In this text, of which we have translated a large excerpt, Henry of Ghent rejects the view defended by Albert and Aquinas according to which powers are accidents distinct from the essence of the soul. Instead, he maintains, the soul is its powers “through its essence”. To show this, Henry devises an argument directed against Aquinas’ claim that a power must be in the same category as its act. The upshot of the argument is that this claim must be rejected because, along with some premises widely accepted by medieval Aristotelians, it leads to a (vicious) infinite regress. Additionally, Henry develops his own theory of the powers of the soul. While he thinks that the soul is its powers through its essence, he contends that the soul’s powers do add something to the soul, namely, relations to their acts. For example, the intellect is the soul as related to the act of thinking, whereas sight is the soul as related to the act of seeing. On the basis of this relational account Henry discusses in this text the distinction between those powers of the soul that are tied to a bodily organ, such as sight, and those that are not, such as the intellect.

This text of Bonaventure’s gives a nice indication of how Aristotle begins to influence the debate about the relation between the soul and its powers in the Latin West around the 1250s. In this text, Bonaventure is still very much in dialogue with the earlier debate. He recounts the early twelfth-century identity theory and earlier versions of the distinction theory, and he argues in favor of the version of the distinction theory defended by early Franciscans like Alexander of Hales. As Bonaventure states this latter theory, the soul and its powers are one “in substance” but differ “in essence”, the essential difference having to do with the fact that the powers of the soul, unlike the soul itself, are relations. But Bonaventure also introduces a philosophical innovation into this theory—one that draws on Aristotle. He argues that the powers of the soul, despite being relations, are special types of substances, namely, substances “by a tracing back” (per reductionem). He understands by “substances by a tracing back” imperfect occupants of the category of substance.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how James uses railway journeys to dramatize the potentially endless and inherently sociable principle of narrative relations that he outlines in his Preface to Roderick Hudson. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The American Scene, I argue that these texts evince a particular concern with ‘stopping-places’, specifically invoking the railway’s associations with distribution and supply. In The Sacred Fount, relationships operate in ways that suggest the railway’s own temporal and alimentary economy, as the train journey opening the novel tropes a continuing disquiet surrounding social contact, as well as providing a context for its central concern about the transfer of ‘resources’. The second half of the chapter examines the representation of similar anxieties throughout The American Scene. From his seat in the Pullman railcar, James is perturbed by the sense of moving ‘without personal effort or suffered transfer’, associating the Pullman’s innovative continuity, in particular, with the difficulty of social and cultural differentiation. In essays like ‘The Future of the Novel’ James deprecates the railway’s role as an arbiter of literary and critical taste.

The introduction describes the principal arguments of the book. The first argument is that the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy was defined by the Brazilian High Court as sedition, which was defined as public disloyalty to the monarch. Taking sedition seriously allows us to see how people made public spaces into sites where people strategized and studied revolution together. The second argument presented is that the Tailors’ Conspiracy was not isolated but was rather the coda to three prior resistance movements across the empire: one in India, one in Angola, and one in Brazil. The Tailors’ Conspiracy was thus part of an empire-wide development in which the Portuguese had to contend with groups of revolutionaries who were racially, ethnically, and financially different and who all wanted greater political recognition from the empire. The third argument is that relations between and among people from all ranks of society was the baseline of political action. Differences in rank between conspirators were apparent when men were outlining the goals of the conspiracy. The political culture that sustained them was thus based on relationality, not cohesive demands.

Collaborative climate governance has emerged as a promising approach to address the urgent need for decarbonization. Here, we summarize the book’s findings on the complex interplay between states and non-state actors in the pursuit of climate goals, using Sweden as a case study. Collaborative governance can effectively engage industry, cities, and other stakeholders in climate politics, yet it falls short in achieving transformative change. The success of collaborative climate governance is influenced by broader political, economic, and social context and calls for a critical examination of its applicability in diverse settings. Looking beyond Sweden, we identify three main research avenues. Firstly, we emphasize the need to engage with the challenge to institutionalize and sustain climate commitments. Secondly, we encourage scholars to explore democratic innovations to address contestation within collaborative governance. Finally, we call for a deeper exploration of how external shocks and crises serve as catalysts or barriers to decarbonization.

