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.

I begin by considering the connection between Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics and A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Knox and Donagan believe that “between 1936 and 1938 Collingwood radically changed his mind about the relation of philosophy to history.” Donagan contends that this break stemmed from Collingwood’s having “come to endorse Ayer’s view that the propositions of traditional metaphysics are unverifiable.” Recently, Vanheeswijck and Beaney have claimed that Collingwood in effect endorsed Ayer’s verificationism. There is a considerable gulf between their claims and my own view of what Collingwood thought about logical positivism. In my view, Collingwood denied logical positivism flat-out. My chapter lays out and assesses the main points Vanheeswijck and Beaney use to support their view. I develop a viable alternative, one that takes account of Collingwood’s treatment of absolute presuppositions (in particular, on the vexed question of whether they can be determined to be true or false) and at the same time avoids the conclusion that Collingwood had, mistakenly, bought into logical positivism in his discussion of absolute presuppositions.

A bitch, as most people already know, is a female dog. As a trendy word we hear (and say) all the time, it might be tempting to guess that it isn’t very old. But if we look up its etymology, that is, the origins of the word, we discover that bitch meaning “a female dog” has a far longer pedigree that goes back over one thousand years. Over the course of a millennium, bitch became stigmatized by its association with social taboos such as prostitution, promiscuity, “bad” women, and “unmanly” men. This led to its offensive senses pushing out the inoffensive one. Bitch – which was once just the literal word for a female dog – eventually became what it is today, arguably one of the most insulting words in the English language. But on the other hand, bitch has developed positive uses in slang and has even been reclaimed in some ways.

The search for purpose and meaning is common to the work of many twentieth-century psychologists. It seems to operate as an overarching motivation or metamotivation for a career rather than as a specific motivation for a transition. Purpose tends to emerge and be discovered, whereas meaning is a constructed system of beliefs that is built over time around the search for purpose. Choices that lead to the discovery and construction of one’s “true nature” or “authentic self” or “essential identity” can give purpose and meaning to one’s life. The search for purpose and meaning in work is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

Using both the Petcoff and Palaganas studies as a point of departure, this chapter looks at the more general educational implications of bringing emoji into pedagogical practices. The underlying premise is that emoji not only are highly understandable images, aiding learning but also can create a positive environment, making teaching and interaction congenial and open to all learners, no matter their backgrounds or learning capacities, since emoji give them an equal voice. Emoji allow for a destigmatized approach, especially for disadvantaged learners who might not be able to adequately speak for themselves. Emoji are a psychological conduit that can easily open up lines of interaction to virtually everyone. Once this is achieved, any subject matter, from English to mathematics, can be imparted broadly through any type of learning style.

In this chapter there is a focus on the expectations or Requirements that sustain an addictive lifestyle. It highlights that in addition to fueling resentments, Requirements also affect how one relates to potential high-risk situations, triggers, and stressful events in general. Chapter 1 of this workbook highlighted that oftentimes it is not the situation or event itself that creates emotional distress, but the Requirements individuals have (often automatically and out of awareness) for the situation or event that activate their I-Systems. Thus, a Recovery Resilience Practice does not focus on changing any given situation (crucial insofar as many distressful situations or triggers may be unavoidable) but focuses instead on changing the “who” one brings to that situation – the Natural Functioning self or I-System Functioning self.

In the last chapter the authors provide an overview of all aspects of a Recovery Resilience Practice that will contribute towards a sustainable recovery-oriented lifestyle. In this chapter the reader will consolidate their Recovery Resilience Practice and see how to use it to support any recovery program or pathway. As highlighted throughout the workbook, the central aim of a Recovery Resilience Practice is to remove the hindrance that obstructs one’s capacity to access Recovery Capital and apply recovery skills as well as provide a practice that can help one deal moment by moment with stress, high-risk situation, triggers, or any troubling situations. In short, a Recovery Resilience Practice removes the hindrance to one’s innate resilience and capacity for flourishing and assists in achieving recovery and life goals. The last chapter provides an overview of how the workbook assists individuals in recovery to have greater self-awareness of their unhealthy and healthy coping styles and prompts them to evolve to a place of greater self-awareness so that they can make more informed decisions about their lives and efficaciously deal with life’s challenges.

The rules of treaty interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties have a special status in international law, dominating the vocabularies and minds of international lawyers. They are ubiquitous – they are always visible, regardless of where one stands in the international legal arena, and they also provide for a sense of community amongst scholars and practitioners, who are constantly reassured by their presence. This chapter argues that it is illusory to believe that the function of the rules of treaty interpretation is to directly bridge the gap between the signifier (treaty provision to be interpreted) and the signified (the meaning of the treaty provision). In fact, ‘rules’ are not determinative of meaning. They only aim to impose a ‘common discipline’ with respect to the admissible ‘sources of interpretive data’ that can be used in treaty interpretation. Furthermore, as there is no unmediated access to any signifier, the rules of interpretation are themselves subject to interpretation. The chapter concludes by shifting the attention from the rules of treaty interpretation to the notion of interpretive authority as a useful complement to understanding the process of treaty interpretation.

