This essay introduces and explores David Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ as something that prevents reason, theology, and social life from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason, after Tracy, depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things while also acknowledging their analogies or ‘similarities-in-difference’. The essay argues that the continuing integrity and scope of Tracyean analogical imagination depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imaginations’ reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination itself. Aided by classic expressions of culture, furthermore, analogical imaginative possibility shades into contingent vision when organised by ‘focal meanings’ to fashion some global sense of the world. This is then brought into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, to help consideration of how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.

The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

Before the Glorious Revolution attitudes towards religion’s position in the state had already helped to define the groupings coming to be known as Tories and Whigs that emerged from pro- and anti-court positions during the 1679–1681 exclusion crisis. Both groups had, however, felt threatened by James VII and II’s circumvention of Parliament and the apparent threat to the Anglican monopoly on power represented by his attempts at religious toleration. The overthrow of the monarch in 1688 made plain the power these elites now wielded through the instrument of Parliament.

The success of a democratic society depends, Rawls thought, on members having a shared sense of justice, a common basis for reasoning about what is right. Otherwise, disagreements born from conflicts of interest and identity – and associated “distrust and resentment” – will have corrosive effects on social cooperation. But can we reasonably hope for a broadly shared sense of justice? Religious and philosophical pluralism arguably leave hope for an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice sufficient to cabin those corrosive effects. But what about the pluralism of conceptions of justice themselves? I argue that, even on favorable assumptions about people and social cooperation, we should expect serious disagreement about conceptions of justice and the forms of democracy they recommend, as well as conflicts between and among the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions. Even on these favorable assumptions, then, we have reason to worry – as I think Rawls always did – about the fragility of democracy.

This chapter builds on recent scholarship uncovering the ways in which, just as there are modernisms, there are also regionalisms, and the two terms are not flipsides of the modernity coin but the same “side” of its Möbius strip, oscillating between op-position and co-position. More specifically, it focuses on the ways modernist debates over new versions of “culture” reshaped regionalism. New versions of “cultural pluralism,” arising out of interdisciplinary conversations among artists, anthropologists, geographers, and critics, were deployed in opposition to the homogenized, industrial nation-state. In these arguments, deployed by figures such as Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Edward Sapir, the unit of culture is both local and transnational, arising from the past but crucially oriented toward the future. These intertwined arguments of cultures, regions, and literary form are shared across key “communities of cultural interest” in the period, in particular the Southwest of Mary Austin and Native writers such as John Joseph Matthews and D’Arcy McNickle, and the South(s) of John Crowe Ransom and Zora Neale Hurston.

Chapter 3 examines a group of nationalist historians based in northern India in the early 1920s. It shows how these historians used the trope of an ‘ancient constitution’ in order to find federalist forms of popular democracy.

Interpreters have long recognized that there is a problem about determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is. Some of his remarks appear to favor a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. Interpreters typically view these as incompatible theses and try to show that one or the other apparent thesis is merely apparent. The problem of determining which of two incompatible theses Aristotle believes is the Dilemmatic Problem of Happiness. But the arguments that rival interpretations amass exert pressure to think that Aristotle really is committed to both of the allegedly incompatible claims. The problem of showing how he can coherently endorse both is the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Any dialectically satisfactory interpretation of Aristotles theory of happiness must solve it. None has done so. It cannot be solved while laboring under the weight of three common assumptions. Chapters 2–4 argue for the falsity of those assumptions and provide materials for constructing a solution to the Conjunctive Problem.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.

This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

This chapter surveys the (relatively limited) place of philosophical ethics in the development of phenomenology, and the problematical legacy of Heidegger’s thought, specifically, for phenomenological engagement with ethics. It discusses divergent interpretations of Heidegger in both philosophy and anthropology, and different anthropological versions of a phenomenology of ethics. It also considers the distinctive approach to ethics, building instead of Heidegger on Husserl’s unpublished lectures on ethics, in the study of values.

We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent in the process of drawing social boundaries. This essay suggests thinking about the nature of those boundaries in three ways, to show how each can reframe our relationships. First, ‘notation’ is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. This is the usual way we think about boundaries, but it also contains important limitations. Second, ‘ritual’ includes those acts that are formalized by social convention and repeated regularly. Ritual crosses boundaries of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Third, we can bracket away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment, which we will call ‘shared experience’. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action, eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models are not mutually exclusive. Using ethnographic examples primarily from China, we argue that all three are necessary, but they intermix in different ways, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

Given the plurality of uses to which the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ritual’ are put, we focus on only one tradition of thought about their relationship, namely that stemming from Austin – in which ritual is understood as an act or as a particular modality of action with ethical entailments. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument and to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. If ritual performance sets the criteria for ethical judgement, ethical concerns establish the choice of ritual performed. Ethical life is shaped by ritual enactment yet is also challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual, liturgical order, or theoretical apparatus can provide.

This chapter reviews contemporary discussions in political philosophy and educational theory about the character of children’s rights and their importance to debates about the character of democratic education. It focuses on five areas in which there is contestation about the interpretation and implications of children’s rights: (i) issues about the appropriate content of democratic education; (ii) issues about children’s rights of access to education and the degree to which educational inequalities are acceptable; (ii) issues about the kind of control parents should exercise over the kind of education children receive; (iv) issues about the degree to which schools are themselves sites of democratic activity; and (v) issues about how educational institutions should be designed or reformed in order respect the educational rights of children.

Within liberal societies, citizens endorse a range of religious, moral, and philosophical views (e.g., Buddhism and utilitarianism). Despite this doctrinal diversity, John Rawls’ account of political liberalism holds that there is a form of democratic equality that is realizable by all citizens. Citizens can be equally politically autonomous if they enjoy equal political power and justify the exercise of that power with public reasons. A political liberal education for democratic citizenship would teach students how to participate in political decision-making, and how to use public reasons when helping to decide fundamental political questions. Political liberalism also can accommodate diverse educational options for families, but this accommodation is limited by political liberalism’s concern for the future political autonomy of students. This concern distinguishes the political liberal account from the “convergence” account of public justification. Unlike political liberalism, the convergence account fails to respect adequately the future political autonomy of students.

Debate and deliberation are two commonly promoted strategies for democratic education. Both strategies are designed to unearth different points of view and then engage in reason-giving and argumentation; in other words, they help students to recognize pluralism. When done well, both also model inquiry and deepen understanding about the issues being investigated. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical justification for each and show how the adversarial aspect of debate engages a different set of democratic skills than the more collaborative approach of deliberation. These differences require teachers to make judgments about how best to use these strategies in the classroom. We conclude by addressing some critiques of these strategies and discuss how alternative discussion designs might overcome some of the limitations of deliberation and debate.

This chapter discusses the role of interest groups and lobbying in the EU. It starts by giving an overview of the number and types of interest groups active at the EU level and the different channels through which they try to exert influence. The system of interest representation in the EU is then analysed in terms of corporatism and pluralism, arguing that overall it is best characterized as a form of ’designed pluralism’. The strategies that interest groups use to influence policy-making are discussed in terms of inside and outside lobbying. Because of the way the EU’s political system works, inside lobbying is a much more common strategy at the EU level than outside lobbying. Although it is difficult to make an overall assessment of interest group influence, the impact that specific groups have depends crucially on the resources they command, the way the decision-making process is organized and the type of issue at stake. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between lobbying and democracy, arguing that whether or not lobbying helps or is a threat to democracy depends on the balance between interest groups and the way in which lobbying takes place.

The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.