In this chapter, I explore the imaginaries of prosperity underlying the European Union’s (EU) approach to industrial law and policy. Long considered a taboo in European politics, the EU began to rediscover industrial policy after the 2008 great financial crisis, gradually increasing its ambitions when it came to shaping the relations between the state and the market. Having reviewed an array of EU measures, starting with the 2010 industrial policy and including the more recent burst of legislative proposals (Chips Act, Batteries Act, Critical Minerals Act, and Net Zero Industry Act), this chapter aims to do two things. First, it identifies shifts in the background understanding of political economy, including the role and appropriate objectives of markets, politics, law, and government, that lie behind successive policy interventions. Second, this chapter sketches the contours of the new synthesis of prosperity that emerges from these recent proposals and measures, while at the same time, and in no ambiguous terms, drawing attention to its considerable limitations.

Chapter 3 explores how European institutions have (re)imagined consumption, and consumers, as part of the changing imaginaries of prosperity. It does so by exploring systematically the discursive shifts behind the European Union’s consumer policies over the past fifty years, identifying how the changing imaginaries of economy, government, law, politics and nature have produced different imaginaries of consumers and consumption. After the long arc of the dominance of neoliberal imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, we have witnessed more recently a gradual shift in the background understanding of political economy. The emergent imaginary of prosperity shares some elements with the previous ‘welfare state’ imaginaries of prosperity and consumption, such as the return of the language of ‘protection’. But it also incorporates entirely new preoccupations such as repair, longevity, maintenance, circularity, and sharing, all the while embracing a more expanded, ‘holistic’ understanding of consumer interests.

Possible-worlds semantics for modal predicates is explained. Ill-foundedness rather than circularity is shown to be the source of most paradoxes. The central status of Löb’s theorem is established.

We discuss to what extent the results depend on how concepts like truth or provability are expressed and how self-referential sentences are obtained.

In ‘Aristotle on the Stages of Cognitive Development’, Thomas Kjeller Johansen examines Aristotle’s contributions to our thinking about concepts from a different perspective, namely in connection to Aristotle’s psychology. He revisits Aristotle’s account of how we acquire universal concepts mainly on the basis of Metaphysics A.1, Posterior Analytics 1.31 and 2.19, and the De Anima. The chapter begins by articulating the following puzzle. On the one hand, Aristotle points out (An. Post. 1.31, 2.19) that we perceive the universal in the particular. On the other, he suggests (Metaph. A.1) that it is only when we have craft and science that we grasp the universal, while perception, memory, and experience all are concerned with the particular. Building on the widespread view that, according to Aristotle, the universal grasped in craft and science is the universal cause, Johansen argues that we should understand perception, memory, and experience teleologically, as stages in the ordering of perceptual information that allows this causal concept to emerge.

This third chapter concludes the first part of the book with a specific focus on the current mainstreamed conceptualisation of the bioeconomy, including expectations and criticisms about its potential societal contribution. Drawing from the green and circular economy – two ideas popularised during the past two decades in the academic, policy, and practitioner communities – the chapter discusses future avenues for the conceptual development and practical implementation of the bioeconomy.

Shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma struggles to find a solid scientific foundation, largely because of a circularity confound, the same diagnostic features under study serve as the basis for categorising cases for research purposes. In an attempt to overcome this circularity, researchers have turned to confessions as a sorting criterion in the research, under the belief that confessions are independent of the diagnostic features and hence not subject to circularity. However, none of the research examines the nature and reliability of the confessions, or the interrogations that produce them; they simply accept the confessions as true, reliable, and independent. Research on interrogations and false confessions, however, along with extensive and wholly consistent anecdotal evidence, strongly suggest that SBS/AHT confessions are largely if not entirely produced by interrogator reliance on the diagnostic findings. That reliance undermines both the independence of the confessions, and hence their ability to break free from circularity, and the reliability of these confessions as a group. On the current state of knowledge, confessions cannot be relied upon to substitute for science to support the SBS/AHT hypothesis.

In Chapter 3, I focus on the nature of reactive blame itself. In order to see fully how the fittingness account of basic desert might help to resolve the problem of blame, we are in need of a clearer picture of the reactive attitudes whose conditions of appropriateness this solution will ultimately depend on. I canvass three prominent views of reactive blame (P. F. Strawson’s, R. J. Wallace’s, and David Shoemaker’s) that I take to be most helpful in further explicating what meeting the desert-based desideratum for normative adequacy might look like. Here I argue for a cognitivist view of the reactive attitudes, and that we ought to restrict the scope of the relevant class of reactive attitudes at issue quite narrowly. With a sharper view of the reactive attitudes in hand, I then return to the fittingness account of basic desert and offer a first pass at an account of the right kind of reasons to reactively blame.