Some critics of Mill understand him to advocate the forced assimilation of people he regards as uncivilized, and to defend toleration and the principle of liberty only for civilized people of the West. Examination of Mill’s social and political writings and practice while serving the British East India Company shows, instead, that Mill is a ‘tolerant imperialist’: Mill defends interference in India to promote the protection of legal rights, respect and toleration for conflicting viewpoints, and a commercial society that (...) can cope with natural threats. He does not think the principle of liberty is waived for the uncivilized, or that the West should forcibly reshape them in its own monistic image. Mill’s tolerant imperialism reflects a tension between liberty and moral development that surfaces also when Mill thinks about the scope of government in civilized societies. (shrink)

This article examines some techno-political aspects of the early years of electrification in British-ruled 1920s Palestine. It emphasizes the importance of local technical, topographical and hydrological forms of knowledge for understanding the dynamics of electrification. Situating the analysis in a general colonial context of electrification, the study shows that British colonial rulers lagged behind both German firms and local entrepreneurs in understanding the specific conditions pertaining to electrification in Palestine. Subsequently, the study shows that the British had (...) limited control of the actual electrification process and its declared/professed developmental purposes, thereby complicating assumptions about electrification as a tool of the Empire/tool of empire. Finding some similarities between the cases of electrifying Palestine and India, the article’s findings may shed further light on the importance of micro-politics of knowledge for understanding the trajectory of electrification in the colonies. (shrink)

This study is about two political church crises that the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which regained its freedom with the conquest of the island of Cyprus by the Ottoman Empire, experienced during the British rule. The British administration in Cyprus is divided into two periods. The first is the period that lasted until 1914 within the scope of the two-point agreement with the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and when the island was actually accepted as Ottoman territory; the (...) second is the period from the British unilateral annexation of the island in 1914 to the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The first of the church crises during the British administration took place in 1900-1910, between the Bishop of Kitium Kyrillos Papadopoulos and the Bishop of Kyrenia Kyrillos Basileiou. The second one took place in 1933-1947, because of the Metropolitan of Paphos Leontios Leontiou's declaration that the metropolitans who were in exile outside of the island due to the 1931 revolts declared that elections could not be held without their return to the island. Since the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church is an autocephalous church, it did not want to interfere with other churches in its internal affairs, but the intervention was inevitable due to the stalemate choice of diocese. The Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which has had an influence in politics until today, was able to overcome the church crises it had experienced at the beginning of the 20th century only with the influence and help of politics. The first Greek flag in Cyprus was used as a supporter gathering effort during the first church crisis. He was taken to Trooditissa Monastery by Kyrillos (Kyrillos Papadopoulos). However, the island of Cyprus has no ties with Greece, neither in previous periods nor now. It is the church that tries and claims to create a bond between the Greeks living on the island of Cyprus and Greece. The church crises mentioned in the process played an important role in the election of Makarios III, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, as archbishop. During this period, among the archbishop candidates, there had been accusations of not defending Enosis passionately against the rival island and being too close to the British administration. Makarios III fiercely defended Enosis and was, at the same time, always in conflict with the British administration. This process brought him first the archbishopric, and then the Presidency of the Republic of Cyprus. The Turkish hostility, which came to the fore in the aforementioned period in Cyprus, was considered the first condition of being an archbishop. After the British annexed the island unilaterally, the archbishops of the Greek Orthodox Church, who were almost sure that the British would leave the island to them, made church propaganda out of hostility to the British administration and then to the Turks. In the study, the attitude of the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which is an autocephalous church, in intra-church disputes and its adherence to church rules are also discussed. These two crises, in which the effect of the idea of enosis on the choice of diocese will be seen more clearly, are very important in terms of understanding the present day of the church. (shrink)

This study analyzed the content of questions in the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire in the UK, the USA, Australia, Singapore, and India. A total of 1,823 questions were sampled. The topics of questions varied from country to country with programs in Australia and the UK over-representing language, the USA and Singapore over-representing light entertainment, and India over-representing history. The share of local themes was positively related to the country’s size of population. In all the countries, questions (...) that awarded higher prizes more frequently required academic knowledge, whereas pocket money questions more often called for popular everyday knowledge. Overall, the global quiz format appears to be sensitive to relatively small cultural differences. The hierarchy of knowledge it features is in line with western norms. (shrink)

