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Automatic complexity is a computable and visual form of Kolmogorov complexity. Introduced by Shallit and Wang in 2001, it replaces Turing machines by finite automata, and has connections to normalized information distance, logical depth, and linear diophantine equations. Automatic Complexity is the first book on the subject and includes exercises with solutions written for the proof assistant Lean, computer programs to calculate automatic complexity, and many open problems.

This book offers the first in-depth treatment in English language of Habermas's long-awaited work on religion, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, published in 2019. Charting the contingent origins and turning points of occidental thinking through to the current "postmetaphysical" stage, the two volumes provide striking insights into the intellectual streams and conflicts in which core components of modern self-understanding have been forged. The encounter of Greek metaphysics with biblical monotheism has led to a theology of history as salvation, expanding in bold arcs from Adam's Fall to Christ and the Last Judgement. The reconstruction of key turns in the relationship between faith and knowledge ends, however, with locating the uniqueness of religion in "ritual" and defining reason as inherently secular. The book exposes the sources and trajectories, analysed by Habermas with great erudition, to different assessments in biblical studies, theology, and philosophy of subjectivity. Apart from Paul and Augustine, key lines of continuity are identified in the Gospels, early patristic theology, Duns Scotus and Schleiermacher that retain the internal connection of faith to autonomous freedom.

Los personajes de la tragedia ática han sido ampliamente estudiados desde perspectivas en las que, a menudo, sus palabras y actos se explican a partir de nuestras nociones modernas sobre la mente humana y la personalidad, y desde valoraciones éticas y juicios morales ajenos a la Grecia clásica. El ensayo Rescatando a Helena se propone contemplar la caracterización de Helena en la tragedia homónima de Eurípides desde una perspectiva en la que la inteligibilidad humana del personaje no procede del supuesto descubrimiento de su conciencia interna o de su psique individual, sino de la adecuada subordinación de la caracterización de Helena a la acción de la obra en la que dicha caracterización está orgánicamente integrada. En vez de aislar al personaje del contexto dramático al que pertenece, como si estuviese dotado de una identidad idiosincrática, mi ensayo no intenta descubrir quién es realmente Helena leyendo entre líneas por debajo de la superficie textual, sino cómo sus palabras y acciones logran conmover eficazmente al auditorio original de la obra. Frente a nuestras lecturas eruditas y reflexivas de los textos conservados, los espectadores del siglo V a. C. acudían al Teatro de Dioniso para ver y oír las acciones y las palabras de los personajes trágicos dentro de un espectáculo más amplio que incluía música y danza. Es decir, la tragedia ática era ante todo una experiencia emocional, no una ocasión para la introspección psicológica o la reflexión filosófica.

Die Lyrik des Epikers Günter Grass stand lange Zeit in dem zweifelhaften Ruf, "interpretationsfeindlich" zu sein. In ihrer Sinnlichkeit wie in ihrer Reflektiertheit verschließen sich vor allem die frühen Gedichte dem flüchtigen Konsum. Da sind zum einen ihre idiolektischen Bilder, die die Geduld und die Findigkeit des Lesers herausfordern, da sind zum anderen die weiten Anspielungshorizonte, die Traditionszitate, das Kulturwissen, ohne deren Kenntnis dieser lyrische Kosmos oft abweisend wirkt. Der Leser findet deshalb im Kommentar neben lexikalischen Angaben zu Personen, geschichtlichen Ereignissen und Räumen, neben Bedeutungserklärungen zu historischem und regional bedingtem Wortmaterial sowie zu individuellen Sprachmustern Aufschluss über die Verweisungssysteme, die durch Zitate, Anspielungen, Imitationen und Transformationen einen Bedeutungsüberschuss erzeugen. Auch motivische, thematische, gedankliche oder ikonographische Beziehungen zum Gesamtwerk werden nachgewiesen, sofern diese zur Erhellung des Textverständnisses beitragen.

