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A.NATURAL.HISTORY. OF. THE. SENSES. “This is one of the best books of the year—by any measure you want to apply. It is interesting, informative, very well written. This book can be opened on any page and read with relish.... thoroughly  ...

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This article presents the main features of the work of Domenico Vandelli (1735-1816), an Italian-born man of science who lived a large part of his life in Portugal. Vandelli's scientific interests as a naturalist paved the way to his activities as a reformer and adviser on economic and financial issues. The topics covered in his writings are similar to those discussed by Linnaeus, with whom Vandelli corresponded. They clearly reveal that the scientific preparation indispensable for a better knowledge of (...) class='Hi'>natural resources was also a fundamental condition for correctly addressing problems of efficiency in their economic allocation. The key argument put forward in this article is that the relationship betweennaturalhistory and the agenda for economic reform and development deserves to be further analysed. It is indeed a central element in the emergence of political economy as an autonomous scientific discourse during the last decades of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

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What will your soul's gender be in Heaven? Will your pet Harry be there? Could your clone have a soul? Will eternity be fun? What is it with the ghosts of loved ones? ANaturalHistory of the Soul makes a challenging topic accessible through an entertaining and readable exploration. It begins by reviewing beliefs about the soul and the afterlife in our popular culture, and looks at how they have evolved from the earliest humans. It identifies key (...) concepts in philosophy and major religions, and examines developments in medicine and technology that are shaping our ideas. Throughout the book, provocative questions are raised to help clarify your own beliefs and inform emerging social policy debates. (shrink)

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Garrod, Smith and the contributors of the volume envisage the longue durée poetics of an early modern genre. They interpret its poetics alongside its various epistemic agenda and make a case for the literary status ofnaturalhistory.

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This paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a (...) specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip,Midland Naturalistand theJournal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction ofnaturalhistory in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value tonaturalhistory. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-centurynaturalhistory. (shrink)

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Living organisms are the ultimate survivalists, having evolved phenotypes with unprecedented adaptability, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and versatility compared to human technology. To harness these properties, functional descriptions and design principles from all sources of biodiversity information must be collated − including the hundreds of thousands of possible survival features manifest innaturalhistory museum collections, which represent 12% of total global biodiversity. This requires a consortium of expert biologists from a range of disciplines to convert the observations, data, and (...) hypotheses into the language of engineering. We hope to unite multidisciplinary biologists andnaturalhistory museum scientists to maximize the coverage of observations, descriptions, and hypotheses relating to adaptation and function across biodiversity, to make it technologically useful. This is to be achieved by developments in meta‐ taxonomic classification, phylogenetics, systematics, biological materials research, structure and morphological characterizations, and ecological data gathering from the collections − the aim being to identify and catalogue features essential for good biomimetic design. (shrink)

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Naturalhistory collections are typically studied in terms of how they were formed rather than how they were received. This gives us only half the picture. Visiting accounts can increase our historical understanding of collections because they can tell us how people in the past understood them. This essay examines the responses of visitors to Walton Hall in West Yorkshire, home of the traveller-naturalist Charles Waterton and his famous taxidermic collection. Waterton’s specimens were not interpreted in isolation. Firstly, (...) they were experienced as components of a larger visiting experience, in which travelling to the Hall, being admitted to the grounds, viewing the park, and meeting the owner, were all just as significant as seeing the specimens themselves. Secondly, they were interpreted in conjunction with familiar stories and images relating to Waterton’s adventurous collecting activities. Visiting accounts can help us begin to recover what people thought about Waterton and his collection in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, in so far as they were responsible for a large part of his subsequent reputation, they can help us better understand our own, present-day conceptions of Charles Waterton and Walton Hall. (shrink)

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Presents Maimonides' messianic beliefs as stemming from his views of the structure of nature and the course ofhistory. The author argues that Maimonides saw the messianic era as an historical period on one hand, and as a Utopian era of eternal peace and the recognition of God on the other.

