Blaise Pascal died on August 19, 1662. The author of Pensees, was a devout mathematician. This story about his infanthood, was published in a magazine, The Living Age, in 1884:
When Blaise Pascal was a year old, a woman reputed among the peasantry of Auvergne to be a sorceress, and whom his father refused to aid in a lawsuit, was supposed to have bewitched the infant, who forthwith began to pine visibly away. M. Pascal, who for some time paid no attention to the gossip, at last grew alarmed, and threatening the woman with the direst pains and penalties, brought her to confess that she had indeed bewitched the child, and that his sickness was unto death. The only remedy was that the charm should be laid on someone else, a life for a life, but as the exchange with a human being was not to be thought of, she consented to take a cat. Undeterred by the remonstrances of two monks who came to console Madame Pascal, the family gave her the cat, and with a plaster made from herbs plucked before sunrise by a girl under seven years old, and no doubt bruised down with the cat's blood, the sick infant recovered, predisposed to accept the miracle of the holy thorn, and other occurrences of the like nature. But M. Pascal, who afterwards repented that be had in his eager desire to save his child allowed this new appeal to the powers of evil, must have seen that the witch's ability was stronger to hurt than to save, since the child's feeble health remained feeble to the end.
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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