Die umfassendste antike Darstellung der Rhetorik findet sich ohne Zweifel in der Institutio oratoria von Quintilian. Obwohl schon viele Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler ihre Forschungen der antiken Rhetorik gewidmet haben, gab es bisher keinen umfangreichen und tiefgehenden Kommentar des 7. Buches von Quintilians Institutio oratoria. Die vorliegende Arbeit schließt diese Forschungslücke. Sie ermöglicht dem/der Leser/-in eine erkenntnisreiche Lektüre, indem ausführliche Informationen zu sprachlichen, textkritischen und inhaltlichen Problemen geboten werden. Die Untersuchung ist in drei Hauptteile gegliedert: (1.) Die Einleitung bietet Erklärungen zu den Hauptthemen der divisio (systematische Gliederung mithilfe von Fragen) sowie der Statuslehre (Einteilung dieser Fragen in Kategorien). (2.) Die Neuedition des Textes stellt die Grundlage für (3.) den Kommentar dar. Jeder, der sich für antike Rhetorik, ihre Argumentationsstruktur, die Welt der Deklamationen und die Kultur der frühen Kaiserzeit interessiert, bekommt mit diesem Buch einen kritischen Begleiter zum Verständnis des von der Forschung eher oberflächlich rezipierten 7. Buches der Institutio oratoria.

Conservation laws, reflecting the symmetry of space and time, play a vital role in understanding the surrounding world. Conservation laws allow us to explain very different phenomena from a unified point of view. The textbook illustrates this principle taking examples from mechanics, optics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics, and medicine. They include, for example, positron annihilation used in experiments aimed at neutrino registration and in the positron emission tomography for patient diagnostics; the functioning of solar cells, infrared detectors, and light emitting diodes (LEDs); slowing down fission neutrons toward achieving a nuclear chain reaction; jet propulsion of a rocket and an octopus; principles of magnetic resonance imaging and principles standing behind fission and fusion nuclear reactions; and more.

This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the intersections between crisis, scholarship, and action. The aim of this book is to think about the "moment of crisis," through the concepts, writings, and methodologies awarded to us by Jewish thinkers in modernity. This book offers a broad gallery of accounts on the notion of crisis in Jewish modernity while emphasizing three terms: interpretation, heresy, and messianism. The main thesis of the volume is that the diasporic and exilic experience of the Jewish people turned their philosophers and theologians into "experts in crisis management" who had to find resources within their own religion, culture and traditions in order to react, endure and overcome short- and long-term historical crises. The underlining assumption of this book is therefore that Jewish thought obtains resources for conceptualizing and reacting to the current forms of crisis in the global, European, and Israeli spheres. The volume addresses a large readership in humanities, social and political sciences and religious studies, taking as its assumption that scholars in modern Jewish thought have an extended responsibility to engage in contemporary debates.

This book offers a timely understanding of the history of the Democratic and Republican Parties and their adaptability, endurance, and importance in presidential elections. Taking the reader from the beginnings of parties as caucuses of members of the First Congress meeting in 1789 through November 2020's presidential election, it provides a fascinating historical account of the debates, events, and personalities behind the beginnings of the nation's political parties. This includes the importance of national party nominating conventions in the nineteenth century, the growing importance of primary elections in nominations beginning in the early twentieth century, and the changes of campaigning for presidential candidates as they started to travel across the United States for the first time in the early twentieth century. The book tells the story of the beginnings of nationally televised presidential debates and any number of other changes in the era of broadcasting and now digital platforms for presidential elections in the twenty-first century. It finishes with a look at political dynamics since the November 2020 election and a study of negative partisanship to define how campaigning for the White House works today.

With the advancement in medicinal chemistry and material science, several highly specific, biocompatible and non-toxic therapeutic agents have been discovered and successfully applied for various clinical applications. Many of the conventional constraints of clinical therapies have been replaced and overcome by the multifaceted applications of material science and nanotechnology. Recently, material science-based therapeutic agents are the major global pharmaceutical market and are believed to mount exponentially shortly. Among the various therapeutic agents, hydrogels are one of the most widely applied materials used in the treatment of various diseases, and one of the most diverse materials that are used for multipurpose applications. Hydrogels were the first biomaterials used for Human being. Hydrogels are polymeric linkages, water-insoluble, however, sometimes established as a colloidal gel in water. Hydrogels are the superabsorbent materials because it can absorb more than 90% water, and hence regarded as natural living tissue. Mechanically strong hydrogels were synthesized by the advent of new synthetic strategies. Owing to the swollen properties, three-dimensional polymer network, and strong mechanical characteristics, these are widely used in catalysis, adsorption, drug delivery systems for proteins, contact lenses, wound dressings, wound healing, bone regeneration, tissue engineering, baby diapers, food rheology, and many others. Due to their diverse applications, hydrogels are considered one of the smartest materials in pharmaceutics, and are eco-friendly materials, cheap, and have good recyclability. They are used as therapeutic agents in different health sectors. As they are very sensitive to target, therefore it is considered favorite and preferred choice in biomedical sectors. Patients are psychologically scared of surgeries regarding huge expenses and failure. So researchers are working on hydrogels as alternative surgical replacement. In most cases, they have successfully achieved research on hydrogels in bones and tissues repairment. It might be hope of life for serious patients in future. The domain of this work will cover state of the art potentials and applications in various technological areas.