British rule over India has been all-pervasive after 1857. This article investigates the response of the Urdu poet, Akbar Ilahabadi, to it. His poetry focuses primarily on philosophical themes like politics, religion, modernity, and women's status and uses a great deal of wit, humor, satire, and parody. This lays down the foundation for a very unique style which has fascinated many literary critics over the past century and has evoked varied responses. In his case, this approach has conveyed (...) some very profound, if not debatable, thoughts. (shrink)

“Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it.... Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are (...) thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks. (shrink)

This article examines Ian McEwan's script for director Richard Eyre's film, The Ploughman's Lunch, the title of which alludes to a deceptive, post-World War II advertising campaign that promulgated a false narrative about British tradition. McEwan's script, and Eyre's film adaptation of it, offer a prescient exposé of Britain's culture of mendacity in the 1980s in ways that draw on rule-consequentialist ethics to maintain that lying on the personal, professional, and political level has a pernicious effect on society. (...) McEwan's work on the film also marks a crucial turning point in the author's career, one in which he first begins to explore complex ethical and moral conundrums that would figure prominently in his major fiction. (shrink)

Usually viewed as the premier apologist for laissez-faire capitalism, Smith is seen in this new interpretation within the context of an earlier tradition that condemned the British aristocracy for relinquishing its moral obligation to promote the public good in favor of an unceasing pursuit of private gain. Through separate chapters on Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Hume, Gallagher shows that Smith echoed civic humanist sermons against the avaricious inclinations of the nobles who profited most from commercial expansion. Unlike earlier critics, however, (...) Smith concluded that the most prudent response to aristocratic corruption was not to hold ministers, kings, and social notables to higher standards but to limit their access to political power. _The Rule of the Rich?_ accordingly shows that the case for limited government made in _The Wealth of Nations_ was not a defense of individual liberty so much as a concession to the apparent incompetence of the British upper class. (shrink)

Usually viewed as the premier apologist for laissez-faire capitalism, Smith is seen in this new interpretation within the context of an earlier tradition that condemned the British aristocracy for relinquishing its moral obligation to promote the public good in favor of an unceasing pursuit of private gain. Through separate chapters on Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Hume, Gallagher shows that Smith echoed civic humanist sermons against the avaricious inclinations of the nobles who profited most from commercial expansion. Unlike earlier critics, however, (...) Smith concluded that the most prudent response to aristocratic corruption was not to hold ministers, kings, and social notables to higher standards but to limit their access to political power. _The Rule of the Rich?_ accordingly shows that the case for limited government made in _The Wealth of Nations_ was not a defense of individual liberty so much as a concession to the apparent incompetence of the British upper class. (shrink)

Where does the human aesthetic come from? How does it develop? By introducing the notion of the ‘niche’ as a key term in an empirically and evolutionarily informed aesthetics, this paper aims to take a fresh look at these and similar questions. It also aims to shed new light on the development and functioning of the aesthetic capacity in humans and its trans-generational transmission. Drawing on recent research developments in evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and cognitive sciences, I shall argue that (...) the human aesthetic capacity—which I understand as the capacity, involving perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes, to enter into a pleasurable/non-pleasurable and expressive relation with objects, artworks, natural phenomena, or other people—relies on constructed environmental resources for its emergence and its ontogenetic development. (shrink)

The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, established in 1879, provided arguments for the bridging of the gap that separated British Hellenism from British philhellenism for the most part of the nineteenth century. For academics and scholars interested in Greek civilization sympathy with modern Greece was always a matter of choice, which might be influenced by classical reading but did not constitute an indispensable part of it. The necessity to visit Greece, study on the spot and, when (...) possible, bring to light the material remnants of Hellenic civilization, and to trace among the people living evidence of the classical age emerged with the introduction of historicity as a concept and archaeology as a practice into British Hellenism. The formation of the Society represented a single but important step in this process. Its rules, on the other hand, “officially” sanctioned the assumption of the continuity of the Greek race. (shrink)

