Chapter 5 turns to the law in action and the politics of litigation involving adjudication and interpretations of the law. The chapter opens with an examination of the Council of the Indies’ initial judgment in September 1784 on the plaintiffs’ case. Based on a narrow reading of slave law and on pro-slavery policies, the ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ controversial claim to collective freedom and to the criteria of freedom presented by the plaintiffs’ brief but allowed hearings to determine ambiguous cases and stipulated the criteria to be utilized by colonial courts in those cases. The ruling gave way to a cascade of hearings and legal actions in lower-level colonial courts and to a conflict of interpretation over the imperial ruling. Ordinary enslaved and fugitive cobreros dispersed throughout the island became direct participants in the judicial arena at this point as they directly engaged in the politics of litigation for freedom in colonial courts. The chapter shows the way imperial and colonial authorities centralized and controlled judicial outcomes but also the room for maneuvering available in some cases.

After the return to the defense, Simmias and Cebes raise objections to Socrates’ kinship argument, Socrates warns them to avoid misology, and then he responds to Simmias’ objection. These objections and this warning simultaneously serve as the climax of the first half of the dialogue and set the agenda for the second. I argue that misology is a more specific problem than it is typically taken to be, a problem that aspiring philosophers (like Socrates’ companions) are especially at risk of suffering, one that involves not merely becoming cynical about arguments but positively hating them. I then turn to Simmias’ objection and Socrates’ response to it. I argue that, as Socrates interprets Simmias’ theory that the soul is a harmonia, it makes the soul a properly fitted together composite, not the formal structure possessed by such a composite. This means that Socrates is not arguing against a type of supervenience theory or epiphenomenalism, as is frequently claimed. Socrates’ arguments against Simmias’ theory highlight how it cannot explain basic ethical features of the soul that the kinship argument’s account can explain.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.