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The concept of agent causation is introduced and queried through an examination of the account given by the eighteenth‐century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, and the more recent accounts of Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. With Reid, the author emphasizes that an exertion of active power is not prior to or logically independent of the intention that is the agent's immediate effect. Against Taylor, he argues that an exertion of active power cannot itself be causally produced. Finally, contra Chisholm, once we recognize that an agent's exertion of active power is intrinsically a direct exercise of control, there is no need to further explain how the agent controls this event itself.

Writers on happiness often discuss a question about our authority with respect to our own happiness. Some maintain that we do have authority; others deny it. This is a vexed topic, in part because talk of ‘authority’ is ambiguous. To say that a person “has authority” over his own happiness might be to say that he has knowledge about his own happiness. In another sense it might be to say that she has some sort of control over how happy she will be. Section 11.1 contains discussion of several different principles about epistemic authority. Arguments are presented to show that all these principles about epistemic authority are false. Section 11.2 contains discussion of several different principles about controlling authority. Each of these principles is false. A strategy for increasing one's own level of happiness is proposed. If Attitudinal Hedonic Eudaimonism is true, then there is a procedure that we can use to make ourselves happier.

An ancient objection to eudaimonism is based on the idea of “disgusting happiness”. Steven Cahn developed an interesting version of this objection based on a fictional character—Judah Rosenthal, from the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Judah passes all popular tests for happiness but is utterly morally corrupt. His case casts doubt on the naive identification of happiness with welfare. It's not clear that the case is decisive. Nevertheless, a form of eudaimonism that is intended to circumvent this problem can be developed. According to this novel form of the theory, the welfare value of each episode of happiness must be adjusted so as to reflect the extent to which the object of that happiness deserves to be enjoyed. It is left to the interested reader to determine whether the modification is really needed.

This chapter examines Confederate surrenders east of the Mississippi after Appomattox Courthouse. It argues that these post-Appomattox surrenders were more complex and contingent than most historians imagine. It focuses on Johnston's surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman at Bennett Place, Jefferson Davis's flight, and why some Confederate soldiers refused to surrender.

This chapter describes the similarity between fatalists and time travelers, and presents David Foster Wallace's opinion concerning the error within this comparison. Fatalists regard the future like the past while time travelers regard the past like the future. This mirroring of the fatalist and time traveler suggests that both positions seem counterintuitive about what one can and cannot do. Richard Taylor expounded on this similarity in his response to the “Ability Criticism,” where he noted that people are all fatalists about the past. In “Richard Taylor's ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality,” David Foster Wallace points out the flaw between the comparison of the two using System J., saying that if Taylor's fatalist conclusion (all actions and inactions are necessary) involves a different sort of modality than the modality operating in his fifth premise, then his argument is rendered invalid.

Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler’s move out of New Orleans into the bayou country of south Louisiana to gain control of important cotton and sugar production, and the Confederacy’s ill-prepared response.

This chapter concentrates on the legal and political issues that arose during the so-called ‘war on terror’ in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Issues that were addressed, very directly, in a series of ‘verbatim’ plays written and produced in that moment. Amongst the most renowned were the so-called ‘Tribunal’ plays written by Richard Norton-Taylor. The genre, as the nomenclature suggests, sought to re-present various high-profile cases and judicial inquiries on the public stage. Whilst the chapter considers a number of different ‘verbatim’ plays, it focusses more closely on Norton-Taylor’s Called to Account. This play is unusual in that it presents a ‘virtual’ history of a fictitious trial, on war crimes charges, of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In so doing, it challenges the defining pretence of the ‘verbatim’ genre; that the simple presentation of legal and quasi-legal transcript confirms the veracity of the text.

Under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor, Confederate forces turned against their Union pursuers south of Shreveport, attacking them at the village of Mansfield, Louisiana. Banks’s army, caught strung out along a narrow road, was defeated and piecemeal and routed in panic back toward the village of Pleasant Hill, where they at last rallied and were reinforced. There, on the day following the battle of Mansfield, Taylor’s exhausted troops attacked them again, fighting them to a bloody tactical stalemate. Banks’s army still greatly exceed Taylor’s in numbers, but nevertheless he chose to withdraw toward New Orleans.

