At the close of Proust’s A La recherche, Marcel reflects on his late discovery that there is within him a ‘vast dimension’ of lost time, composed of moments that ‘still adhered to me and that I could still find again, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself’. The vehicle through which he is to achieve that descent, he thinks to himself, is the novel itself, the novel he is now to write.

A la recherche is, for this reason, a novel which demands to be reread, a novel which reveals the structural necessity of rereading that inhabits all acts of being in time. This essay responds to this demand, and this necessity, by reading Proust’s novel as an exercise in rereading. The epiphanic close to the novel rests on the conviction that there will come a form of writing, and a form of reading, that might absorb lost time into itself, and in so doing stage a recovery of a spent past, and of a spent life. But in calling in this way for its own repetition, the novel can only live, again, through the loss that it seeks to overcome. This inescapable play between recovery and loss, though, does not constitute a failure of the hope that the novel seems, on each reading, to rediscover. Rather, in inserting a logic of rereading into its own expressive mechanism, the novel becomes a scale for weighing those elements of time that are recoverable against those that are not. It allows us to see the novel as a differential machine, that can find the junction, in the contemporary moment of reading, between that which can be saved and that which cannot – the junction that is the horizon, in our own time, of literary, political and personal possibility.

Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. The young Karl Marx writes that ‘the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it’. Beauty happens in this difficult gulf between hand and eye, between eye and ear. This essay approaches the problem of beauty through the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith enacts the taking place of the artwork in the duplications it urges on us, as beauty ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes expression; but in the ground that lies between On Beauty and Howards End, this essay looks for a kind of critical language and a kind of political institution in which the idea of beauty might find expression.

Oscillations between members of flavoured, electrically neutral meson pairs and the CP violation are phenomena strictly connected with the mixing. However, CP is more general, having been observed also in the decay of charged mesons.

CP violation was first observed in the neutral K system. We see the states of definite strangeness, those of definite CP and those with definite mass and lifetime. The oscillation between the former states, the mathematical expressions and the experimental evidence.

The oscillations and CP violation in the B0 system, and the beautiful experimental results obtained at dedicated high-luminosity electron–positron colliders, the ‘beauty factories’. Beauty physics at the dedicated experiment LHCb at LHC, in particular for the B0, that is not accessible to beauty factories. Examples of CP violation in B0. The recent discovery of CP violation in the charm sector.

How the many different measurements can be put together to test the SM with the unitary triangle.

If the mass of a hadron is large enough, decays into final states that can be reached by strong interaction, that is, without violating any selection rule, are possible. The lifetime is then extremely short, of the order of a yoctosecond (10−24 s). These hadrons decay practically where they were born. We show how they are observed as ‘resonances’.

Hadrons, both baryons and mesons, were discovered in rapidly increasing numbers in the 1950s and early 1960s. How their quantum numbers, spin, parity and isospin were measured. Gradually it became clear that hadrons with the same spin and parity could be grouped in multiplets of the SU(3) symmetry. Proposal of the quark model and experimental verifications of its predictions. With increasing accelerator energies, more surprises were to come. The quarks are not only the three originally known, u, d and s, but three more exist, c, b and t. And more leptons were found, in total three ‘families’ of fundamental fermions, each with two quarks, a charged lepton and its neutrino.

The Consolation defends many claims about human nature and personhood, and depicts an exemplary human person, Boethius the character. This chapter synthesizes the book’s often puzzling and apparently divergent claims, while illustrating them with the depiction of the character of Boethius. It begins by outlining Boethius’ account of human powers and human nature, and then considers the Consolation’s account of human personhood. While Boethius’ account of personhood in the Consolation lacks the technical precision found in his Trinitarian works, he does give an account of some fundamental characteristics of persons consonant with his more explicit treatment in other texts. Finally, the chapter considers three distinctive themes in the Consolation’s account of human persons. First, this text controversially depicts human nature as able to change into that of a god or of a beast. Second, the Consolation depicts all human persons as microcosms, including within ourselves all aspects of the cosmos. Third, Boethius, like many classical writers, depicts human persons as most understandable in relation to beauty. Since this theme sums up earlier ones, the chapter closes there.

