This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.

This chapter explains why cognition (Erkenntnis) is its own kind of cognitive good, apart from questions of justification. I argue against reducing the work of thought experiments to their epistemological results, such as their potential to provide prima facie justification. As an apparatus for cognition, a thought experiment enacts the three core elements of Ørsted’s Kantian account: (1) it is a tool for variation; (2) it proceeds from concepts, and (3) its goal is the genuine activation or reactivation of mental processes. Cognition has two components: givenness and thought. I will show in this chapter how givenness and thought are both achieved through thought experiments.

Publicity created a central position for the politician in a transnational communicative space. The politician played a ‘personal’ role as a public persona. Competition forced commercial newspapers to focus on entertainment, which hurt political coverage but benefitted individual politicians. Particularly politicians with eccentric physiques and props profited from human interest journalism. Politicians’ ‘complex’ personalities, moreover, provided food for psychological analyses. Possibilities to visualize politicians and their private lives – literally in photographs; figuratively in character sketches – completed this personal appeal. Mass media favoured political personalities over abstract institutions. Newspapers projected family values onto politicians that enabled bourgeois readers to identify with them. This focus on politicians and their private lives made them ‘celebrities’. In celebrity reporting, monarchs enjoyed an advantage: they were famous by descent, provided entertaining pomp, and stood above partisanship. Yet journalists described charismatic career politicians, greeted by excited crowds on political journeys, in royal terms as well. These celebrities functioned as ‘brands’. A brand name buttressed a politician’s position but could also be exploited commercially. The media focus on the personal shaped expectations for politicians to become mediagenic and ‘special’ – to make the private public. The celebrity culture surrounding a brand-name politician finally underpinned the imagined community and widened the scope of politics.

In chapter four, Sean Williams illustrates the creative potential of music and dance for the development of revivalism up to the present day. During the early years of the Revival, beginning in the 1890s, Irish dance and music were governed by strict ideas about form and performance promulgated by such groups as the Gaelic League. Music and dance, in different ways, underscore the difficulties of remaining connected to traditional standards while allowing the introduction of modern or non-Irish elements in singing style, dance steps, and instrumentation. At each stage of the development of cultural revivalism, cultural authenticity is vitally important. Despite apparent ruptures in the traditions of music and dance, both have flourished on a world stage with their “Irishness” intact. Because of the inclusion of non-Irish dance and vocal styles, a contemporary spectacle such as Riverdance, while quite different from traditional forms of dance, remain connected to broader revivalist concerns.

In her chapter, Elizabeth Crooke examines the work of nineteenth-century antiquarian scholar George Petrie and the poet and archivist Samuel Ferguson, who were vital to the formation of a modern revivalist movement. The accumulation of knowledge about the Irish past is a condition of freedom, for it stands as a bulwark against false and degrading historical representations and frees Irish institutions to use the recovery of cultural artifacts to support the process of national Bildung. Museums connect the past, through present cultural activity, to the realization of Ireland’s national future. This connection motivates the early designers of museums and other cultural institutions charged with preserving cultural artifacts to regard authenticity as a quality of cultural objects, an aura that transcends historical conditions. During the Decade of Centenaries (2012–2022), Petrie and Ferguson became themselves a part of Ireland’s future in the form of commemorations, the visible signs of institutional memory.

Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.

This chapter focuses on Neo-Victorian fiction as a sub-genre of the historical novel. It examines how British neo-Victorian texts are informed by Anglo-American and European postmodernist theories that challenged the division between history and literature. In this context, it contains discussions of a wide range of novels including Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), and Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy that have now become part of an ever-growing Neo-Victorian canon, while also engaging with more recent manifestations of Neo-Victorianism in TV and film adaptations. It explores how Neo-Victorianism has intersected with British political discourse; how authors’ investment in Britain’s history and Victorian literary culture problematises the Neo-Victorian novel’s position in the academy; the form’s perceived prestige; and its contribution to debates surrounding accuracy and authenticity to argue that neo-Victorianism can be read as a symptom of decadent postmodernity.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

Writings on hip hop education from hip-hop’s golden age onwards have often concerned themselves with the relationship between educational institutions, pedagogic practices and spaces and the vernacular identities and multicultural literacies of their disadvantaged students. This parallels and is related to the contentious educational debates that erupted during the so-called US culture wars of the 1990s concerning race, cultural identity, relevance and value. Accordingly, the chapter argues that a chief source of hip-hop education’s legitimacy derives from an abiding insistence amongst its practitioners and advocates that the more ostensibly “positive” and “conscious” examples of rap, in keeping with the black cultural continuum, express hip-hop’s inherent didacticism. I describe and examine these issues and their methodological and pedagogic claims – past and present – against a backdrop of moral panic that has long dogged rap music but also supplied it with critical impetus. The final section of the chapter offers a case-study of a recent British hip-hop education programme that seeks to make use of UK drill music to develop the capacities of educationally disaffected school-age young people.

Political legitimacy entails a process of evaluation and eventually of judgment concerning whether or not, and to what extent, the exercise of political power (institutions, leadership, policies, and results) meets the conditions required by legitimacy. Despite the importance of the contribution of law to legitimacy, legitimacy cannot be purely and simply identified with and reduced to law. This is, in part, the case because law functions as an expression and vector of two other components of political legitimacy: values and consent. As such, this chapter is organized into three parts. First, I examine the meaning of values and consent and of their relationship in general. Second, I refer to the challenges that can be associated with values and consent. Third, I show how values and consent, provided that they are not the captives of these challenges, can operate as sources and criteria of evaluation and judgment of political legitimacy.

This chapter refutes three interrelated feminist objections to Heidegger’s thought. Section 6.1 argues that the analytic of Dasein should not be seen as the elaboration of an implicitly masculine exemplar, but rather that it is the articulation of a structural essence, which can and has been productively employed by feminist philosophers. Section 6.2 suggests that far from erasing the issue of gender at an ontological level, Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s neutrality speaks to an anti-essentialist critique of binary gender. Finally, Section 6.3 offers an interpretation of authenticity as a form of genuine self-understanding – similar to Sandra Lee Bartky’s notion of developing a ‘feminist consciousness’ – which can work to critique and transform role-based relations and ‘inauthentic’ understandings prescribed by das Man. The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that far from being inimical to feminist theorizing, Being and Time can be a fruitful resource for furthering feminist projects.

Authenticity plays key methodological and normative roles for early Heidegger: as he puts it, to ‘work out the question of Being adequately … we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being’. But the precise nature of those roles, and how Heidegger differs from other thinkers of authenticity, is much less clear. This chapter considers three possible interpretations of authenticity found in the contemporary literature. On a transcendental reading, authenticity is what allows us to first recognize reasons as such and act in light of norms at all. On a unity reading, authenticity unifies Dasein’s commitments, and thereby grants a special narrative or judgmental coherence to my life. Finally, on the structural reading, ultimately defended here, authenticity is an inchoate awareness of the structural features of normative space and of Dasein’s own way of being. It is only this interpretation, it is argued, that can make sense of Heidegger’s text and the centrality of authenticity within his early work.

Heidegger’s subordination of reason to “care” in Being and Time has exposed him to the charge of irrationalism. Against this view, I argue that Being and Time offers a “normativity-first” account in which reason, as reason-giving (logon didonai), is an ineluctable demand constitutive of authentic selfhood. Examining Heidegger’s rejection of the neo-Kantian equation of reason with logic in his 1929 Kantbuch, I explain the threads that connect what Heidegger calls “pure sensible reason” to his extensive phenomenological account, in Being and Time, of the “everyday” and “authentic” modes of Dasein’s care-structure. As authenticity’s discursive mode, the “call of conscience” is Dasein’s portal into normative space. As the essay “On the Essence of Ground” makes plain, Dasein’s response to the call involves answerability for what it holds to be best in its practical life, hence reason-giving. Such an origin of reason contrasts with rationalism only in eschewing any principle of sufficient reason.

The issue of whether technology is inherently motivating for learners and teachers has often been discussed in the literature around computers and language learning. Yet, there is more to this relationship than initially meets the eye. This chapter outlines the ways in which symbolic power plays a part in both personal and institutional motivations for the adoption of technology. The chapter also looks at the way motivation is often credited as a key to success, though rarely with much empirical evidence. Finally, the article takes on a practitioner’s viewpoint to share several motivational techniques that can assist with practice and research.