freedom, criminal punishment and mass incarceration, environmental philosophy, bioethics, artificial intelligence, the Black intellectual tradition, feminism, gender, and social construction; the final chapter examines the future of pragmatism itself.

Ambrosio reads Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as inviting us to conduct experiments with our imaginations. On her account, the images that Peirce used to prompt his audience into such imaginative inquiry are tools that elicit imaginative activity. But since they are external and public, they also constrain that activity, resulting in shared habits that are subject to social criticism and thus to change. Ambrosio also considers John Dewey’s characterization of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal” in the imagination of different possible courses of action. While she notes that Dewey’s approach to the imagination adds a moral dimension missing from Peirce’s, she sees the two pragmatists as united in the view that experimental imaginative activities are empirical and social with important material components. She also engages with contemporary work on the imagination, suggesting that contributors to recent debates on that topic would benefit from studying Peirce and Dewey.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.