Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.

Cebes’ cloakmaker objection presents an alternative model of the soul according to which it is ultimately destroyed in the process of providing life to the body. Socrates’ final argument rejects this model by arguing that the soul’s bringing life to the body, far from destroying the soul, is precisely what ensures that it must be immortal and imperishable. In doing so, the argument identifies a way in which the soul has a characteristic of the divine – immortality – thereby specifying one way in which it is akin to the divine, as Socrates claimed in the kinship argument. Thus, the final argument responds to Cebes’ cloak maker objection in a way that further fills in the kinship argument’s account of the soul. The final argument also includes an important discussion of forms and ordinary objects. I argue that Socrates here identifies the most basic reason why forms cannot be ordinary, perceptible things: ordinary objects are receptive of opposites, whereas forms cannot be.

What has triggered this new concern with an impersonal yet singular life? In what sense do these formal innovations in contemporary aesthetics open up new ways to understand shared experience? In the belief that the analysis and reading of these cultural practices can help us foster the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences, this chapter wishes to unlock the ethical and political challenges of our time as they are elaborated and discussed in contemporary art practices by Teixeira Coelho, Diamela Eltit, Sergio Chejfec, Rosângela Rennó, Gian Paolo Minelli, and Claudia Andujar.

The two major questions posed by this chapter are: What is life and how do we define and identify it? How did life originate? It discusses different definitions of life and the role of entropy as a constraint. It discusses some forms that may or may not meet differing definitions of life (e.g. prions, viruses). The various hypotheses, studies, and discoveries pertaining to the origins of life are explored, including the Miller–Urey experiment, the Murcheson meteorite, and more recent NASA experiments relating to the potential origins of DNA and complex proteins. It also discusses the conditions on Earth during the origins of life, and presents the current hypotheses for the origins of water on this planet. It also reviews the candidates for the earliest life on Earth discovered in the fossil record, and explores just how we would identify the oldest life.

Chapter 3 explores a series of attempts to restrict the Abortion Act fought between 1974 and 1990. The early attacks were led by men, most of them Tories, and framed in terms of defending family values, personal responsibility and moral standards. We show how the Women’s Movement now claimed and defended the Act, itself being importantly shaped in the process. We describe how, over the course of two decades, the centre ground for debate would gradually shift, with attacks coming to be framed in a language of social justice, civil liberties and scientific advance. The chapter ends when Parliament is finally given the opportunity for a meaningful vote on the Act and uses it to endorse the Act’s broad framework.

Chapter 5 considers those battles regarding the Abortion Act that found their way to the courts, as broader struggles over the meaning of the Act became framed as narrow, technical questions of statutory interpretation. We consider the role of Pro-Life (and, to a much lesser extent, Pro-Choice) groups in driving this litigation and explore how the focus and framing of these disputes would change over time in line with the shifting centre of the moral debate. We consider how meaning was given to the statutory text, emphasising the important roles played by doctors in giving meaning to the Act before these disputes reached the courts.

Chapter 1 applies Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to define necropolitical law as the norms, practices, and relations of enmity that justify and legitimize discounting life through killing, as well as through the diminishing of socially and politically empowered life. Mapping the co-constitutions of racialized discounted lives within the domestic terrain of the United States, as well as in global sites of the long War on Terror, the chapter’s provocation is that law – notions of authority, legitimacy, and community – is at work in effecting the nationally and globally discounted lives of the long War on Terror. Chapter 1 also supplies the contours for the book’s methodology and epistemology: law as culture; an interpretive sociolegal reading for law attentive to law’s archive and law’s violence; a normative commitment to rule of law’s scrutiny and restraint of power; and a suspicion of the roles of spectacle, affect, and publicity in displacing rule-of-law’s commitments to power’s accountability and to law as public thing.

Chapter 12 examines Hegel's characterization of human society as the "living good," which expresses his version of the analogy between societies and organisms. For him the analogy implies that societies both incorporate processes of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction) and possess the same structure as biological life (that of a "self-positing" subject, which maintains itself by positing "contradictions" internal to itself and then negotiating them so as establish its own identity). Hegel also insists on the differences between life and social being: the presence in social life of self-consciousness and the capacity for freedom. Thus, societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good via specialized, coordinated functions, which, unlike the activities of organisms, are infused with ethical content deriving from their potential to be consciously self-determined. Analyzing Hegel's master–slave dialectic illustrates these ontological claims.