Kripke finds in Wittgenstein an argument for the view that there is no such thing as meaning. A key premise in that argument is that there are semantic norms – norms governing the uses of expressions that hold in virtue of what those expressions mean. Standardly, those norms are understood to be norms of truth – roughly, they permit truly applying expressions and prohibit falsely applying them. An increasing number of philosophers reject the standard interpretation. In this chapter, I explore alternative construals due to Alan Millar and Indrek Reiland and argue that they are either unmotivated or not competitors with the standard account. In doing so, I defend a kind of pluralism about semantic normativity. If there are norms of truth that hold in virtue of what expressions mean, there will be further norms that make reference to the doxastic, epistemic, and motivational states of language-users, norms that are explanatory posterior to the norms of truth.

Kripke finds in Wittgenstein an argument for the conclusion that there are no meaning facts and considers the consequences of this outcome for the meaning of meaning-ascribing sentences. One immediate consequence is that their meaning cannot be given by their truth conditions. Kripke proposes instead that meaning ascriptions obtain their meaning from (i) their assertibility conditions and (ii) the non-representational function that the practice of asserting these sentences in these conditions plays in our lives, accepting that these sentences can’t play the role of representing the world. I present a strategy for avoiding this outcome. Meaning ascriptions obtain their meanings from their assertibility conditions, but they successfully perform the function of representing the world. The states of affairs they represent can be singled out with definitions by abstraction, using the synonymy conditions generated by their assertibility conditions. When meaning facts are construed in this way, the argument that Kripke finds in Wittgenstein does not establish that they don’t exist.

Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on the purported “normativity” of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the “finiteness” of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as “normative.”

Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language argues that there are no facts about what anyone means by their words, so meaning is a fiction. But some fictions are useful, and Chapter 3 explains why this one is. One side-effect of that explanation is supposed to be the “Private and solitary language argument,” which says that we cannot, or at least cannot usefully, ascribe meaning to an individual “considered in isolation”; it thereby reveals something essentially communitarian about meaning.

This chapter briefly defends that fictionalist reading of Kripke’s great work before arguing at more length that no communitarian conclusion follows. Even if semantic ascriptions are all false, they may still be useful, even when made by, or applied to, or addressed by, an individual “considered in isolation”– whatever exactly this turns out to mean.

I read Kripke’s sketches of our ordinary view of meaning in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as attempts to highlight the features of meaning that enable us to draw the distinction between what seems right and what is right. I argue that Kripke thinks the best way to clarify these features of meaning is to describe metasemantic conditions that a speaker’s words must satisfy if the speaker is to be warranted in asserting a sentence in which the words occur. Although the view of meaning I attribute to Kripke is initially compelling, I argue that it rests on a subtle yet fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between what seems right and what is right.

Kripke’s writings can be understood as suggesting that Wittgenstein, though a non-reductionist, was not a quietist about meaning, that is, did not maintain that nothing philosophically constructive could be said about it. It is Kripke and the quietist who can in fact be seen to have much in common. For, though they both conceive of the skeptical challenge as a meta-semantical challenge, calling for a foundational account of meaning, they both end up with purely semantic, descriptive remarks about meaning. Failing to share his diagnosis of the paradox with Wittgenstein, Kripke does not recognize that, once the skeptical problem is dissolved, as Wittgenstein recommends, a new meta-semantical challenge arises, which is connected to the essential link Wittgenstein emphasizes between meaning and use. Consequently, Kripke does not see that the positive remarks Wittgenstein makes after dismissing the skeptical paradox, especially those concerning agreement, are meant to do some constructive, not just descriptive, work, in response to the problem newly arisen.

Some neo-Aristotelians see a strong link between virtues and eudaimonia or flourishing, but others do not. After acknowledging this difference, the chapter explores some of the possible implications of this link. The view explored in this chapter is that virtues contribute to success in goal and good pursuit, which, in turn, contributes to a flourishing life. The neo-Aristotelian view examined holds that there are things that are good for humans qua humans (e.g., close personal relationships, group belonging). Success in pursuing these goods is hypothesized to be correlated with eudaimonia. It explores several challenges in studying eudaimonia, but concludes that eudaimonia research should continue and be updated as conceptualization and measurement improves. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three well-documented human goods (close personal relationships, group belonging, and meaning) and their hypothesized relationships with specific virtues (e.g., loyalty, forgiveness, honesty).