Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu made herself a writer. Hard-hitting, eloquent, and often funny, this is a revised edition of her non-epistolary writings.

In this paper, the work of Cynthia Lowenthal, Barbara Taylor, and others is adduced to support the notion that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accomplished something remarkably progressive in her Turkish letters and her British “Spectatress” letters; part of the conclusion is that feminist work may proceed by metaphor as well as by argument and debate. Some of the innovation of her work is signaled by her use of comparison and contrast in describing her travels: she does not hesitate (...) to juxtapose unusual items and situations. In addition, Lady Mary's work is briefly contrasted with that of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft. (shrink)

During a smallpox epidemic in April 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu asked Dr. Charles Maitland to "engraft" her daughter, thus instigating the first documented inoculation for smallpox (_Variola_ virus) in England. Engrafting, or variolation, was a means of conferring immunity to smallpox by placing pus taken from a smallpox pustule under the skin of an uninfected person to create a local infection. The introduction of infectious viral matter, however, could trigger fullblown smallpox, and the practice was controversial for (...) both this reason and the pervasive conviction that it was immoral to intentionally infect a human body. Eventually, engrafting was phased out altogether in favor of vaccination, a much safer procedure established by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century. Montagu's decision was influenced by her experiences in Constantinople, where she had spent a year, and where engrafting was commonplace. As a smallpox survivor herself, Montagu had taken an interest in Turkish inoculation practices, and had had her son Edward engrafted while in Turkey. She was not the first person to import the idea of smallpox inoculation to England, nor the first English person to have their child inoculated (other English children had been inoculated while visiting Turkey), yet she quickly became known for importing and popularizing smallpox inoculation. At the request of her acquaintances, she took her inoculated daughter with her on a round of visits into elite households to demonstrate the safety of the procedure. The reputation she gained was both positive and negative: monuments were erected in her honor, encomiastic poems were published, and Voltaire declared her "a woman of as fine a genius, and endued with as great a strength of mind as any of her sex in the British Kingdoms"; however, anti-inoculationists ridiculed her, some society figures regarded her warily, and Alexander Pope satirized her in his poetry.

Montagu’s pioneering role in the smallpox debate is undoubtedly significant: she instigated the first smallpox inoculation on English soil, and she was largely responsible for making the practice acceptable in elite circles. My interest in this essay is in the nature and significance of Montagu’s reputation as an inoculation pioneer. I will argue that her reputation was based on the particular combination of her social position as a Whig and an aristocratic woman; her interest in progressive and enlightened forms of social, political, and scientific thought; her standing in influential literary circles; and, not least, the force of her own personality. In broad terms, I offer Montagu’s involvement in the smallpox debate as a case study in a new kind of public role becoming available to elite women in the early eighteenth century — a role that caused considerable discomfort among her peers and in the medical community, and one that stimulated a widespread controversy in print publications of the day. (shrink)

Theoretical arguments and empirical investigations indicate that a high proportion of published findings do not replicate and are likely false. The current position paper provides a broad perspective on scientific error, which may lead to replication failures. This broad perspective focuses on reform history and on opportunities for future reform. We organize our perspective along four main themes: institutional reform, methodological reform, statistical reform and publishing reform. For each theme, we illustrate potential errors by narrating the story of a fictional (...) researcher during the research cycle. We discuss future opportunities for reform. The resulting agenda provides a resource to usher in an era that is marked by a research culture that is less error-prone and a scientific publication landscape with fewer spurious findings. (shrink)

In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years' War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country's plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome. Montagu's focus on the ancient republics gives his contribution a distinctive twist to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain's decline, and his analysis exerted influence in three momentous eighteenth-century crises: the Seven Years' War, the American War of (...) Independence, and the French Revolution. This is the first modern edition of Montagu's work. Edward Wortley Montagu (1713 -1776) was the son of a wealthy British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a student of oriental languages at the University of Leiden, which apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

We comment on the proposition “that lower temperatures and especially greater seasonal variation in temperature call for individuals and societies to adopt … a greater degree of self-control” (Van Lange et al., sect. 3, para. 4) for which we cannot find empirical support in a large data set with data-driven analyses. After providing greater nuance in our theoretical review, we suggest that Van Lange et al. revisit their model with an eye toward the social determinants of self-control.

