This is one of the identities offered by Ovid for the goddess Anna Perenna, whose festival falls on the Ides of March. Ovid's lines give us the following information about this version of Anna: she was a poor but industrious old woman living in the suburbs of Rome, her benevolent baking and distribution of cakes provided much-needed sustenance for theplebsduring theirsecessioon the Mons Sacer, and theplebsrepaid this service when peace was restored by dedicating a cult-statue to her, so founding the (...) cult of Anna Perenna. This Anna is thus a minor character, otherwise unknown, associated with a cult of obscure origin and with a major historical event, the firstsecessio plebisto the Mons Sacer usually dated to 494 B.C. This alone would make it likely that Ovid is inventing her here as circumstantial detail. When we consider that wo are told that she lived at Bovillae, some twelve miles south-east of Rome, and that the Mons Sacer was located three miles north-east of the city, any probability of Ovid's story being a fully historical report vanishes; Anna of Bovillae was simply in the wrong place to purvey cakes to theplebson this occasion, unless she ran a modern-style delivery service over a thirty-mile circuit. The possibility remains that there was an otherwise unknown cult of Anna Perenna at Bovillae to which Ovid refers, since the association of Anna with Bovillae must have come from somewhere, especially as it here seems to introduce an unwanted inconsistency. (shrink)

The high moral tone of Horace's Reguhls ode makes it unsurprising that the poet should employ the traditional imagery of philosophers, both in the speech of Regulus and in the final simile. I should like here to point out some instances which seem to have escaped the notice of commentators.This passage is intended to illustrate the lost ‘virtus’ of the prisoners in Carthage, who, Regulus claims, will be of no greater use to the Romans if ransomed since they were cowardly (...) enough to surrender in the first place. For the first image of dyeing wool Kiessling–Heinze refer the reader to Lucretius 6.1074–7:purpureusque colos conchyli iungitur unacorpore cum lanae, dirimi qui non queat usquam,non si Neptuni fluctu renovare operam des,non mare si totum velit eluere omnibus undis.This gives the first hint that the image belongs to the philosophical tradition, though it does not seem to occur in the extant remains of Epicurus. This is confirmed by a passage of Plato, who at Rep. 429d ff. has an elaborate image taken from the dyer's art. The Guardians of the ideal city are to be carefully selected and prepared like wool for the dyeing process of education; then, as good wool keeps its colour after dyeing, so the Guardians will keep right opinions when they are taught them. The image is summarized by Socrates at 430a ff. (shrink)

These rhetorical texts by Apuleius, second-century Latin writer and author of the famous novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, have not been translated into English since 1909. They are some of the very few Latin speeches surviving from their century, and constitute important evidence for Latin and Roman North African social and intellectual culture in the second century AD, a period where there is increasing interest amongst classicists and ancient historians. They are the work of a talented writer who is (...) being increasingly viewed as the major literary artist of his time in Latin. (shrink)

The winning of the ultimate military honour of spolia opima, spoils taken personally from an enemy commander killed by a Roman commander, traditionally occurred only three times in Roman history, the winners being Romulus in the legendary period, A. Cornelius Cossus in either 437 or 426 and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 B.C.1 The dedication-place of these special spoils was the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, traditionally founded by Romulus for the purpose, and considered the oldest (...) temple in Rome : the god was said to draw his name either from the fact that the spolia opima were carried up to the Capitol by the victorious general in person, or from the fact that the general had to strike down his opposite number before such spoils could be won. (shrink)

This brief study employs Lacan's theory about the self and about the way that our self-image is constituted to highlight some crucial differences between one important Roman Catholic philosophical religious anthropology and one interpretation of the Theravāda Buddhist theory of anattā. It concludes that one persuaded of Lacanian theory would be likely to regard the Roman Catholic model of personal-identity as fostering a particularly tenacious and dangerous illusion, while being likely to view the Theravādan philosophy more favourably, regarding (...) it as encouraging a similar process of ego-deconstruction to that available within Lacanian psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Horace's Asterie ode has been somewhat neglected by critics. Fraenkel, uninterested in the erotic odes, fails to mention it, and others see it as merely counterbalancing the preceding six Roman Odes by its frivolity and light irony. However, it is one of Horace's most subtle and best-organized erotic odes, matching the more obvious conventions of Latin love-elegy with a romanticized Odyssey as an underlying framework.