In 1972 and 1973 Lovelock and Margulis composed and circulated their first Gaia articles. After initial rejections at the end of 1972, they published three co-authored Gaia papers in 1974 and a fourth in 1975, lead-authored by Margulis. After this set of original Gaia articles was published, the immediate response was muted at best. Margulis continued to work on her reconstructions of Gaia’s early evolution. However, at mid-decade, Lovelock was embroiled in the ozone controversy, putting their joint efforts on hiatus. Around 1977, Margulis revived their collaboration with a Gaian consideration of planetary atmospheres in light of data from the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. After a decade of Gaia writing in the professional article format appropriate to the introduction of a new concept, they now proceeded to book projects. As the 1970s closed, Margulis was working on her next major book, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, while Lovelock was putting finishing touches on his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

The correspondence commences in the summer of 1970, when a still untenured Margulis sends Lovelock a request for information along with offprints of her own work. The scientific collaboration of Lovelock and Margulis launched in earnest in January 1972, a year and a half after their first exchange of letters. The opening chapters of their correspondence document Margulis’s importance for both the construction and the communication of Gaian ideas. Their collaboration develops precisely as a writing partnership, with Margulis in the de facto role of in-house editor as well as co-author of their early papers. The letters exchanged in 1972 show them meticulously working through the host of technical matters intrinsic to their bold project until an initial manuscript is ready for submission. These early letters are also the most minutely specialized, as they are both still teaching the other what they need to learn in order to bring their respective specializations together.

Spiritual training in the Way of Hermes was supposed to culminate in an experience of radical transformation known as rebirth (palingenesis). This process involved a state of mania (divine madness) and an exorcism of daimonic entities, and is analyzed in detail with reference to Corpus Hermeticum XIII.

Having attained rebirth, the pupil’s mind was opened permanently to the universal cosmic consciousness of Gods own imagination. As described in a unique Coptic treatise, s/he could then make a further ascent beyond the cosmos to experience the Ogdoad of universal Life, the Ennead of universal Light, and even glimpse the pēgē, the divine Source of manifestation.

Chapter 6 considers The City of God books XIII and XIV, which complete Augustine’s inquiry into the origins of the two cities, one marked by humility and obedience, the other by pride and rebellion, and the metaphysics of pride and humility. Augustine’s defense of humility in this pair of books aims to reveal humility as fertile soil for abundant life, while pride pollutes the ground and withers life at its root.

Katharine Dell’s contribution explores the question whether there is a distinctive set of theological ideas for the three key wisdom books – Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. After a brief survey of scholarship on this debate over the last century and a half, key themes that the books have in common are explored, with salient examples – the doctrine of retribution; the fear of the Lord; the figure of Wisdom and the attainment of wisdom; the theme of creation; communication and life and death. Although considerable commonality is found, there is also a discovery of difference and of interlinking with other books in the canon. The themes themselves are not confined to these ‘wisdom’ books, even though they characterize them accompanied by an essential didactic approach.

Viability is a capacity an organism’s constituents have – the ability to engage in various such as nutrition in an integrated way. It is what makes things compose an organism and what makes an organism alive. To die is to lose that capacity. So things come alive by coming to be organisms, and they die when they cease to be organisms. But in theory an object that dies while it is an organism might later be brought back to life. Since dying is the loss of viability, and nothing is viable while nonexistent, any object that ceases to exist while it is alive dies. Nor may anything be a corpse while it is still an organism. Yet objects that die while they are organisms may continue to exist – they may become corpses. So the dead may exist. Personhood is a phase objects go through while they are organisms that can think. When you and I use the term “I,” we refer to an object that is currently both an organism and a person, but the property of being a person is contingent to organisms, and the property of being an organism is contingent to us.

I present an overview of On the Soul, Aristotle’s investigation into how psuchē (soul) explains biological phenomena in a unified way. This principle serves as a final, formal, and efficient cause of living activities. Soul needs specific consideration because it is a unique sort of form. It is responsible not just for giving living things their capacities, but also for when and how they exercise these capacities. Soul orders the ways in which living things grow, reproduce, move, and cognize the world. It accounts for all the more specific capacities and activities of the living thing. Studying soul thus gives Aristotle the opportunity to make some of his most subtle distinctions about kinds of capacity and activity. Aristotle’s discussion of soul as cause also prepares the way for considering how it works together with body, as Aristotle does in the Parva Naturalia and biological works. I then present synopses of the chapters in this guide and discuss how they relate to one another.

I examine the status of Aristotle’s science of soul and argue that it is trans-generic in the way that Aristotle's universal mathematics is. For just as the branches of the latter differ considerably, so too do the sciences of life: botany, zoology, psychology, and (in Aristotle’s view) astronomy and theology. Discovering the correct definition of soul, which is their starting point or first principle, as with other scientific starting points, involves both induction and dialectic. Induction uses scientific observation of living things to move toward this starting point. Dialectic enables the scientist to assemble endoxa, or reputable beliefs, that allow us to solve each puzzle (aporia) that clouds our understanding (nous) of the starting point that induction enables us to reach.