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This concluding chapter contains the author's reflections on the publication of this volume as well as the ideas expressed therein. It first begins with a survey of Machiavellian thought as discussed among the author's contemporaries, before returning to the question of how republican thought had inexplicably taken root in English soil, to say nothing of the scope of Machiavellian thought in the larger scope of European history. The chapter also introduces further questions raised by the topics discussed in this volume, which have not been addressed, emphasizing that The Machiavellian Moment but illuminates certain things which were going on in the history it narrates, and that it touches on many things which could be seen and expressed differently.

This chapter links the parable of the Doorkeeper and other “parables of vigilance” with the eighteenth‐century spiritual writer Jean Pierre De Caussade's “spirituality of the present moment.” It points out that the metaphor of the doorkeeper illuminates the idea of fulfilling God's appointed task (being a watchman, a doorkeeper) and the idea of urgency, and that it is aimed in particular at the following way of thinking:

If God wants me to do something I don’t have to do it now

I can do it at some other time (later)

This chapter argues that de Caussade's notion of “the sacrament of the present moment” illuminates the parable's message that God appears incognito in the duty or task of the present moment, and that watchfulness and readiness to recognize him, alert one to the opportunity to enter the Kingdom of God, by meeting God in the present moment.

This chapter discusses the relation of religion, culture, and society in Kierkegaard's writings. It discusses the phenomenon of leveling in the present age, the phantom of the public, the principle of association, unum noris omnes, the European crisis of 1848, martyrs and pastors as reformers of the crowd, the relation of religion and politics, the Church militant and the Church triumphant, and the function and authority of the institutional church. It examines Kierkegaard's final open attack against the state church. The attack came from two stages, first from a series of articles in a political newspaper, Fædrelandet, followed by a series of self-published pamphlets called The Moment. The final section investigates the reception of his writings and contributions to Christian thought.

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.

This chapter argues for the singular role of Nicolas Malebranche over and above that of Leibniz and Newton in generating analytical mechanics in France in the decades around 1700. It argues first for the importance and widespread influence of Malebranche's philosophy as articulated in his large, multi-volume, and often revised opus La Recherche de la verité, published in many editions between 1674 and Malebranche's death in 1717. In particular, it argues that Malebranche articulated a phenomenalist understanding of scientific knowledge that privileged mathematical analysis, and that his philosophy served as a guiding frame supporting the key innovations that led to analytical mechanics. It also argues that Malebranche's philosophy was widely disseminated and intellectually supported because of its connection to two other features of French intellectual life ca. 1700: the Oratorian religious order and the wide appeal of Cartesian mathematical rationalism, which Malebranche anchored his own philosophy within. The result, the chapter argues, was the emergence of a "Malebranchian Moment" in the decades around 1700 where the widespread cultural awareness of and appeal for Malebranchian thought dominated the culture. This environment was one of the key sources for the emergence of analytical mechanics in France at this precise moment.

This mainly theoretical chapter discusses neglected areas in Wagner’s theoretical works which underpin his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. It focuses in particular on the term Moment which Wagner used liberally in connection with the more familiar Motiv (Grundmotiv). It demonstrates how his exposition of the role of the joint concept serves as a means of expressing the dynamic, dramatic, and structural impact of climactic points in the Ring, functions which are not inherent in the term Motiv alone. In practice the joint technique when applied in the Ring contributes greatly to its unity as a tetralogy and one which aspires to the status of Gesamtkunstwerk. Having also demonstrated the provenance of the term Moment in late 18th- and early 19th-century aesthetics, I argue the case for its further role as a critical concept which can play a leading role in the appreciation of the Ring as Gesamtkunstwerk.

The eternal is the dialectical hinge that turns the individual inward where one encounters the divine in its transcendence but also its intimacy, and it turns the individual outward where one encounters humanity and the human social tasks that belong to one who exists historically. Without the eternal in Kierkegaard’s scheme the category of the individual is not a religious category, but also without the eternal individuals can fall prey to levelling. This chapter considers Kierkegaard’s concepts of ‘the moment’, contemporaneity, and hope, which mediate the relationships between humanity and divinity, temporality and eternity. The chapter also examines how the eternal orients human attention to this world and social life. Finally, the chapter will explain how the eternal, once it becomes a historical task and a human task, also inspires communicative ethics.

