December 27, 1821 (or 26, sources vary) is the birth date of Lady Wilde. She collected and published Irish folk tales, and "The Demon Cat" recounts the story of a fish stealing cat, a cat that was huge and black, and attacked any one who came between it and the fish. Except for the size (and who knows how big "huge" is) this cat's behavior seems pretty feline, except that it dissolved when holy water was sprinkled on it. So we know it was a demon. Lady Wilde was Oscar's mom.
Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she accepted the post of Principal of N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely argument in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world. A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper. We have this picture of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne
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