The ‘turgid archaisms’ of Paul the Silentiary's style have ensured that his two hexameter Ekphrases, describing the Emperor Justinian's sixth-century church of S. Sophia in Constantinople and its ambo, have lately attracted little interest, except among art historians who seek to extract nuggets of architectural information. On the other hand, the eighty or so pagan epigrams by Paul which are preserved in the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies have received attention in recent years both because of their literary interest and (...) for the social and historical information which they contain. In my opinion, the much more substantial Ekphrases likewise deserve to be examined as literary and historical documents. The title Ekphrasis disguises the historical interest of the works: unlike the majority of the epigrams, these poems are no mere literary exercises, but official, public works, undoubtedly commissioned by Justinian, and delivered on specific and identifiable occasions. Only the central portion of the major poem describing S. Sophia comprises technical architectural ekphrasis; this is preceded and followed by panegyrical material appropriate to the occasion of recitation which together takes up almost half the total length of the poem . Here the Emperor Justinian, patron of the church, and Eutychius, Patriarch of Constantinople, are praised, and the events leading up to the occasion of the poem sketched. This topical part of the work provides evidence for the ceremonial which accompanied the poem's recitation and demonstrates the type of imperial propaganda pertinent to the end of the reign of Justinian. Moreover, an explanation for a limited number of stylistic flaws in a work which, by contemporary standards at least, is of high literary quality, may lie in the recognition that Paul was obliged to complete his poem in time for a specific occasion. It is with these three occasional aspects of the work that I shall here be concerned. (shrink)

The past 25 years have seen an upsurge of interest in the figure of Mary Magdalene, whose image has been transformed through feminist scholarship from penitent prostitute to prominent disciple of Jesus. This article documents another, non-academic, interpretation of Mary Magdalene – the image of Mary as goddess or embodiment of the female divine. The most influential proponent of this view is Margaret Starbird, who hypothesizes that Mary was both Jesus’ wife and his divine feminine counterpart. (...) The author suggests that feminist theologians/thealogians should be aware of this popular understanding of Mary; and consider what it is about Mary Magdalene as the sacred feminine/bride of Jesus/sophia that captures the public imagination in a way that other feminist christologies do not. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley discussed Aristotle's ethics as an alternative to modern moral philosophy. This idea is best known from Anscombe's 1958 paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The main...

The extent to which Latin was familiar to the inhabitants of late sixth- and early seventh-century Constantinople is a topic of current discussion and interest. While there is little evidence to suggest a significant knowledge of Latin even among the educated in the seventh century, it is clear that in the late sixth century the language was still familiar to a section of the upper classes. Among native easterners, the degree of this familiarity would certainly have varied considerably, from those (...) who could recognise a few words of Latin, through the lawyers, administrators and military men who had a specialised, professional knowledge, to the small proportion who could detect the Virgilian echoes in Corippus' panegyric of Justin II. Whether Paul the Silentiary, epigrammatist and panegyrist of the Emperor Justinian's church of S. Sophia, should be included in the small category who were acquainted with Latin literature is indeed a more far-reaching issue than that of the survival of Latin in the eastern capital, since it is an element in the larger problem of the extent to which late Greek poets knew and imitated the work of their Latin predecessors. The broad generalisations of the past no longer satisfy modern scholarship, which rightly demands rigorous scrutiny of the evidence for each individual author. (shrink)

