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?

This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

Superficially, the period of Conservative rule since 2010 has been one of electoral stability. The Conservatives emerged as the largest party in four general elections in a row. As a result, the party has retained the reins of power for fourteen years. This represents the second longest period of government tenure for any one party in post-war British politics. Yet, in truth, it has been a period of unprecedented electoral instability and political change. Two of the four elections produced a hung parliament, an outcome that had only occurred once before in the post-war period, while a third only produced a small overall majority. After the first of these hung parliaments, in 2010, Britain was governed by a coalition for the first time since 1945, while in the second such parliament, between 2017 and 2019, a minority government entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists. The right of prime ministers to call an election at a time of their own choosing was taken away, only to result in parliamentary tussles that, in the event, failed to stop two prime ministers from eventually holding an election well before the parliamentary term was due to come to an end.

This chapter explores the consequences of the extensive influence campaign mounted by Russia and its proxies during the Russian–Ukrainian war. It focuses on the extent to which the media discourse that emanated from the Donbas ‘Republics’ and Russia about the Euromaidan revolution, the Donbas War, the ‘Kyiv regime’, and the 2022 invasion resulted in shifts in terms of how people in Donbas and Ukraine felt about themselves. Years of sustained effort to portray Ukraine as a pro-fascist country with a US-installed puppet government were at least somewhat successful at fostering stronger anti-Ukrainian sentiments within Russia, and to an extent among Ukrainians in the Donbas ‘Republics’. This success has expressed itself as continued and sustained support among Russians for the invasion of Ukraine. However, in Ukraine itself (and especially among Russian-speaking Ukrainians), this propaganda campaign backfired, and instead contributed to a consolidation of Ukrainian identity, which became stronger than ever before.

Whether students will take action in the face of uncertainty is based, in part, on their own agentic self-beliefs and the social supports they receive. This chapter provides an oveview and discussion of the kinds of beliefs and supports involved in deciding to (or not to) take action under uncertainty.

The conclusion that China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a failure from a US perspective stems from: 1) loading too many issues and expectations—including an entire panoply of national security and geostrategic concerns—on to the WTO and its trade-rules-based, binding dispute settlement system to address; 2) failure by the United States and the rest of the world to use the tools available as a result of China’s accession to the WTO to both protect their domestic markets and hold China to account for its WTO commitments; and 3) China’s U-turn away from market-economy reforms to a much more state-centric, Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-run the economy. Addressing the United States’ concerns with China will require working to strengthen the WTO and then using it to take on a more limited set of trade concerns while using other tools to address broader concerns over China, both bilaterally and in conjunction with allies and partners.

How does a person curious about or wanting to do science learn it? The thesis of this book is learning science requires not only digging deeply into the subject but learning how to learn. It is not enough to learn facts about the history of science or to study chemistry, biology, or physics per se. One must also have a sense of the roles of psychological and social factors in science. We can read about the development of Newtonian mechanics or quantum physics, but that does not tell us why Newton, or Planck, Bohr, Born, or Heisenberg studied these subjects in the first place or what thought processes they used in their work. It does not tell us how their personalities and intuition drove their work. It also does not tell us why the work of these scientists was or was not accepted by the scientific community, rightly or wrongly. Most importantly, it does not tell us why we think we know what we do or even if what we study is real. Epistemology and metaphysics are required here. This chapter explains why such knowledge is obligatory if one is to do science well.

If the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia helped to shatter an already ailing anti-imperialist internationalism, a concomitant refugee crisis offered the rival vision of human rights internationalism a remarkable opportunity to fill the void. What remained of the anti-imperialist left contributed little to resolving the issue, yet the human rights internationalists stepped into the breach. Former French radicals turned humanitarians worked with Vietnamese refugees, Eastern European dissidents, and human rights groups such as Doctors Without Borders to organize a campaign against human rights violations in Vietnam. They chartered a hospital ship to rescue the refugees, which amounted to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation-state, showcasing a new kind of humanitarian interventionism. At the same time, they internationalized the campaign, even winning the support of the US government, which was only too happy to use the crisis to rewrite the history of the war, rebrand itself as a virtuous nation, and shine a harsh spotlight on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite efforts to deflect charges of rights violations, the SRV could do little to explain itself in the face of undeniable evidence of repression. If anti-imperialism helped secure their international victory in the 1960s, human rights sealed their defeat a decade later. The remaining radicals in the North Atlantic fought back but had little to offer as an alternative. With the core notions of the Leninist problematic in question, the radical left’s vision of internationalism lost its appeal, particularly among a new generation of activists looking for a way to do good in the world. And with anti-imperialism’s influence over the wider progressive milieu slipping, human rights internationalism made a giant leap in consolidating its hegemony, so much so that even some committed anti-imperialists ended up accepting its terms as the least bad option.

