Number One Excuse: cat on lap

August 23, 1941

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

August 25, 1990

Watch enough old movies (pandemic anyone) and you can fill in this scene--- businessmen, sex, court corridors. This is the backdrop to a scene from Morley Callaghan's novel, The Man With the Coat , (1955), from which we quote: As a businessman, Singerman might say he couldn’t afford to be associated with an old fighter who was an outcast from a place where the best people went. “I won’t be an outcast,” Mike said so loudly that his own voice in the darkness startled him and he sat up in bed. Then he heard a cat in the lane behind the building. The window was open a few inches. The weeds that bothered his hay fever grew in the lane. Again he heard the cat dragging at the lid of the garbage pail. The lid clattered and rolled and he jumped up, slammed the window shut, then he clenched his big fists with the broken knuckles and stood in a trance for a long time. A more directly biographical account is Morley Callaghan's story of accompanying a lady friend to the coliseum one night,

April 26, 1711

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, was born on April 26, 1711. In his "Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding," Hume distinguishes between experience, the origin of ideas, and ideas using a cat as an example. You see a cat, and this is experience. You remember seeing the cat later, and this is a idea, the idea of a cat. Sounds simple. Like a ball of tangled yarn. (his cat said this last.)

The Philosopher's Cat

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