In this new edition of Matt Qvortrup's acclaimed book, the author shows how neuroscience can help us understand why people willingly give up their democratic rights or are unwillingly forced to do so.According to Plato, democracies die when people get angry. Resentment causes them to vote for demagogues. Recently, democratically elected politicians have used crises as a pretext for dismantling democracy, following a pattern we have seen since the dawn of civilization. Why do people fall for the lure of dictatorships? And what can we learn from the cause and effects of dictatorships to understand why democracies die?Death by a Thousand Cuts: Neuropolitics, Thymos, and the Slow Demise of Democracy is written in an accessible style with vignettes and new empirical data to provide historical context and neurological evidence on a much-discussed topic: the threat of democracy. This book will help readers who are concerned about the longevity of democracy understand when and why democracy is in danger of collapsing and alert them to the warning signs of its demise.

This volume examines the Byzantine manuscripts which transmit unique collections of Greek exegetical extracts on the Gospel of Luke. These codices singuli contain compilations which differ in content and sequence of scholia from all the other known catena types of this Gospel. The Clavis Patrum Graecorum volume on catenae, updated by Jacques Noret in 2018, briefly discusses these individual manuscripts in the codices singuli section (C137). The witnesses are: Vindobonensis theol. gr. 301 (C137.1); Monacensis graecus 208 (C137.2), Codex Zacynthius (C137.3); Vaticanus graecus 349 (C137.4), Palatinus graecus 273 (C137.5), and Laurentianus Conv. Soppr. 159 (C137.6). To these, Parpulov's 2021 catalogue of Greek New Testament Catenae added four further codices singuli: Parisina supplementa graeca 612 and 1248 (C137.7), Prague, Národní Knihovna České republiky, XXV B 7 (C137.8), Venice, BNM, Z.495 (1048) (C137.9) and Drama, Μ. Κοσινίτσης, 3 (C137.10). It also adds a new catena type, C139.1, attested by four manuscripts. These updates have been incorporated in the online Clavis Clavium. Further research, however, has shown that Codex Zacynthius, Palatinus graecus 273 and Prague, Národní Knihovna České republiky, XXV B 7 all transmit the same compilation; Vindobonensis theol. gr. 301 contains a collection of comments similar to C132 and is not a codex singulus; Parisinum supplementum graecum 1225, previously identified as C131, is a separate catenae type which may be assigned the siglum C137.11. This present volume provides the editio princeps of four of the unique catenae on Luke which have not previously been published (C137.2, C137.4, C137.6, C137.11) and the new catena identified as C139.1. It includes a thorough examination of the content and structure of each manuscript and an investigation of the direct and indirect sources used by their compilers.

The Codex Vercellensis is one of the great treasures of the Vercelli library, containing the four Gospels. Written during the fourth century, it is the oldest remaining Latin manuscript of the Greek New Testament and one of the most important witnesses to the early understanding of the Gospels. In this edition, Weissenrieder and Visinoni provide the Latin text of the work parallel to spectral images, indicating abbreviations, lineation, foliation and staurograms as well as a (reconstructed) critical edition with references to the most important texts of the Old Latin tradition as well as Greek and Syriac manuscripts and a commentary to this unique Latin translation. The analyses involved will be: (1) digital methods, (2) philological and theological, (3) translation theories in antiquity as well as (4) genealogical. The authors call into question assumptions about the text preserved in the manuscript, arguing that it represents an early stage of the Latin Gospels. The manuscript will be examined in light of its wide-ranging cultural and historical context. As such, the project aligns itself methodologically with the field of manuscript studies and attempts to integrate the specialized expertise of various disciplines in the study of a single object.