In an incendiary 2010 Nature article, M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson present a savage critique of the best-known and most widely used framework for the study of social evolution, W. D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection. More than a hundred biologists have since rallied to the theory’s defence, but Nowak et al. maintain that their arguments ‘stand unrefuted’. Here I consider the most contentious claim Nowak et al. defend: that Hamilton’s rule, the core explanatory (...) principle of kin selection theory, ‘almost never holds’. I first distinguish two versions of Hamilton’s rule in contemporary theory: a special version (HRS) that requires restrictive assumptions, and a general version (HRG) that does not. I then show that Nowak et al. are most charitably construed as arguing that HRS almost never holds, while HRG buys its generality at the expense of explanatory power. While their arguments against HRS are fairly uncontroversial, their arguments against HRG are more contentious, yet these have been largely overlooked in the ensuing furore. I consider the arguments for and against the explanatory value of HRG, with a view to assessing what exactly is at stake in the debate. I suggest that the debate hinges on issues concerning the causal interpretability of regression coefficients, and concerning the explanatory function Hamilton’s rule is intended to serve. (shrink)

Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations is a collection of 16 individual essays. The book is organised into four parts, covering a wide range of topics. ‘Basic Themes’ (Part I) presents an overview of Kant’s ethics and its development in contemporary philosophy; ‘Virtue’ (Part II) considers the notion of virtue from a variety of theoretical perspectives; ‘Moral Rules and Principles’ (Part III) interprets and defends the idea of a ‘Kantian legislative perspective’; and ‘Practical Questions’ (Part IV) addresses a number of (...) real-life problems ranging from humanitarian intervention to the responsibilities of bystanders. Thomas E. Hill Jr. brings a remarkable degree of clarity, thoughtfulness, and originality to these essays. They will undoubtedly be of interest to anyone working on Kant and contemporary ethics. (shrink)

Two conservative theorists, F. A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott, have advanced theories of law with important and plausible central theses focusing on the rule of law. The author argues, however, that in each case the theorist ‐ or at least some of his followers on the contemporary British and American political scene ‐ have wrongly inferred strong conclusions from these theories which are inimical to the welfare state. In conclusion, the author points to possible ways of reconciling (...) class='Hi'>rule of law to social justice. (shrink)

Plato’s Politicus argues for a striking normative claim about the law: the ideal expert ruler will not only change the laws of the city when he thinks it best, but will also contravene them. The Eleatic Stranger’s argument for this conclusion reveals important features of Plato’s views on expertise in general, and political expertise in particular. Laws should not be inviolable for an expert ruler because no craft lays down inviolable rules for its practitioners. There are no inviolable rules of (...) action for experts because crafts are teleological: expert action aims only to produce some good. The expert ruler’s political action recognizes no constraints besides the aim of best promoting the good condition of the whole city. Plato believes that the statesman will do markedly better at promoting this end when unconstrained by even the best laws, and there is evidence that he will harm individual citizens in order to do so. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author reflects on her long personal association with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning /Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and many of its South African grantees. The academic refugees who came to the SPSL's notice in the 1960s, specially the South Africans, bent the ‘rules’ and signalled the new ways in which the SPSL was going to have to work in a very changed social and educational environment in Britain, and equally great changes (...) in the nature of the academic refugees. Before the rise of Hitler, German scholars had advanced the frontiers of knowledge in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. And in many of these fields the Jews of Central Europe had played a crucial role. Increasingly from the 1960s, however, many of the refugee academics to the UK were from the so-called ‘third world’, especially Latin America and countries just emerging from colonialism in Africa. Academic refugees from South Africa formed something of a bridge between the old and the new. While most of the South African grantees were white and from institutions modelled on British universities, they were on the whole younger and less highly qualified than the earlier generation of grantees. The very small number of Africans assisted at this time were in fact far more eminent; significantly, however, they were the very first Africans to be assisted by the Society. (shrink)

Peter Winch famously critiqued Michael Oakeshott's view of human conduct. He argued that Oakeshott had missed the fact that truly human conduct is conduct that 'follows a rule.' This paper argues that, as is sometimes the case with Oakeshott, what seems, on the surface, to be a disagreement with another, somewhat compatible thinker about a matter of detail in some social theory in fact turns out to point to a deeper philosophical divide. In particular, I contend, Winch, as typical (...) of those who only picked up on Oakeshott's work in the 1940s and 1950s, when Oakeshott became known for his critique of rationalism, failed to understand the idealist metaphysics underlying that critique. (shrink)

