This chapter explores meat-eating as an important way by which humans define themselves and explores it as part of a broader ‘anthropology’ of food and eating. It tells the story of a boastful consumption of a wild boar at a (fictional) Roman dinner party to show that in the ancient world (as in the modern), what you eat is who you are.

It remains surprising to never see Heidegger pose the question What is literature? In this sense, our interrogation will revolve around why Heidegger never applies the “fundamental question” to the very specific form of logos at work and in play in literature. And thus, why Heidegger never overtly enquires into the heading which literature could provide for and in the “History of Being.” Does something lie in literature – a secret – which impedes its grasp in the ontological horizon of the “History of Being”?

Romantic-era writing affirms the ideal of a bond between human and animal, while often showing this bond destroyed by the killing of the nonhuman animal. This chapter explores the treatment of such bonds, and their destruction, in the light of Mark Payne’s argument that literary representations of dying animals incorporate a sacrificial logic by which the nonhuman animal’s death enables the development of the fully human subject and the expression of that humanity in writing. In Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, William Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well, Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, and William Blake’s "The Fly," I argue that elements of this "humanizing" process can be traced, but that the poems are characterized by ambivalence: too troubled by animal death, too uncertain about the efficacy of the message they attempt to draw from it, or in the case of “The Fly,” too wedded to the radical equivalence of all beings to be fully committed to a story of progress through sacrifice. The chapter ends with a discussion of John Clare’s badger poems and “To the Snipe,” in which there is a radical refusal of sacrificial logic.

Cyprian of Carthage is the most fulsome and direct user of sacrificial language in relation to Christian worship and organisation up to his own time, even though his community experienced persecution under the emperor Decius via a decree of universal sacrifice. Cyprian’s De lapsis and his Letter 63 both use common knowledge about sacrificial ritual shared between Jews, Christians, and other Romans to make more specific points in controversies over reconciliation of apostates and use of wine in the Eucharist. Cyprian’s use of shared assumptions about ritual helps reveal shared ancient understandings about sacrifice, centred not on altruism or violence but on gift. His formulations also reflect how he, like Decius, was seeking to use older ideas of tradition and communal solidarity in the service of new challenges.

This chapter shows how the Laudians conceived the history of the church as a succession of sacrifices and altars stretching from Adam or Abel through the actual sacrifices of the Jews, under first natural, and then Mosaic law, and then through the spiritual sacrifices offered up by and in Christian churches. Where there were sacrifices there also altars and priests, and so the history of the church was conceived as a succession of consecrated persons and spaces, centred on altars, and then on episcopal chairs, stretching from the apostles to the present. The chapter shows the Laudians attempting to trace the presence in the primitive church, and then in the church of England, of the basic triad of priest, sacrifice and altar. They encountered some issues in so doing in the post-reformation church of England and the chapter shows some of their critics, most notably Bishop Williams, pointing that out and the Laudians responding with difficulty to those criticisms.

This chapter describes how romantic partners navigate the disagreements that necessarily result from their interdependence and how partners recover when they intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other. Specifically, it reviews the ways in which goals and desires conflict to produce disagreements and how disagreements provide a diagnostic situation in which people make inferences about their partner’s thoughts, feelings, and commitment. Next, it describes typical conflict topics, how conflicts tend to be experienced, and typical conflict prevalence over the course of a romantic relationship. Next, the chapter covers how people manage interpersonal conflicts and highlights specific conflict behaviors that are typically destructive (e.g., hostility, withdrawal) and specific conflict behaviors that are typically constructive (e.g., intimacy, problem solving), as well as how the adaptiveness of conflict behaviors can change depending on the situation. Finally, this chapter reviews how partners can recover from destructive conflicts and other relationship transgressions by accommodating rather than retaliating, sacrificing, and forgiving.

This chapter offers a broad overview of the dominant views of personhood and selfhood in ancient Mesoamerica. It begins with a discussion of the conception of social personhood, then turns to the issue of essence and selfhood, finally culminating in the “embedded identity” theory of personal identity that relies on these previous views.