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_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 220 - 239 Art has been crucial for Western philosophy roughly since Kant – that is, for what is becoming known as “correlationist” philosophy – because it has so often had assigned to it a singular ontological status. The artwork, in this view, is material being that has been transfigured and shot through with subjectivity. The work of art, what art does and how it works have all been understood as mediating between the (...) otherwise irreconcilable opposites of historical spirit and the mute material world, between communicative thought and the unresponsiveness otherness of nature. I revisit this aesthetic tradition from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the proposed name of the new geological epoch of the present, distinguished by the fact that collective human action has now acquired the scale of a world-shapingnatural force. The Anthropocene is at once a geological epoch and a historical period. What forms of narrative might possibly relate these two temporal orders together? What other aesthetic categories might help us think through the conceptual impasse of the Anthropocene present? How might aesthetic experience illuminate thehistory of Anthropocene? Whatnatural histories might artworks tell today? My speculative endpoint: the Anthropocene globe is the universal artwork of the contemporary moment. (shrink)

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Nineteenth-centurynaturalhistory societies sought to address the concerns of a scientific and a local public. Focusing onnaturalhistory societies in late Victorian Scotland, this paper concentrates on the relations between associationalnaturalhistory and local civic culture. By examining the recruitment rhetoric used by leading members and by exploring the public meetings organized by the societies, the paper signals a number of ways in which members worked to make their societies important public (...) bodies in Scottish towns. In addition, by narrating a number of disputes between members over hownaturalhistory societies should operate, the paper shows how civic science could occasion social discord rather than harmony. Overall, by investigating the presence of field clubs in different urban settings, and describing members' attempts to portraynatural historical pursuits as a significant cultural endeavour, the paper seeks to map an important part of the historical geography of Scottish civic science. (shrink)

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Whatever its merits and difficulties, the concept of logic embedded in much of the "new philosophy" of the early modern period was then understood to supplant contemporary views of formal logic. The notion of compiling anaturalhistory of the understanding constituted the basis of this new concept of logic. The following paper attempts to trace this view of logic through some of the major and numerous minor texts of the period, centering on the development and influence of (...) John Locke's understanding of the analysis of the cognitive faculties as the discipline of logic. (shrink)

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Throughout the twentieth century calls to modernizenaturalhistory motivated a range of responses. It was unclear how research innaturalhistory museums would participate in the significant technological and conceptual changes that were occurring in the life sciences. By the 1960s, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the few university-basednaturalhistory museums that were able to maintain their specimen collections and support active research. The MVZ (...) therefore provides a window to the modernization ofnaturalhistory. This paper concentrates on the directorial transitions that occurred at the MVZ between 1965 and 1971. During this period, the MVZ had four directors: Alden H. Miller (Director 1940–1965), an ornithologist; Aldo Starker Leopold (Acting Director 1965–1966), a conservationist and wildlife biologist; Oliver P. Pearson (Director 1966–1971), a physiologist and mammalogist; and David B. Wake (Director 1971–1998), a morphologist, developmental biologist, and herpetologist. The paper explores how a diversity of overlapping modernization strategies, including hiring new faculty, building infrastructure to study live animals, establishing new kinds of collections, and building modern laboratories combined to maintain collections at the MVZ’s core. The paper examines the tensions between the different modernization strategies to inform an analysis of how and why some changes were institutionalized while others were short-lived. By exploring the modernization of collections-based research, this paper emphasizes the importance of collections in the transformation of the life sciences. (shrink)

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Translating current research into accessible terms, Taylor discusses the brain's electrical and chemical processes, amnesia, mystical states, and multiple personality and the nature of dreaming, memory, pain, and intelligence.

