This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

Chapter 2 explores Pentecostal ethics, and how urban Pentecostal churches in Rwanda attempted to Pentecostalise ubwenge, a traditional concept often translated as ‘intelligence’, ‘wisdom’, or even ‘cunning’. It traces discursive attempts on the part of Pentecostal pastors to show that the ‘spirit of intelligence’ (umwuka w’ubwenge) had divine origins. Moving from discourse to practice, the chapter also considers how young Pentecostals employed ubwenge in their own lives, using it to navigate relationships both within the church and with the state.

This chapter concludes by revisiting the importance of genre assessment. The wilderness narrative is not history, but this does not mean it has no historicity. As political allegory that became ever more generically complex, it is deeply implicated in Israel’s history. The literary history that emerged from readings of the complaint episodes is summarized here; it entails a pseudo-biographical version, an annalistic version, a tragic version, a hierocratic version, and a prophetic version. This preliminary literary history should be viewed as a map to guide readings of other texts, not a model to be imposed on them. The result is a history of political thought in action.

The scientific community fundamentally requires the conduct of research to meet ethical standards. Bureaucracy and regulation may enforce these requirements, but they ultimately reflect the underlying values of science and the social norms that translate these values into practice. In creating knowledge, scientists must protect research participants, and they are also obliged to treat their data and communications in accordance with honesty, transparency, and a commitment to the benefit of society. We review the history and current state of human participant protection; make a case that many of the changes in standards of data handling and publication reporting over the past ten years themselves have ethical dimensions; and briefly list a number of pending ethics issues in research and publishing that do not as yet have a clear, consensual resolution in the field of psychology.

By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological perspectives underpinning LGBTIQ psychology and considerations for undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. An overview of five main theoretical approaches (essentialism, social constructionism, critical realism, feminism, and queer theory) is provided, and each is discussed in relation to its implications for understanding LGBTIQ people’s lives and experiences. The construct ‘heteronormativity’ is also introduced. The chapter also introduces a range of overarching methodological approaches used in LGBTIQ psychological research (e.g., experiments, surveys, qualitative studies) and explores the extent to which each had been used for researching LGBTIQ topics. The final section of this chapter focuses on considerations in undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. Challenges in defining populations of interest, access to and recruitment of participants, and principles for ethical practice with LGBTIQ populations are discussed here.

This chapter provides an overview of methods for data collection in Conversation Analysis and practical advice on collecting interactional data. We touch on several recurrent issues that researchers encounter in the process. These issues include accessing data; the use of existing data (including user-uploaded, like YouTube); navigating gatekeepers in accessing a setting; building trust with members of a setting; building ethnographic understanding of activities under examination; obtaining ethical approvals; protecting privacy of participants; methods and materials for informed consent (including with populations with diminished capacities); devising a recording schedule; deciding when/how often to record; selecting the right quantity and type of recording equipment; considerations of spatial and audio environments; the use of alternative technologies for recording; recording mediated interactions; procedures and check-lists for before recording; positioning and framing the camera; when to press record and when to press stop; navigating the presence of the researcher-recorder on site; and gathering supplementary documentation from the setting.

What are the basic coordinates of the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas over the phenomenology of “death” and its larger ontological or ethical significance? Or, put in the “perfectionist” terms developed in Chapter 4, in what ways do Heidegger and Levinas disagree about how we human beings become genuinely or fully ourselves? Examining the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s phenomenologies of death, this chapter suggests that Heidegger and Levinas both understood themselves as struggling to articulate the requisite ethical response to the great traumas of the twentieth century. By comparing their thinking at this level, I contend, we can better understand the ways in which Levinas genuinely diverges from Heidegger even while building critically on his thinking.

In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), I sought to establish and build upon the hermeneutic thesis that Heidegger’s concern to reform education spans his entire career of thought. In my view, a radical rethinking of education – in a word, an ontologization of education, one that situates a transformative death and rebirth of the self at the very heart of the educational vision that founded the philosophical academy in Plato’s Republic – forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of Heidegger’s work, early as well as late. We will come back to this “ontologization” of education at the end, but I want to begin by addressing a worry I did not previously thematize and confront. If my interpretive thesis is correct, then we should expect to find some sign of Heidegger’s supposed lifelong concern with education in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. The fact, then, that little or nothing had been written on Being and Time’s “philosophy of education” before my first book came out could reasonably be taken to cast doubt upon my thesis that a philosophical rethinking of education was of great importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole. Such a worry, of course, does not arise deductively; even if Being and Time contained no philosophy of education, one might be able to explain such an omission in a way that would leave my general thesis intact. Rather than trying to preserve the thesis in the face of such a hermeneutic anomaly, however, I will instead demonstrate that no such anomaly exists. This chapter will seek both to show that Heidegger’s philosophy of education deeply permeates Being and Time and to explain some of the context and significance of this fact, thereby coming to understand yet another interlocking set of philosophical implications arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death.

Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.

Jesus of Nazareth, deeply rooted in Second Temple Judaism, lived and taught within its religious and cultural traditions. He observed Jewish customs like the Sabbath and dietary laws, while offering fresh interpretations in light of the kingdom of God. His teachings, often in dialogue with different Jewish sects, emphasized a relational approach to Torah, prioritizing love and ethical conduct over ritual precision. Jesus saw himself as a messenger for this inaugurated kingdom, foregrounding his own and his followers’ relationship to God as a compassionate Father.

This last chapter summarizes most of the material in this book in a range of concluding statements. It provides a summary of the lessons learned. These lessons can be viewed as guidelines for research practice.

The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.