Cicero's praise of Caesar in thePro Marcelloof September 46b.c.e.has been much discussed for its sincerity or otherwise. Here I would like to point out some unobserved literary colour which may make some contribution to the argument, namely Cicero's subtle evocation of Hercules in describing the achievements of the victorious Caesar. Such an analogy is not unlikely in the context of Roman military image-making: Sulla in 78b.c.e.and Crassus and Pompey in 70b.c.e.had earlier encouraged connections with Hercules in analogous victorious contexts, (...) and similar comparisons are later made between the foreign conquests of Augustus and those of Hercules in both Virgil and Horace. (shrink)

This paper highlights certain features of the metamorphosis that the concept “the end of the world” has undergone from its origin in early Christian thought to the present day. This concept has, in recent decades, become increasingly prominent within Western European Lutheran and Roman Catholic theology. This paperdemonstrates that the notion of the end of the world popularized by Jürgen Moltmann and Karl Rahner, despite the traditional, biblical language in which it is couched, has more affinity with the philosophical (...) concept “the end of history” developed by Hegel than it has with the ideas common in early Christianity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 633-637 [Access article in PDF] Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas; Elsner, eds. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii + 379 pp. Cloth, $65. As he moves from monument to monument and polis to polis, Pausanias gives the impression that the sun is always shining and the weather fresh and sweet. Beyond the (...) next turn in the road, there might be a grove or spring and maybe a precinct of Demeter, a statue of Artemis, or a little temple of Aphrodite. If they were "worth seeing," we can rely on Pausanias to let us know. Delivering a mixed narrative that weaves together history, myth, and his own style of ekphrasis, his even-toned voiceover makes him a comfortable traveling companion. Or does it? We know that the oaks on Mt. Parnon make the forest dark (they are still there today), but for Pausanias, the land is called Skotitas, "Dark," not for the shadows of the oaks, but for Zeus Skotitas who had his sanctuary nearby. As Ada Cohen points out in her essay, Pausanias does not describe the landscape itself but only the places where it intersects with divinity. As the collaborators here make clear, similar principles of selection operate on other levels. Pausanias may enable us to visualize a lost world, but the view is sanitized. Writing at the peak of Roman wealth, power, and privilege, he gives us old Greece with hardly a trace of Rome. He presents cities without houses, landscapes without agriculture, sanctuaries without worshippers, and the past without the present. Like the cardboard and cellophane 3-D glasses worn by cinema audiences in the 1950s, his text brings into temporary and unstable focus a very specialized scene, but the view is that of a virtual museum, a theme park created for our viewing enjoyment.How did he do it and what are the consequences? I admit that when it comes to Pausanias, I am one of those "seekers after lost religions" whom Elsner classifies with archaeologists surveying the text of Pausanias for possible excavation sites. We will all be a little more careful after reading this book. Yet, where else [End Page 633] could we find the information Pausanias gives? Habicht rehabilitated Pausanias in the 1980s by demonstrating how well his text stands up when compared with the surviving external record. Pausanias did not have a spreadsheet to keep straight the sixty-nine altars at Olympia, but he must at least have taken notes.The arrangement of the articles presented here replicates a familiar academic setting. Structured like a weekend conference, the book divides into three sessions ("The Traveler and the Text," "Studies and Comparisons," and "Nachleben"), with four papers and two comments in each session. Very generally, the topics are: landscape as language (J. Elsner); mental baggage and method (E. Bowie); informants and information (C. P. Jones); pilgrimage and the inspiration of vision (I. Rutherford); selection and cultural choice (M. Torelli); memory and memorization (D. Konstan); identity, monumentality and the recall of mo(nu)ments sublime (J. Porter); representation of space and movement (A. Cohen); archaic text and image on the chest of Kypselos (A. M. Snodgrass); filling the empty map of Messenia (S. E. Alcock); Greek narratives in Roman images (B. Bergmann); other Spartas (P. Cartledge); shaping the genre of travel writing (S. B. Sutton); Leake's Pausanias and Greek topography (J. M. Wagstaff); rearranging Pausanias or Farnell on Greek ritual (J. Henderson); Harrison and Verrall present Pausanias for the hoipolloi (M. Beard); Sparta and the French Enlightenment (S. Bann); and remembering and reforming the past (J. Cherry).There isn't space enough here to do justice to every argument, but I will take a sentence to praise the editors for inspiring the synergy of so many specialties. Archaeologists talk about texts; literary scholars talk about places and objects; and art historians discuss the relation between the two. The section entitled Nachleben surveys the nineteenth-century efflorescence of Pausanias and from four very different vantage points evaluates his influence on... (shrink)