Chapter 3 takes up the Elenctic section of the dialogue, in which Socrates begins to chisel away at Alcibiades’ hubris in an effort to expose his double ignorance, that is, his ignorance of his ignorance. The young man hastens to the Athenian bema, eager to give a speech about justice, but estranged from justice beyond the level of ethical virtue. Without self-knowledge, he desires nothing other than the accolades of the many and asks not even the simplest question about justice, to say nothing of ascending to contemplate it as intelligible reality. Socrates refutes him in order to remove his arrogant pretension, not only that he knows justice, but that he knows himself. Generally, the Elenctic section removes the obstacles that stand in the way of Alcibiades’ conversion, and the Neoplatonic student learns that he must undergo a similar cleansing to that of Socrates’ interlocutor – Alcibiades’ purification is that of any philosophical initiate.

The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

Appreciations of Nietzsche as a so-called poet-philosopher reveal little about Nietzsche’s thinking about the poets and they pay insufficient attention to his conception of philosophy. This chapter offers a corrective by examining how he figures the task of the poets in his middle writings. The focus is on what he has to say about the poets in relation to the passions, as this provides the best way of approaching the problem. His criticisms of the poets – that they are fundamentally melancholic and that they too readily give vent to naturalizing impulses – is best seen in the context of his upholding philosophy’s classical concern with and teaching of the mastery of the passions. The concern with self-cultivation informs Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy at a deep level, and it also drives his reflections on the poets. Poets are significant because they assume the task of providing signposts to the future by developing images of what he calls “beautiful human beings.” I attend to Nietzsche’s interest in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in the final section of the chapter, since it is from Stifter that Nietzsche may have derived, at least in part, his conception of the cultivation of beautiful human beings.

‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.

Early Christian theologians regarded the sense of sight, along with the other bodily senses, as an essential aid for comprehending invisible and transcendent realities. Although Christ’s incarnation was regarded as divine condescension to the human need for eyewitnesses, a profound and complex theory, partly influenced by ancient and contemporary philosophical sources, judged visual perception of the external, material world as playing a key role in judging, retaining, and transmitting knowledge about the immaterial realm. The essential connections between physical sight and spiritual cognition were seen as pathways that engendered appreciation both for the divine presence and for the human potential for enlightenment, in this life and in the age to come. Such cognition thus depended not only on words read or heard, insofar as the action of seeing became an equally dynamic and effective means for attaining knowledge of the nature and purposes of God.

Moral realism in Philebus and Statesman are explored in this chapter. Plato’s later dialogues focus on this-worldly issues within a larger metaphysical framework (Section 6.1). Integrated unity according to kind is explained in relation to the good life. In Philebus Plato provides us with a criterion for the presence of manifestations of the Good: the complex unity of truth, beauty, and symmetry. The Good can be understood to be manifested in the sensible world. In Statesman, the ideal statesman turns out to be different from the philosopher (Section 6.3). The ideal for anything is integrative unity according to kind. As Plato says in Republic, the virtuous person “becomes one out of many” (Section 6.2). Plato also outlines a type of hylomorphic composition according to which the Good can be a this-worldly Demiurge instantiating goodness in the polis and in its inhabitants. The skill thus displayed is now seen to be different from that of the philosopher (Section 6.3).

How do we perceive the rest of nature meaningfully from the vantage point of our manufactured spaces? Whether the life teeming in a tropical forest, or surviving tenaciously on the remote reaches of the planet, we impact life that we probably never see first-hand. Our impact is from the manifestation of our nature, which is creative, industrious and prolific. Unfortunately, our impact threatens the stability of the only biosphere we can call home. How can human nature be connected to instead of orphaned from the rest of nature? No matter how much data we acquire about the crises we create for ecosystems, there remains tremendous inertia to apply the principal remedy: changing our behaviour. This implies the necessity to expand our focus from quantitative deduction of the problem and solutions, to ensuring we have the inner connections and relationships necessary for qualitative response to environmental stress. Does art create this sensitive bridge?

Chapter 2 describes Kant’s developing views of free beauty and of “form,” a term widely used throughout all phases of his aesthetics. If Kant is a formalist of some kind, which kind is he? The chapter argues that there are strong, moderate, and weak formalisms in Kant’s aesthetic theory, both early and late.

Chapter 1 surveys philosophers from the German and British aesthetic and intellectual traditions with which Kant directly engages in the third Critique and pre-Critical materials. What is the role of rules in his early aesthetics? Laying the foundation for some of the book’s later analyses, the chapter shows how the early Kant synthesizes ideas from his German and British predecessors.