Hybrids were integral to the classificatory schemes that organized knowledge in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Texts produced by Hanno, Ktesias and Megasthenes reveal the slippage whereby ethnographic description created hierarchies of territories and cultures exemplified by hybrid animals and exotic humans. In literary texts India played an especially significant role. It was a mirror image of the Mediterranean, yet far enough away to also generate anomalous wonders on its borders. It was not merely the exotic animals of distant lands, such as camels, leopards, and giraffes, that astonished the Greek subjects of Hellenistic kings, but also the descriptions of anomalous humans, such as Blemmyes, Dog-Heads and Skiapods, that confirmed an orderly Mediterranean world of properly recognizable humanity, the edges of which were populated by the monstrous, the ugly and the deformed. Ethnography and paradoxography were therefore highly conservative genres that provided hierarchies structured on normality and anomaly to reinforce order.

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.

The nature of culture and cosmologies, the role of utopian thinking in modern societies, and the limits of social change and activism.

Chapter 3 analyses the normativity of sustainable development in international law and politics as expressed beyond the questions on its present (domestic) manifestations or the endless struggle to place the concept within general legal (normative) registers. It highlights how international law tends to subordinate non-Western experiences in its elevation of sustainable development into a global standard. What emerges from this process is that the more the world pursues sustainable development in its current form, the more we unwittingly contribute to the global dissemination of a particular strand of Eurocentrism. Sustainable development thus reveals itself as an amalgam of power and knowledge while simultaneously establishing itself as a vital component in international legal governance. What emerges in this chapter is that, although the concept of sustainable development is always at the forefront of international public discourse, little is done, in fact, to achieve its presumed objectives. Thus, while sustainable development’s quick ascent to become a universalist concept is central to this book, the concept’s character must be understood as quietly operating to mute global ecological violence that disproportionately affects marginalised peoples in the Global South.

Gary Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional identity speaks to normative questions about the exercise of constituent power in constitution making. To gain purchase on these questions, this article applies Rousseau’s description of three "moments" of citizenship to the creation and maintenance of constitutional orders. Jacobsohn’s understanding of constitutional identity as something that emerges over time as opposed to an episodic expression enriches the Rousseauian model’s response to the paradoxes of democracy. Ultimately, Jacobsohn’s model implies that true constituent power is exercised only in the form of a dialogue within a shared understanding of democratic legitimacy, raising the possibility that moments of violent disruptive constitutional change cannot be accommodated to the requirements of democratic legitimacy at all – a return to Rousseau’s paradox of founding.

In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jacobsohn highlights the tension both within constitutional systems and between constitutions and societal norms (culture). In this essay, we explore the first tension and glance at the second. One objective of the essay is to enumerate a set of “disharmonies” that appear with some frequency within constitutions and, employing historical data, identify the constitutional systems that contain them. Appealing to formal logic, we develop a taxonomy that helps us understand the kinds of disharmonies on display; a taxonomy that points to their sources. The essay thus generalizes Jacobsohn’s notion of disharmony and extends his insights from a small set of cases that begin with the letter “I” to a larger set.

There are two Sun Tzu verses which, by Sun Tzu’s own affirmations, may be seen as summations of the active ingredient of his way of war. One is Theme #6’s centerpiece verse III.4 (Passage #6.1).

Bertrand Russell famously remarked that “a logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible.” John Buridan, like many medieval logicians, adopted the same methodology: he developed and refined his theories of truth and other semantic notions against an array of paradoxes. Indeed, in an appendix to his Summulae de dialectica Buridan gave a succinct but comprehensive introduction to his logical philosophy in the form of responses to a collection of sophisms (his Sophismata). Among these sophisms are the logical paradoxes, the so-called “insoluble,” such as the Liar Paradox (is one who says he is lying, lying or telling the truth?). But before he comes to these especially difficult examples, Buridan tackles puzzles which lead him to reject standard accounts of meaning, truth, logical consequence, tense, hyperintensionality, and other semantic notions. In the final chapter of the Sophismata, he deals with various problems involving self-referential propositions, not all of them insolubles. When he turns at last to the insolubles, he elaborates a revision he had already suggested in his Questions on the Sophistical Refutations to the general solution he had developed for them over a long career in the arts faculty at the University of Paris dealing with philosophical puzzles.

Chapter 3 focuses on lexical semantics–pragmatics. Drawing on the views adopted in Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory, it provides an in-depth analysis aimed at exploring the nature of conceptual content and its use in context. It is argued that lexical concepts are best characterized by means of rich networks of encyclopedic knowledge, an approach that enables Relevance Theory to resolve a number of conflicting assumptions (including the presumed paradox discussed in Leclercq, 2022). At the same time, the case is made that this knowledge constitutes an intrinsically context-sensitive semantic potential that serves as the foundation of an inferential process guided by strong pragmatic principles. This process is addressed in terms of lexically regulated saturation, which forms the cornerstone of the integrated model outlined in this book.

Kisses have an uneasy relationship with time. They are ever desired, withheld, stolen, and multiplied because they create more longing than they satiate. The kiss is both sensual and spiritual, direct and oblique, unifying and dividing – it is the embodiment of the erotic paradox. From its origins in the Song of Songs and Catullus, to the Basia of Secundus and the baci mordaci of Marino, the tradition of kiss-poetry conveys the pleasurable frustration of talking about love instead of making it: the necessity of speech acts in bringing about the physical act of kissing, and the impossibility of simultaneity between the two. Monteverdi’s engagement with the poetic conceit of kisses – mouths uttering delights by actions, words, and song – dates to his introduction to the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) during his final years in Cremona. This chapter traces the history of kiss poetry to focus on Monteverdi's earliest interactions with kiss poetry, the madrigals from his Second Book of 1590.

For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.