Much behavioral welfare economics assumes that expected utility theory does not accurately describe most human choice under risk. A substantial literature instead evaluates welfare consequences by taking cumulative prospect theory as the natural default alternative, at least where description is concerned. We present evidence, based on a review of previous literature and new experimental data, that the most empirically adequate hypothesis about human choice under risk is that it is heterogeneous, and that where EUT does not apply, more choice is (...) characterized by rank-dependent utility models than by CPT. Most of the apparently loss-averse choice behavior results from probability weighting rather than from direct disutility experienced when an outcome is framed as a loss against an idiosyncratic reference point. We then consider implications of this finding for methodological debates about how to model welfare effects of policies, and argue that abandonment of a dogmatic belief in CPT as the correct theory of risk human choice exposes a conceptual error that is widespread in behavioral welfare economics. We provide concluding reflections on second-order, philosophical issues around the grounding of normative commitments in policy-focused economics. (shrink)

The stakeholder perspective has provided a rich forum for a variety of debates at the intersection of business and society. Scholars gathered for two consecutive years, first in North America, and then in Europe, to discuss the major issues surrounding what has come to be known as stakeholder theory, to attempt to find common ground, and to uncover areas in need of further inquiry. Those meetings led to a list of “tensions” and a call for papers for this special issue (...) to help address them. In this article, we introduce the resulting articles and provide some brief commentary on their importance. We end with a few of our own observations about the stakeholder perspective and stakeholder research. (shrink)

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice (...) environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business. (shrink)

The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate and defeasible justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive epistemic justification for a rich catalogue of our evaluative beliefs. However, despite the fact that this justificatory thesis of emotion is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little (...) has been done to explicitly isolate what it is about emotions that bestows them with justificatory ability. The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel and thorough analysis into the prospects of phenomenology-based—or dogmatist—views of emotional justification. By surveying and rejecting various instantiations of the emotional dogmatist view, I endeavour to provide an inductive case for the conclusion that emotional phenomenology cannot be the seat of the emotions’ power to immediately justify evaluative belief. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the (...) significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual. (shrink)

We study computable Polish spaces and Polish groups up to homeomorphism. We prove a natural effective analogy of Stone duality, and we also develop an effective definability technique which works up to homeomorphism. As an application, we show that there is a $\Delta ^0_2$ Polish space not homeomorphic to a computable one. We apply our techniques to build, for any computable ordinal $\alpha $, an effectively closed set not homeomorphic to any $0^{}$-computable Polish space; this answers a question of Nies. (...) We also prove analogous results for compact Polish groups and locally path-connected spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adam Smith and the History of the Invisible HandPeter HarrisonFew phrases in the history of ideas have attracted as much attention as Smith’s “invisible hand,” and there is a large body of secondary literature devoted to it. In spite of this there is no consensus on what Smith might have intended when he used this expression, or on what role it played in Smith’s thought. Estimates of its significance (...) range from the laudatory—“one of the great ideas of history,” to the dismissive—“an ironic joke.”1 Commentators are also divided on whether Smith’s “invisible hand” has teleological or providential connotations, or whether it is simply a rhetorical device. John Kenneth Galbraith declared that we do a grave disservice to Smith if we insist on understanding his invisible hand as a kind of “spiritual force.”2 Spenser J. Pack maintained that the invisible hand was “a rhetorical device which Smith made up, and knew he made up” and certainly “not [End Page 29] a theological underpinning for Smith’s social and/or economic theory.”3 Others have adopted the opposite view. Jacob Viner contended that Smith’s economic theory becomes unintelligible if “the invisible hand” is evacuated of its theological significance.4 For David A. Martin, Smith’s use of the phrase pointed to the foundational role played by divine wisdom in Smith’s thought, while for Andy Denis, “the invisible hand concept in Smith was entirely and unambiguously theological.”5Surprisingly, given this situation, a systematic study of the uses of the expression before Smith has yet to be made.6 Indeed, it is not unusual to find claims that Smith invented the expression himself, or that it was primarily owing to his influence that the phrase first became widespread.7 Those who have made perfunctory efforts at a history of the phrase generally point to a few scattered literary references with a view either to judging them irrelevant to Smith’s oeuvre, or to suggesting that Smith’s (admittedly meagre) uses of the phrase are empty metaphors. This paper seeks to remedy this deficiency, offering a history of “the invisible hand” with a particular focus on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What clearly emerges from this survey is that the concept was relatively common by the time Smith came to use it. Moreover, while “invisible hand” was used in a variety of contexts, by far the most common involved reference to God’s [End Page 30] oversight of human history and to his control of the operations of nature. Almost certainly, then, when readers encountered the phrase in Smith, they would have understood it as referring to God’s unseen agency in political economy. Whether Smith was himself committed to such a view is more difficult to determine, but the history of the expression and the contexts in which it appears in Smith’s writings offer some support for providentialist readings.Hidden and Invisible HandsThe expression “invisible hand” was not commonly used before the seventeenth century. It does not occur in classical literature (although some have suggested that the phrase may be found in Ovid).8 Neither does it appear in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.9 The earliest reference that I have found occurs in a Greek liturgy which invokes God’s “invisible right hand which is full of blessing.”10 The liturgy was used by the Alexandrian Church and its origins date back (probably) to the second century. However, [End Page 31] the expression is relatively rare in subsequent patristic and medieval writings. In one of his Old Testament commentaries, Alexandrian Church father Origen (185–254 ce) attributed the Israelites’ defeat of the Amalekites, recorded in Exodus 17, to the agency of God’s hidden hand.11 Some later sources made reference to the work of a “hidden” or “invisible” hand of God in restoring individuals to health. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce) thus spoke of the hidden hand of God which heals and makes whole.12 A medieval source refers similarly to a wound being healed by the touch of an invisible hand.13 French Benedictine Petrus Cellensis (1115–83 ce) alluded to the action... (shrink)

