This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Caldwell focuses on how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s failure influenced the formation of Germany’s second democracy, the Federal Republic of Germany. It highlights how the actors who shaped the Bonn Republic actively compared Weimar and Bonn: The “Weimar analogy” here was not an abstraction, but highly present both as a lesson and as a trauma. “Bonn’s Weimar” demonstrates how a historical analogy may work in practice and it proceeds to make several general arguments about the way the analogies work. In particular, the chapter shows that there was never one Weimar analogy but that it is mobilized in different ways, by different actors, to make sense of democracy’s failure.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

The general theory of science outlined in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics mandates that the scientific enterprise proceeds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stages of inquiry, respectively. Aristotle’s study of animals illustrates this methodological insight in an especially clear way. Moreover, the following epistemic principle controls Aristotle’s study of animals: the study of animals must start from the most organized and most determinate form of life and must take that as its starting point to generate results that can be subsequently extended to what is comparatively less organized and less articulate. This means that the study of animals must begin with a discussion of the human body. This methodological insight is at work in Aristotle’s History of Animals. However, its significance goes well beyond the stage of the collection and presentation of the relevant data; this chapter shows that this rule of inquiry also shapes the explanation of the zoological data in Parts of Animals, Progression of Animals, and Generation of Animals. The chapter also discusses the distortions created by the application of this rule of inquiry with a concentration on Aristotle’s explanation of animal locomotion.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.

Most intelligence models include an array of processes and mechanisms that enable experts to generalize their knowledge and processes during career transitions and produce flexibility in cognitive structures that enable individuals to overcome limitations in applying expert knowledge and processes across domains and functional areas. These processes have been described variously as insightful thinking, induction, eduction, elaborating and mapping, novelty and metaphorical capacity, inductive inference, divergent production abilities, analogy, flexibility of use, and closure. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter introduces the reader to how Theophrastus approaches the topic of plants by offering a selective discussion of the first book of History of Plants. This book is a prolegomenon to the study of plants. It is also a liminal space where Theophrastus negotiates the transition from the study of animals to the study of plants. From the very way Theophrastus refers to animals, we can infer that Theophrastus builds his whole edifice on the results achieved in the study of animals. This overall approach not only confirms that the Peripatetic study of perishable living beings is approached via separate studies of animals and plants but also suggests that the relevant order of study is first animals, then plants.

In the second chapter, the role of the dialogue’s Proem is treated in detail. Socrates’ first words are not those of concepts but of courtship, and Alcibiades’ pending metamorphosis is begun by means of love. The Neoplatonic reading of the dialogue’s opening section is not just a reflection on Socrates’ pederastic obsession with a beautiful young man and his attempt to seduce him away from his other lovers; it is a prolonged meditation on the nature of love and its ultimate expression in the philosophical life. Far from being a playful preface without philosophical substance, the Proem is an introduction to this introductory dialogue, an isagogic first step in a lengthy rite of philosophical transformation that begins with erotic initiation. The Neoplatonic student finds that Socrates nurtures the seeds of erotic contemplativity in Alcibiades prior to his formal questions and arguments.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Historical linguists investigate those contexts that are considered to be most relevant to language change, given the theoretical approach adopted and the phenomena to be investigated. The topic of this chapter is usage-based perspectives on language-internal change, especially as conceptualized in the frameworks of research on grammaticalization, semantic-pragmatic change, and diachronic construction grammar. Contexts may be immediate, local “co-texts” or wider linguistic discourse contexts. Contexts tend to be wide and discursive as change begins to occur and local after it has occurred. I discuss the roles in enabling change of ambiguity, of pragmatic inferencing, and of “assemblies of discursive uses” such as have been proposed in work on constructionalization. With respect to contexts for “actualization,” the step-by-step language-internal spread (or loss) of a change that has occurred, focus is on host-class expansion and on the often analogy-driven changes across contexts, especially as revealed in corpus work.

In Chapter 5, we discuss the processing components that underlie the perspective-taking analogy that we articulated in Chapter 2. This analysis makes it clear that the retrieval of personal knowledge and experience is critical, and we review some of what is known about episodic retrieval and how it can be used in this context. In forming an analogy, one must be able to identify how elements of the story world are related to corresponding elements in one’s own experience. To understand this process, we discuss how readers must construct similarity relations. Finally, we discuss the mechanics of analogy formation per se and describe the notion of a structural mapping between the reader and the character that underlies the perspective-taking analogy. We close out Chapter 5 with a discussion of perspective-taking dynamics. This includes an illustration of how perspective taking can be driven by the events of the story world or evaluations of the character. As we make clear, perspective taking is an ongoing process that can unfold in a variety of ways over the course of reading a narrative.

Both because Islam arose later than Christianity and because of its present largely negative reputation, this chapter is structured somewhat differently from its predecessors. A first section looks at its historical relations with culture, stressing first positive aspects and then the distortions noted by Edward Said and his followers, as well as the more general, detrimental effect of western imperialism. The second section then explores historical restraints upon fundamentalism; first in the four Sunni schools through analogy, abrogation and chains of transmission. Mystical Sufism is then portrayed as an unjustifiably marginalised alternative. The final section then looks at contemporary options, taking first modern Muslim contextualisation before noting possible reasons why Christians could legitimately endorse Mohammad’s modification of earlier biblical stories. The variety of its present forms demonstrates the extent to which it can be seen to be pulled in opposing directions, hope in openness to new ideas restrained by warning pressures to ossify its past.