Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

Abstract: This chapter explores the potential of mathematics education for the formation of critical democratic habits of open-mindedness, flexibility, and concern for understanding. It shows how different approaches to the teaching of math serve to model different conceptions of authority and analyzes the implications that these conceptions have for democratic engagement.

The Epilogue argues that a collary of the book's thesis is that earnestness and credulity are not the same thing: the satires of Swift and Defoe reveal that credulous investment in even apparently authentic beliefs need not be earnest. This remains true regardless of whether there is a rigorous factual basis for such beliefs: the same bad faith can power both the most rigorous research as well as the most baseless conspiracy theorizing. A second corollary is therefore that such credulity need not be naïve or unreflective but can instead demonstrate both self-awareness and a deep cynicism, in the same way that Hutcheson’s moral sense is simultaneously an automatic and instantaneous process yet also one that reflects, upon further investigation, a kind of reasoning.

This essay outlines the semantic breadth and formal contours of Brecht’s early poetic experiments. For his Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary) collection (1927) Brecht pulled together those poems that he wrote between 1913 and 1925 as sharp protest against social tensions and frictions in the Weimar period. The title of his collection refers to Martin Luther’s “Postille” writings and their ritualized religious instructions. Brecht secularizes Luther’s religious agenda and poetic agitation when he categorizes his poems as Gebrauchslyrik (functional or everyday poetry). Their cynicism not only activates the reevaluation of classical literature and aesthetics, but more poignantly also the social norms, gender concepts, moral judgments and legal processes of bourgeois society. The essay argues that Brecht’s early poetic experiments model a cynical mindset that not only informs his anti-fascist satires in exile but also his later work as it set a standard for the twentieth-century modes of poetic and theatrical reflection in general.