Explores the historical relations between science and religion and discusses contemporary issues with perspectives from cosmology, evolutionary biology and bioethics.

Few seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between religious and secular institutions, yet there is widespread disagreement regarding what "religion" actually means. Indeed, some go so far as to question whether there is anything at all distinctive about religions. Hence, formulating a definition of "religion" that can command wide assent has proven to be an extremely difficult task. In this article I consider the most prominent of the many rival definitions that have been proposed, the majority falling within three basic (...) types: intellectual, affective and functional definitions. I conclude that there are pragmatic reasons for favouring the formerly popular view that essentialist definitions of "religions" are inadequate, and that religions should be construed, instead, as possessing a number of "family resemblances". In so arguing, I provide a response to the view that there is nothing distinctive about religions, as well as to the recent claim that religions do not exist. (shrink)

Most people take it for granted that it's morally permissible to have children. They may raise questions about the number of children it's responsible to have or whether it's permissible to reproduce when there's a strong risk of serious disability. But in general, having children is considered a good thing to do, something that's morally permissible in most cases (perhaps even obligatory).

Recent perspectives on community investments suggest that they are opportunities for firms to create value for shareholders and other stakeholders. However, many corporate managers are still influenced by a widely held belief that such investments erode profits and are therefore unjustifiable from an agency perspective. In this paper, we refine and test theory regarding countervailing forces that influence community-based firm performance. We hypothesize that high levels of available slack will be associated with higher community-based performance, but that this relationship will (...) be moderated by three important governance variables: board independence, investment fund ownership, and CEO ownership. We find support for our hypotheses in longitudinal study of a large sample of U.S. corporations. (shrink)

In a recent essay in this journal, Tom O’Shea defends socialist republicanism, marrying the value of freedom as nondomination to public ownership of the means of production. In this reply, I argue that the efficiency costs that often attach to public ownership may undercut the ability of the socialist republic to combat domination by public agents. I provide two reasons in support of this claim. First, the economic gains provided by efficiency can insulate individuals from the discretionary power of other (...) agents. Put briefly, the more wealth you have, the less the discretionary power threatens your basic interests. Second, the efficiency costs of public ownership also make it more difficult to hold accountable the managers of economic organizations. This shortcoming of O’Shea’s argument reveals a point hitherto neglected in the republican literature—caring about nondomination implies caring about efficiency. (shrink)

Virtually everyone takes the moral supervenience thesis to be a basic conceptual truth about morality. As a result, if a metaethical theory has difficulties respecting or adequately explaining the supervenience relationship it is deemed to be in big trouble. However, the moral supervenience thesis is a not a conceptual truth (though it may be true) and as such it is not a problem if a metaethical theory cannot respect or explain it.

