Field experiments have a long tradition in some areas of the social and behavioral sciences and have become increasingly popular in sociology. Field experiments are staged in "natural" research settings where individuals usually interact in everyday life and regularly complete the task under investigation. The implementation in the field is the core feature distinguishing the approach from laboratory experiments. It is also one of the major reasons why researchers use field experiments; they allow incorporating social context, investigating subjects under "natural" conditions, and collecting unobtrusive measures of behavior. However, these advantages of field experiments come at the price of reduced control. In contrast to the controlled setting of the laboratory, many factors can influence the outcome but are not under the experimenter’s control and are often hard to measure in the field. Using field experiments on the broken windows theory, the strengths and potential pitfalls of experimenting in the field are illustrated. The chapter also covers the nascent area of digital field experiments, which share key features with other types of experiments but offer exciting new ways to study social behavior by enabling the collection large-scale data with fine-grained and unobtrusive behavioral measures at relatively low variable costs.

According to many physicists, several aspects of the laws of nature, the constants, and the cosmic boundary conditions are fine-tuned for life: had they been slightly different, life would not have existed. Here I review the claimed instances of fine-tuning and some of the criticism that has been levelled against the fine-tuning considerations. I also discuss in which sense, if any, fine-tuned parameters may qualify as improbable. Finally, I review the naturalness criterion of theory choice and discuss how violations of naturalness may be regarded as relevant to the discussion about fine-tuning for life.

This essay argues that the traditional (and not just Romantic) association of Shakespeare with nature and passion ties his work to a non-doctrinaire politics and morals. As ‘the poet of nature’, in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Shakespeare is linked to an anti-systematic, open, essentially tolerant worldview. The essay brings this point into sharper focus by recounting how one of the poet’s strangest and most ardent admirers, the twentieth-century French-Rumanian writer E.M. Cioran, understood Shakespeare as an artist fundamentally hostile to philosophy and even to reason itself. For Cioran, Shakespeare, along with kindred authors such as Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, exploded systems and the pretensions of thought. It was Shakespeare’s commitment to the passions and experience, his basic irrationalism, that made his work such a powerful antidote to the murderous and programmatic utopianism that, Cioran believed, had blighted so much of human existence, not least in the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 addresses the debate about the stylistics of the new (muḥdath) Abbasid poets, with a particular focus on rhetorical figures (badīʿ). It establishes that there was a shift in paradigm from an old school of criticism (ninth–eleventh century), which based its evaluation of poetry on its truthfulness and naturalness (qualities associated with the idealized “classical style” of the pre-Islamic poets), to a new school of criticism (eleventh century onwards) based on an aesthetic of wonder. This new school, represented first and foremost by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078), articulated the beauty of the kinds of rhetorical figures (badīʿ) that the muḥdath poets relished, especially hyperbolic and fantastic make-believe imagery, by adducing their ability to evoke wonder in the listener. By doing so, they shifted their judgment of poetry from a truth-based scale, to one that is based on an experience of wonder, which results from novelty, strangeness, and the unexpected that can exist in the poetic form regardless of the truth or falsehood of its content. The chapter argues that an aesthetic of wonder is inherent in the very structure of many of the rhetorical figures, including those identified by critics beyond al-Jurjānī, namely, al-Sakkākī, and al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī.

The epistemicist solution to the Sorites Paradox consists of two key components. First, vague terms, just as non-vague ones, have ordinary classical semantic-values and do not require any revision of classical logic or semantics. In the case of ‘tall’, each person is either tall or not tall, and there is a specific number k such that someone is tall if and only if they are over k metres in height, thus ensuring that one of the premises of the paradox is just plainly false. Second, although words like ‘tall’ have such sharp boundaries, we do not and cannot know what these boundaries are, and this explains why we might be tempted to (falsely) conclude that such boundaries do not exist.

Epistemicm faces four principle challenges: addressing the counterintuitiveness of the view; accounting for how the sharp meanings of vague terms are determined; explaining why we are principally ignorant of the sharp-boundaries of vague terms; and explaining what makes vagueness into a distinctive phenomenon, different than other kinds of ignorance. The chapter focuses on discussion of these four challenges, presents the most prominent defence of Epistemicism - Timothy Williamson’s- and discusses a range of objections from recent literature to these responses.