From QR codes to stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, the pandemic posed intriguing questions about the nature of political power in a time that is increasingly being classified as marked by democratic erosion, backsliding, or populism, Through a multi-methodological analysis of datasets covering different characteristics of pandemic responses in 54 liberal democratic states, Authoritarian Liberal Surveillance and the COVID-19 Pandemic draws attention to a different set of processes and dynamics. By adopting the theoretical frameworks of authoritarian liberalism and surveillance capitalism, a new explanation of political, economic, and social outcomes that arose over the course of the pandemic is provided in a critical cross-national inquiry. Findings turn attention to a previously neglected set of factors that were behind the emergence of widespread illiberal practices. Many liberal democracies experienced a metamorphosis that arose out of the unfettered implementation of authoritarian liberal economic policy making which merged with previously embedded structures of surveillance capitalism.

This work compares medieval and modern Arabic sources relating to the Berber Empires (11th-13th centuries) with the way in which European studies have apprehended this topic against the backdrop of the emergence of orientalism and the expansion of France in the Maghreb.Indeed, the invocation and then the study of the Berber Empires served to characterize a great Other of proximity: the Maghreb at once so close and yet so different. Studying this past therefore amounted to giving perspectives to this radical difference. In the context of the colonized and then newly independent Maghreb, this yet distant past never ceased to serve as a reference and as a framework for a "roman national" which aimed to give these States a solid foundation.

In 1732, Christian Petter Löwe, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, published his Speculum Religionis Judaicæ (Mirror of the Jewish Religion), a description of the Jewish religion and ceremonies as practised at the time. Over 50 years before Jews were permitted to settle in Sweden in 1782, the genre of Christian ethnographical writing about Jews and Jewish rituals had arrived in Sweden from Germany. In this volume, Jonathan Adams (University of Gothenburg) introduces the background to Löwe's "mirror" by looking at both the earlier history of Jews in Sweden and the phenomenon of ethnographical writing about Jews. The text of Speculum is presented in its original Swedish with a translation into English facing on the opposite pages. This edition includes notes explaining technical terms, identifying people and places, and translating Hebrew words and phrases. The volume also includes two works published in Sweden prior to Speculum: Bezelius' Die Herrlichkeit des Christenthums (The Glory of Christianity [excerpts], 1684) and Seeligmann's Jüdischer Ceremonien (On Jewish Ceremonies, 1725). The volume should be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish and Scandinavian history as well as the history of Jewish-Christian relations.

This book analyses how the early Greek whole-Bible manuscripts (pandects) change and preserve the text. Dormandy refutes the method based on singular readings and so investigates all the ways in which each pandect differs from the initial text, both changes introduced by its own scribe and by the scribes of earlier manuscripts. He surveys sample chapters in John, Romans, Revelation, Sirach and Judges (including discussing the "new finds" of Sinaiticus). Dormandy's observations of Codex Ephraemi challenge accepted transcriptions. Dormandy argues that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus may plausibly have been made in response to commissions by Constantine and Constans. Dormandy concludes that generally, across all the Biblical books considered, the pandects preserve the initial text well. Transcriptional and linguistic variations are more common than harmonisations or changes of content. The more precise profiles of each manuscript vary between Biblical books. The pandects thus create bibliographic unity from textual diversity. This shows their significance in the history of the Christian Bible: they reflect in bibliographic form the hermeneutical move to consider all the books of the Christian Bible as one corpus.

The second edition presents schemes, simplicial sets, higher categories, model categories, derived algebraic geometry, and spectral algebraic geometry in a self-contained manner. It discusses Motives, Goodwillie Calculus, Higher Galois, Supersymmetry, and topics in physical mathematics. A new chapter on Derived Motivic Spectrais now included as is an extended introduction to Infinity Category as well as a revised chapter on Stacks.

Philosophers, theologians, physicists, and psychologists join their efforts to reflect on the crucial issues of limit and infinity, time and eternity, empty space and material space. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to some of the most important issues of our times: questions on God and consciousness are discussed in parallel with quantum theory, black holes, the inflationary universe, the Big Bang, and string theory, from different perspectives and angles, ranging from neuroscience to AI.