This article explains how li 禮 or ‘ritual propriety’ is the ‘body language’ of ren 仁 or the authentic expression of our humanity. Li and ren are interdependent aspects of a larger creative human way (rendao 仁道) that can be conceptually distinguished as follows: li refers to the ritualized social form of appropriate conduct and ren to the more general, authentically human spirit this expresses. Li is the social instrument for self-cultivation and the vehicle of harmonious human interaction. More, li (...) must mean something that is effectively communicated to others for an authentic, human (ren) interaction to occur. Li is the body language of ren in being the ritual vehicle for its’ expression; however, li is underdetermined by ren and so must be distinguished from it in on further grounds: authentic human activity must not just be equivocated with social convention because conclusively establishing whether a particular action is li (or is a truly ren action) is impossible. As a result, li is often confused with social power and privilege that is easier to empirically identify than ren conduct is, but this is a mistake since li has to express ren or it is not li at all. The inescapable ambiguity of li – an ambiguity that attaches to any language – can be critiqued by the Western view that sees something ‘essential’ to the ‘self,’ and that makes one a ‘self’ in and of oneself and not in a way that depends on others. I show that such Western individualism – while resting on a fundamentally different way of thinking of being a person and living a good life – does not reduce Confucian ritual to being an instrument for social discrimination and subordination. My argument is indebted to twentieth-century philosophy of language in the West that offered the idea that some words are actions. (shrink)

Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God’s love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion’ governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí’s animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to (...) its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate’ expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro’s conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.’ As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion’ and foster engagement in its practice. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to relate Husserl’s thought about God to his published philosophy. Since the manuscript sources are few, with many gaps, usually brief and often rather cryptic, they do not reflect all of his thinking on the problem. This interpretation cannot, then, claim to be definitive. Most of the sources are published inZur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, hrsg. von Iso Kern, The Hague, 1973. An anonymous reader forSophia is to be thanked for his helpful (...) comments on an earlier submitted draft of the paper. (shrink)

Robert C. Solomon saw spirituality and emotion as interpenetrating themes. I will summarize his views on spirituality and then introduce the articles in the special issue in his honor. Relating emotional integrity to spirituality, Bob argues that it is precisely through engagement - throwing ourselves into relationships and endeavors - that we come to recognize ourselves as part of something much larger than ourselves. Spirituality is an on-going adventure according to Bob, and it recommends itself in the way that all (...) adventures do. It is exciting and fun, a matter of an overflowing passionate life. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the English philosopher Mary Astell’s marginalia in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s personal copy of the 1704 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur le comète (first published in 1682). I argue that Astell’s annotations provide good reasons for thinking that Bayle is biased toward atheism in this work. Recent scholars maintain that Bayle can be interpreted as an Academic Sceptic: as someone who honestly and impartially follows a dialectical method of argument in order (...) to obtain the goal of intellectual integrity. In her commentary, however, Astell suggests that: (i) if Bayle were honest and impartial in his inquiries, then he would not have pretended to attack popular superstition, only to undermine generally-held religious beliefs; and (ii) if Bayle valued intellectual integrity, then his argument for a society of virtuous atheists would not have relied upon a deceptive equivocation in terms. I conclude that the rediscovery of this marginalia is valuable for enhancing our appreciation of Astell as an astute reader of one of her most enigmatic contemporaries. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a (...) symbolic re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking (...) insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will (...) somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self. (shrink)

This article presents a commentary by James Steuart on David Hume’s History of the Tudors, written in the early 1760s. In doing so, the article sketches new aspects of Steuart’s political and historical thought at a time when he was hopeful about returning to Scotland from his long continental exile, following his leading role in the 1745 Jacobite rising. After providing a short biographical context, it establishes that the text was written whilst Steuart was working on his Political Oeconomy, and (...) when the ‘Marian controversy’ dominated Scottish historical debate. It goes on to explore the influence of Steuart’s friend Mary Wortley Montagu on his criticism of Hume’s misogynistic representation of Mary, Queen of Scots. It then reconstructs Steuart’s central argument about the failures of monarchs to adapt from feudal to commercial society, resulting in untrammelled liberties that harmed the lower classes. Concerned with the history of industry and commerce, political judgment, and the spirit of the people, Steuart’s hitherto unpublished commentary is a key source for understanding the ‘late Jacobite’ system of thought which influenced the reign of George III and inspired radicals later in the century. (shrink)