After giving an overview about regularisation and renormalisation methods, this chapter shows the calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron in QED. Using a power counting argument, non-, super- and renormalisable theories are distinguish from one another. The structure of the divergences and perturbative renormalisation is discussed for the case of the λϕ‎₄ theory. regularisation methods, renormalisation schemes, anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, power counting, renormalisation of the λϕ‎₄ theory.

This chapter reviews the book Be’or shineihem: ’al ’aliyatam shel yehudei polin lifnei hashoah (In the Last Moment: Jewish Immigration from Poland in the 1930s) (2015), by Irith Cherniavsky. In the Last Moment provides an overview of a mass migration that was critical to Polish Jewry and the Yishuv. More specifically, it explores Polish Jews’ immigration to Palestine during the Fifth Aliyah (1930–1939). During the 1930s, strict immigration quotas in the United States made Mandatory Palestine the main destination for Polish Jewish immigrants. Cherniavsky criticizes scholars who have tended to focus on Polish Jewish immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah (1924–1926), even though “immigrants from Poland also comprised the majority of the Fifth Aliyah, of which only fifteen percent were from Central Europe (Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia).”

The last decade of Kierkegaard’s life represents what scholars refer to as the second half of the authorship, namely, the period from 1846 after the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Kierkegaard’s death in 1855. This chapter explores some of Kierkegaard’s main works from these years, such as A Literary Review of Two Ages, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, The Sickness unto Death, Practice in Christianity, and The Moment. In the exploration of these texts it becomes evident that even as Kierkegaard grows older, he continues to return to the figure of Socrates as a source of inspiration. Even in the last text that he ever completed before his death, he explicitly states that Socrates was the only model that he used for his work. The chapter ends with a biographical account of Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish State Church, his final illness and death, and his rich legacy.

This chapter addresses the question as to how the Christian devout life is related to contemporary holistic spirituality, taking C. G. Jung as representative of holistic spirituality’s quest to balance the binary elements of the self. By way of contrast, Christian spirituality might seem to require the hierarchical subordination of one part of the self to another, reinforcing suspicions as to its essentially heteronomous nature. Nevertheless, the devout life can be shown to be a life involving the coordination of ‘body, mind, and spirit’. Where contemporary holism emphasizes the spatial balancing of the self the devout life integrates spatial and temporal dimensions of selfhood seeking to be focused on the sacrament of the present moment as it moves forward in tranquillity and equanimity.

This chapter examines how situationally induced heroism contributes to objectification—the phenomenon of experiencing other human beings as objects rather than integrated wholes of psyche and soma, worthy of respect and even reverence. It considers the ways in which who we are and what we are often collide to bring more evil into the world, and how they turn otherwise ordinary people into “heroes of the moment.” It suggests that atypical circumstances can ignite what Phillip Zimbardo terms “the heroic imagination” within an ordinary person.

Some models of time do not match the human experience of time ‘flowing’ or passing. This chapter touches upon those models that suggest that this experience is an illusion. The Block Universe model is a contextually incomplete geometric model of spacetime that explicitly fails to describe our feeling of the ‘now’ or the moment of the present. The chapter discusses this and the phenomenon of persistence and transtemporality, that conspire to give us the impression that things exist or endure in time. The chapter discusses the extreme form of this, the so-called problem of time in quantum cosmology, which suggests that the wave-function of the universe is changeless and that time does not exist on the cosmological level.

The Conclusion interprets the narrativization of the Muslim community’s past between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries as the triumph of the ‘historical’ moment. By the end of the seventeenth century, the consolidation of narrative pasts had successfully created a genealogical record of Muslim settlement in Gujarat connecting the history of the Muslim community under the Gujarat sultans to the period of the Mughal occupation of Gujarat. Apart from transcribing the history of migration and settlement, Sufi texts had been instrumental in the early modern conceptualization of the history of the state, the region, and finally the Mughal province.