Fervent expressions of erotic desire, the beauty and terror of passionate arousal, are here uncovered in religious texts, creation myths, ‘arts of love’, poetry and fiction across four millenia and twenty-four cultures. The chapter starts with an example known throughout the world: the Hebrew love poem preserved as The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, translated into many languages including German, Chinese and Yoruba, emulated by Oscar Wilde and Toni Morrison. It argues that the Song and related literature are significant for the frank celebration of mutuality and orgasm, and the psychological understanding of cruelty and loss, rather than for their supposed spiritual meanings. These central themes are traced back to the most ancient narratives of primal copulation (including the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh) and forward to intensely sexual episodes in Milton, Goethe, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and women authors from Mediaeval mystics up to the present. A closely related literary genre turns love-making into an art form, cultivated for its own sake: examples come from ancient Egypt and Rome, the Indian Kama Sutra, the Arabic Perfumed Garden, the Modi of Aretino in Renaissance Italy, and French, Chinese and Japanese novels of sexual instruction and adventure.

Ban Zhao (c. 45–117) was the first woman public intellectual in ancient China. Her Lessons for Women (Nüjie), composed around 100 CE, was the earliest Chinese written work known to be authored by a woman scholar solely intended for women’s education. This text was widely studied since its publication until the early twentieth century. Besides being an accoladed scholar, Ban Zhao was also a mother of several children. Her life and writings exhibited an interesting contradiction between her independent spirit as a contrarian and a conformist compromise to constrictive social norms on women. Consequently, she was both praised as an exemplary woman philosopher and condemned as an accomplice of the patriarchal oppression of women. This chapter argues against the overly-simplistic anti-feminist charge of Ban Zhao by examining her life and a wider range of her writings than is usually considered, including not only her Lessons for Women but also her poetry and official memoranda, in order to reappraise her philosophy and her distinctive strategy to gender politics.

A valid explanation may not be based on any theory, and luck can be a valid explanation of certain business events. Regression to the mean suggests that good performance (probably due to good luck) is likely to be followed by decline whereas poor performance (probably due to bad luck) is likely to be followed by improvement. When theory is used, there is a risk of theory-ladenness of observation, which challenges the traditional empiricist account of scientific observation as the passive reception of sense-data. The theory-laden view implies that different paradigms or theories may be incommensurable in the sense that their proponents may not be able to communicate with and understand each other meaningfully. However, both theory-ladenness and incommensurability are exaggerations and can be overcome. The example of yin-yang theory shows that it is important to distinguish between substantive theory (or theory in the usual meaning of the term) and metatheory. The former is used to explain empirical phenomena whereas the latter serves as the philosophical foundation for the former.