The internet presents not just opportunities but also risks that range, to name a few, from online abuse and misinformation to the polarisation of public debate. Given the increasingly digital nature of our societies, these risks make it essential for users to learn how to wisely use digital technologies as part of a more holistic approach to promoting human flourishing. However, insofar as they are exacerbated by both the affordances and the political economy of the internet, this article argues that (...) a new understanding of wisdom that is germane to the digital age is needed. As a result, we propose a framework for conceptualising what we call cyber-wisdom, and how this can be cultivated via formal education, in ways that are grounded in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and that build on three prominent existing models of wisdom. The framework, according to which cyber-wisdom is crucial to navigating online risks and opportunities through the deployment of character virtues necessary for flourishing online, suggests that cyber-wisdom consists of four components: cyber-wisdom literacy, cyber-wisdom reasoning, cyber-wisdom self-reflection, cyber-wisdom motivation. Unlike the models on which it builds, the framework accounts for the specificity of the digital age and is both conceptual and practical. On the one hand, each component has conceptual implications for what it means to be wise in the digital age. On the other hand, informed by character education literature and practice, it has practical implications for how to cultivate cyber-wisdom in the classroom through teaching methods that match its different components. (shrink)

Divine command theories of metaethics are commonly rejected on the basis of the Euthyphro problem. In this paper, I argue that the Euthyphro can be raised for all forms of moral realism. I go on to argue that this does not matter as the Euthyphro is not really a problem after all. I then briefly outline some of the attractions of a divine command theory of metaethics. I suggest that given one of the major reasons for rejecting such an analysis (...) has been found to be unsound divine command theories deserve to be taken more seriously in contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, Page 234-264, Summer 2023.

[Introduction]: Curiosity is now widely regarded, with some justification, as a vital ingredient of the inquiring mind and, more particularly, as a crucial virtue for the practitioner of the pure sciences. We have become accustomed to associate curiosity with innocence and, in its more mature manifestations, with the pursuit of truth for its own sake. It was not always so. The sentiments expressed in Sir John Davies's poem, published on the eve of the seventeenth century, paint a somewhat different picture. (...) To seek knowledge with no particular end in mind was to indulge in "fruitlesse curiositie," while the "desire to know" was associated with those catastrophic events that took place at the dawn of history in the Garden of Eden and with the ensuing curse that fell upon succeeding generations. Davies's poem neatly sets out two of the chief impediments to the advancement of learning in seventeenth-century England: the fact that the Genesis narrative attributes the Fall of the human race to the desire for knowledge, and the moral disapprobation associated with the vice of curiosity. In short, the traditional classification of curiosity amongst the vices and its complicity in the commission of the first sin represented a major obstacle to early modern projects to enlarge human learning. This essay will explore the changing fortunes of curiosity, from its construction as an intellectual vice in the patristic era to its subsequent transformation, over the course of the seventeenth century, to a virtue. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which Francis Bacon dealt with prevailing conceptions of curiosity and forbidden knowledge and how he modified an existing view of the moral legitimacy of knowledge of nature in order to provide rhetorical justification for his proposed instauration of learning. This change in the status of knowledge of nature, initiated by Bacon and promoted by his successors, highlights the morally charged character of early modem debates over the status of natural philosophy and the particular virtues required of its practitioners. As we shall see, the rehabilitation of curiosity was a crucial element in the objectification of scientific knowledge and led to a shift of focus away from the moral qualities of investigators and the propriety of particular objects of knowledge to specific disciplines, procedures, and methods. (shrink)

Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707–1778) became known during his lifetime as a "second Adam" because of his taxonomic endeavors. The significance of this epithet was that in Genesis Adam was reported to have named the beasts—an episode that was usually interpreted to mean that Adam possessed a scientific knowledge of nature and a perfect taxonomy. Linnaeus's soubriquet exemplifies the way in which the Genesis narratives of creation were used in the early modern period to give religious legitimacy to scientific (...) activities and to taxonomy in particular. Allusions to Adam's work in the Garden of Eden thus became a way of investing the vocation of the naturalist with religious significance. (shrink)