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The general popularity ofnaturalhistory in the eighteenth century is mirrored in the frequency and importance of the more than 4,500 articles onnaturalhistory in the "Encyclopédie". The main contributors tonaturalhistory were Daubenton, Diderot, Jaucourt and d'Holbach, but some of the key animating principles derive from Buffon, who wrote nothing specifically for the "Encyclopédie". Still, a number of articles reflect his thinking, especially his antipathy toward Linnaeus. There was in principle (...) anatural tie between encyclopedism, with its emphasis on connected knowledge, and the task ofnatural historians who concentrated on the relationships among living forms. Both the encyclopedists andnatural historians aimed at a sweeping overview of knowledge, and we see that Diderot's discussions of the encyclopedia were apparently informed by his reading ofnaturalhistory. Most of the articles onnaturalhistory drew from traditional sources, but there are differences in emphasis and choice of subject, depending upon the author. Diderot's 300 contributions are often practical, interesting, and depend upon accounts from other parts of the world. Jaucourt, who wrote more articles onnaturalhistory than anyone else, followed in his footsteps. Daubenton's 900 articles reflected a more narrow, professional approach. His contributions concluded for the most part with Volume 8, and Jaucourt carried on almost single-handedly after that. While staking out traditional ground (description, taxonomy) and advancing newer theoretical views linked with Buffon,naturalhistory in the "Encyclopédie" avoided almost completely the sentimentalism concerning nature that developed after Rousseau. (shrink)

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ABSTRACT In a series of papers read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society through the 1820s, the Cambridge mathematician George Peacock laid the foundation for anaturalhistory of arithmetic that would tell a story of human progress from counting to modern arithmetic. The trajectory of thathistory, Peacock argued, established algebraic analysis as a form of universal reasoning that used empirically warranted operations of mind to think with symbols on paper. The science of counting would suggest arithmetic, (...) arithmetic would suggest arithmetical algebra, and, finally, arithmetical algebra would suggest symbolic algebra. This philosophy of suggestion provided the foundation for Peacock's “principle of equivalent forms,” which justified the practice of nineteenth-century English symbolic algebra. Peacock's philosophy of suggestion owed a considerable debt to the early Cambridge Philosophical Society culture ofnaturalhistory. The aim of this essay is to show how that culture ofnaturalhistory was constitutively significant to the practice of nineteenth-century English algebra. (shrink)

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Investigators of animal behavior since the eighteenth century have sought to make their work integral to the enterprises ofnaturalhistory and/or the life sciences. In their efforts to do so, they have frequently based their claims of authority on the advantages offered by the special places where they have conducted their research. The zoo, the laboratory, and the field have been major settings for animal behavior studies. The issue of the relative advantages of these different sites has (...) been a persistent one in thehistory of animal behavior studies up to and including the work of the ethologists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

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This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known (...) clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazihistory and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recentnatural selection. (shrink)

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Nature,History, State: 1933-1934 presents the first complete English-language translation of Heidegger's seminar 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature,History and State', together with full introductory material and interpretive essays by five leading thinkers and scholars: Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar, which was held while Heidegger was serving as National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg, represents important evidence of the development of Heidegger's political thought. The text (...) consists of ten 'protocols' on the seminar sessions, composed by students and reviewed by Heidegger. The first session's protocol is a rather personal commentary on the atmosphere in the classroom, but the remainder have every appearance of being faithful transcripts of Heidegger's words, in which he raises a variety of fundamental questions about nature,history and the state. The seminar culminates in an attempt to sketch a political philosophy that supports the 'Führer state'. The text is important evidence for anyone considering the tortured question of Heidegger's Nazism and its connection to his philosophy in general. (shrink)

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As recent research has shown, many of the activities of early modern (including eighteenth‐century) naturalists were carried out in the household. This article investigates the ways in which family members in particular, both male and female, ended up engaging in kinds of labor which furthered the pursuit ofnaturalhistory in the eighteenth century. Examining evidence from various different parts of Europe and its colonies, the article argues thatnaturalhistory can be seen to have often (...) been what might be termed a family enterprise, one to which many different family members might contribute in ways shaped by concerns of kinship and inheritance. (shrink)

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This essay defends a form of ethical naturalism in which ethical knowledge is explained by human nature. Human nature, here, is not the essence of the species but itsnaturalhistory as socially and historically determined. The argument does not lead to social relativism, but it does place limits on the scope of ethical critique. As society becomes “total”, critique can only be immanent; to this extent, Adorno and the Frankfurt School are right.

