Victorian physics meets industrial capitalism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9554-0 Authors Bruce J. Hunt, History Department, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B7000, Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This chapter contains sections titled: Nothing Wants to Die An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth Solution 1: Keep Your Powder Dry Solution 2: Pretend It Wasn't You Solution 3: Give, and Ye Shall Receive Solution 4: Take Only What You Need Solution 5: Cheat Death The Keepers of the Game as a Moral Authority Notes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Marcia Muelder Eaton ANTHONY POWELL AND THE AESTHETIC LIFE Anthony POWELL'S work has been looked at carefully by relatively few critical scholars, in spite of the fact that he has been called "the most elegant writer presently working in the English language." ' I am surprised at how little he is read — at least in the United States. He is a splendid writer, often entertaining, always a skilled (...) craftsman. His earlier novels {Afternoon Men, 1931; Venusberg, 1932; From a View to a Death, 1933; Agents and Patients, 1936; and What's Become of Waring, 1939) are short satiric and ironic comedies dealing mainly with London bohemia in the 1920s. His later fictional work is a twelve volume tour de force (A Question of Upbringing, 1951; A Buyer's Market, 1952; The Acceptance World, 1955; At Lady Molly's, 1957; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, 1960; The Kindly Ones, 1962; The Valley of Bones, 1964; The Soldier's Art, 1966; The Military Philosophers, 1968; Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971; Temporary Kings, 1973; Hearing Secret Harmonies, 1975) 2 in which the narrator, NicholasJenkins, attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of life as A Dance to the Music of Time. Both the early and later works are populated by many characters. Manageable in the short, independent novels, they become so numerous in the interdependent volumes of Dance that several critics are dubious about anyone's keeping them straight; had I read them as they were published — with months, sometimes years and the novels of others between appearances — I am sure it would have been impossible to keep track of the minor characters. In 1960, Time and Tide published a cast ofcharacters for "readers who find it difficult to remember from book to book details of family and other more tenuous relationships between characters who have a habit of popping up surprisingly in the most unexpected places."3 The entries provide the following kinds of information: "McReith, Lady (Gwen): friend of Babs Templer and Jimmy Stripling; goes to bed with 166 Marcia Muelder Eaton167 Peter Templer when staying in the Templer (senior) house.... Tolland, George: son of Lord Warminster: was in Coldstream for some years then went into city. Very correct." More recently Hilary Spurling has compiled a book-length guide to the plots and characters ofDance. It also includes an index of books, paintings, and places referred to.4 Even with these guides there are loose ends, and it is not always clear what functions certain minor characters serve. Nonetheless, the popping-up in unexpected places is, as I hope to show, essential to the theme of the work. Powell is by no means universally acclaimed; his novels have been described as "contrived,"5 and "pseudo-Proustian" and "blandly snobbish."6 The early novels have been said to "tell about 'twentyish emancipation, silly parties at which drunks behave stupidly, ambitious young men on the make for the daughters of fox-hunting families, all with an air of slightness and couldn't-care less." 7 And Dance has likewise been scorned: To begin with, each character is introduced as he first appears to the narrator, who immediately speculates for three or four pages on the probable nature of a character who is blond, has small ears, and wears a black overcoat. The overcoat then says a few desultory words, whereupon the narrator takes several pages of pain to modify his original opinion in the light of this additional evidence.8 Like all parodies, these have some truth in them. But it is simplistic to describe his work in these terms — it amounts to painting in colors far too crude what is an enormously subtle picture of life. Powell's "easy modulations," as John Russell has called his novels,9 capture intricacies of human behavior and interaction in a profound and original way. And Powell's focus on ritual and the attempts of people to play chosen roles, ultimately provides a genuinely metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic interpretation of life. It is hopeless to try to provide a synopsis of the twelve volumes. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins from his school days to late middle age. Friends such as Peter Templer, Charles... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Sisk DOCTOR JOHNSON KICKS A STONE Readers OF Boswell's Life ofJohnson will remember the great Doctor's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism. He and Boswell had just come out of a church in Harwich and were discussing the Bishop's "ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter." Boswell observed "that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." To mis Johnson (...) responded, "striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, T refute it thus.'" For Boswell diis was an argument from first principles diat are as fundamental to metaphysics as axioms are to mathematics. To use Johnson's own phrase, it is an argument based on "the experience of mankind" — the ground upon which he confidendy stood when he expressed his disapproval of such other phUosophical contemporaries as Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau (the latter "a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society"). Or as WalterJackson Bate puts it in TheAchievement ofSamuelJohnson, the first principle ofhis thinking was "To go back to the living and concrete nature of experience."1 Boswell thought Johnson a philosopher, though he admits in a famous passage that his table manners might have suggested otherwise. Apparently G. K. Chesterton thought he had some claim to the term, for he called Johnson's novel Rasselas "a sort of philosophical satire on philosophy." Most likelyJohnson thought ofhimselfas among many other things a philosopher: the humanities had not yet setded snugly into dieir modern compartments. Now, of course, any undergraduate student of philosophy is willing to believe that Johnson's argument against Berkeley isn't worth much (he may be no less willing to believe that the Bishop's argument isn't worth much eitiier). He may also know that in the perspective of die modern physicist Johnson's stone was not as solid as Johnson thought it was — though it is likely he would have thought diis information 65 66Philosophy and Literature no more relevant to die argument dian Thaïes' belief diat all diings are made of water or Pydiagoras' diat all diings are numbers. The important thing was whether a drinker violated die experience of mankind. When the Scotchman Lord Hunderland praised the ancient philosophers for the candor and good humor widi which they disputed with one anotherJohnson would have none of it: "They disputed with good humour upon dieir fanciful dieories," he said, "because diey were not interested in the truth of them." It is not hard to imagine the Doctor's reaction to our own fanciful theories in philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism. Suppose him at the Mitre Tavern for an evening's defense of die experience of mankind against die ingenious sophistries of a company made up ofJacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and Jacques Lacan — the lot of them variously committed to the belief diat the proper job of philosophy is not the pursuit of the truth but the pursuit of die trudi about die pursuit of die truth. Johnson eyes die group warily, expecting the worst. There are too many Frenchmen present, and as he made clear at supper one July evening in the Turk's Head coffee house, French writers are superficial "because they are not scholars, and so proceed upon the mere power of dieir own minds." Nevertheless, the assembled gendemen present their positions: we are all prisoners ofthe total epistemological environment of our age, our episteme; locked linguistically into interpretive communities, we cannot know die text in itself; die proper function of the critic is creative free play, the text being merely a convenient occasion; language, being self-referential, cannot reveal a subject; human agency is a flattering but deceptive myth; transcendent systems of thought are impossible; if literature touches reality anywhere we cannot know it. MeanwhileJohnson, than whom no man ever had "a more ardent love of literature, or a higher respect for it," is in high dudgeon, kicking figurative stones right and left, no real ones being available inside the Mitre. His adversaries observe him with indulgent good humor, amused but not impressed with this crude bourgeois display, having... (shrink)

