Frances Steloff was born on December 31, 1887. Ms. Steloff founded and ran the Gotham Book Mart, a historic bookstore in New York City. It was a haven for writers and readers. Anais Nin, for instance, mailed her library to Frances for safekeeping, when she had to flee Paris. In the 1960s Frances found a buyer for her bookstore. The contract let Steloff keep an apartment upstairs, where she and her cats continued to live. In her will she provided not just for her cats, but left money for strays as well. Frances Steloff is a nice figure to end the year on, since this blog is not just about cats, but books too.
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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