Fergus Kelly: Thinking in Threes: The Triad in Early Irish Literature Brian Pullan: Charity and Usury: Jewish and Christian Lending in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy Noel Malcolm: The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella H. R. Woudhuysen: The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text J. G. A. Pocock: The Re-Description of Enlightenment Andrew Hadfield: Michael Drayton and the Burden of History Eric Foner: Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator? Gillian Beer: Revenants and Migrants: (...) Hardy, Butler, Woolf and Sebald Stephen Banfield: Scholarship and the Musical: Reclaiming Jerome Kern Brian Simpson: The Rule of Law in International Affairs Christopher Bayly: 'The Nation Within': British India at War 1939-47 John Vickers: Economics for Consumer Policy Gillian Feeley-Harnik: The Geography of Descent Susan Gathercole: Working Memory and Learning During the School Years Lothar Ledderose: Carving Stone Sutras before the World Ends: The Inscription of 1118 CE at Cloud Dwelling Monastery near Beijing. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the transmission of some ideas of the pragmatist tradition to Wittgenstein, in his ‘middle period,’ through the intermediary of F. P. Ramsey, with whom he had numerous fruitful discussions at Cambridge in 1929. I argue more specifically that one must first come to terms with Ramsey’s own views in 1929, and explain how they differ from views expressed in earlier papers from 1925-27, so a large part of this paper is devoted to this task. One (...) is then in a better position to understand the impact of Ramsey’s astute critique of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in conjunction with his pragmatism, and explain how it may have set into motion the ‘later’ Wittgenstein. I then argue that Ramsey introduced his notion of ‘variable hypothetical’ as a rule, not a proposition, on pragmatist grounds and that Wittgenstein picked this up in 1929, along with a more ‘dynamic’ view of meaning than the ‘static’ view of the Tractatus, and that this explains in part Wittgenstein’s turn to his ‘later philosophy.’. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill’s justification for British rule in India is well known. Less well known and discussed are Mill’s extensive writings on the practice of British rule in India. A close engagement with Mill’s writings on this issue shows Mill was a much more uncertain and anxious imperialist than he is often presented to be. Mill was acutely aware of the difficulties presented by the imperial context in India, he identified a number of very demanding conditions (...) that would have to be met if Britain’s imperial mission was to be successful, and he was very troubled by the dangers posed to this mission from politics in Britain. Toward the end of his life, Mill become much more pessimistic about the progressive possibilities of British colonialism, in part because of what he thought had happened after the transfer of British rule from the East India Company to the British state. A focus on Mill’s arguments about the practice of British rule in India goes some way to providing a more nuanced account of what Mill thought about colonialism. (shrink)

This is about Gassendi's 5th Objections to the Meditations and Descartes' Reply. The main issue is what clear and distinct perception consists in and whether we need a criterion in order to know if we perceive something clearly and distinctly.

Britain in the fin de siècle was home to many significant communities of political émigrés. Among Russian revolutionaries who made London their home were Sergei Stepniak and Feliks Volkhovskii, forced to flee Russia as a result of their revolutionary activities in the 1870s. Britain became a symbol of liberty in their writings as a source of comparison with tsarist rule. These comparisons also supported their justifications of the use of terrorism by Russian revolutionaries when writing for audiences with concerns (...) about the use of terrorism in Britain. The emphasis on Russian otherness in these comparisons also helped to justify their opposition to Russian imperialism, while at the same time praising a benevolent imperialism rooted in social and cultural activism. Their thought represents a blending of liberal and socialist ideas employed to place the Russian experience beyond the scope of modernity and liberal political understanding. (shrink)

