As a new immigrant to Canada, Marie-Paule Lory lived the popular “Canadian experience,” including learning and working with English-speaking researchers. Her vision of multilingualism in Ontario is to address the "threat" to the sustainability of the French language while taking the risk of changing teacher practices in multilingual classrooms.

Ever since their seventeenth-century origins, Baptists have represented an array of theological, racial, ethnic, ideological, and political backgrounds and have traversed a number of social, theological, and ecclesiastical roads. The first Baptists came out of the dissenting tradition in England; the persecution they experienced during their early history in America helps explain their enduring support for the separation of church and state. Baptists make the Bible central to their practice, an emphasis central to their disputes over slavery, gender, and sexuality. They value the theological notion of the “priesthood of the believer.” Baptists hold that only people who can publicly profess their Christian conversion can be candidates for baptism. They have varied on who can take the Lord’s Supper; many Baptist churches practice open communion, but some do not. A central tenet of Baptist governance is the autonomy of the local church.

The immersion principle in multimedia learning is that immersive virtual environments promote better learning when they incorporate multimedia design principles. In short, immersive media do not necessarily improve learning but effective instructional methods within immersive virtual environments do improve learning. The goal of effective instructional design in immersive virtual environments is to promote processes of selecting, organizing, and integrating information. Psychological presence – the subjective experience of “being there” – is an affective affordance of learning in immersive learning environments that can motivate learners to engage in deeper learning. The chapter also describes boundary conditions of immersive virtual environments, including the potential for instructional design to cause extraneous cognitive load and impose high metacognitive demands on learners. Multimedia learning principles developed based on research with less immersive media may generalize to learning in immersive environments.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.

Plato is not only a key figure in the history of the aesthetics of deception; the focus of my study also permits us to reassess his criticism of poetry in the Republic. Chapter 4 examines how Plato takes seriously Gorgias’ playful entwinement of aesthetics with ethics and uses it to give new substance to the charges against poetry that Gorgias had deflated. For Plato, immersion is a central factor of the harm done by poets. After exploring his entanglement of aesthetic illusion with the corruption of the soul, I consider passages that seem to respond to Gorgias and help us capture the similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Finally, I contend that, while unanimously condemned by a broad alliance of scholars, Plato’s view of poetry is premised on an assessment of aesthetic experience that turns out to be valid when seen in the light of cognitive studies.

Chapter 7 moves on to Lucian, who extends the field of reflection by conjuring up the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion, not exclusively but chiefly in texts devoted to philosophy and its pretensions. Philopseudes uses the allure of superstitious tales circulated by philosophers to contemplate the effect of immersive narrative at large; Nigrinus calls upon the aesthetics of deception to expose the shortcomings of protreptic discourse and facile ideas of conversion; Hermotimus compares philosophical misguidance to the effects of visual art and poetry. However, Lucian’s engagement with the aesthetics of deception is not confined to ridiculing philosophy; it is carried by a serious concern with the effects of logos as diagnosed by Plato. The high reflexivity that the form of dialogue and the layering of narrative levels generate in the discussed texts can be seen as a response to the danger inherent in immersion.

Deceit plays a major role in Sophocles’ Electra, the subject of Chapter 3. As I will argue, the messenger scene at the core of this play blends together deception and aesthetic illusion – the lie of the paedagogus about Orestes’ death relies on a highly immersive narration to be analysed from an embodied and enactive perspective. It would be more than bold to envisage Electra as inspired by Gorgias fr. 23 DK; what Sophocles’ play does is show that the association of deception and aesthetic illusion pinpointed by Gorgias was somehow in the air and could be exploited to great dramatic effect. I will also suggest that Electra features reflections on aesthetic illusion that contain the seeds of the later rhetorical category of enargeia.

In the second chapter, I first present other texts from the Classical period that use apatē to signify the effect of theatre and other forms of representation. These texts give evidence for the wide circulation of apatē as an aesthetic term, perhaps – this is my tentative suggestion – as a result of a Gorgianic coinage. Then, I critically examine the tendency to view Gorgias fr. 23 DK merely as paving the way for Aristotle’s Poetics. This view is in danger of confounding aesthetic illusion with fictionality and ignores the salience of apatē’s enmeshing of aesthetics with ethics.

