Prometheus, having lamented the burden of his brother Atlas, speaks of earthborn Typhos and his punishment by Zeus. The text and apparatus of lines 351 to 357 are given in Sir Denys Page's edition thus.

In a review in JHS lxxxix 127 Dr M. L. West gives as an example of ‘a certain innocence on matters of literary history’ the belief that seven-stringed lyres ‘came in’ in the seventh century B.C. Since the emphasis in the context is upon rigorous down-dating, what Dr West seems to be saying is that seven-stringed lyres were not in use amongst the Greeks before about 600 B.C. I hope that I do not misunderstand Dr West's contention: the purpose of (...) this short note is to suggest, with the greatest respect and deference, that another view of the matter may perhaps be permissible.Let us ignore the seven-stringed musical instrument shown on the Ayia Triadha sarcophagus, because evidence from the Late Bronze Age may be thought too remote to be relevant to early Hellenic musical practice. Let us also leave aside ancient opinions associating Terpander with the seven-stringed lyre and assigning him to the first half of the seventh century B.C.. Dr West may well regard the putting of trust in such testimonies as evidence of incorrigible amateurism. There remains, nevertheless, a contemporary witness to the existence of seven-stringed lyres amongst the Greeks of the seventh century B.C.In JHS lxxi 248, fig. 8, there is illustrated a fragment of a Subgeometric dinos of the first half of the seventh century B.C. from the excavations at Old Smyrna. On the piece is painted a seven-stringed lyre. The lines representing strings are carefully distinguished and spaced. It would be extravagant to assert that the artist could not count, or that he was suffering from hallucinations, or that he was imagining a type of instrument never seen by himself or his customers. In short, a tentative suggestion may be made—with due deference and hesitation: scholars, including those whom in this particular matter Dr West would, it seems, classify as innocents, ‘can seriously argue’ that seven-stringed lyres were reintroduced to Greece or ‘came in’ well within the first half of the seventh century B.C. (shrink)

I agree with comments suggesting that humans must make an unremitting effort to expand a circle of sympathy for others. However, I disagree with the idea, expressed by everyone except Sarah Hrdy, that evolution is in some sense consistently good.

T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to their needs, (...) and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

