The topic is ancient Greek terms for knowing: three main verbs, three cognate nouns, how to translate them, and how to understand the relation between translation issues and philosophical interpretation. Central are the schemas devised by John Lyons, in Structural Semantics: An Analysis of Part of the Vocabulary of Plato (Oxford, 1961). So far as Plato is concerned I favour Lyons’ original book account, as against his subsequent accommodation to the Rylean distinctions which so dominated scholarly discussion in Barnes’ and my youth. Besides the extensive texts of Plato and Aristotle, there is an account of Simplicius disagreeing with Alexander about the four knowledge verbs in the first sentence of Aristotle’s Physics. I close by elucidating Heraclitus frag. 57.

In the twentieth century, secular philosophers explicitly defended rule-utilitarian theories as alternatives to act-utilitarian theories that, they believed, led to implausible moral conclusions. This approach was powerfully criticized by people like David Lyons and J. J. C. Smart who thought rule-consequentialism was paradoxical because it awarded rules a weight that could not be justified on consequentialist grounds. In the mid- to late twentieth century there were philosophers who attempted to challenge the boundaries of utilitarian orthodoxy by expressly using nonconsequentialist moral premises to justify the shift to a legislative rather than situated perspective. The focus on the failure of rule-utilitarianism in terms of strict utilitarian orthodoxy has obscured the importance of hybrid theories that draw on both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist premises. A number of thinkers who are classified as rule-utilitarians (and sometimes criticized for betraying utilitarian orthodoxy) in fact expressly acknowledged nonutilitarian aspects to their theories (including R. M. Hare and John Harsanyi). The chapter ends with a summary of the main historical claims of Part I.

France’s introduction of mulberries and silkworms originated in the pincer-like arrival of resources and expertise across both its Spanish and Italian borders, and production would last through to the end of the nineteenth century, concentrated in southern regions. This chapter considers the moments of acceleration in the seventeenth century when French schemes (pushed by agronomists and political economists) sought to carry production to new regions. The fact that French domestic production of raw silk never came close to the quantity or quality required by its silk industry encouraged new ambitions overseas. The chapter tracks in turn the idiosyncratic projects in the French Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, and the more concerted ambitions and undertakings in Louisiana in the early eighteenth century – in both of which cases, enslaved labourers were mobilised for a time to nurture silkworms and reel silk, and women played prominent roles. French efforts around the Caribbean basin were compromised by competition with other crops, by the instability of the region’s geopolitics, and by a host of commodity-specific threats which showed up the fragility of silkworms. Even while French New World prospects of sericulture retreated, however, production was consolidated and deepened at home, thanks to environmental and labour advantages.