With special reference to Diotima’s teaching in Plato’s Symposium, this chapter discusses the central importance to Hermetic spirituality of beauty and reverence (eusebeia), Hermetic psychological theory, and the centrality of imagination to the Hermetic concept of “becoming aiōn” and gaining cosmic consciousness.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

The constituent elements of the book: Hermetic spirituality, the historical imagination, alterations of consciousness, the relation between language and experiential knowledge, and radical agnosticism in the study of religion. Narrative historiography and historical-comparative methods.

Chapter 3 marks the transition of Augustine’s argument in The City of God from politics to philosophy, by means of the civil religion of ancient Rome. In books VI and VII, Augustine endeavors to unmask counterfeits of virtuous humility – conventions propagated by civic and philosophic elites, including in some respects Varro and Seneca – and to exhort people to live and worship only in accord with their true dignity.

This fragment’s argument refutes leading theoretical assumptions informing comparative law to the effect that comparatism can be objective and access truth, on one hand, and that it must be objective and access truth, on the other. Through a biographical sketch, this argument shows that there cannot be a comparison that is not informed by the comparatist’s predispositions and predilections, themselves having much to do with the cultural world that the comparatist embodies.

The previous chapter locates Parmenides in his physical and linguistic contexts; this chapter locates him in his poetic, intellectual, and cultural milieux. It argues that we need to understand Parmenides’ poem in light of the late archaic revolution in the way that Homer was conceptualized. This chapter examines the epistemological framework Parmenides inherits from Hesiod and Xenophanes in considering the nature of human enquiry; the way that other poets in the late archaic period make use of the newly emergent figure of Homer and the corpus of Homeric poetry, especially with respect to their claims to knowledge and their relationship to the Muses; and the ways that scholars have characterized developments between Homeric poetry and the poetry of the late archaic period. I show how Parmenides uses the resources this Homeric tradition offers to launch a multipronged response to the challenges set down by Hesiod and Xenophanes. These include: reinitiating contact with a Muse-like figure in the proem; the use of crossroads imagery to articulate fundamental distinctions; ceding the voice of the poem to the unnamed goddess; the use of argument; and the return to the privileged poetic form of epic dactylic hexameter.

The chapter takes a historical perspective and asks us to consider the long and overlapping concerns of both scientists and religious believers with truth, beauty and creative ordering. Science is no enemy of religion but a casual reductive materialism, often presented in the media under the auspices of ‘science’, and fails to see the sophistication and glory of religious belief that God created all that is (creation ex nihilo), and that this conviction is fully compatible with robust modern science.

Scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge, is a ‘culture’; that is, it is embedded in practices, relations and histories. The stand-off between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ has a lot to do with the failure to recognize this and with the anxiety that any concessions here will damage the truth claims of science. It is argued that a view of truthfulness that sees it as a sustainable, corrigible set of practices in coping with an environment we do not control or possess allows us to maintain a form of realism while acknowledging that there may be diverse sets of practices which legitimately embody the same principle of sustainable engagement – including the practices of traditional religious faith.

This chapter considers one of the major alternatives to reductionist, mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century, focusing upon three key English figures: Herbert of Cherbury, Robert Greville, and Anne Conway. While these thinkers have typically been relegated to the margins of the history of philosophy and science, they nonetheless represent a significant, if largely eclipsed tradition, and one that shows how, during this period, ‘disenchanted’ understandings of nature were not the sole option, and how they could co-exist with scientific conceptions of nature. Accordingly, these figures exemplify ways of being modern and scientific without abandoning an ‘enchanted’ view of the natural world.

In Chapter 4, I suggested that young children may experience a feeling of understanding, namely that something makes sense, before they acquire a concept of understanding. However, that subjective feeling may not meet an appropriate level of truth or correctness. Young children may feel they understand, when in fact they misunderstand. Adults recognize the possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, one of the identity conditions for understanding is that of truth or correctness.

The concluding chapter sketches a portrait of Kant the empiricist and highlights what is of broader philosophical interest in it. Kant has a keen understanding that empirical knowledge is gradually acquired through a process of revision and refinement. Empirical knowledge is not an epistemic state but a process – not a possession but an ongoing pursuit. This follows from making a regulative assumption a necessary condition of empirical experience and knowledge. Furthermore, only the complete but unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of causally explanatory concepts can ground the objectivity and truth science seeks. Empirical truth too is ultimately an end we continuously pursue. Our claims to knowledge and our attempts at scientific explanation lay claim to being objectively true. But they are in principle open to revision, refinement or outright rejection. The chapter further claims that Kant’s conception of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature is an account of the acquisition of our most fundamental empirical concepts of observation, which also explains the fact that what we most fundamentally perceive are unchanging simple objects and their salient sensible properties. Finally, it shows that the aesthetic condition of experience does not prey to the "myth of the given."

We have more information at our fingertips than ever, yet how much of it can we trust? If, as was argued in Chapter 3, we need to be able to trust the information upon which we base our assessments and beliefs about the trustworthiness of other actors, then the sorts of information disorders associated with the age of disinformation can have profoundly negative repercussions for societal trust and the social cooperation and coordination it supports. By examining the rise of mistrust and disinformation, the many faces of disinformation, and the causes of our current “age of disinformation,” this chapter aims to set the context for understanding the appeal and promise of blockchains and distributed ledgers in troubled times.

Novel, largely artificial-intelligence-driven technologies have become more widely accessible in recent years. This, combined with the rising dominance of social media as a primary source of news and the “weaponization” of information for political and other purposes, has led to increases in the forgery and manipulation of the evidential basis of factual claims. How easy is it for us to know when the evidentials that we rely upon to assess something as “fact” have been undermined? This chapter examines different types of evidential forgery and manipulation and describes the technological, social, and cognitive challenges we face in identifying these undermined evidentials. The chapter also explores what happens if we do become aware that the evidentiary underpinnings of our facts might be untrustworthy, and asks what threat this uncertainty poses to the epistemic foundations of societal trusting relations.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.

Blockchains and distributed ledgers, like records of all kinds, can be viewed as socio-informational-technical ecosystems, not just technical artifacts. As such, they are governed by principles, procedures, and rules created by social actors. These “epistemic rules of the game” – and the version of social “truth” that results from their operation – are deeply interrelated to epistemic and social trust, and with power and authority. When peer disagreements arise within blockchain and distributed ledger ecosystems, much can be learned from how such epistemic disagreements are resolved (or not) about what version of “truth” concerning a state of affairs will be accepted in the face of two alternate justified true beliefs, and about the basic character and cohesiveness of these ecosystems and the socio-epistemic realities they constitute.

Like the panoramas, sets of lithographs based on officers’ drawings created new versions of the Arctic imaginary. Such products were too expensive to appeal to the average consumer, but printsellers’ practice of displaying lithographs in their windows and holding exhibitions ensured that this particular version of the Arctic reached far more people than simply those who could afford to purchase them. This chapter observes how the Arctic and the search were represented in three folios of lithographs produced from officers’ sketches (Browne, 1850; Cresswell, 1854; May, 1855). With attention to text and picture, using sketches and written sources, I offer close readings of these materials. This chapter emphasises how the lithographs, from 1850 to 1855, increasingly imply that a battle is being waged against the capricious Arctic nature in an effort to find Franklin. Significantly, the ability of these apparently factual lithographs to continually evolve and multiply, both digitally and on paper, ensures that they continue to inform ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century Arctic, and perhaps the present-day Arctic, into the future.