The consolidation of the TIS 2.0 enlivened resistance among diverse groups who came together in the seventh major pluralizing coalition since the late Ottoman period. Coalescing around multiple – but not always compatible – visions of living in diversity, the coalition brought together pro-secular Turks on the right and left including municipal actors, youth, women and LGBTQ+ activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and environmentalists, among others. Innovating frames for political, religious, ethnic, and gender pluralism, the coalition registered a major success, retaking city governments in the 2019 elections, an outcome it repeated in 2024.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

There is an enduring tradition that the first Europeans in the Americas and Hawai’i were perceived as gods, a phenomenon known as “apotheosis” or “the act of turning men into gods.” The tradition is especially strong in relation to two historical figures: the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the British navigator Captain James Cook in Hawai’i. It is, however, by no means confined to these two figures. Furthermore, considerable explanatory power is attributed to this divine identification: indigenous peoples apparently submitted before the demonstration of godly power. In the heyday of European imperialism – the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – this tradition was accepted uncritically by western historians. In the wake of decolonization, from the 1950s and 1960s, increasing interest in non-European perspectives on these early encounters caused historians to call this interpretation into question. Three key issues emerge: what evidence is there that such an apotheosis took place? If it did not, how did the tradition arise? And how did native peoples in fact perceive Europeans?

This chapter introduces the ten complaint episodes in the books of Exodus and Numbers as the primary focus of the book and sets the context and method for reading them. The history of modern biblical scholarship is a history of the pursuit of sources. This book focuses instead on genre as a set of historically grounded aesthetic norms. It proposes that we can best understand the literary history of the wilderness narrative by tracking how these norms change over time as Israel’s political and social circumstances change and its scribes navigate those changes by revising existing texts in order to create new possibilities for meaning. Pursuing the kind of genre history Hermann Gunkel advocated without tying it to existing approaches can yield new readings of these episodes and new insights into the literary history of the Pentateuch (Torah), whether documentary or supplementary. Historical criticism is presented as an exegetical, not an antiquarian, endeavor, one that requires the kind of literarily sensitive close reading typical of so-called synchronic studies of the final form. The genres used will help us situate this literature historically, as will the creative ways in which scribes used them.

This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted exploration of the ironies of a value-free society and of literature’s responses to dehumanization, from the 1950’s “Age of Anxiety” to the postmodern vanishing of the author and its much-awaited re-materialization. From the ambivalence of liberal humanism in Eating People Is Wrong to the bitter satire of sociology as a threat to free will and accountability in The History Man, from the caricature of intellectual arrogance in Doctor Criminale and Mensonge to the problematization of anti-foundational epistemologies that legitimize interpretation in To the Hermitage, Bradbury’s novels of ideas dissect the institutional conditions of knowledge in democratic societies. They offer us not only a humorous outlook on postwar England but also a critical lens to examine the role of the humanities and the mission of academic institutions on a broader scale, issues that continue to be timely.

The introduction offers a historical overview of terrorism through the ages and describes the development of international counterterrorism law. It discusses the interplay between terrorism and international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. It also introduces some of the controversy surrounding terrorism as a term.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is integrated into the fabric of his system. We absorb into our thinking the concepts and relationships that have survived the successes and failures of experience (Phenomenology). Through disciplined thought we articulate the internal logic of those concepts (Logic). By working out what the world beyond thought would be like, seeing how the world instantiates those expectations, and then building those discoveries into our next ventures, we develop a systematic picture of the stages of natural complexity and human functioning (Philosophies of Nature and Spirit). Since Hegel’s time, however, we have discovered that nature has a history; time and space are no longer absolutes; the discoveries of science have expanded in both breadth and detail; and our comprehensive explanations for the way the world functions are continually being falsified by the discovery of new facts. A philosophy of nature, then, needs to reshape the way reason functions. Adopting the strategies we use to solve problems and that science uses to develop and test hypotheses, we broaden our perspective to cover multiple domains in nature and search for patterns that show how and why they fit together as they do.

The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter returns to the question: What can we learn from history? Drawing not only on C. Vann Woodward but also on insights of Reinhold Niebuhr, Garry Wills, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, suggests that the irony of history alerts us to the folly of ignoring inconvenient history. History, at its best, should give us a keen awareness of the irony embedded in the human experience, and, as it does, it should temper our pride even when showing mercy and our zeal even when seeking justice.

