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David Hume (1711–76) is commonly acknowledged to be the most important philosopher of the English language, and scepticism is commonly understood to be central to Hume’s thought. What, however, counts as scepticism for Hume and how it informs his various works has remained a topic of enduring controversy. Hume’s Scepticism: Pyrrhonian and Academic answers the constellation of interpretive questions around which that controversy has orbited by presenting a comprehensive and detailed investigation of Hume’s scepticism that situates it in the intersecting sceptical traditions from which it sprang. Making a sharp break with dominant contemporary readings, Hume’s Scepticism offers a radical interpretation of Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic—epistemic, metaphysical, and also doxastic. Hume’s Scepticism advances its arguments for this conclusion in two broad hemispheres. Part One situates Hume’s thought historically in both the Pyrrhonian and the Academic streams of sceptical thought that preceded him. Part Two investigates and interprets the conceptual spaces and logical apparatuses of the complete Humean corpus–including the Treatise, Enquiries, Essays, History, Dialogues, and letters–through the lens of what has come to be called the Pyrrhonian Fourfold. Hume’s Scepticism argues that Hume’s naturalism is a component of his sceptical philosophy and not a refutation of it or therapy for it. Drawing on the probabilistic and doxastic theories of Philonian Academic scepticism, especially in Clitomachus of Carthage, the book shows how Hume developed an utterly non-dogmatic theory of belief. The text delineates the sceptical core of Humes’ political thought and his philosophy of religion; and it explains his sceptical rendering of science and of the external world. Hume’s Scepticism, in other words, advances both historical and logical reasons for the conclusion that Hume is a complete, profound, and coherent sceptic.

‘Radical alterity is not about exotism and exclusion but about imagination of how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds.’ This is what Barbara Glowczewski calls ‘indigenising anthropology’ in this collection of essays that chart her intellectual trajectory as an anthropologist involved since 1979 with Warlpiri people from central Australia and other Indigenous people in the Kimberley and on Palm Island. The book shows how the many ways in which Aboriginal men and women actualise virtualities of their Dreaming totemic space-time into collective networks of ritualised places resonate with some of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts and also with reticular digital memories. It is a tribute to Indigenous cosmovisions and art, as well as the creative affirmation of collective movements in Oceania, in Brazil and France, who struggle to defend existential territories that could restore a multiplicity of commons to heal the earth from past colonisation and present destruction. Glowczewski draws on 40 years of shared experiences with Indigenous peoples, her own conversations with Guattari, her participation in decolonial ecological debates and engagement for an ‘earth in common’ (https://encommun.eco/), to deliver an innovative agenda for radical anthropology which offers new avenues for research on environmental and social justice based on the value of difference and creative resistance.

This book is the first study of the material culture of Egypt during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule (ca. 526-404 B.C., also known as the ‘27th Dynasty’). Previous studies have characterised this period either as ephemeral and weak or oppressive and harsh. These characterisations, however, are based on the perceived lack of evidence for this period, filtered through ancient and modern preconceptions about the Persians. This book challenges these views in two ways: first, by assembling and analyzing the archaeological remains from this period, including temples, tombs, irrigation works, statues, stelae, sealings, drinking vessels and coins; and second, by using that material to study both the nature of Achaemenid rule, and how the people living in Egypt experienced that rule. The archaeological perspective permits the study of people from all walks of life, not just the elites who could afford to commission statues and; rather, by looking at the decisions made about material culture by a wide range of people in Egypt, it is possible to understand both how the Persians integrated Egypt into their empire, and how various individuals understood their roles in society during the course of this integration. It is thus a study of both imperialism and identity.

The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.