T. H. Huxley's essay and prolegomena of 1894 argued that the process and products of evolution are morally unacceptable and act in opposition to the ethical progress of humanity. Modern sociobiological insights and studies of organisms in natural settings support Huxley and justify an even more extreme condemnation of nature and an antithesis of the naturalistic fallacy: what is, in the biological world, normally ought not. Modern biology also provides suggestions on the origin of the human moral impulse (...) and on tactics likely to be effective in the combat against nature urged by Huxley. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Dewey in Chicago: Some BiographicalNotes* GEORGE DYKHUIZEN DEWEY'S REPUTATION in philosophical, psychological, and educational circles brought him many invitations to lecture at other institutions of higher learning, and he was frequently kept busy meeting these engagements. In July, 1896, for example, he headed the departments of psychology and pedagogy at the Summer Institute of Martha's Vineyard,1 and in August delivered a series of lectures on "Imagination in Education" (...) at Chatauqua. 2 During the summer of 1901, he gave courses at the University of California in Berkeley~ and in the spring of 1904 gave six lectures on "Problems of Knowledge" at Columbia University and three lectures on "Moral Education" at Brooklyn Institute3 Dewey was also very much in demand as a speaker at professional meetings of philosophers, psychologists, and educators. In the spring of 1896 he spoke at the first annual meeting of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.5 He was elected president of the American Psychological Association for the year 1899-1900 and gave as his presidential address, "Psychology and Social Practice." Later, in December, 1901, he addressed the Association on "Interpretation of Savage Mind." g Dewey was also an active member of the American Philosophical Association and was to become its president in 1905 He was a member of the Illinois Society for Child Study and of the National Herbart Society and frequently addressed meetings of these organizations. With so much of his spare time taken up with off-campus engagements, Dewey could not take as great a part in on-campus activities as he may have wished. Nevertheless, like other members of the faculty, he took his turn speaking at the Wednesday afternoon lecture series which the University provided for the students. The most outstanding of Dewey's talks on these occasions were the two he delivered on successive Wednesdays in the summer of 1897. These were entitled "Evolution and Ethics," and created quite a stir because in them Dewey defended evolution and attacked the dualism between the cosmic and ethical processes set up by T. H. Huxley in his Romanes lecture of 1893. Dewey argued that the ethical has its roots in the cosmic and is continuous with itY *This is the second of two articles on John Dewey'sChicago years. For the first of these articles, see my "John Dewey: The Chicago Years," Journal of the History o/ Philosophy, I1:2 (Oct., 1964),227-253. 1University Record, I (July, 1896),278. Ibid. (Aug.7, 1896),311. 81bid. VI (July 26, 1901),171. ~Ibid. IX (June, 1904),92. 51bid. I (April10, 1896),35. *Ibid. VI (March, 1902), 358. Dewey's talk appeared in Psychological Review, IX (May, 1902),217-230. Ibid. II (July, 1897),162.Dewey'stalks werepublished in the Monist, III (1898),321-341. [217] 218 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY There is no record of Dewey having spoken, as did many of the other faculty members, at the University Chapel services held, for a while, each noon on the campus. Indeed, during his Chicago years and thereafter, Dewey disassociated himself more and more from organized religion and instead devoted his energies to educational and social affairs. He did not join the Hyde Park Congregational Church upon surrendering his membership in the Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, and he did not require that his children do so. When his mother, a loyal and pious Congregationalist who was living with them, remonstrated and declared that the children ought to be sent to Sunday School, Dewey's reply was that in his youth he had gone to Sunday School enough to make up for his children's failure to do so. Dewey attended only irregularly the meetings of the University Senate, being present at only eleven of the nineteen meetings held during his years at Chicago. But he made his voice heard when he was present. He was one of two opposed to the establishment of a separate school of commerce and political science;s he moved to waive the requirement of Latin for graduation from the Senior College ;9 he proposed "a modification of the requirements respecting history in the undergraduate course"; 1~and he voted in favor of requiring one... (shrink)

I concur with Williams that improving human ethics requires full consideration of the biogenetic facts; but I argue that the understanding of biogenetic facts, and of ethics also, can be improved by a fuller view of nature's mechanism for selecting what is fit, a view recently generated by physical scientists. For me ethics necessarily must fit the evolved genotype, but ethics does not emerge until the rise of cultural evolution, where nature selects a culturetype symbiotic with the genotype. I outline (...) my integrated dynamics of the relation of culturetypes to genotypes and to the laws governing physical systems. The biologist's finding that a living organism is of transient significance compared with its lines of heritage and their consequences, I argue, is constructively important for ethical and theological understanding. (shrink)

Many believe that nanotechnology will be disruptive to our society. Presumably, this means that some people and even whole industries will be undermined by technological developments that nanoscience makes possible. This, in turn, implies that we should anticipate potential workforce disruptions, mitigate in advance social problems likely to arise, and work to fairly distribute the future benefits of nanotechnology. This general, somewhat vague sense of disruption, is very difficult to specify – what will it entail? And how can we responsibly (...) anticipate and mitigate any problems? We can't even clearly state what the problems are anticipated to be. In fact, when we move from sweeping policy statements to more concrete accounts, nanotechnology seems to bifurcate into two divergent streams: one is fairly continuous with current developments, extending extant science in a quantitative way; the other is radically new, and includes science fiction-like dreams of molecular manufacturing and assemblers, with their utopian scenarios of absolute plenty. In these cases, “disruption” takes on the valence of Huxley's brave new world. (shrink)

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and social (...) and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success. (shrink)

Historically labor has been central to human interactions with the environment, yet environmentalists pay it scant attention. Indeed, they have been critical of those who foreground labor in their politics, socialists in particular. However, environmentalists have found the nineteenth-century socialist William Morris appealing despite the fact that he wrote extensively on labor. This paper considers the place of labor in the relationship between humanity and the natural world in the work of Morris and two of his contemporaries, the eminent scientist (...) Thomas Henry Huxley, and the Fabian socialist Herbert George Wells. I suggest that Morris's conception of labor has much to recommend it to environmentalists who are also interested in issues of social justice. (shrink)