This book explores some implications of studying international relations from a systemic perspective. This chapter takes on the preliminary tasks of defining systems, identifying distinctive characteristics of systemic explanations, and situating systems approaches in a broader context of relational framings. A system is a bounded set of components of particular types, arranged in definite ways, operating in a specific fashion to produce characteristic outcomes, some of which are emergent. The arrangement and operation of the components produce “emergent” “systems effects;” properties and outcomes that cannot be fully understood through knowledge of the parts considered separately. I emphasize the relational character of systemic explanations and their reliance on mechanisms and processes, in order to foster developing a relational processual systemic perspective within a pluralistic IR.

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

We outline the core concepts of network analysis, issues of research design, and data collection for different structural questions.

Analogy is a core cognitive capacity encompassing basic similarity (“this is like that”), relational similarity (proportional analogies of the form A:B::C:x), and complex system mappings, in which the elements of one situation are structurally aligned with the elements of another. The latter permits complex inferences from a known source situation to a less familiar target situation. Because of its centrality in human thinking, analogy has been the subject of numerous computational modeling efforts. Models of similarity come from multiple traditions in cognitive science, including associationist approaches (such as connectionist models), “traditional” symbolic approaches (such as graph matching and production systems), and hybrid symbolic/connectionist approaches. This chapter reviews and evaluates several models from these various approaches in terms of their ability to simulate basic similarity, relational similarity, and system mapping.

We unpack the role of sense of place in relation to urban experimentation. We conceptualise urban experimentation as a governance approach to foster and activate innovation capacities of communities and places for climate adaptation and institutional trialling of novel approaches. We focus on an urban living laboratory (ULL) as one specific type of urban experiment that has received increasing attention in European cities recently, and use experimentation in ULL as an example to reconsider a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of place. We find that our case study, BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, NL provides a space where new place-related narratives of change, novel practices and relations emerge, while being embedded within wider, translocal networks of practice. Backed by these insights, we contend that a translocal, pluralised and dynamic concept of place promises to be a valuable lens in order to understand the impacts, manifestations and appropriate responses to global challenges in everyday life.

In this concluding chapter, I explore the implications of contractual theories’ failures to satisfactorily justify the robust moral status of PSID. Social contract theory can justify a robust moral status and meaningful social integration for many people with cognitive impairments. However, (1) not all PSID can fit within a contractual framework and (2) in many cases, there are salient facts about PSID that ought to guide their treatment and social integration. I suggest that relational or role-based accounts of morality offer a promising way to reconcile our seemingly conflicting intuitions about the grounds for the robust moral status of all human beings. I argue that we should not discard social contract theories, but rather give them their due place, which involves limiting them to the relations or circumstances to which they apply. I am not yet making the case for integrating theories of care ethics, concern, empathy, or fiduciary relations in a theory of justice, or in a parallel theory complementing it, but I deal with a few objections that social contract theorists may raise against such an endeavor.

As noted by Bauer, real dvandva compounds – that is, coordinative compounds that properly express the aggregation of two different entities, not the intersection of properties in one entity – are extremely rare in English and Spanish. This article explores the empirical domain of dvandva compounding in Spanish, and notes that they are productive when not used as heads within their phrases. We propose that the explanation for this is that Spanish can only productively build dvandva compounds using flat structures without internal hierarchy. This causes the compound to look externally for a head noun that defines the interpretation of the relation established between the two members of the dvandva. The proposal also explains why proper names are preferred in dvandva compounding, given that they do not denote properties.

This chapter discusses the central question why Aristotle, in spite of having everything required to conceptualize a complex measure of speed in terms of time and space, did in the end not explicitly develop such a measure. It is first investigated whether contemporaries of Aristotle may have worked with such a complex measure of speed, and concluded that it cannot be found in either of the two thinkers most likely to have done so, namely Eudoxus and Autolycus. The second part of the chapter investigates what made Aristotle cling to a simple measure and suggests that there are mathematical and metaphysical reasons: metaphysically, Aristotle cannot explicitly accommodate a relation as a measure of motion, since relations are derivative and problematic for him; mathematically, the principle of homogeneity which derives from the realm of Greek mathematics makes it impossible to combine of different dimensions in a single measure in the way needed for measuring speed in a mathematically informed physics such as Aristotle’s.