In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.

Why does Plato in the Republic attach such importance to mathematics? Not for its practical utility, nor for the transferable skills acquired by the mathematician, nor because of the rigour of the formal procedures of mathematical proof. It is rather that the five mathematical sciences described and explained in Book VII convert the soul from merely human perspective, and tell us how things are objectively speaking. Their content is what counts. They convey knowledge or understanding of the context-invariant truth of unqualified reality. In contrast with modern conceptions of mathematics and its relation to reality, these sciences are conceived as themselves sciences of value. Above all, they enlarge ethical understanding. Crucial here is harmonics, which incorporates principles first studied through the first four sciences that Plato specifies. Mathematical proportion is what underpins the musical structures – the concords – that form the subject matter of harmonics. Such mathematical structures, when internalised by the philosopher, function as abstract schemata for applying their knowledge of the Good in the social world. Plato values them so highly because they create and sustain unity: unity is for him the highest value.

The Platonic cosmogony and zoogony of the Timaeus is distinctive in that the actions of the Demiurge and the lesser gods are modelled on a wide variety of skills, some obeying mathematical principles, some being modelled on more empirical crafts. Focused on Tim. 30c-34a, this chapter examines the reasons provided by Timaeus to account for some key properties attributed to the body of the World Animal (uniqueness, completeness, composition out of four elements, sphericity) and considers in detail Timaeus’ arguments to account for the actual composition of the World Body out of four elements unified by the mathematical bond of analogia. It is suggested that these arguments belong to a broader Platonic reflection on how to bind multiple parts into unified and coherent wholes. This broader Platonic reflection is here labelled ‘desmology’, a word coined on the Greek noun desmos (bond) frequently used in the Timaeus to refer to cosmogonical and zoogonical processes. This chapter also argues that making sense of how Plato uses desmos and other cognate terms in the Timaeus is key to understanding to what extent the cosmo-zoogony of the Timaeus as a whole actually fulfills Socrates’ strong teleological requirement for natural science expressed in the Phaedo (99b-c), as he criticizes earlier Presocratic accounts.

This chapter turns to the question of how the judgment of taste is related to cognition and to the larger conception of judgment discussed in Chapter 2. It offers a new reading and contextualization of the argument of §21, in the Fourth Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, which establishes a “common sense” as a necessary condition of the universal communicability of cognition. On my reading, Kant does not provide, or seek to provide, a deduction of the judgment of taste avant la lettre. His point, instead, is to show that cognition involves its own form of reflective judgment. Cognitive judgment considered from the perspective of the third Critique – actual, situated judgment – depends on a norm beyond that of correctness: of aptness or appropriateness; of what calls for judgment. My reading is an alternative not only to the widespread “aesthetic” construal of Kant’s argument, on which it is meant to establish an aesthetic common sense, but also to the “epistemic” construal proposed by Henry Allison, on which it is meant to establish an epistemic common sense.

In “Shaping the Life: Hemingway Biographies Since 2000,” Kirk Curnutt argues that between roughly 1999 and 2016 Hemingway biography eschewed full, cradle-to-grave accounts of the subject’s life in favor of narrower, more up-close-and-personal examinations of specific periods and specific relationships. Within these depictions are questions of subjectivity and slanted presentation, such as Stephen Koch’s rampant use of free indirect discourse, a technique associated with fiction, in his account of Hemingway’s fractured friendship with John Dos Passos over the 1937 execution of Jose Robles. Curnutt weighs Koch’s prejudicial presentation against more balanced efforts by Amanda Vaill, Steve Paul, Paul Hendrickson, James McGrath Morris, and others, including such family members as his son John Hemingway and former personal secretary Valerie Hemingway. Assessed in detail are three complete biographies by James M. Hutchisson, Verna Kale, and Mary V. Dearborn. Here Curnutt explores how each biography markets itself as a “new” life of Hemingway when sensational discoveries in the archives that marked the 1980s have long been exhausted.