In this chapter, I show that Augustine’s “divine illumination theory of knowledge” is merely his belief that the human mind is capable of intellectual cognition because it naturally “participates” in the Divine Mind, as its image. Consequently, the claim that Augustine thought the human mind must be enlightened by special divine assistance in ordinary (nonmystical) intellectual cognition is erroneous. That is true of the whole of his writing career: earlier works such as On the Teacher and the Confessions agree with his presentation in On the Trinity 12. This resolution of a long-standing debate about how to interpret Augustine becomes possible when we pay careful attention to the ancient philosophical problems “illumination” is meant to resolve, and when we use Plotinus and the early Christian Neoplatonist Marius Victorinus to interpret his vocabulary and claims.  The recovery of this late ancient context greatly clarifies Augustine’s epistemological theory and reveals its explanatory power.

In “The Formation of the Book of Isaiah: Foundations and Current Issues,” Marvin A. Sweeney analyzes the history of scholarship about the editorial processes that gave rise to the Hebrew text as we have it. As scholars have long done, he takes Bernhard Duhm’s nineteenth-century commentary as a starting point, but then shows the myriad ways in which more recent scholars have challenged his presuppositions and greatly improved on his findings. In the process, he identifies many of the themes and features in the book that have led him and other interpreters to perceive a redactional shaping of the book in four major phases—broadly one per century in the eighth through fifth centuries bce. Sweeney’s most significant contributions to the study of Isaiah, reflected here, have been his demonstration of the Davidic covenant in the final form of the book and his refinement of our understanding of the Josianic layer from the late seventh century bce.

Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.

Sociology is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. Empirically, a key goal is to find relations between variables. This is often done using naturally occurring data, survey data, or in-depth interviews. With such data, the challenge is to establish whether a relation between variables is causal or merely a correlation. One approach is to address the causality issue by applying proper statistical or econometric techniques, which is possible under certain conditions for some research questions. Alternatively, one can generate new data with experimental control in a laboratory or the field. It is precisely through this control via randomization and the manipulation of the causal factors of interest that the experimental method ensures – with a high degree of confidence – tests of causal explanations. In this chapter, the canonical approach to causality in randomized experiments (the Neyman–Rubin causal model) is first introduced. This model formalizes the idea of causality using the "potential outcomes" or "counterfactual" approach. The chapter then discusses the limits of the counterfactual approach and the key role of theory in establishing causal explanations in experimental sociology.

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

Pronunciation teaching is often based on assumptions that learners are monolingual speakers, with the sound system of their native language determining the segmental and suprasegmental difficulties that mark learners’ foreign accents. However, many, if not a majority of speakers of other languages come to pronunciation with more than one language under their command. These bilingual/multilingual speakers are the norm in a globalized world, but how we teach pronunciation rarely accounts for the knowledge and skills these speakers bring to the learning of pronunciation. This chapter describes how the characteristics of bilingual speakers suggest how pronunciation teaching can be reimagined to take into account the range and flexibility of bilingual speakers in using multiple languages. Specifically, we argue that taking a nativeness viewpoint is inconsistent with taking a bilingual viewpoint and calls for pedagogical techniques that build on the kinds of needs bilingual speakers have in pronouncing additional languages.

The fifth chapter covers the broad span of prose and poetic Latin literature that intends to instruct. But didactic works are never simply technical: even those that seem clunky to us were written with an eye to style, at least in parts. On the other hand, some of those that seem purely ornamental have in fact been found genuinely useful by some readers. We discuss the genre’s origins in Greek literature, and explore primary prose and poetic exemplars: Cato, Varro, Cicero, Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid.