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Horowitz's chapter is critical of the consociational aspects of Northern Ireland's Agreement. It views the ‘grand coalition’ executive at the heart of the Agreement as unwieldy because it includes the extremes, particularly Sinn Fein. The chapter describes the commitments contained in the Agreement as maximalists, and argues that these commitments will rebound, when they are not delivered, to the advantage of militants. Horowitz prefers, for Northern Ireland and elsewhere, what he calls an ‘incentives’ approach. The likeliest and most stable coalition resulting from this is one that includes moderates and excludes militants.

A lot of people write on the history of ancient Israel, from biblical scholars to archaeologists and social scientists. However, most such writers are not historians and often do not understand what a proper historical investigation should look like. This has been the bane of the history of Israel: that most of those who write on history are ultimately not interested in history as such. This chapter examines some issues relating to scholarly debate that are not always understood because they relate to approaches and attitudes, yet which are often more important in the direction taken by debate than the actual issues of data and specific scholarly method. These issues include minimalism vs. maximalism, whether the United Monarchy ever existed, ad hominem arguments by conservative evangelicals, and the forgery of antiquities.

What is the relationship between an embodied human subject and the human animal which sustains the subject's mental capacities? After distinguishing the main ingredients of phenomenal embodiment (seeming to have a body), an account of embodiment itself is developed which does not require subjects actually to be in their bodies. In recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that neo-Lockean accounts of the self inevitably double the number of subjects there actually are — this is sometimes called the ‘too many subjects’ problem. How one answers this objection depends on the stance one takes on other issues, e.g., some take the self to occupy just a part of its body, others say selves and their bodies exactly coincide (‘minimalism’ v. ‘maximalism’). The C-theory is not restricted to any one conception of embodiment, but it is most naturally construed along minimalist lines.

This book has demonstrated that all major ideas of Symeon the New Theologian are rooted in Orthodox tradition and that his teaching corresponds to the ideas of preceding Fathers, including Gregory Nazianzen and Symeon the Studite. It can also be asserted that the ideal of ‘living according to the Gospel’ was a cantus firmus of the whole of patristic theology and that Symeon repeated what had been preached from age to age by the church Fathers. It can be claimed that Symeon's mysticism is a part of the mystical experience of the Orthodox Church and that the same sort of experience was the driving force behind the development of Orthodox theology. It can be maintained, after all, that Symeon's maximalism reflected in fact the general approach of the Christian tradition and the maximalism of Jesus Christ. What distinguishes Symeon from the majority of other church Fathers is his autobiographical approach to mystical themes, in particular his openness in description of his own visions of the divine light.

This chapter explores the connections between Dickens’s Bleak House and developments in calculus around the concept of the limit. Apparently limitless, an eminently maximalist text, endlessly esteemed as “massive,” pedestaled as the very archetype of realism, Bleak House famously encompasses the biggest city in the nineteenth century and the foundational institution underwriting it: the law. Yet the form of this novel turns out to be conspicuously delimited in ways that pinpoint a surprising minimalism: bounded settings, a tight repertoire of architectural tropes, a small cast of pivotal actors, incomplete plotting, and the iconic split narration whittle and winnow this novel’s amplitude. The chapter shows that limits in an aesthetic or social sense have often been understood as exclusive, but that their mathematical sense can help us to see their inclusiveness, what they generate and enable. Limits stipple the shapes of social space into perceptibly high relief. If you want to build, you have to start somewhere.

This chapter is about events in the history of Soviet theater and arts from 1926 to 1927. During the period, a real attempt was made to bring the theater completely under Party control by appointing Communists as producers and administrators; establishing “artistic councils” within the theater; and emphasizing the role of “activist” groups such as Party, Komsomol, and trade unions to wage “civil war in the theater” and end the “spiritual New Economic Policy (NÉP).” Meyerhold's Inspector General was the dominant production of this transitional period, marking the apogee of his power and influence. The stripped-down and minimalist mechanism of his earlier productions was replaced by opulence and maximalism.

The network novel is a late-twentieth-century literary genre that reworks and intensifies the cultural concerns regarding a world interconnected by communication and transportation networks, and made unprecedentedly dependent upon an informational economy. This chapter examines two novels—Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999)—that foreground the maximal capacities of network aesthetics. When read together, these texts disclose both the novel form’s epistemological capacity to know networks and to record the structural impossibility of knowing networks through language alone. These novels open up a series of concepts that network form encourages us to think in new ways, including the “knowledge,” “history,” “event,” and “materiality.” The various clashes of formal logics in these texts run parallel to paradoxical sociopolitical logics inherent in the discourse and material practices associated with US networks of late capitalism.

If the theory of truth as truthmaking is to be plausible, then all truths must have a truthmaker. This is truthmaker maximalism. It is a difficult idea to defend (§3.1), and existing arguments for it are not sufficiently strong (§3.2). I’ll offer a more powerful argument, showing that the maximalist’s opponent is committed to a maximalist ontology (§3.4, §3.6). I consider some objections to the argument in §3.5.

Negotiating Taruskin's concept of maximalism, this chapter explains the character of the period covered and establishes the subject as that of art and its audience in the age of modernism. The book's argument is contextualized with reference to the theories in Richard Leppert's The Sight of Sound and John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. There is also an attempt to explore the nuances of an understanding of romanticism through discussion of a key text by Wackenroder. This facilitates a better sense of what might be “late” romantic about Mahler's Second Symphony, a critical discussion of which, linked to the author's experience of hearing it for the first time, occupies the closing section of the chapter.

