This chapter lays out the metatheoretic approach of the book. The focus is on how scientists use experimental work to support compositional hypotheses. It sets aside questions of how scientists might reason in the lab or how scientists might support hypotheses in review articles or textbooks. It brackets questions of the warrant of scientific reasoning. It addresses some of the challenges facing the use of case studies.

According to the standard account of time reversal, namely the account found in physics books, a time-reversal transformation involves a temporal operator 𝑇 that, when acting on a sequence of states, inverts the order with which states happen, and suitably changes the properties of the entities in the state so as to make the theory time-reversal invariant. This ‘symmetry first’ approach imposes symmetries on the theory: the changes in the states are a consequence of requiring the theory to be time-reversal invariant. Some (Albert, Callender) find this view unjustified: we discover a theory has a given symmetry, on the basis of the theory’s ontology, not the other way around. So, they propose a ‘metaphysics first’ approach, sometimes dubbed ‘pancake account’ of time reversal: 𝑇 inverts the order of the states but does nothing else. Consequently, since there are no obvious independent reasons for the state to change as 𝑇 prescribes to preserve time-reversal symmetry, then the theory is not time-reversal invariant. In this chapter I wish to further motivate the pancake account of time reversal by arguing the standard account is far more problematical than has been suggested. Moreover, I defend the pancake account from recent objections raised by Roberts. Finally, since I value symmetries, I propose an alternative account, which aims at retaining the best of both approaches: the 𝑇 operator changes the order of the states, it leaves the state unaffected (like the pancake account), but also makes the theory time-reversal invariant (like the standard account).

The need to implement time reversal via complex conjugation in quantum theory has always been a bit of a puzzle. Why should i go to –i under temporal reflection when it has no spatiotemporal dimensions? I’ll provide a new insight into this question by showing how the little-appreciated “quantum-looking” classical Schrödinger equation of Schiller and Rosen faces the exact same problem. Since we know how to escape this problem classically, this observation teaches us one way to solve the problem quantum mechanically too. Big picture: if I’m right, the puzzle over quantum time reversal is connected to the interpretation of quantum theory.

Many scholars argue that Ockham is ontologically committed to non-present temporalia. Often, that claim is defended by an appeal to Ockham’s account of the truth conditions for tensed propositions, which these scholars argue entails that a true tensed proposition presupposes non-present temporalia. I argue, however, that the truth conditions that Ockham provides for tensed propositions entail no such thing. For, according to the account that Ockham provides, a tensed proposition is true just in case some equivalent present-tense proposition was (will be) true. A present-tense proposition is ontologically committing only when it is true, however, and, at those times at which it is true, the things it presupposes are presently existing things, not non-present temporalia. Consequently, the claim that Ockham is committed to non-present temporalia cannot be defended by appeal to his account of the truth conditions for tensed propositions.

Ockham’s so-called nominalism consists of two distinct, but closely related, projects: namely, (1) securing a reductionist ontology, and (2) developing a nominalist semantics. Ockham’s commentators have long supposed that Ockham’s ontological reductionism is achieved through the development and deployment of his nominalist semantics. In this chapter, I challenge this traditional, ‘semantics-first,’ understanding of Ockham’s nominalism. In particular, I argue that a careful reading of Ockham’s elaborate treatment of terms in SL I shows that his semantics presupposes rather than establishes his reductionist ontology. Thus, far from being a semantics-first project in ontology, Ockham’s treatment of key semantic principles and distinctions in SL I reads much more like an ontology-first project in semantics. Having thus dispatched the semantics-first reading of Ockham’s nominalism, I conclude by sketching an alternative account of the principles that guide Ockham’s metaphysical methodology.

This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.

Reinach understood the specific temporality as an important structural element of law. It requires its own phenomenological assessment, which distinguishes the being of law from that of physical and psychological, but also mathematical objects. For him, however, the foundations of the temporality of law do not lie in consciousness, as in the later phenomenological theory of law, but in the a priori nature of the forms of law themselves. This is reconstructed here for the first time from the scattered fragments of Reinach’s phenomenology of the temporality of law and contrasted with Gerhard Husserl’s theory of law and time, which can draw on his father Edmund’s phenomenology of inner time consciousness and Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Both make important contributions to a theory of the temporality of law.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

The conclusion explores Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), focusing on the way its characters and, we, as readers, make sense of embodied actions on board the San Dominick. Being able to read the emplotment of bodies becomes the key to solving the mystery on the ship, and to making sense of the story itself. By doing so, Melville complicates the mind-centered ontological paradigm’s structuring of our reading practices, our “mind-centered reading practices,” that reduce all bodies to just so many textual objects recording lived experience. By privileging the expressive agency of the material body, Melville also presents a competing reading practice, a “body-centered reading practice,” that understands the body as an active agent making meaning out of lived experience. The conclusion contrasts Amasa Delano’s faulty “mind-centered reading practice” with Babo’s rebellious “body-centered reading practice.” Melville thus “minds the body” to demonstrate the way the material expressions of the lived experiences of racial embodiment can short-circuit the objectification of Black bodies in the nineteenth-century chattel slave economy. And by doing so, Melville also models for us, as twenty-first-century readers, new ways to interpret critically the resistant meaning-making possibilities of embodied experience in all of its expressive dynamism.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the medically-trained writer, Robert Montgomery Bird, and his fraught experience of the way the competing ontological paradigms that inflected Edgar Huntly also conditioned early nineteenth-century medical discourse. Bird uses his picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), to interrogate what was called “regular” medical discourse and its mind-centered ontology, and to imagine instead the ontological possibilities that result from the body-centered ontology of metempsychosis. For Bird, metempsychosis involves our consciousness migrating from one body to another, and being defined by its different embodiment. In representing the lived experience of both white and Black embodiment, Bird uses metempsychosis to interrogate “regular” medicine’s mind-centered ontological paradigm, even as he puts pressure on “irregular” medicine as well. As I argue, Bird understands conscious existence as ontological drift, as I call it, a far less clear, but far more capacious ontology than either regular or irregular medical discourses entertain. By “minding the body” in this way, Bird uses his novel’s interrogation of the mind-body relationship to imagine a less repressive, but not unproblematic, form of racialized conscious existence in the antebellum period.