This volume is concerned with the concept of rationality and the interrelations between rationality, belief and desire in the explanation and evaluation of ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century ThoughtPeter HarrisonDiscussions about animals—their purpose, their minds or souls, their interior operations, our duties towards them—have always played a role in human self-understanding. At no time, however, except perhaps our own, have such concerns sparked the magnitude of debate which took place during the course of the seventeenth century. The agenda had been set in the late 1500s by Montaigne, who had made (...) the remarkable (if somewhat rhetorical) claim that animals were both moral and rational, and moreover, more moral and rational than humans. In the century which followed, Descartes, not to be outdone, put forward the even more contentious counter-proposal that animals were not only neither rational nor moral, but that they were not even conscious. The Cartesian hypothesis fueled a debate which continued until well into the eighteenth century. 1 While in recent years much attention has been given to issues of animal consciousness and cognition in seventeenth-century thought, the related question of the moral capabilities of animals has been by comparison neglected. In this paper I shall explore the converse side of the better known arguments about the rational capabilities of the beasts, focusing on seventeenth-century discussions concerning the behaviors and passions of the beasts and the extent to which animals were thought to participate in the moral universe of human beings.I. During the first sixteen hundred years of the common era, those thinkers who directed their attention to the natural world had tended to be preoccupied neither with questions of how animals came into being nor with the direct [End Page 463] causes of their various operations but rather with the question of why they existed at all. Almost without exception responses to this question were variations on a single theme: animals had been placed in the world to provide for the physical needs of human beings. 2 While this response proved to be satisfactory in general terms, there were acknowledged deficiencies. Many living things seemed to have been rather extravagantly designed for their putative purpose. Others seemed blatantly to contradict it. Why were our meat supplies, for example, not more conveniently presented, like the fabled Scythian lamb which grew on a tree? Why was it that a significant number of creatures appeared to be useless or even downright harmful to those whom they were designed to serve? And why, finally, were human beings created such that they were dependent upon lesser creatures for their survival?Responses to these difficulties generally took one of three forms, each of which was influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. First, it could be asserted that as a result of the Fall, human beings had forfeited their dominion over the creatures, many of which now served as instruments for their punishment and correction. Augustine observed that “there are many things, such as fire, frost, wild beasts and so forth, which do not suit but injure this thin-blooded and frail mortality of our flesh, which is at present under just punishment.” 3 In the seventeenth century this view still attracted many supporters. Thus Godfrey Goodman, in The Fall of Man (1616), wrote that “all the creatures, forsaking their first and naturall use, did serve for mans punishment, and rebelled against him.” 4Second, an appeal could be made to the Platonic principle of plenitude and the related idea of the chain of being. The principle of plenitude taught that more is better and that variety is preferable to uniformity. God, wrote the third-century Christian apologist Lactantius, “wished to display His providence and power by a wonderful variety of many things.” 5 It followed that all existing things could be ranged in a vast scale from non-existence to God himself, with each link in the chain separated from its neighbor by a small difference. Again, this view found many adherents in the early modern period. Thomas Robinson declared that “it was necessary that there shou’d be a variety of Natures, and [End Page 464] different Degrees of Life and Perfection.” Thus “every Creature even of the lowest Degree of Life, is Good and Perfect in its Kind.” 6 Important for our... (shrink)

The last few decades have witnessed a flowering of interest in the history of science in the British Empire. This essay aims to provide an overview of some of the most important work in this area, identifying interpretative shifts and emerging themes. In so doing, it raises some questions about the analytical framework in which colonial science has traditionally been viewed, highlighting interactions with indigenous scientific traditions and the use of network‐based models to understand scientific relations within and beyond colonial (...) contexts. (shrink)

I argue social and political freedom is not primarily about the absence of constraints, whether those constraints be in the form of interference or domination. Instead, social freedom is centrally about what makes us free. That is, the question of social freedom is first and foremost about determining the positive preconditions of being a free person within society. Social freedom is about what I call the social bases of freedom, or those features of our social world that we have a (...) reason to rely on in making plans or going about our business. (shrink)

To show how the case of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein brings light to the ethical and moral issues raised in Institutional Review Board protocols, we nest an imaginary IRB proposal dated August 1790 by Victor Frankenstein within a discussion of the importance and function of the IRB. Considering the world of science as would have appeared in 1790 when Victor was a student at Ingolstadt, we offer a schematic overview of a fecund moment when advances in comparative anatomy, medical experimentation (...) and theories of life involving animalcules and animal electricity sparked intensive debates about the basic principles of life and the relationship between body and soul. Constructing an IRB application based upon myriad speculations circulating up to 1790, we imagine how Victor would have drawn upon his contemporaries’ scientific work to justify the feasibility of his project, as well as how he might have outlined the ethical implications of his plan to animate life from “dead” tissues. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor failed to consider his creature’s autonomy, vulnerability, and welfare. In this IRB proposal, we show Victor facing those issues of justice and emphasize how the novel can be an important component in courses or workshops on research ethics. Had Victor Frankenstein had to submit an IRB proposal tragedy may have been averted, for he would have been compelled to consider the consequences of his experiment and acknowledge, if not fulfill, his concomitant responsibilities to the creature that he abandoned and left to fend for itself. (shrink)