Lewis Carroll died on January 14, 1898. Carroll loved cats, as we can see in Alice's Adventures, but he was not always terribly observant of the feline world. Here is how the university mathematician describes some kittens in an Alice story--they are Kitty and Snowdrop, Dinah's kittens. Kitty, "you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her." Fantasy must maintain some semblance of reality to succeed, and this instance rings false.
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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