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The phrase, "state of nature", has been used over centuries to describe the uncultivated state of lands and animals, nudity, innocence, heaven and hell, interstate relations, and the locus of pre- and supra-political rights, such as the right to resistance, to property, to create and leave polities, and the freedom of religion, speech, and opinion, which may be reactivated or reprioritised when the polity and its laws fail. Combining intellectualhistory with current concerns, this volume brings together fourteen essays (...) on the past, present and possible future applications of the legal fiction known as the state of nature. Contributors are: Daniel S. Allemann, Pamela Edwards, Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Mary C. Fuller, David Singh Grewal, Francesca Iurlaro, Edward J. Kolla, László Kontler, Grant S. McCall, Tom Sparks, Benjamin Straumann, Karl Widerquist, Sarah Winter, and Simone Zurbuchen. (shrink)

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This paper aims to examine Kant's views on evolution of organized beings and to show that Kant's antievolutionary conclusions stem from his study ofnaturalhistory and variability of organisms. Accordingly, I discuss Kant's study ofnaturalhistory and consider whether his conclusion about impossibility of knowledge about suchhistory expands on the research ofhistory of organized beings. Moving forward, I examine the notion of variability in Kant's philosophy, and show that his theory (...) of organized beings relies on the preformationist conception of variability that provides limited insight into thehistory of organisms. I explain that Kant's endorsement of preformationism is conditioned by a lack of knowledge about the mechanism that successfully explains adaptation and transmutation of organisms leading towards the creation of new species. Finally, I sumarize the following reasons for Kant's rejection of the hypothesis of evolution: lack of cognitive ability to discover all changes ofnatural phenomena in different periods of time and adoption of preformationist conception of variability of organized beings. I finish off with a discussion about mechanical inexplicability of organisms and find a third reason Kant believes that the idea of evolution is only "a daring adventure on the part of reason". (shrink)

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Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality argues that human socio-political inequality is product of human activity and not a function ofnatural processes. Recent studies have begun to address the role ofnaturalhistory in the Discourse and have argued that Rousseau anticipated modern developments in evolutionist theory, sociobiology, ethology, and primatology. I take issue with this trend in Rousseau scholarship. In this work I demonstrate that Rousseau should not be counted as a forerunner of either Darwin or more (...) recent attempts at integrating politics and the life sciences; that, on the contrary, Rousseau's Discourse is best understood as a call to resist this approach to political inquiry. ;I begin my discussion by examining the structure and political implications of the dominant eighteenth-century theory ofnaturalhistory--the "chain of being". I demonstrate that this view of nature held that inequality was bothnatural and just, and that in order for Rousseau to sustain his egalitarian commitments he needed to refute this claim. ;Next, I begin to reconstruct Rousseau's understanding ofnaturalhistory in order to demonstrate that Rousseau should not be included as a forerunner of Darwin. I demonstrate that on issues central tonaturalhistory he shows a marked willingness to accept key presuppositions of the chain of being. I then examine how he is nonetheless able to escape the inegalitarian implications of this theory ofnaturalhistory by making the issue of objectivity central to his investigation of the origin and foundation of human inequality. ;I demonstrate how Rousseau argues that competing conceptions of human nature and thenatural condition of the human species should be rejected as insufficiently objective. I discuss Rousseau's solution to the problem of objectivity and its effect on his own description of human beings in the state of nature. I conclude by arguing that the main relevance of the Second Discourse to contemporary biopolitics is the extent to which it anticipates the concerns of its critics. (shrink)

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This article presents a new argument concerning the relation between Kant’s theory of race and aspects of the critical philosophy. It argues that Kant’s treatment of the problem of the systematic unity of nature and knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment can be traced back a methodological problem in thenaturalhistory of the period – that of the possibility of anatural system of nature. Kant’s transformation of (...) the methodological problem fromnaturalhistory into a set of philosophical problems proceeds by way of the working out of his own problem innaturalhistory – the problem of thenaturalhistory of the human races – and specifically the problem of the unity in diversity of the human species, in response to which he develops a theory of race. This theory of race is, further, the first developed model of the use of teleological judgment in Kant’s work. The article thus argues that Kant’s philosophical position on the sy... (shrink)