Judgments concerning animals have arisen across a variety of established practice areas. There is, however, no publicly available repository of judgments concerning the emerging practice area of animal protection law. This has hindered the identification of individual animal protection law judgments and comprehension of the scale of animal protection law made by courts. Thus, we detail the creation of an initial animal protection law repository using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. This involved domain expert classification of 500 judgments (...) according to whether or not they were concerned with animal protection law. 400 of these judgments were used to train various models, each of which was used to predict the classification of the remaining 100 judgments. The predictions of each model were superior to a baseline measure intended to mimic current searching practice, with the best performing model being a support vector machine (SVM) approach that classified judgments according to term frequency—inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) values. Investigation of this model consisted of considering its most influential features and conducting an error analysis of all incorrectly predicted judgments. This showed the features indicative of animal protection law judgments to include terms such as ‘welfare’, ‘hunt’ and ‘cull’, and that incorrectly predicted judgments were often deemed marginal decisions by the domain expert. The TF-IDF SVM was then used to classify non-labelled judgments, resulting in an initial animal protection law repository. Inspection of this repository suggested that there were 175 animal protection judgments between January 2000 and December 2020 from the Privy Council, House of Lords, Supreme Court and upper England and Wales courts. (shrink)

The entwining of the craft worker’s body both with the materials of her artistic process and with the craft object itself is central to an understanding of craft aesthetics. This paper addresses embodied craft in Lia Cook’s weavings, which foreground the artist’s body and the embodying dynamics of woven art. Cook’s work is read in relation to the Lady of Shalott, a fictional textile artist portrayed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem by that name, and the painted versions of it (...) by William Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. Cook’s work emerges as an elaboration upon Pre-Raphaelite ideas for the digital age, and a useful model for understanding the embodied dynamics of craft aesthetics. (shrink)

John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of Ranks contains one of the first extensive and systematic discussions of the status of women in different societies. In this paper I attempt to show first that a combi nation of circumstances associated with the teaching of moral philos ophy at Glasgow and with the reform of Scots law undertaken by Lord Kames made the status of women a critical problem for Millar. Second, I attempt to demonstrate that Millar drew heavily upon (...) the resources of associationist psychology to explain how female status changed from hunting to pastoral to agricultural to commercial societies and that in doing so he diverged substantially from the perspectives developed by his mentor, Adam Smith. Finally, in view of Millar's extraordinarily positive reputation throughout Europe prior to the French Revolution and in view of the potential relevance of his analysis to early feminism and to mid-19th-century anthropological discussions of early matri archy, I seek to account for why his work was virtually ignored from around 1802 to 1960. (shrink)

From Patristic writings ample evidence can be gathered about the important part which hymn-singing held in Early Christianity. Until recently, however, Early Christian hymnography was known only from documents transmitting the text but not the music. The discovery and publication of a Christian hymn in Greek with musical notation was, therefore, bound to change the whole aspect of studies concerned with the history of Early Christian music. This happened, as is well known, in 1922 when, under No. 1786 of the (...) fifteenth volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri A. S. Hunt edited a fragment of a hymn, dating from the late third century, together with a transcript of the music by H. Stuart Jones. For the first time it became possible to realize what kind of music Greek-speaking Christians in Egypt sang in praise of the Lord. (shrink)

The law of unjust enrichment admits a novel policy motivated unjust factor called the policy against accumulation. This applies where a claimant (R) receives a benefit, or has the right to recover a debt or damages from another party (X), and receives or has the right to receive value in respect of the same debt or damage from a third party (Y). The claimant is rarely permitted to retain both the transfers made by X and Y. In other words, R (...) may not accumulate and one transfer must be reversed. This article contends that the right of a third party to participate in damages recovered by the claimant is best explained by the policy against accumulation. The focus of this inquiry is to illustrate the operation of this novel unjust factor by placing in parallel three House of Lords decisions: Hunt v Severs [1994] 2 AC 350, Dimond v Lovell [2000] 2 WLR 1121, and Lord Napier and Ettrick v Hunter [1993] AC 713. (shrink)

The view that exertion of effort determines praiseworthiness for an achievement is implicit in ‘no pain, no praise’-style objections to biomedical enhancement. On such views, if enhancements were t...

Mammalian sex chromosomes exhibit marked sexual dimorphism in behavior during gametogenesis. During oogenesis, the X chromosomes pair and participate in unrestricted recombination; both are transcriptionally active. However, during spermatogenesis the X and Y chromosomes experience spatial restriction of pairing and recombination, are transcriptionally inactive, and form a chromatin domain that is markedly different from that of the autosomes. Thus the male germ cell has to contend with the potential loss of X‐encoded gene products, and it appears that coping strategies have (...) evolved. Genetic control of sex‐chromosome inactivation during spermatogenesis does not involve pairing or the presence of the Y chromosome or an intact X chromosome, and may therefore be under exogenous control by the gonad. Sex‐chromosome reactivation during oogenesis and inactivation during spermatogenesis probably reflect specific meiotic events such as recombination. Understanding these phenomena may help explain other sex‐related differences in genetic recombination. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, the promotion of collaborative partnerships involving researchers from low and middle income countries with those from high income countries has been a major development in global health research. Ideally, these partnerships would lead to more equitable collaboration including the sharing of research responsibilities and rewards. While collaborative partnership initiatives have shown promise and attracted growing interest, there has been little scholarly debate regarding the fair distribution of authorship credit within these partnerships.