It is humbling to be human. Humilitatem and humanitas have always been connected. So, Shakespeare’s characters know when they are "not gentle, not humble" [Love’s, 5,2,617]. But living in an age of service, their creator was also conscious of the fine line between humility and humiliation. Persistently, his plays therefore stage the "Cinderella" scenario of a "proud humility" [All’s Well, 1,1,172], as if he had internalized the self-abjection by which power abases itself in "the gown of humility" [Coriolanus, 2,3,36]. Almost all of Shakespeare’s references to humility describe it as an act. Hence, "I have sounded the very base-string of humility" [1Henry IV, 2,5,5], reports his most winning king. In staging his own "abject position," as a professional "waiter" on the mighty, "our humble author" [2Henry IV, Epi, 23] thereby seems to anticipate modern skepticism towards the false modesty of the "humbled visaged" [Love’s, 2,,34], the "meekness and humility" that is "cramm’d" with "arrogancy, spleen and pride" [Henry VIII, 2,4107-108]. This chapter on humility argues that Shakespeare’s dramatization of the supposed virtue has never been more relevant than in our own populist times, when the clown prince dives into our hearts, "with humble and familiar" smiles [Richard II, 1,4,25-27].

Transforming our food systems will require changing our innovation systems, in which organisations on agricultural research and innovation can play a crucial role. Key success factors for change can be organised into three dimensions: designing and managing transformative innovations, culture and structures of innovation organisations, and their engagement with the wider innovation ecosystem. Failures are crucial elements of innovation processes. Rapidly testing, sharing, building on, and learning from successful, and failed, innovations are key. This connects to the paradigm ‘Open Innovation 2.0’, which is widely applied in the private sector but not yet applied and evaluated for research and innovation organisations in the public sector or tertiary education. Four key principles emerge, namely big-picture action-oriented thinking, entrepreneurial organisational culture, close attention to partnerships and contexts, and diverse investment portfolios, with different levels of risk. These also imply—and require—the upstream transformation of funding and incentive systems.

While Wittgenstein has become recognized as the most overt philosophical influence in Wallace’s writing, he was by no means the only one. Wallace was heavily indebted to numerous philosophical schools, and was particularly influenced by the linguistic turn, and the post-philosophical ideas of Rorty and Cavell. Wallace attended classes with Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, and his influence on Wallace has been traced in recent scholarship by Adam Kelly and others. This chapter offers guidance on reading Wallace through the lens of what Cavell referred to as “moral perfectionism” – the drive toward constant moral improvement, an endless iterative repetition of self-discovery, “a process of moving to, and from, nexts” – which Wallace explored and embodied in different ways throughout the work. The recurrent theme of heroic attention as a virtuous struggle arguably owes a debt to Cavell’s concept of acknowledging the other as a moral good, and the anti-teleological drive of Wallace’s oeuvre fits neatly with Cavell’s imaginary of unending toil toward the good. Using the Pop Quiz structure of “Octet” as a point of departure and focusing more broadly on the dialogic imperative of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as a whole, this chapter argues that Wallace’s work, with its sense of repeating shapes, themes and patterns, and especially the persistent figurations of failure and regrouping, is best read as a series of iterations of perfectionism, a career-long fantasy of searching for the good in the knowledge that it will not be attained.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

A very different picture of the redistribution of metal density and stress, caused by electric stressing, can be expected in multibranch interconnect structures formed by connected metal lines within the same metal layer. The absence of diffusion barriers in line junctions allows atoms to freely migrate between lines along the trajectories of the current carriers. When a multibranch structure includes metal lines that are connected in parallel, the creation of a void in one of the parallel branches does not necessarily result in a failure, which contrasts with what happens in a single line segment, because current can continue to flow in the unvoided parallel lines. The on-chip power/ground (p/g) grid is an example of such electrically redundant multibranch structures. In this chapter, we review a recently developed assessment methodology of the p/g grid MTTF and describe a novel experimental technique that could validate the proposed methodology. EM assessment performed on the grids with tens of millions of nodes has shown that the formation of the first void alone didn’t cause a grid failure. A failure criterion of 10% voltage drop increase was met due to cumulative effect of nucleation of several voids and their growth in the failed branches.