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This paper challenges the presumed triumph of laboratory life in thehistory of twentieth-century biomedical research through an exploration of the relationships between laboratory, clinic, and field in the regional understanding and treatment of allergy in America. In the early establishment of allergy clinics, many physicians opted to work closely with botanists knowledgeable about the local flora in the region to develop pollen extracts in desensitization treatments, rather than rely upon pharmaceutical companies that had adopted a principle of standardized (...) vaccines beholden to bacteriology that gave no thought to the particularities of place where their products were to be sold.Natural historical sciences like plant ecology and systematics furnished important knowledge, resources, and practices in establishing a medical marketplace for allergy in America. And botanists similarly profited from biomedicine and allergic bodies in extending their network of knowledge about the plant world. (shrink)

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Theodor Adorno's concept of 'naturalhistory' [Naturgeschichte] was central for a number of Adorno's theoretical projects, but remains elusive. In this essay, I analyse different dimensions of the concept ofnaturalhistory, distinguishing amongst (a) a reflection on the normative and methodological bases of philosophical anthropology and critical social science; (b) a conception of critical memory oriented toward the preservation of the memory of historical suffering; and (c) the notion of 'mindfulness of nature in the subject' (...) provocatively asserted in Max Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. These strands are united by the notion of transience and goal of developing a critical theory sensitive to the transient inhistory. The essay concludes by suggesting some implications of an expanded concept ofnaturalhistory for issues in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

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This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation innatural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

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This chapter develops a naturalistic and evolutionary psychological account of shame and the sense of shame, according to which shame is a social rank‐based emotion. Culture, itself a part of nature, can modify our Homo sapiens bioprogram. In a special case of the cultural modification of our shame program, Early Confucian culture sought to exploit shame in order to decrease high rates of violence in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Early Confucian leaders believed that if people were to acquire (...) increases in social rank primarily through prestige rather than violence, peace would reign. For several reasons, not least having to do with high‐fidelity cultural transmission of Confucianism through Chinesehistory, East Asians today display a heightened shame profile that makes them outliers with respect to the rest of the world. This is developed in the final part of the paper. (shrink)

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In his 1785-review of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Kant objects to Herder's conception of nature as being imbued with active forces. This attack is usually evaluated against the background of Kant's critical project and his epistemological concern to caution against the “metaphysical excess” of attributing immanent properties to matter. In this paper I explore a slightly different reading by investigating Kant's pre-critical account of creation and generation. The aim of this is to show that Kant's struggle (...) with the forces of matter has a longhistory and revolves around one central problem: that of how to distinguish between the non-purposive forces of nature and the intentional powers of the mind. Given thishistory, the epistemic stricture that Kant's critical project imposes on him no longer appears to be the primary reason for his attack on Herder. It merely aggravates a problem that Kant has been battling with since his earliest writings. (shrink)

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Neo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalism purports to show that moral evaluation of human action and character is an evaluation ofnatural goodness—a kind of evaluation that applies to living things in virtue of their nature and based on their form of life. The standard neo‐Aristotelian view definesnatural goodness by way of generic statements describing thenaturalhistory, or the ‘characteristic’ life, of a species. In this paper, I argue that this conception ofnatural goodness commits the (...) neo‐Aristotelian view to a problematic anti‐individualism that results in the wrong assessment of individuals with uniquely adaptive adjustments. I then offer an alternative account ofnatural goodness that avoids this problem. Instead of relying on generic statements about a species, my account definesnatural goodness based on counterfactual conditionals describing the modal properties of a single individual. I argue that this modal‐explanatory account gives a conception ofnatural goodness that is more intuitively plausible and better suited to capture the diversity and plasticity distinctive of life. (shrink)

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[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter ofnatural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments innatural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seemnatural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz (...) and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments innatural theology. They find that althoughnatural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of thesenatural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

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While some seventeenth-century scholars promotednaturalhistory as the basis ofnatural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), exploresnaturalhistory as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approachednaturalhistory very differently, with different objectives, and relying on (...) different traditions of handling specimens and organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own. (shrink)

