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This analysis of Saadiah’s reading of Job begins with a brief summary of his discussion of the suffering of the righteous in Beliefs and Opinions, where he lays out the philosophical ideas that are critical for his interpretation of Job. This is followed by a summary of the contents of his commentary on Job. The discussion then proceeds in the order of the three interfaces outlined in the introduction: a discussion of the sources and antecedents of Saadiah’s reading of the Book of Job; an analysis of Saadiah’s reading as an exegetical exercise grappling with the biblical text; and finally revisiting Saadiah’s discussion of the suffering of the righteous in Beliefs and Opinions to determine precisely how his systematic thinking on theodicy relates to his exegesis on Job.

This chapters looks at the various written charms—such as certain passages from the Quran or the names of God—that were worn, engraved, or hung up, as well as the rituals to protect against disease, misfortune, and the jinn. The most common was to protect against the evil eye—cowrie shells, alum, and mixtures of herbs and salts, were commonly used. Other practices were also used to cure sickness or disability, and this chapter describes the systems and beliefs used to determine the course of action. It ends with a run down on which days of the week are considered ‘fortunate’ and auspicious.

Looking at Sunni Muslims, this chapter starts with the four schools (the Hanafis, the Shafi‘is, the Makikis, and the Hanbalis), and who adheres to which school. It provides a summation of the basic beliefs in Islam and looks at ideas of morality and religious ritual, such as prayer. It explains the different types of prayers, how they are performed, as well as explaining what happens at Friday prayers. Finally, it explores both civil law, governing personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc.), and criminal law (for example, theft, adultery, and apostasy), as well as how the justice system worked.

This chapter explores how guerrilla motifs were still readily discernible in the official discourse of the 1970s. Scholarly studies have often overlooked this period in the Revolution’s trajectory, designating it simply as a decade of “Sovietization,” or, to use the Cuban term, increased “institutionalization.” What the evidence in this chapter reveals is that, though the Revolution underwent a profound structural change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the beliefs and values which underpinned the revolutionary project in its formative years—that is, those linked to a guerrilla ethos—were still being promoted well into the Revolution’s second decade in power.

Human agents do not simply survive but navigate their world quite successfully despite being inclined to adopt and hang onto irrational beliefs. In this introductory chapter, the author justifies the new framework of epistemic innocence as an attempt to make sense of the idea that our undesirable and at times cringeworthy irrationality may be instrumental to succeed as imperfect agents. The challenge is to create the conceptual resources for evaluating the epistemic status of beliefs that violate standards of truth, accuracy, and epistemic rationality but play an important role in supporting epistemic functionality. The notions of epistemic irrationality, epistemic functionality, and epistemic innocence are introduced and the methodological assumptions guiding the discussion in the subsequent chapters are explained.

In this chapter, the author argues that beliefs about the past that are based on distorted autobiographical memories have the potential for epistemic innocence. The focus is on beliefs about the past that people report in the context of dementia and other conditions in which autobiographical memory is severely compromised. Such beliefs may embellish people’s past achievements or present circumstances, or simply be inconsistent with life events that people can no longer remember. Having memory beliefs to report increases the opportunity for socialisation and information exchange with peers, making content available for sharing and enabling feedback on it. More important still, the maintenance and reporting of memory beliefs about the autobiographical past, when these are not entirely fabricated and contain a grain of truth, enable the retention of key self-related information that would otherwise be threatened by progressive memory loss.

This chapter presents a philosophical discussion of Immanuel Kant's contractualism. It first considers the Rational Agreement Formula, which says everyone ought to follow the principles to whose being universally accepted it would be rational for everyone to agree. It then examines John Rawls' Contractualist account of morality, which he calls rightness as fairness. It argues that when applied to morality, Rawls' version of contractualism fails. But if we removed the contractualism from Rawls' great theory of justice, the result would be a liberal egalitarian view that is both in itself very appealing and well supported by some of Rawls' non-contractualist claims and arguments. The chapter also tackles reasons and rationality in relation to the Kantian Contractualist Formula, which says everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will, or choose. Finally, it analyses Thomas M. Scanlon's version of contractualism and the so-called Deontic Beliefs Restriction.