This chapter explores the intersection of legal methodology and beer law, drawing parallels between brewing recipes and regulatory frameworks. It posits that beer law is a distinct legal field, akin to IT law, requiring an understanding of technological and market dynamics. The pragmatic method emerges as the most suitable approach for beer law, emphasizing practical applicability over rigid legal interpretations. The chapter highlights the role of institutions in shaping beer culture and law, using Iceland’s prohibition history as a case study. It discusses performance-based regulation as a potential framework for beer law, advocating for flexibility and innovation in legal structures. Additionally, the chapter addresses the teleological aspects of beer law, stressing the importance of purpose in legal interpretation, particularly concerning trademarks and quality assurance. Ultimately, it asserts that the guiding principle of beer law should be the practical availability of beer, advocating for interpretations that support the brewing and distribution capabilities of relevant institutions.

The Introduction sets out the research question of the book viz: the question of whether future generations ought to be represented in the global legal order and institutions to address the climate change challenge and, assuming a positive answer to this, how best such representation should occur. The massive bias against the interests of future generations in current climate law and policy-making is demonstrated. This provides a powerful rationale as to why there is an urgent need to explore proxy-style mechanisms to represent future generations. The pragmatist methodology (in the tradition of John Dewey) of the book is explained. This involves analysing existing practices, and values which are incorporated into these values, and extending them to deal with new problems. The legal realism methodology of the book is also explained, including its application to the sources of international law. The strong links between the book and Earth System Governance scholarship are set out; finally, the structure of the book is explained.

The Conclusion reiterates the overarching argument of the book, namely that the search for – and collective experimentation with – new forms of representation are immensely important forms of sustainable climate policy. Through proxy representation, future generations can be practically and institutionally involved in climate law and policy-making, considering both the vulnerability of future generations and their distinctive interests. The chapter discusses the need to find synergies between proposals for proxy-style mechanisms to represent future generations and development policy. New avenues for research are suggested, including the way in which science and scientific discourse can be a proxy for future generations’ interests, and also the way in which proxy representation of future generations features in climate treaty making processes and climate activism more generally.

This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. Insurance practices and related metaphors began expanding rapidly from a European base some 500 years ago. The simultaneous emergence of the modern state was hardly coincidental. Increasingly complex societies energized by market economies required protection from risks of various kinds. This required mobilizing and organizing private capital to achieve common goals. The deepening of markets and development of financial technologies now increases demands for protection beyond conventional borders. But where the fiscal power of the modern state underpinned national insurance and reinsurance systems, the absence of a global fiscal authority is exposed by rising cross-border, systemic, and global risks. That the background condition for necessary innovation in governance is uncertainty has also become undeniable.

By revisiting the works of the eclectic and controversial thinker Giovanni Papini, the chapter shows how pragmatism was much more than an original American product. It was a transnational philosophical approach involving many people on both sides of the Atlantic enmeshed in a kaleidoscope of different philosophical traditions, whether voluntarist, immanentist, or historicist. By framing the pragmatist tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, I show that Vico’s intellectual resurrection in the early twentieth century and the parallel success of pragmatism in the same period are somewhat linked. They both resulted from a widely felt obsession with human action and an uncompromising contempt for all kinds of barren intellectualism.

Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.

This chapter begins by acknowledging the value of the classical model of scientific discovery with its commitment to isolating variables and cancelling out noise to give us a sense of significance in the numerical results produced. But the 20 chapters in this book amply demonstrate that in the real world of discovery things are messy, unpredictable, and highly differentiated within and across disciplines. Such enduring principles of discovery, emerging from the work of scientists and scholars, are identified not only for their intellectual value but also for their practical guidance for those engaged in advanced research.

This book introduces a normative theory of property. Property laws and social norms are justified by whether and how well they secure natural rights. The natural rights are justified by run-of-the-mill principles of natural law, which evaluate human action by whether it helps people survive or flourish rationally. The book studies how natural rights legitimate property law in general and in specific doctrines. It also studies the main topics in property law and policy – ownership, public commons, the appropriate design of property rights, rights less sweeping than rights of ownership, property torts, regulatory takings, and eminent domain. The book studies in particular the phenomenon of practical reasoning, the sphere of moral reasoning that converts fundamental moral goals into specific laws and policies to enforce in practice. A theory of natural rights contributes importantly to normative theory beyond the theories most respected today – egalitarian or progressive theories, law and economics, and approaches the book calls pragmatic.

Arndt Emmerich and Alyaa Ebbiary explore the evolution of scholarship on Salafi Islamic movements, highlighting how the field has matured over time. The chapter emphasizes recent research that recognizes the agency exhibited by Salafi women in engaging with their faith. These women adhere to the core rulings while negotiating secondary ones to ensure they can live fulfilling lives while respecting tradition.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.