Owen Barfield died on December 14, 1997. Photographs of this obscure philosopher show a sweet man. During the century he lived, his friendships are the first thing readers would recall--he was one of the inner circle of Tolkien's Oxford buddies--a circle that included C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Apparently he was influential on Lewis, as this anecdote suggests: hearing Lewis refer to philosophizing as a profession, Barfield corrected Lewis, saying "Philosophy is a 'way.'" Barfield was not a fiction writer but he did write a novel: English People, and fortunately for cat almanacists, there is a cat in the novel. A cat along with fictive Rudolph Steiner, Freud, and Jung. The cat, named Merlin, gets lost, and drama surrounds the question of whether the cat has been stolen by magicians.
Just in case you wondered what people were thinking about between the 20th century wars.
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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