Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher, was born on June 23, 1668. He may not have understood the extent to which the philosophy of history was a religious construct, but he knew he was engaging in an original work when he devised his view of the movement of history: Vico envisioned history moving in circles, but these circles change at each revolution so that the repetition is not precise. There is a totally unsubstantiated rumor the idea for these circles came to Vico after watching a cat play with a piece of string.
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
Comments
Post a Comment