Many readers have seen Piers Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in this text. For Langland, monetary exchange, along with the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is conducive to balance and order, to the practice of virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates to needs that cannot be measured, and thus to desires that cannot be checked and boundaries that cannot be known.

This final chapter provides words of encouragement and hopefully inspiration.

This chapter discusses the four main reasons to measure outcomes: 1. measuring the change in outcomes tells you how you are doing with respect to providing health care; 2. with outcome data you can identify opportunities for learning and improvement; 3. outcome data give patients and their families critical information about what to expect when they seek care from you or your organization (or, if you work for a payer organization or employer, from the health care providers within your network); and 4. you have an ethical obligation to understand whether the care you provide is helping or harming.

This chapter describes what it means to measure the outcomes that matter most to people and describes the Capability, Comfort, and Calm outcome measurement framework developed by Elizabeth Teisberg and Scott Wallace.This framework orients measurement and improvement efforts around achieving health and the outcomes that matter most to patients. It also helps reframe existing measurement efforts into a framework that facilitates measuring the results of health care. This chapter outlines the following key principles in measuring health outcomes: measure at the individual patient level and measure during the course of care.

[38.1] Statutory reasonableness refers to the use in legislation of the ‘reasonableness’ standard in its various forms. The concept of statutory reasonableness may be profitably examined, taking in its general characteristics and its special interpretative aspects. The importance of examining it is underlined by the fact that, for a number of compelling reasons, it is widely used in statute law.

Chapter 2, ‘A Mathematical Culture: The Art of Setting Limits’ brings the reader directly into early modern metal mines. The birth of a vernacular culture of geometry is described, detailing the daily work of craftsmen and insisting on the materiality of measuring practices. Surveys, carried out in public during solemn ceremonies, were a keystone of mining laws. The chapter exposes a central hypothesis of this book: At the time, mathematical accuracy acquired a dual meaning. Measurements had to be precise enough to solve intricate technical problems, while at the same time respecting procedures codified in mining customs and laws. Far from being a mere tool, geometry was meant to ensure trust; it was ubiquitous and pervaded many aspects of a miner’s life. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran pastors actively fostered the rise of practical mathematics. Mathematical and religious rationality were equated, making subterranean geometry accurate in a third way, this time as an expression of divine will. The omnipresence of measurements, combined with their legal and religious recognition, ultimately conferred a higher status to the discipline.

As a preliminary to discussing the idea that, for Aristotle, sensibility and intelligence are “measures” of their respective objects, in this chapter I discuss Aristotle’s conception of “measure.” Though the devil is in the details, the fundamental point is tolerably clear. It is that measures for knowing the objects of some genus are prior to – enter into the very idea of – certain particular forms of that genus. The inch, for example, is a measure of length, and it enters into the very idea of certain particular lengths, e.g. one inch, two inches, three inches, and so on. Similarly, if straight is the measure of linear shape, it enters into the very idea of certain particular shapes, e.g. straight and curved. In this way and in this sense, measures are “forms of forms”: that is, what it is to be certain particular quantities or qualities of a genus is to stand in some relation to the “measure” of that genus.

This chapter is focused on Aristotle’s account of sensibility in De Anima II 12. My thesis is that the account defines sensibility as the standard in relation to which perceptible qualities are the sorts of quality they are. To illustrate, Aristotle holds that some colors are dark, others light; this implies that the spectrum of dark and light is “divided” into two “sides,” one dark, the other light. In the previous chapter I suggested that what it is for a quality to lie on one side of a spectrum – e.g. to be one of the dark colors – is a matter of its relation to the “middle” of the associated spectrum. In this chapter I argue that the claim that sensibility just is “as it were a kind of mean of the contrariety in perceptible qualities” implies that these “middles” are defined by sensibility itself, the form or essence of the primary sense organ. The upshot is that the senses are “forms” or “standards” of perceptible qualities, in that the particular qualities known by their means are the sorts of quality they are (e.g. dark colors or light ones) thanks to their relationship to the form of the primary sense organ.

This chapter asks what it is about “intelligence” (nous) that, in Aristotle’s view, makes “understanding” or “insight” (noēsis) its proprietary work. It argues that the answer lies in the peculiar clarity and distinctness of that activity. This clarity and distinctness, it argues, make intelligence the very “form” or “measure” of its objects – what they all “have in common,” what “makes” them intelligible, what their intelligibility consists in.

This chapter contains counterexamples related to set functions, in particular to measures and outer measures.

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.