Keeping track of how appreciation and understanding of Tristan und Isolde has evolved, in live performance, recording and scholarly studies, is a formidable task. One path through the labyrinth is opened up by Wagner’s poetic text, in which the title characters express their disorientation, their alienation from communal norms. Stage directors and musicological commentators alike have found ways of dramatising the particular tensions between conformity and nonconformity that encapsulate the drama’s representations of love and death, in settings that balance magical interventions (the love potion) against the worldly intrusions of King Marke and his entourage. Surveying and critiquing accounts of the role that Tristan und Isolde has played at the heart of fundamental changes to musical form and style since the 1860s reinforces the value of arguing that the continued presence of modernist qualities in contemporary music – works by Schoenberg, Nono, Henze, Andriessen and Anderson are instanced - is a direct consequence of Wagner’s materials and methods, particularly in Tristan.

The journey of mediation as a non-authoritative process into the court system has come full circle with one utterly different model emerging in contemporary times. As mentioned in the previous chapters, mediation has inspired hybrid judicial roles and settlement promotion and introduced consent as the foundation for many hybrid legal processes. Yet this hybridization has worked both ways, affecting mediation as well. Authority-based mediation is emerging as an advanced judicial process that generates public norms. This new sophisticated model for dealing with polycentric legal problems while preserving soft qualities of the process and keeping a narrow focus on a legal outcome is, in fact, a novel form of private adjudication. We describe this emergent form of mediation and its theoretical underpinnings.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

The novel of ideas was rejected by British-based modernist writers. In the international literary sphere there was less hostility to the fictional representation of philosophical, political and religious ideas, and there was also significant critical discussion of literature as a specific kind of speculative thinking. Outside Britain the representation of ideas and the formal experimentations of the modern novel were not seen as being in conflict with one another. Writers at the forefront of developments in the novel, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Rabindranath Tagore and Jean-Paul Sartre were both formally experimental and engaged with the novelistic implications of philosophical, religious or political thought. In this chapter I consider two kinds of modern novels of ideas, the ironic and the dialogistic. I focus on the writing of John Galsworthy in relation to Thomas Mann’s ironic Buddenbrooks and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory in relation to André Malraux’s dialogistic La Condition Humaine.

H. G. Wells did not openly identify his fiction as a contribution to the ‘novel of ideas’ until the publication of Babes in the Darkling Wood in 1940. And yet, he arguably did more than any other writer of his time to shape this tradition in Britain and to distinguish its trajectory and priorities from that of the dominant ‘modernist’ tradition. This chapter explores how Wells understood the difference between his own work and that of peers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf the difference between the novel as a disseminator of social, political ideas and the novel as Art. It then investigates the significance of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exposition’ to Wells as a means of embedding these ideas in fiction, moving from Ann Veronica (1909) through lesser known works such as The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel (1919), to The Shape of Things to Come (1933).

This chapter presents Jewish and Christian documents leading up to and including the destruction of European Jewry, which reflect on the Christian contribution as well as those who were proactive in opposing Nazism. This period also witnessed the establishment of Jewish–Christian dialogue organisations, as well as the emergence of a small number of scholars who re-evaluated Jewish–Christian relations and helped establish the foundations of modern dialogue.

This chapter surveys and critiques the three major viewpoints on the ethics of communication, which I label Civility, Victory, and Open-mindedness. For Civility, activism must be governed by a set of rules for respectful engagement. For Victory, the ends justify the means, and for the sake of one’s political goals, one may need to mislead audiences, dismiss opponents, and use ad hominem attacks. For Open-mindedness, it is violent and immoral to impose one’s views on others. I argue that all three perspectives have serious shortcomings, but that each voice expresses a valuable concern. People want their advocacy to be moral, effective, and nonviolent, but often feel like it is impossible to have all three.

Normatively speaking, Christianity involves a rejection of “us versus them” ways of thinking and speaking. Christian political advocacy must thereby testify to the reconciliation of all people. It would be ironic, even self-defeating, to advocate for Christian commitments in ways that reify divisions between people or deny opponents’ human dignity. But Christians can still make prophetic and incisive criticisms, take controversial stands, and employ rigorous argumentation. Drawing upon the work of Desmond Tutu and J. Deotis Roberts, I argue that Christian witness always proceeds as “good news.” Good news is not only the content but the form of Christian proclamation. Christian speech disrupts systems of injustice and dehumanizing myths, while simultaneously expressing the truth that every person – even those who are currently oppressors – is a beloved child of God. This conclusion can help Christians engage in political, ethical, and cultural conflicts in ways that are simultaneously more persuasive and more faithful to their convictions.