In some applications, researchers using the synthetic control method (SCM) to evaluate the effect of a policy may struggle to determine whether they have identified a “good match” between the control group and treated group. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of the mean and maximum Absolute Standardized Mean Difference (ASMD) as a test of balance between a synthetic control unit and treated unit, and provide guidance on what constitutes a poor fit when using a synthetic control. We explore (...) and compare other potential metrics using a simulation study. We provide an application of our proposed balance metric to the 2013 Los Angeles (LA) Firearm Study [9]. Using Uniform Crime Report data, we apply the SCM to obtain a counterfactual for the LA firearm-related crime rate based on a weighted combination of control units in a donor pool of cities. We use this counterfactual to estimate the effect of the LA Firearm Study intervention and explore the impact of changing the donor pool and pre-intervention duration period on resulting matches and estimated effects. We demonstrate how decision-making about the quality of a synthetic control can be improved by using ASMD. The mean and max ASMD clearly differentiate between poor matches and good matches. Researchers need better guidance on what is a meaningful imbalance between synthetic control and treated groups. In addition to the use of gap plots, the proposed balance metric can provide an objective way of determining fit. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of Canadian-trained health professionals working in humanitarian and development organizations who considered not treating a patient or group of patients because of resource limitations. In the narratives, not treating the patient(s) was sometimes understood as the right thing to do, and sometimes as wrong. In analyzing participants’ narratives we draw attention to how medications and equipment are represented. In one type of narrative, medications and equipment are represented primarily as scarce resources; in another, they are (...) represented as patient care. In the contexts respondents were working, medications and equipment were often both patient care interventions and scarce resources. The analytic point is that health professionals tend to emphasize one conceptualization over the other in coming to assert that not treating is right, or wrong. Rendering tacit ethical frameworks more explicit makes them available for reflection and debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFeminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the 1750s. I add to the evidence of the early Rousseau’s egalitarian response to ‘the (...) woman question’ by showing his philosophical convergence with the feminist arguments of the anonymous ‘Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’ as well as Madame Dupin’s ‘Ouvrage sur les femmes’ – manuscripts largely in his secretarial hand. Through this triangulation of understudied texts, we find that the early Rousseau was not a patriarchal apologist, but rather a feminist secretary and a secretary to a feminist. (shrink)

This paper explores how undergraduate students understood the social relevance of their engineering course content knowledge and drew broader social and ethical implications from that knowledge. Based on a three-year qualitative study in a junior-level engineering class, we found that students had difficulty in acknowledging the social and ethical aspects of engineering as relevant topics in their coursework. Many students considered the immediate technical usability or improved efficiency of technical innovations as the noteworthy social and ethical implications of engineering. Findings (...) suggest that highly-structured engineering programs leave little room for undergraduate students to explore the ethical dimension of engineering content knowledge and interact with other students/programs on campus to expand their “technically-minded” perspective. We discussed the issues of the “culture of disengagement” :42–72, 2014) fueled by disciplinary elitism, spatial distance, and insulated curriculum prevalent in the current structure of engineering programs. We called for more conscious effort by engineering educators to offer meaningful interdisciplinary engagement opportunities and in-class conversations on ethics that support engineering students' holistic intellectual growth and well-rounded professional ethics. (shrink)

Summary It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the (...) present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era. (shrink)

The Constitution of the World Health Organization affirms that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights lays the foundations for the international framework for the right to health. This human right is now codified in numerous national constitutions, as well as legally binding international human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.Although medical care and access to (...) medicines are vital features of the right to health, almost two billion people lack access to essential medicines, leading to immense avoidable suffering. Improving access to essential medicines could save 10 million lives each year, four million of them in Africa and South-East Asia alone. Gross inequity is a shocking feature of the world pharmaceutical situation. (shrink)