The resurrection of Jesus, pivotal to Christian history and praxis, is universally attested in early Christian sources, even if often critiqued or sidelined as myth or apologetics in modern scholarship. Paul’s letters and of the Gospels in their narrative diversity document the resurrection’s transformative and abiding impact on Jesus’s followers. In bringing the aspirations of myth and metaphor to fruition in time, the resurrection of Jesus is both an event in history and yet constitutes a new reality that transcends the register of available language and analogy.

This chapter examines two so-called transitional theologians who straddled the worlds of orthodox belief and learning and forward-looking scholarship and literary engagement. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755) and Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775) pointed the way to a new view of the Reformation, even if the results of their interventions went much farther then they intended. Mosheim’s History of Michael Servetus sought a type of transhistorical reconciliation between the eponymous Spanish heretic and John Calvin, who had him burned at the stake in Geneva. Mosheim tried to acknowledge the occasional brutality of Reformation-era Protestants while contextualizing the historical attitudes of an earlier era. Walch’s twenty-four-volume Luther edition was notable not only for rendering Luther’s language into a readable vernacular, but also for a long historical essay on Luther’s “accomplishments.” Walch sought to both acknowledge the genuine contributions of the first Reformer while also stripping away some of the mythical status that had accrued to Luther through generations of pious veneration.

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.

Let us add another item to the long list of lessons still to be learned from Being and Time: We need an ontology of philosophical failure. What is failure in philosophy? I am not asking about failing at philosophy either by failing to do it or by doing it badly. I mean the more deeply puzzling phenomenon of doing philosophy as well as it has ever been done and yet failing in that philosophy, nonetheless. What does it mean to say, rightly, that Being and Time fails, or that it is (in Kisiel’s words) “a failed project”? In what way can and should the most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century be considered a failure, judged by the most sympathetic standards of an “internal” or immanent reading (that is, by its own lights or on its own terms) rather than by some measure “external” to the text itself? What did Being and Time set out to accomplish, and why did it fail to achieve that goal? Is this a failure Heidegger could have avoided or rectified if he had had time to complete the book in the way he originally planned? Or is this a necessary failure, one that follows from some inexhaustibility inherent in the subject matter of Being and Time itself, and so from the impossibly ambitious nature of its attempt to answer “the question of being”? In what way must philosophy fail itself (to employ a polysemic locution), necessarily falling short of its own deepest, perennial ambitions? What is the lesson of such necessary philosophical failure?

In his chapter on “Art” in Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Collingwood attempts to explain the revival of Celtic art that occurred in Britain after a period of Roman art of almost four hundred years. In his Autobiography he declared this was “a chapter which I would gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle.” This chapter has received little attention from archaeologists and historians (and even less from philosophers), exception from Martin Henig in his book The Art of Roman Britain. I defend Collingwood from Henig’s criticisms and try to make his explanation more understandable by placing it in his own historical context. Here I follow Collingwood’s advice that we may better understand an explanation when we understand the context from which it originates. This is not to say Collingwood’s explanation is without shortcomings. I demonstrate how these are brought to light when his explanation for the revival of Celtic art is compared to more recent treatments of this phenomenon.

Governor of the Marwanid period in Iraq for fourteen years, Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī was dismissed from his office in 120/738. The narratives of his downfall – the reasons for his dismissal as well as his killing — are found in the Abbasid historiography about him. Next to these narratives, a letter that the caliph Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik addressed to him in 119/736–37 can be found in two different sources. This contribution offers a study of this letter and its transmission. It investigates the relationship between the letter and the most developed narratives about Khālid. Unpacking these relationships allows us to look beyond them and provide insights into Khālid’s removal. Finally, this paper looks at this correspondence as an expression of the writing of power and explores how it helps us better understand the ties that bind a caliph and his subordinate.

In “The Book of Isaiah in the Neo-Assyrian Period,” Michael Chan offers an overview of the centuries of Assyrian dominance in the Levant. He takes five exegetical case studies that demonstrate the historical and literary impact of that Mesopotamian power on Isaiah and his successors in the eighth and seventh centuries bce. In particular, he observes how Assyrian imperial propaganda was subverted by the prophets in various ways.