This chapter discusses film industry regulation in totalitarian states. It is often suggested that in the totalitarian states of the 1930s — the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire — cinema was no more than a crude form of state propaganda. Certainly these were not liberal states and overt opposition was not tolerated, but it would be equally wrong to see the films that were produced in these countries as simply propagandist. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’ by Richard Taylor, which shows that, while Soviet cinema is usually seen as an organ of the Soviet state, it was actually organised as a commercial activity that was expected to stand on its own two feet financially.

Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, having failed to achieve a foothold in Texas with an amphibious invasion, attempted an overland campaign across south Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1863. He was defeated by the inferior numbers of Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor and force to retreat, well short of the Texas border.

This chapter presents some final thoughts. Mississippi was among the last of the Confederate states to be surrendered; on May 4, 1865 General Richard Taylor surrendered his troops. Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9 and Joseph E. Johnston on April 26. However, for many who fought for and/or supported the Confederacy, the war did not end in 1865. The emotional, physical, and psychological trauma of defeat, the impact of the war dead on families, the lingering effects of severe wounds, and the losses of homes and property left scars that filtered down through many generations.

With Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg presenting an increasing threat to that vital river fortress, Confederate authorities in Richmond called for Confederate forces in the trans-Mississippi to cooperate with the city’s garrison to raise the siege. A division of Texas troops struck the Federal line on the west bank of the Mississippi River, but, after achieving initial success, were repulsed by Union gunboats.

Having failed three times to establish a beachhead in Texas, N. P. Banks attempted once again in the early spring of 1864, moving toward the rich cotton producing area of central Louisiana and northeast Texas. With a massive three-pronged offensive—which included a large naval component moving up the Red River as well as his own Army of the Gulf, veterans of U. S. Grant’s successful campaign against Vicksburg, and Frederick Steele’s army at Little Rock—he easily captured Alexandria and continued to converge on the strategically vital Confederate city of Shreveport, Louisiana.

Although happiness and meaning are interrelated, they are not the same. A person may renounce happiness in favor of uncomfortable resistance. This kind of choice is often associated with heroes and, to some extent, saints. One can still live a meaningful life even without much happiness, despite the fact that a meaningful life provides its own measure of happiness. This chapter examines what makes a life meaningful. It looks at the relationship between happiness and meaning in John Stuart Mill’s autobiography and proposes a notion of a pluralism that is essential for the problem of meaning as much as for other areas of philosophy. It illustrates some of the ramifications of the pluralist approach by considering the ideas of the philosopher Richard Taylor about meaning. The chapter also introduces the concept of significance in relation to a meaningful life.

Samuel Mansfield is the first in the class to take command of a volunteer unit. He returns to his home town in Connecticut after the death of his father, Maj. Gen. J. K. F. Mansfield at Antietam and helps raise the Twenty-fourth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry Regiment. It is assigned to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks and the Department of the Gulf in November 1862 to participate in an expedition to capture Port Hudson. From March until July, 1863, Mansfield marches with Brig. Gen. Cuvier Grover’s division through the swamps, bayous, and lakes of Louisiana, participates in engagements at Irish Bend and Franklin where Banks’s force is hindered by Confederate general Richard Taylor’s army and former classmates Oliver Semmes and John West. Semmes is captured and sent north to a prisoner-of-war camp, but escapes before arrival and eventually returns to Louisiana to lead General Taylor’s artillery. Meanwhile, after seven weeks and 180 miles, Mansfield finally reaches Port Hudson in late May to participate in the attacks and siege, including almost twenty-five days behind an earthen barricade. After the surrender of Port Hudson in early July, his unit is ordered home and mustered out of federal service in October 1863. Mansfield doffs his volunteer rank and returns to his duties in the regular army as an engineer officer.

This chapter begins Part III of the book, which addresses the other major theoretical perspective on meaning in life, the naturalist view that imperfect ways of living in a purely physical world can be sufficient for meaning. Chapter 9 considers subjective naturalism, the theory that ways of life are meaningful insofar as they are the object of propositional attitudes, e.g., by satisfying desires. The chapter first rejects arguments for subjectivism that come from Richard Taylor, Harry Frankfurt and others, after which it rejects subjectivism itself for having counterintuitive implications regarding which lives count as meaningful. This criticism has been common to make, and so the chapter adds fresh ideas by considering whether less well-known forms of subjectivism, such as the intersubjectivism of Stephen Darwall, can avoid the problem. It concludes that they cannot, and that some notion of objective value is essential for a plausible theory of meaning in life.