Imagined States examines the significance of the law in colonial and postcolonial fiction from and about Nigeria between 1900 and 1966. The book argues that in the discrete period of the final half-century of British colonialism in Nigeria through into the early years of independence prior to the Biafran War, the law provided a key site for fiction’s negotiations with the increasingly complex realities of the colonial project. Attending to the representation of the law in that fiction provides important insights not only into the realities of the historical period but, equally importantly, into the dominant and emergent discourses and ideologies that shaped those realities. Imagined States explores a range of texts including popular, middle-brow and acclaimed postcolonial novels, as well as newspaper stories and memoirs, by both British and Nigerian authors (including Chinua Achebe, Joyce Carey, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace), focusing in particular on how the state of exception and ideas of civilisation were negotiated imaginatively in the law and fiction. These explorations are organised chronologically and thematically, moving from the law ‘upcountry’ (focusing on pre- and inter-war British representations of the District Commissioner), through the law in the city (focusing on late colonial and early postcolonial Nigerian fiction), to law and politics (focusing on postcolonial Nigerian representations of treason and violence).

In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet, very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both, a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves – the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. On this basis, the book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.

Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England. This collection uses adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches to analyze early modern transformations of Ovid, providing innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. The chapters explore Ovidian adaptations in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lyly, Hewood, among others. The volume is divided into four sections: I. Gender/Queer/Trans Studies and Ovidian Rhizomes; II. Ovidian Specters and Remnants; III. Affect, Rhetoric, and Ovidian Appropriation; and IV. Ovid Remixed: Transmedial, Rhizomatic, and Hyperreal Adaptations.” Focusing on these larger topics, this book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance. The book contains chapters by Simone Chess, Shannon Kelley, Daniel G. Lauby, Deborah Uman, Lisa S. Starks, John S. Garrison, Catherine Winiarski, Jennifer Feather, John D. Staines, Goran Stanivukovic, Louise Geddes, Liz Oakley-Brown, Ed Gieskes, and Jim Casey.

Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has had a significant influence on film theory in recent years. This book proposes a relationship between Levinasian ethics and film style. It argues that films can convey Levinasian ethics not just through their subject matter but also through their use of style. The book brings this relationship between ethics and style into a productive dialogue with theories of performativity, such as J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, Jacques Derrida’s notion of originary performativity and Judith Butler’s reconfiguration of performativity within the socio-political sphere. It explores Levinas’s influence on film through the study of three directorial bodies of work: those of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. The book focuses on a range of films, including the Dardennes’ Je Pense à Vous (1992), La Promesse (1996), Le Fils (2002) and The Kid with a Bike (2011), Schroeder’s Maîtresse (1975), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Terror’s Advocate (2007) and Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) and Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008). In doing so, it demonstrates how films can perform a Levinasian ethics through different styles.

In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction argues that this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment in the project of the postcolonial nation-state in post-revolutionary Egypt. If the countryside ceased to be the idealized space of the nation, neither the Cairene metropolis nor the city of Alexandria took its place. Moreover, the transgression of borders to an exilic space served to unsettle categories of national and regional belonging. At the heart of this book is an argument about the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. It provides a full examination of the emergence and establishment of a group of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature across six decades, while also attending to the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes during a pivotal moment in Egypt’s contemporary history.

This book argues that nature even in generation in Aristotle should be understood on an emergent model that sees a unity in the four causes. The model of artifice divides form from matter, where material only appears as already informed because it is itself natural, but functions in artifice as the stuff for form. Natural generation, and thus nature, appears to follow this model insofar as form in the figure of semen appears to impose itself on matter as menses, making form the superior and positive power that is the contrary to matter, which lacks and seeks after form. This book affirms the internal source of movement view by arguing that form in generation is working in and through matter and that matter has a character of its own, suggesting the Möbius strip as a model for the relationship. Semen does the work of form through the material that makes it semen; semen’s matter has its own power to contribute to form, not reducible to its relationship to form. The book presents arguments against the existence of species form and prime matter in Aristotle and canvasses ancient Greek depictions of the feminine in order to situate the specifics of Aristotle’s account of material in the composition and working of semen and menses in generation and sex differentiation. It concludes by canvassing the places Aristotle uses the analogy to craft to show how they work in specific contexts.