This was the best-selling poetry anthology of the eighteenth century, edited by the most celebrated publisher of the era, Alexander Pope's protege, Robert Dodsley. It includes poems by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, David Garrick, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Horace Walpole, Joseph and Thomas Warton, James Thomson, Elizabeth Carter, Pope himself, and many others. The Collection of Poems is an invaluable index of literary culture in the eighteenth century, and yet despite its great popularity and influence, it has not (...) been in print for more than two hundred years. (shrink)

This is an analysis of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, first written in the early eighteenth century when she travelled to the Ottoman Empire, and finally ‘published’ in 1763. As well as producing ‘the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient’, Montagu is a pioneer in introducing the Turkish women's practice of inoculation against smallpox into England. This article sets out the long-standing critical debate over the rights and wrongs (...) of the Letters, particularly focusing on the period since the 1970s when feminist and post-colonial readings have presented or questioned Montagu's credentials with respect to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, religion and class. It concludes that Montagu describes how she is received with considerable, if conditional, hospitality by Turkish women in their bagnio and ‘harems’, and that her writing is, in turn, conditionally hospitable towards them. She is explicitly concerned not to fall into the Orientalizing clichés of Early Modern men's travel writing, which typically represents Muslim women as imprisoned in harems, enslaved, starved of sex and sexually voracious. By careful consideration of the historical, political and social context of the societies which Montagu knew, and could make comparison between, a modern reader too can act hospitably in taking Montagu's narrative into her own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
ources VICTORIA, LADY WELBY’S PAPERS AT YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO I. G-G Mathematics / Middlesex U.  St. Leonard’s Road, Bengeo, Herts.  ,  .-@.. ne of the fringe figures in British philosophical life during Russell’s early Ocareer was Victoria, Lady Welby (–). Coming in middle age to academic concerns, she was the most receptive person in Britain to the semiotics of C. S. Peirce (–), giving his work (...) some publicity especially in her books What Is Meaning? () and Significs and Language (). After her death much of her library went to the University of London Library; her heavily annotated copies of journals such as Mind and The Monist are worth consulting. Her papers remained with her family until they were purchased from Sir Oliver Welby in  by York University, Toronto. The large collection is stored in  large boxes, with the general reference number -; the archival staff has prepared an excellent catalogue. I sampled the collection in a short recent visit. It divides into two nearly equal halves. One half includes her own manuscripts and essays, sometimes including comments made by friends. Some manuscripts by others, or transcripts thereof (for example, H. G. Wells) were also stored. I looked at the manuscripts related to logic and language, and found that several were composed of transcriptions of her notes typed out on strips and then set in a chosen order by fixing to large sheets with pins. Logic as such did not feature strongly; more prominent were aspects of linguistics or speech practice. Lady Welby strove to popularize the work of fellow enthusiasts for linguistics. In particular, box  comprises her commissioned English translations of several articles published during the s by the logician and philosopher Giovanni Vailati (–), also the earliest follower of Russell’s hero Giuseppe Peano. Presumably Vailati’s and Welby’s deaths prevented the publication of the planned book. The other half of the collection comprises Lady Welby’s extensive correspondence, including copies or drafts of some of her own letters. Attached to many russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (summer ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  -  . - letters are partial typewritten transcriptions, presumably prepared by or for her daughter Nina Cust (–) for a two-volume edition. As these transcriptions suggest, the originals were not only selected but also mauled quite a bit; the edition provides only extracts both locally within a letter and also globally across a file. They are organized chronologically in chapters each covering a short run of years, so that any extensive exchange is spread across several chapters. Further, the precise date of each letter is never given. This is a pity, for the full collection reveals an impressive range of serious contacts in the philosophical and other communities, and also with some figures related to her social status (from the aristocratic Stuart-Wortley family, Very Important in those days). Some letters relate to a discussion group which met at her home; first at Denton Manor, Grantham, Lincolnshire, and then during her widowhood in Harrow, London. To Lady Welby herself, one of the most important exchanges was that with C. S. Peirce (–), some of which appeared in the daughter’s edition and since has been published in full. For my interests two other files stood out. One is an intense exchange, especially in , with Mary Boole (–), in which her working relationship with her late husband and their religious stance were discussed. The other exchange was with Philip Jourdain (–); they used to lend each other books and recent issues of journals. When Lady Welby planned a visit in September , Jourdain assured her that a “tyred fly” would be hired to bring her to his home from the railway station, and that it had a large room which should be satisfactory to “you and your maid”. These two also exchanged opinions on recent philosophical literature, including that by Russell, whose work is mentioned in other files. There is a small exchange with Russell himself; both sides are available here, and of course also at the Russell Archives. Some or all of these files are printed in the Cust volumes, but the full collection needs to be consulted in order to do justice to the material. Researchers visiting the Russell... (shrink)