This paper provides a short overview of how Oakeshott identifies the functions and limits of government, with reliance primarily on two texts. The first one from “Lectures on the History of Political” thought distinguishes nomocratic and teleocratic ways of governing. Oakeshott describes the two forms in a detached fashion, and indirectly hints at his preference for nomocratic rule. The second text is Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”, where Oakeshott gives a sceptical and critical description of human nature. The paper (...) argues that this account of human nature should be seen as the basis, on which a nomocratic rule can be defended. It will be argued, that the two texts should be read together, if we want to get a reasoned overview of Oakeshott’s criticism of contemporary forms of government, and of his reasons to choose nomocratic rule instead of the teleocratic one. It will be argued that a complex political philosophy based on these two pillars will be provided by Oakeshott’s late book On Human Conduct. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British PhilosophersHeiner F. KlemmeJohn W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price, John Stephens, general editors. The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers. Vols. 1, 2. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. Pp. xxiii + 1,013. Cloth, $550.00.Good dictionaries are like good maps of a city: they indicate the main and minor quarters, give you an impression of its internal developments, and they indicate to where its highways (...) eventually lead. In philosophy, comprehensive subject dictionaries have a long history, and they do seem to experience a revival these days. To be sure, the lives and works of the leading figures of the history of ideas are generally well explored and documented. We even know which French dishes Hume liked to cook or which types of wine Kant preferred. But the lives and works of lesser known philosophers and men of letters still seem to be more or less neglected. The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers fills this gap for the period and the subject it covers. It comprises entries on almost six hundred persons as well as a number of entries on anonymous works. The work of close to a hundred scholars from several countries, it is unique in its attempt to bring together in two extensive volumes all minor and major British philosophers of the period between John Locke and Dugald Stewart. Since "British" is to be understood in a broad sense meaning authors who lived under British rule, it also includes Americans writing before 1776, Irish philosophers (like George Berkeley) and the French thinker Pierre Desmaizeaux, who lived and worked for a long period in Britain. Nor is the Dictionary restricted to philosophers in today's sense of the word, comprising entries on people who made in one way or the other a contribution to the history of ideas, even if their contributions are of marginal importance. Besides historians, poets, translators, mathematicians and physicists, dissenting ministers and physicians are well represented.In almost all cases, the selection makes sense. The boundaries between philosophy and, say, natural sciences were not as nicely drawn in the eighteenth century as they are today. But there are a few entries where one might wonder whether the subject's work had any specific philosophical importance or influence at all, as for example: Charles Burnet, author of a history of music; John Ellicott, who wrote on Electricity, and Thomas Innes, who published in 1729 a book on "Ancient Inhabitants on the Northern Parts of Britain or Scotland." One might also wonder if Gaelic scholar Beg Eolach Moidhach would appreciate being remembered today as a British philosopher.The length of the entries varies from several lines to up to seven pages. Generally, each entry gives the details of the life and work of the person covered, provides a bibliography of his or her main works, references to "other relevant works," and a section of "further reading." While the larger entries are naturally devoted to the better known figures, most of the authors dealt with in the minor sections cannot complain either. In many cases, information about the life and work of these minor authors is scarce and the entries are useful for this reason alone. But unfortunately, there are also cases in which essential references to "classical" biographical accounts are not listed in the bibliography, like Williams Smellie´s account of James Gregory or George Skene Keith´s biography of John Campbell.The entries on Lord Kames and George Turnbull lay, as far as their length is [End Page 282] concerned, somewhere in the middle between the shorter and longer contributions. They nevertheless are highly informative, densely argued, and are good reading. Knud Haakonssen sees in Kames "perhaps the most complete 'Enlightenment man' among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers´" because he covers like no other author "the whole spectrum of human knowledge and its applicability to his society" (503). The most philosophical work of Kames is his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). According to Haakonssen, it is important because in it Kames "turns the previous moral-sense criticism of moral scepticism into a refutation of general epistemological scepticism" (504). By arguing that our... (shrink)

This chapter describes various aspects of the impact on philosophy of Newton’s Principia. It shows how Newton’s achievement dramatically influenced debates over the way subsequent philosophers conceived of their activity, and thus prepared the way for an institutional and methodological split between philosophy and science. These large-scale themes are illustrated by attention to a number of detailed debates over the nature and importance of Newton’s legacy: debates concerning gravity and matter theory, the status of Newton’s “laws of motion”, the role (...) of final causes in natural philosophy, and the interpretation of Newton’s “rules for the study of natural philosophy”. Important contributors to these debates included Hume, Colin Maclaurin, Priestley, and Reid. The chapter also includes discussion of how eighteenth-century philosophers understood Newton’s place in the history of science. (shrink)

This paper advances an interpretation of what Hume called ‘the general rules’: natural principles of belief-formation that nevertheless can be augmented via reflection. According to Hume, reflection is, in part, what separates the wise from the vulgar. In this paper, I argue that for Hume being wise must therefore be, to some degree, voluntary. Hume faced a significant problem in attempting to reconcile his epistemic normativity, i.e. his claims about what we ought to believe, with his largely involuntarist theory of (...) the mind. Reflection on the General Rules, and an interpretation of that reflection as voluntary, helps explain not only Hume's theory of belief, but also how he hoped to reconcile epistemic normativity with naturalism about the mental. (shrink)