The Philosopher's Cat

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...

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the  National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took...

The Gifford Lectures  website  summarizes the significance of Rudolf Bultmann (August 20, 1884 to July 30, 1976) for modern theology: 'Rudolf Bultmann a highly acclaimed New Testament scholar was born in the former German state of Oldenburg in 1884. His theological training which began at the University of Tübingen in 1903 was subsequently carried out at the universities of Marburg and Berlin. Adolf von Harnack Wilhelm Herrmann and Johannes Weiss rank high among professors who most influenced Bultmann. In the course of his distinguished teaching career brief appointments at the Universities of Marburg (1912–1916) Breslau (1916––1920) and Giessen (1920––1921) were followed by a lengthy tenure at Marburg (1921––1951) that put him in close association with the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Already enamoured of Herrmann's insight that theology must engage experience as well as concepts Bultmann was drawn to Heidegger's understanding of existence with its distinct...