Band 26 bietet drei Fassungen der "Glaubenslehre"-Vorlesungen, die Ernst Troeltsch als Heidelberger Ordinarius für Systematische Theologie alle zwei Jahre fünfstündig in zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Semestern hielt. Neben der Vorlesung des Jahres 1911, die 1925 von Gertrud von le Fort ediert wurde, finden sich auch die Diktate zu einer Vorlesung aus dem Wintersemester 1908/09, die durch eine von ihm kritisch kommentierte Abschrift Karl Barths überliefert sind. Von einem Studenten, dessen Name nicht ermittelt werden konnte, stammt eine Mitschrift aus dem Winter 1906/07 und Sommer 1908.

Removing the barriers to the Global Optimization of Plant Utility Systems by providing practical tools and techniques to deal with these unique challenges is the purpose of this book. The operating cost of a typical Plant Utility System of a typical Industrial Production Process Plant is enormous - often in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars per Annum. With so much money at stake, one would expect that heroic optimization efforts would be made to reduce the operating cost, however such is usually not the case. One reason for this complacency is that Plant Utility Systems are usually "cost centers" in Process Plants and their operating cost is prorated amongst the various Production Units, so it suffers from what is at times referred to as "the tragedy of the commons". Another reason for this complacency is that the Plant Utility System structure is significantly different than that of other Production Units, as for flexibility and safety reasons it has a large spare capacity to meet increased utility demand during startups, shutdowns, and emergencies. The existence of a spare equipment necessitates optimization of discrete decisions, whereby traditional optimization techniques do not readily apply. Part of the problem is that the traditional engineering curriculum primarily emphasizes only one of the many optimization methods, called Non-Linear Programming (NLP). Although NLP can address large classes of optimization problems, it has fairly stringent requirements that all describing relationships (or functions) be continuous and have continuous derivatives. Additionally, in general, NLP only guarantees a local but not the global optimum. Another optimization method is particularly well suited for modeling Plant Utility Systems is called Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). And unlike NLP, MILP methods can guarantee global optimum, which is very reassuring. MILP, however, does impose linearity requirements but as discussed in this book there are techniques to overcome this limitation.

Salomo Friedlaender was a prolific German-Jewish philosopher, poet, and satirist. His Kant for Children is intended to help young people learn about Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Friedlaender writes, "Morality is inherent in us organically. But its abstract formula should be imprinted on schoolchildren." Published in 1924, 200 years after Kant's birth, the book sparked interest in some quarters, attracting the attention of the first Newbery Award winner, Hendrik Willem van Loon, who corresponded with Friedlaender in 1933 requesting an English translation. That didn't happen. This is the first English translation of the book. During the National Socialist period, Kant for Children troubled the Nazis. They banned Friedlaender's work. Rebecca Hanf, friend of Ernst Marcus, the philosopher who claimed to have resurrected Kant, recognized that Friedlaender's Kant for Children could counter the Nazi appropriation of Kant and realign Kant with egalitarianism and anti-fascist politics, meaning the book has contemporary relevance in light of an international resurgence of fascism. A lifelong student of Kant's works, Friedlaender deserves a wider audience among Kant scholars and students. This first English translation includes an introduction to Friedlaender as well as essays by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Sarah Holtman, Robert Louden, Kate Moran, Krista Thomason, and Jens Timmermann. For translating and editing Kant for Children, Bruce Krajewski received The 2023 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting writers in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage.

Should emotions play a role in our decisions, even if they are "just feelings" and not necessarily "imbued with reason" or cognitively penetrated? The author shows that such basic feelings as aversion and attraction can be important normative guides by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs, enabling us to reconsider our ways, which is important due to the ever-changing nature of ethical demands on us. Therefore, these feelings should guide our decisions, even if they are not cognitive. This book fi lls a gap in the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and virtue epistemology.

n the past decade, spanning from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, rural poverty in the United States has risen dramatically. The impact of the pandemic is set to intensify these inequalities as the decades of neoliberal dismantling of public healthcare and other social institutions leave inhabitants of impoverished rural areas particularly vulnerable.Even before this current exacerbation, representations of rural landscape in American cinema have sought to spatially visualize the country's social inequalities and focus on the victims of poverty and marginalization. The films discussed in this monograph, Ballast (2008), Winter's Bone (2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Leave No Trace (2018), address deep rural poverty in a complex manner and facilitate an interactive, social understanding of landscape.New Rural Cinema suggest a novel way of looking at landscape in cinema that responds to and guides its readers through this recent development in American Independent film. It views the chosen films as expressions of a growing awareness of the dire inequality caused by neoliberal capitalism in the United States and the role landscape plays both in its mechanisms of social exclusion as well as in its collective contestation.