This epilogue examines Dorothy Day's absolute pacifism as part of her maximalist practical theology. It considers the pacifist form-of-life that Day defended in the face of World War II and how it corresponded to her evangelical poverty as both a form of witness and technique for forming Christian conscience. From its inception in 1933, the Catholic Worker movement hit the streets with a distinctive amalgamation of radical politics and maximalist Christian spirituality, maintaining a dogged opposition to all forms of militarism as an evangelical sign of contradiction against the prevailing “just war” traditions that dominated Catholic moral theology and international policy. This chapter discusses the influence of Lacouturisme—largely under the stewardship of John Hugo—along with Peter Maurin and other critical interventions in Day's spiritual development on Christian maximalism that became the hallmark of the Catholic Worker personalism.

Recent times have seen resolute efforts seeking to reconcile Asian traditions with democracy, specifically by bending some hierarchical features of the past in the direction of the qualitative equality and relationality demanded in our age. The chapter concentrates on debates in several Asian countries, including China, about the compatibility of Confucian teachings with the democratic requirement of equal citizenship. The chapter distinguishes between a minimalist, a maximalist, and a balanced approach. In the first case, Confucian teachings are restricted to the purely private sphere removed from public life. This model robs Confucianism of the crucial element of social relationality. In the second type, Confucianism is elevated to a dominant creed, in violation of the constitutive openness (or emptiness) of the democratic public space. The last version rejects this totalizing ambition, but without abandoning Confucianism’s educational and socializing qualities, thus arriving at a social-democratic vision.

The introduction shows how a general suspicion of stylistic flamboyance in post-war England led writers like Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, and Martin Amis to feel at odds with English literary culture. Reconsidering these writers as sophisticated stylists and ethicists—the ‘stylists of excess’—the introduction outlines the major arguments of the ethical turn in literary criticism, describing some of the general antagonisms between the humanist revival and the new ethics, before suggesting a literary ethics that borrows from both without over-relying on notions of character and interiority (contra the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the ‘new ethics’). It proposes an expansive approach to style in order to appreciate the stylists of excess: for example, style as perception; style as a way of knowing and being in the world; and style as the expression of an ethical sensibility that can affect the reader.

The problem of act versions arises because one’s best option can be a version of a bad option. For instance, kissing passionately is a version of kissing. But it may be that although kissing passionately is one’s best option, kissing is a bad option. For it could be that, as a matter of fact, one would kiss nonpassionately if one were to kiss. This chapter argues that the best solution to this problem lies with adopting maximalism. On this view, the only options that have their deontic status in virtue of their own goodness are maximal options—options that are entailed only by evaluatively equivalent options (those being options that are identical in terms of whatever ultimately matters). According to maximalism, then, one ought to kiss even if one would, as a matter of fact, kiss nonpassionately. On this view, one ought to kiss, because one ought to kiss passionately, and kissing passionately entails kissing.

Maximalism forces us to deny either that we ought to do whatever we have most reason to do or that how much reason there is to perform a given option is directly proportional to how good that option is. In this chapter, I argue that we should deny the latter. We should instead hold that how much reason there is to perform a given option is directly proportional to how good the best version of that option is. Thus, how much reason I have to kiss my partner is not a function of, say, the bad consequences that would result from my doing so (for assume that I would in fact kiss her nonpassionately if I were to kiss her), but a function of the good consequences that would result from my kissing her passionately.

This chapter demonstrates how rationalism, maximalism, and teleology operate together to determine the deontic statuses of our options. And the chapter explains what rationalist teleological maximalism’s main virtues are. Last, the chapter explains why it’s important to work out the structure of our normative theories.

This chapter concerns the classic Christological problem of how Jesus came to be worshipped as God. It contrasts two basic types of explanation: internalist or “developmental” theories that regard Christological development as an unfolding of the inner logic of Christian experience or way of life, and externalist or “evolutionary” theories that attribute this development to the interaction between the Christian movement and various cultural forces from without. The chapter argues in favor of the latter, externalist view. Specifically, it defends the thesis that the upward tendency of Christological development can be explained in terms of early Christian efforts to differentiate themselves from other Jewish communities. Even after Christian and Jewish communities had “parted ways,” representations of the Jewish “other” remain integral to Christian identity formation as rival Christian groups contend for exclusive rights over the Christian name.

The chapter traces Cage’s central role in the development of a new sensibility through his musical and artistic experimentation. In 1952 he produced a work of extreme minimalism, 4ʹ33ʺ, which is about silence opening up listeners to new sounds in their environment. In his excessively maximalist work Theater Piece no. 1, the first happening, performers read poetry, danced, played records, showed slides, and much more in an act of spontaneous experimentation. The chapter fits Cage within the context of the New York City avant-garde and examines his use of the I Ching as a method for composition.

What should we say about the ‘difficult’ cases of truthmaking, involving general and negative existential truths, modal truths, counterfactual truths, analytic truths, and temporal truths? The toughest cases are the general and negative existential truths. I’ll argue that we can’t account for them without introducing new bits of ontology (§5.2 and §5.3). Armstrong’s totality states of affairs are not the best option (§5.4). Negative states of affairs are a better bet (§5.5), although their metaphysical analysis is difficult (§5.6). I’ll discuss the remaining cases – modal truths, counterfactual truths, analytic truths, and temporal truths – in §5.7.