This book offers a defence of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at (...) least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it follows that we have good reason to believe in the mathematical objects posited by those mathematical theories used in empirical science, and therefore to believe that the mathematical theories utilized in empirical science are true. Previous responses to the indispensability argument have focused on arguing that mathematical assumptions can be dispensed with in formulating our empirical theories. This book, by contrast, offers an account of the role of mathematics in empirical science according to which the successful use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories need not rely on the truth of the mathematics utilized. (shrink)

We all know that speech can be harmful. But how? Mary Kate McGowan argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. She investigates such harms as oppression, subordination, and discrimination in such forms of speech as sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers, and micro-aggressions.

RésuméL'ouvrage de Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality, adopte une méthodologie philosophique provocatrice. Moreau puise dans les expériences des victimes de discrimination et à même les contours fondamentaux du droit à la non-discrimination afin d’élaborer sa théorie de la discrimination répréhensible. Cependant, si nous prenons au sérieux les enseignements des études féministes et critiques de la « race », une tension émerge au sein de la dyade méthodologique de Moreau : si les lois contre la discrimination sont souvent elles-mêmes source (...) d'hostilité et d'invalidation pour les victimes de discrimination, comment ces expériences et ces lois peuvent-elles toutes deux faire autorité pour déterminer la nature de la discrimination répréhensible? Cet article explore cette tension à l’œuvre dans Faces of Inequality à la lumière de la théorie de la « conscience multiple » de Mari Matsuda. (shrink)

From the title, Interpreting Duns Scotus, one would expect to find in this volume a type of meta-study. By this I mean that each article would reveal as much about the author as about the subject,...

Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In _Beast and Man_ Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, _Beast (...) and Man_ has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live. (shrink)

This article examines the claim that Duns Scotus’s position on the will’s freedom changed between his early Lectura teaching to his late Reportatio lectures on Distinction 25 of Book II of the Sentences. Stephen Dumont in “Did Duns Scotus Change His Mind on the Will?” suggests that Scotus moves closer to the position of Henry of Ghent on the will. The Franciscan had criticized that position in his earlier teaching. In order to demonstrate that Scotus’s voluntarism continues to be moderate, (...) the author first explicates the notion of a rational will in Scotist thought, by means of the two affections of the will and the position outlined in Scotus’s Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle Book IX, Q. 15. Following this, a textual comparison of Lectura II, D. 25 with Reportatio II, D. 25 shows that there is indeed a shift, but not toward a more exaggerated form of voluntarism. Rather, close reading of these texts reveals that, in his early teaching, Scotus did not think the will was the rational potency, and did not identify its freedom with rationality. In the later Parisian teaching he presents the will as the sole rational potency, thereby diminishing the role of the intellect, but not that of rationality. The textual evidence of Ordinatio II, D. 6, Questions on the Metaphysics, Lectura II, D. 25 and Reportatio II, D. 25 show that Scotus’s final teaching on the will integrates rationality into the functioning of freedom, and does not align him with Henry’s position, despite similarity of language. (shrink)

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.