Biogenic toxins are fascinating natural products characterized by an enormous diversity of chemical structures and pharmacological activities. They not only pose hazards to humans and animals, but they are important components in the interplay of substances and living beings in nature and, moreover, important sources for new drugs. Numerous images of plants and chemical structural formulas complete the book, as well as extensive references for further reading. The multivolume reference is an essential resource for physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists, chemists, biochemists, food chemists and biologists, for students in the relevant fields, and maybe for interested laymen. All aspects of natural toxins based on the latest scientific knowledge are included: All aspects of the toxicology of all living organisms and natural foods, chemistry, action mechanisms, symptoms of intoxications. The only book arranged on a strictly scientific base according to the biogenetic origin and chemical structure. Natural Poisons and Venoms in 5 Volumes: Volume 1: Plant Toxins: Terpenes and Steroids 2023, ISBN 978-3-11-072472-1 Volume 3: Plant Toxins: Alkaloids and Lectins 2025, ISBN 978-3-11-112740-8 Volume 4: Animal Toxins 2023, ISBN 978-3-11-072854-5 Volume 5: Fungal and Microbial Toxins 2025, ISBN 978-3-11-072856-9

The work provides fundamental expertise of quantum optics and photonic quantum technology with particular attention to the generation of non-classical light with semiconductor nanostructures. The book is written by experimentalists for experimentalists at various career stages: physics and engineering students, researchers in quantum optics, industry experts in quantum technology. A didactical structure is followed, having in each chapter overview and summary of the discussed topics, allowing for a quick consultation. The book covers:

This book is devoted to the existence and uniqueness results for various classes of problems with periodic conditions. All of the problems in this book deal with fractional differential equations and some fractional derivatives such as the Riemann-Liouville, Caputo and Hilfer fractional derivatives. Classical fixed point theorems as well as the coincidence degree theory of Mawhin are employed as tools.

Microbial oxidative enzymes are in need of today and in the future also. Several microbial oxidative enzymes are being used by various sectors like food, agriculture, medicine, detergents, leather, paper, etc. Microbial oxidative enzymes are a natural product, hence, the application of these enzymes is eco-friendly. Oxidative enzymes from microbes like bacteria, and fungi will be helpful in numerous applications including plant-soil health management, and waste treatments. This book will be more informative as well as useful for related industries and end users and will be of great value to those interested in present-day research on oxidation-reduction enzymes. In the coming years, this book will be a game changer for the field of oxidative enzyme development and its applications.　

The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed. "Like Aristotle and Dewey, Arnarsson and Baruchello do not define their terms at the outset, but instead they relentlessly pursue the meanings of two ordinary words that everyone vaguely understads to arrive at a critical insight into the concepts these words represent, which are both disparate and interrelated." - Richard Marc Rubin, President, George Santayana Society

The fourth volume of the groundbreaking Handbook of Qurʾānic Hermeneutics comprises 29 chapters dealing with the hermeneutical approach to the Qurʾān by Muslim authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. These authors had to deal with the changes and influences of modernity on Muslim society. Scientific progress and related developments in the natural sciences and humanities posed new questions and challenges to the traditional interpretation of the Qurʾān. The confrontation with the colonial period also shaped the way of thinking of some of these authors and their hermeneutical work. This led them to a search for identity and a reassessment of their own traditions and beliefs. Authors in this volume reflect on these historical experiences in their interpretation of the Qurʾān. The hermeneutical approaches to the Qurʾān in this volume are, thus, closely linked to the social, political, and intellectual conditions in which the authors have done their work. They represent a response to the challenges and changes of their time. By critically engaging with modernity, scientific progress, and the colonial legacy, these authors contributed to understanding and interpreting Islam in a new context.