This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

Normal science is one of the core concepts in Kuhn’s philosophy, and its implications have been the target of both critical approaches and friendly attempts at analytic elucidation. This chapter aims to clarify the role of normal science in Kuhn’s philosophy, showing that some basic features of normal science, such as problem solving and the lack of criticism toward basic commitments, lead to a successful explanation of scientific progress. To do this, the chapter examines normal science, emphasizing the main features of the concept, the role it plays in the notion of science defended by Kuhn, and how it allows us to articulate the social and cognitive dimensions of scientific practice.

This chapter points to a dilemma at the heart of the judicial role. How can courts robustly review legislation for compliance with rights without exceeding the limits of the judicial role? And how can they pay respect to the democratically elected branches of government without ceding their obligations to uphold rights? Presenting courts as a form of constitutional ‘quality control’, this chapter argues they solve this dilemma by engaging in calibrated constitutional review. This requires judges to carefully calibrate the grounds and intensity of review depending on a complex analysis of legal and institutional concerns.

This chapter provides a broad overview of existing anthropological work on exemplars and proposes a new relational way of understanding exemplarity. Most existing philosophical and anthropological work on exemplarity has taken an explicitly functionalist approach. Academics have often valued exemplars because of their ‘articulatory power’ to connect the world of things with the world of ideas. This chapter advances this conversation by examining exemplarity as a relationship between persons and things rather than an attribute of either. In doing so, the chapter explores the social effort that is required to stabilize exemplars in the world, and it shows how the creation of exemplars always goes hand in hand with scepticism and critique. Finally, the chapter investigates whether the modern world has been overcome by scepticism towards exemplars such that we now face a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which only ‘everyday exemplars’ can be recognized.

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

This chapter explores the value of and bases for police legitimacy. In doing so, it distinguishes between descriptive (or perceived, popular) legitimacy, and normative legitimacy, ultimately arguing that the latter is the natural ground of democratic policing and the more critical of the two, given policing’s commitment to practical, substantive justice. One of the principal hazards of descriptive legitimacy is its ability to yield a popular perception of policing’s legitimate authority that can sanction populist sentiments, ones that do not necessarily protect minority rights or honor a commitment to pluralism. Legitimacy is critical in the police pursuit of cooperation, especially in times of epistemic uncertainty, and the argument here is that the careful pursuit of substantive justice that conforms to the requirements of normative legitimacy will yield descriptive legitimacy across a substantial part of the community, and especially among its more marginalized or vulnerable members.

There are many different things we mean when we say that something is true. What is the relevant sense of truth operative in actual practices, and in the actual judgements that we make concerning the epistemic quality of propositions? It is helpful to start with a distinction between secondary truth (which is grounded in the truth of other propositions), and primary truth (which is not). Concerning the meaning of primary truth in empirical domains, I propose the following definition: a proposition is true to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying on it. This ‘truth-by-operational-coherence’ is not a matter of binary yes-or-no, but a quality with many dimensions. It also provides secure underpinnings for epistemic pluralism: mutually incommensurable systems of practice can each contain a set of propositions that are true-by-operational-coherence. Through this notion of truth we can also rehabilitate James’s pragmatist theory of truth.

This chapter investigates the conditions for dialogue between science and religion, and asks what makes dialogue possible or desirable. Sometimes, dialogue has simply amounted to theology and religion accommodating themselves to the sciences, and this can serve to reinforce unhelpful ways of categorising science and religion. Different models for dialogue are suggested by past relations between natural philosophy and religion, understood as formative practices (rather than proposition-generating activities). An alternative approach is also suggested by the problem of incommensurability, initially applied in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alasdair MacIntyre to the relations between competing scientific frameworks, but which is also applicable also to science–religion relations. Thinking of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in terms of historical traditions, to use MacIntyre’s expression, leads to a different understanding of their possible relationships. Historical and sociological descriptions of scientific and religious practices, in short, should play a more prominent role in our understandings of sciences, religions, and their relations.

I spell out Kuhn’s rationale for pursuing the evolutionary approach. He first concluded that the historical record does not support the assumption that science develops teleologically towards the truth, which then led him to outline an evolutionary view of scientific development. Kuhn argues that the future of the sciences is open-ended and that the sciences are bound to diversify, not unify. Because the historical process of the sciences leads to an ever more fragmented outcome, there is no coherent worldview at the end of this process. Kuhn thought that not only sciences fail to arrive at the final truth about the world, but that truth as correspondence to the mind-independent world must be rejected. Because sciences’ niches, in which sciences are practiced, change, there simply is no fixed and permanent mind-independent world to which statements and theories could correspond. Nevertheless, Kuhn was interested in the function of ‘truth,’ that is, the possibility to judge whether beliefs and theories should be accepted or rejected. I argue that a specific Sellarsian pragmatist notion of truth, which understands truth as semantic assertibility, serves Kuhn’s interests well.

I examine the variety of Kuhn’s notions of incommensurability, including methodological, semantic and observational incommensurability as found in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and local incommensurability as found in later publications. I argue that through these various presentations, Kuhn establishes reasons to criticize and reject the correspondence theory of truth that is predicated on a mind-independent world. I show that under both observational incommensurability and local incommensurability, Kuhn provides reasons to criticize the epistemic assumptions in truth as correspondence. I maintain that for both semantic incommensurability and local incommensurability, Kuhn assumes the conception of language as the universal medium. I contend that this view of language, together with Kuhn’s rejection of a neutral language, provides reasons to challenge the linguistic assumptions behind the correspondence theory. I suggest that, given the challenges his thesis of incommensurability raises against truth as correspondence, Kuhn rejects the correspondence theory and instead considers alternative theories of truth.

I argue historical information on the relationship between Copernicus’s work and Islamicate astronomy, which came to light when Kuhn was writing The Copernican Revolution, complicates the depiction of Copernicus’s work as revolutionary, or discontinuous with previous astronomy. I consider Saliba’s claim that Tusi’s work was “a Scientific Revolution before the Renaissance.” I conclude that, although Tusi’s work is important, it is better understood as extending normal science. Similar arguments undermine the claim that Copernicus’s work was revolutionary. Earlier histories of the Copernican revolution have given too little credit to the innovations of Tycho Brahe, and his imitators and opponents, and the solid scientific reasons for preferring Tycho’s system over Copernicus’s as late as 1650. However, the situation in European astronomy and cosmology from the career of Copernicus to the death of Newton does look like a Kuhnian crisis state. It is also possible to locate incommensurabilities between heliocentric and geocentric cosmologies, especially beginning with Kepler. The concept of incommensurability remains an important resource for understanding the history of science.

In Chapter 5, I discuss how people’s divergent Islamic conceptions, practices, and imaginaries can become incommensurable with one another. I describe and discuss the different Islamic divination and healing practices encountered in the zongos and trace their surrounding discourses and debates. These ‘bōkā’ practices are diverse and contested, if not rejected outright by their critics. Proposing the concept of the imaginary, I argue that these practices should be considered in their respective contexts and in view of people’s understandings of how things (should) hang together. I therefore present two ‘bōkā’ practitioners and relate the discourses they hold on their practices, seeking to convey how they ground these in the Islamic discursive tradition and make sense of them. I also discuss people’s varied conceptions and practices of ṣadaqa. I then present the critiques of ‘bōkā’ by different actors and highlight how they ground these within and lay claim to the same discursive tradition of Islam. As I argue, the people of the zongo engage with and take part in a shared discursive tradition as they (re)make and live their religion. Yet, the ways in which they participate in this religion and what they make of it are not only open to varied engagements but inherently diverse.