What cat wants to be wet?

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,

Cotswold Lions

Below I copied today's post to www.cat-lovers-almanac.blogspot.com. Mostly I forget to use this forum to expand on the philosophical element often in my cat posts. One interesting thing about Harington is he puts the loss of learning from the 16th century to the present, in perspective. Also, Harington seems to occupy a place as one of the originators of an emphasis on the individual as important per se. From the post below you will recall that he included personal details about himself, in his translation of Orlando. And had to defend himself for this. The recent post about Augustus Toplady is another example of where we could/should expand on the philosophical. That guy was astonishing. And his debating Wesley about free will. I will get back to that but what Toplady saw, was that BOTH free will and determinism were present for a person. Hard to discuss that. And you can see (not in my post) how John Wesley totally missed the point. He (Wesley) takes the cheap road of accusing

The Philosopher's Cat

Search This Blog