The historical relationship between semiotics and healthcare is explored in Chapter 3. The authors look specifically at the link between education and healthcare communications that is established by the use of emoji in such communications. The semioliterate nature of healthcare and its implications for respective education are explored, particularly as these relate to early diagnoses based on physical signs and symptoms. Parallels are then drawn between the semioliterate qualities of emoji in the Petcoff study (Chapter 2) and the potentiality of emoji as an effective doctor-to-patient healthcare communicative tool. The chapter concludes by considering how the emoji code can be inserted into traditional healthcare professional education settings, so as to show students how effective it can be in practitioner–patient interactions.

The Consolation presents two especially puzzling features that make its exegesis particularly challenging. Literarily, it adopts an uncommon style for a philosophical text, the prosimetrum, which combines prose with poetry. Content-wise, it develops a cogent philosophical message that, perplexingly, is conveyed in a labyrinthine way. These exegetical difficulties disappear if we interpret the Consolation as a form of self-examination grounded in Neoplatonic philosophy. The meandering way in which the text expresses its message illustrates Boethius’ inner conflict brought about by his sudden political fall. The root cause of his conflict is an unresolved tension within the Neoplatonic account of the human soul: the difficulty of reconciling our material self with our divine self. The Consolation’s highly unusual combination of prose and poetry is steeped in some of the basic principles of Neoplatonic pedagogy.

A common view of the Gorgias is that Plato is portraying the limits of Socratic discussion. Interlocutors become hostile, little agreement seems reached, and conversation breaks down. Furthermore, non-rational forces, by which may be included pleasures, pains, epithumiai, and the pathos of eros, come to the fore at various points. These twin factors have led to a growing consensus that what is shown is that discussion is not effective with persons in whom non-rational forces are strong. This chapter questions this consensus, bolstering Socrates’ optimistic reply to Callicles, that if the same things are examined “often and better”, Callicles will be persuaded. It argues that dialogue is a normative practice, which exemplifies the virtues that constitute its subject matter; this enables greater appreciation of how it can play a role in shaping cognition and behaviour. If values are involved in the very operation of dialogue, then participants can become accustomed to the values that form the explicit content of discussion by learning to adhere correctly to its form. Seen as such, Socratic argument is not just determined by the desires of its participants (unlike rhetoric), but is capable of shaping them.

We explore multimodal communication in robot agents and focus on communicative gesturing as a means to improve naturalness in the human–robot interactions and to create shared context between the user and the robot. We discuss challenges related to accurate timing and acute perception of the partner’s gestures, so as to support appropriate presentation of the message and understanding of the partner’s speech. We also discuss how such conversational behavior can be modelled for a robot agent in context-aware dialogue modelling. The chapter discusses technologies and the building of models for appropriate and adequate gesturing in HRI and presents some experimental research that addresses the challenges. The aim of the research is to gain better understanding of the gesture modality in HRI as well as to explore innovative solutions to improve human well-being and quality of life in the current society. The article draws examples from the AICO corpus which is collected for the purposes of comparative gaze and gesture studies between human–human and human–robot interactions.

Contradictions in intellectual history are presented in this chapter regarding: scientific discoveries in physics and biology, Montaigne’s prolific self-investigation, and research on self-complexity. There are also cultural differences: East Asians view the world as being involved in constant flux and are tolerant of contradictions. This tolerance is more problematic for Western individuals, who tend to experience contradiction as a threat to their self-esteem. The Japanese folkloristic figure of yokai is presented as an example representing a coalition of good and bad. Furthermore, utopian ideals are critically discussed as embracing one ultimate end position, with the denial of the fundamentally contradictive nature of human beings. The work of Carl Jung on "shadows" is introduced and compared to the moral middle ground. The process of generative dialogue is proposed as a way to deal with contradictions. Finally, some practical implications are presented: the fostering of self-empathy, stimulating tolerance of uncertainty, and the influence of high-quality listening on the softening of the boundaries of the self.

In this concluding chapter, we identify two potent contributions of the concept of constitutional identity, underscoring and exploring its relationship with the associated ideas of disharmony and difference. We first discuss the relationship between constitutional identity and constitutional development, before turning to lessons that the concept of constitutional identity offers both scholars and practitioners. Against this background, we then identify three promising areas for future scholarly reflection and briefly sketch the first steps of a research agenda oriented towards carrying forward the project limned in this volume. Inspired by the analytic purpose underlying the concept of constitutional identity, our comments in this section are intended to be less prescriptive than interpretive. The scholarly futures we discuss emerge as much from the political world in which constitutional governance must now proceed as from the progress that scholars have made towards understanding the aspirations of that enterprise.