The ekphrastic play with verbal and iconic representations reveals that not only literature but also pictures can effect apatē. Chapter 9 is devoted to a piece of early Christian apologetic writing that cashes in on the ambiguity of apatē for an assault against pagan idolatry. Clement’s Protrepticus, an interesting document for the multifaceted attempts of the early Christians to negotiate the relation of their faith with pagan culture, is couched in the language and imagery of the culture it is criticizing; it not only takes up specific theories of perception, but also knowingly transfers the aesthetics of deception from poetry to pictures. While other apologetes assume that demons instrumentalize statues for their deception, Clement makes the capacity of iconic representation for deception itself a cornerstone of his deconstruction of pagan modes of viewing.

Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis, discussed in Chapter 6, is one of the first testimonies to the resuscitation of apatē as a critical term in the Imperial era. In defending the educational function of poetry, Plutarch is responding to Plato. While Plutarch’s positive view disagrees with Plato’s negative verdict, his argument, as I will argue, is predicated on Plato’s association of immersion with corruption. Plutarch, after acknowledging poetry’s spell, lays out a strongly reflexive mode of reading intended to render the young readers immune to the dangers of absorption. His agenda has been appraised as prefiguring the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, but there are also important differences to be noted. Besides drawing our attention to the role of Plato, De audiendis poetis suggests further reasons for the appeal of apatē in the Imperial era, notably a culture of rhetorical epideixis that put a premium on captivating performances and the socio-political function of literature for the Greek elites in the Roman empire that gave new prominence to its ethical dimension.

The final chapter commences with an episode from Petronius, which illustrates that it would be rewarding to look for the aesthetics of deception in Latin literature. However, instead of staying within the temporal boundaries of antiquity, I conclude my inquiry with some contemporary spotlights. By no means did apatē have the reception history of mimēsis, and yet, I contend, its association of aesthetic illusion with deception has particular force in our world. After pointing out a significant shift of focus from the ancient to the present aesthetics of deception, I discuss examples from journalism, politics, art and psychotherapy that in various ways engage with immersion and deception.

The chapter deals with a crucial transition within Hegel’s Encyclopedia: the transition from its first part – the “science of logic” – to its second part – the “philosophy of nature” (§§244–51). My overall argument will be organized in three, consecutive steps. First I present a rational reconstruction of §244. Secondly I attempt to shed light on Hegel’s characterization of nature as presented in the first paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. My aim is to motivate and defend his claim that we can know a priori that nature must be a material space-time system. In the third part I address the question of what it might reasonably mean to claim, as Hegel does, that concepts or universals are “immanent” in nature. I argue that it is crucial, in this context, to take seriously his remark that “the concept” does not as such occur in nature, but only as “internal” (innerlich) or “immersed” (versenkt).

The exploration of the ancient aesthetics of deception takes its cue from Gorgias fr. B 23 DK. After contemplating the fragment in its original contexts – Plutarch cites it in two different treatises – I will argue that Gorgias’ assertion derives its poignancy from the transformation of several topoi. What reads like a mere witticism is the result of a crossing of an epistemological tradition with an ethical paradox and a poetological premise, all under the auspices of aesthetics.

Hellenistic criticism provides little material for my study; Chapter 5 tries to grasp why this is due not only to its scanty transmission. Neither critics who championed pleasure as the function of poetry nor the ekphrastic tradition seem to have taken an interest in apatē’s ambiguity. We find more evidence at the beginning of the Imperial era in the critical essays of Dionysus of Halicarnassus and in Philo’s polemics against a specific kind of rhetoric and myth. Only Philo, however, exploits apatē’s oscillation between aesthetic illusion and deception. Philo’s debts to Plato help us identify one reason for apatē’s decline in Hellenistic criticism: as some scholia illustrate, Plato’s criticism of poetry was well-known but was often felt to be less compelling than the ideas of other philosophical schools. With due caution, I also suggest that the waning interest in apatē is related to the emergence of the Hellenistic book-culture that made it easy to contemplate aesthetic issues independently of ethical issues.