In this chapter, we look at Mesoamerican views on human activity and life. How did precolonial Mesoamerican philosophers think about proper or right action, in the case of the individual and the wider community? This includes issues such as the role of the state, the ruler, and the individual’s duties toward each. The chapter focuses on key ethical concepts and views in Mesoamerican traditions, such as those concerning humility, sacrifice, and the situational and temporary nature of goodness.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

Gruesome instances of mass killing have punctuated the 6000 year-long sequence of the prehistoric South American Andes, an area that encompasses modern-day Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Argentina and Chile. Accurately gauging the intensity and intent of violence—in particular mass extermination—among people who left no form of written language, requires a forensic skeletal approach that informs on both the cause and manner of death, as well as the nature of corpse disposal or burial, which itself reveals how bodies were treated after death.

Time and again, aggressors in the Andes marshalled common tactics, including the sacking of towns and sanctuaries, instituting systems of mass displacement, controlling reproduction among women, moving children from subservient groups, and orchestrating the maiming and murder of both formidable rivals and civilian noncombatants alike. These violent episodes of eradication may best be understood as outbreaks of local communal strife, limited in both place and time. These genocidal moments capture the collective murder of targeted sub-population groups. The physical and material record helps us identify catastrophic death assemblages, reconstruct the profiles of victim and perpetrators, discern the methods of murder, and even deduce underlying motivations for attack.

On September 13, 1918, as autumn settled upon the Western Front after the costly failure of Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive and ensuing loss of strategic initiative against strengthening Allied Armies, Martin Heidegger, serving in a weather unit in the vicinity of Verdun, sat down in the early morning at his observation post to write a letter to his recently betrothed Elfriede, at home in Freiburg with their newborn son. He is sitting “at the telephone and passing huge quantities of numbers on to the artillery, airship men, [and] gas officers” against the backdrop of “heavy artillery” and the “thunder of bombs, making everything in the hut shake.”

This chapter analyzes the evidence that suggests that Jesus endorsed and participated in the worship of the Jerusalem temple during his public ministry, arguing that the Gospel of Matthew offers important data that have been often overlooked and undervalued by the quest. Among other traditions, this chapter offers analysis of Jesuss instructions on offering sacrifice in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:23–24), Jesus’s Instructions to the leper to offer sacrifice (Matt 8:1–4); the healing of the paralytic (Matt 9:1–8); Jesuss quotation of Hosea 6:6 (Matt 9:13; 12:7); Jesuss statement that something greater than the temple is here (Matt 12:6); Jesus and the temple tax (Matt 17:24–27); Jesuss statement that the house is desolate (Matt 23:38); and Jesuss participation in the Passover celebration (Matt 26:17–19).

The book’s final chapter draws on recent scholarship on cultic imagery in the New Testament to demonstrate that Jesus likely used temple and priestly imagery in his teaching, yet without the intention of repudiating the validity of the temple. Among other narratives, the Last Supper traditioins are given special attention.

This chapter seeks to identify the doctrinal content of Trent’s decrees on the Eucharist, and to understand its engagement with Protestant teaching, in three areas: Christ’s presence in the Eucharist; communion in both kinds; and the Eucharist as sacrifice.

This chapter argues that, just as the opening of the dialogue repeatedly alluded forward to the theories Socrates goes on to develop, Socrates’ death scene repeatedly refers back to these theories. It does so by showing Socrates living in accordance with the views he has defended over the course of the dialogue about the soul, courage, temperance, how to act toward the gods, and the correct way to interpret them. Scholarship on the death scene, especially in the last thirty years, has been dominated by Socrates’ famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. All of you must pay what is owed and not be careless” (118a7–8). Given its obscurity and the temptation to project our own desired message back onto these words, it is especially important to place them within their context in the death scene and the dialogue as a whole. My procedure is first to set up constraints within which an interpretation should operate, and then suggest a series of interrelated possibilities that fit within these constraints. Doing so provides the opportunity to review some of the dialogue’s major ideas.