The sounds of the college campus raise important questions of participation, identity, privilege, disability, and marginalization. During the 2019–2020 academic year, three university instructors from distinct disciplines (music, history, and political science) and a student research assistant (history) used sound as a method for inquiring into contested and erased sites on the campus of Western Carolina University, a regional comprehensive university located in the southeastern United States. The project came to be called Sonic Histories. Paid student volunteers were led on (...) a soundwalk and completed three online questionnaires that engaged questions of race and belonging on campus. This study presents findings on how students experience and interpret contested and erased sites through sounds heard and imagined. Sonic Histories explores two central questions. Historically, whose voices have been included and whose have been excluded on college campuses? How can sound promote awareness of racialized spaces and, in turn, achieve social engagement? The authors challenge the triumphant narrative of campus histories, which highlights racial reconciliation and progress while eliding the ways predominantly white campuses still exclude minorities. By re-centering minority voices in campus spaces, the authors explore the systemic exclusion of minorities that has occurred on college campuses across the country. At a time when places of higher education are refining and developing their commitment to diversity and inclusivity—while assessing their past in honest ways—the Sonic Histories project builds upon ongoing initiatives to position the college campus as a scholarly community that lives up to its democratic ideals of inclusion. (shrink)

Richard Kennington, a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory with humanitarian goals. (...) This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era. (shrink)

Managing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in crisis-affected and fragile humanitarian contexts requires special attention because primary health care systems often collapse or become compromised in such settings. As a result, addressing and managing these diseases become more challenging. Humanitarian organizations that intervene in crisis situations are increasingly including NCD management in the services they support and provide; however, they encounter a range of issues such as ensuring the quality of care, sustainability of programs, and the possibility of unintended harms. This case (...) study explores ethical considerations raised by a mobile NCD program run by an international humanitarian organization in a country affected by a protracted civil war. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the (...) fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti- apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love. (shrink)

The publication in 1869 of Mill’s Subjection of Women gave rise to philosophical and political responses beyond Western Europe on the relationship between Westernization and women’s rights in developing, colonial, and post-colonial countries. Through the first comparative study of the Subjection of Women alongside the forewords to six of its earliest non–Western European editions, we explore how this book provoked local intellectuals in Russia, Chile, and India to engage its liberal utilitarian, imperial, Orientalist, and feminist ideas. By showing how Mill’s (...) Western European biases and instrumental reasoning establish problematic rhetorical models for women’s rights arguments, we are able to explore the ethical dimensions of women’s rights issues in the context of cultural and political imperialism. Most importantly, this reception history illustrates how cross-cultural and culturally sensitive dialogue on women’s rights can push us beyond Western bias and imperialism in advocating for the end of women’s subjection around the globe. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft’s visionary treatise, originally published in 1792, was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal human rights. Ideal for coursework and classroom study, this comprehensive edition of Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking feminist argument includes illuminating essays by leading scholars that highlight the author’s significant contributions to modern political philosophy, making a powerful case for her as one of the most substantive political thinkers of the Enlightenment era. No other scholarly work to date has examined as closely (...) both the ideological moorings and the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft’s courageous discourse. (shrink)

Utilizing a series of essays examining the broad philosophical concepts embedded in Rod Serling's series, The Twilight Zone, Philosophy in The Twilight Zone provides a platform for further philosophical discussion. Features essays by eminent contemporary philosophers concerning the over-arching themes in The Twilight Zone, as well as in-depth discussions of particular episodes Fuses popular cult entertainment with classical philosophical perspectives Acts as a guide to unearthing larger questions - from human nature to the nature of reality and beyond - posed (...) in the series Includes substantial critical and biographical information on series creator Rob Serling. (shrink)

Father Lord, author of Armchair Philosophy, herein offers to a wider audience some notes from a recent talk to the Philosophers in St. Louis. He believes that writing is necessary not only to express, but also really to assimilate philosophy.

Martin Luther King, Jr drew upon his early grounding in family and church to forge a praxis of egalitarian justice in the rigidly segregated American South of his youth. King?s ethical outlook was eclectic, reflecting the influence of such figures as Mays, Davis, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Thurman and Gandhi, alongside such doctrines as personalism and liberalism, nationalism and realism. Yet King?s subsequent academic study more nearly enhanced than restructured his early, formative exposure to black church and community. King became committed to (...) nonviolence, not as passive resistance, but as an active, aggressive, individual and self?improving solution to problems of gross injustice in society. Nonviolence for King was not an end, but a means, to the achievement of what he called ?Beloved Community? (shrink)