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Absent as a breeding bird from Britain for at least a century, avocets began nesting on the east coast of Britain, in Suffolk, shortly after the end of the Second World War, having homed in on two spots on Britain’s coast that had been flooded for war-related reasons. The avocets’ presence was surrounded in secrecy, while a dedicated few kept up a protective watch over them. As the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds took over responsibility for the flourishing (...) colony, they claimed the episode as a symbol of success for British protection, later making the bird their logo. Counter to the RSPB’s story of protecting a British bird, I read the narratives of events in terms of making a bird British. I show how, as postwar Britain slumped economically and spiritually and tried to rebuild itself, the birds became a vehicle for formulating national identity: of Britain as a home to which to return and belong. Exploring the themes of returning servicemen and closed territories, the paper also examines the episode in terms of the naturalisation of the military and the militarisation of nature. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Argument oftheNaturalHistory Mark Webb In the NaturalHistoryofReligion Hume claims there are two principal questions concerning religion: one "concerning its foundation in reason," and the other "concerning its origin in human nature." He forthrightly states that his concern here is to determine "[w]hat those principles are, which give rise to the original belief, and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation."1 That (...) is to say, his express intentis, via an empirically based study, to determine and elucidate the causal ornatural origin of religion—its beliefs and practices. These are among his first remarks. Consider now his very last remarks: The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result ofour most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species ofsuperstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape, into the calm, though obscure, regions ofphilosophy. (NHR 4:363) These last remarks should strike one as enigmatic: for, given that his purported aim is to offer a naturalistic account ofwhy humans hold religious beliefs, it is strange that he should be content to end in mystery—particularly sosince theworkitselfonersaplausible account ofsuch origins. Still, even ifHume should have felt the project to have failed, what does that have to do with "suspense of judgment," "quarrelling superstitions," and especially his "happy escape"? But of course he is up to much more in theNaturalHistory than he lets on. Indeed,he offersnotonly acausal accountofreligiousbeliefbutamoral critique ofitas well. Why shouldhe doboth in the same work? I suggest that the causal account and the moral critique are intimately connected; and that the work is first and foremost a moral critique intended to sever allegiance to "traditional religion"—traditional theism in general, and Christianityin particular. One aim ofthis paper Volume XVII Number 2 141 MARKWEBB is to offer a unified reading of theNaturalHistory, while the other is to assess the cogency ofHume's project on this reading. To this end we should first situate theNaturalHistory among Hume's other works. It follows the firstEnquiry which addresses inter alia the credibility of "revealed" religion (particularly section 10, "Of Miracles"), and the second Enquiry which advances a naturalistically based morality. It was completed about the time he began the Dialogues, the main contention ofwhich is thatnatural theology offers minimal if any support for most traditional religious claims. In theNaturalHistory, then, it is reasonable to suppose he is assuming the cogency of his claims against revealed religion, the viability of a naturalistically based morality, and the utter inability ofnatural theology to ground either traditional religious tenets or morality. The Dialogues in particular illuminate Hume's thought: after concluding that a posteriori arguments offer absolutely no grounds for ascribing the traditional moral attributes to the Deity, Philo goes on to counter Cleanthes' claim—that "[r]eligion, however corrupted, is still better than noreligion atall"2—bycontendingthattraditional religion simply is unessential andeven harmful to the needs ofsociety. Hume advances his causal account because he believes both that traditional religion lacks any basis in reason, and that recourse to a supernatural origin is untenable. And it will become evident in the course of this paper that theNaturalHistory is most accurately understood against the backdrop of his moral theory as expounded in the second Enquiry—indeed the former is an exercise in applied ethics. The Strategy oftheNaturalHistory The sceptical tone ofmany ofits passages should strike one as out of place. For the scepticism is directed not towards providing a causal account of the origin ofreligious beliefs and practices (the purported aim), but rather towards their plausibility. Yet one might well expect such passages if Hume is assuming that religion has no tenable basis in reason nor for its revelational claims, and that he intends the work to be more than merely anaturalhistory—as indeed he does. Speaking of polytheism and the... (shrink)

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The volume consists of eleven of Löwith's essays on the philosophy ofhistory, thehistory of philosophy, and the nature of the challenges faced by philosophy and the Christian faith in the twentieth century. Included are illuminating studies on Heidegger, Pascal and the early Marx. Appearing for the first time in translation are three noteworthy and challenging essays, "The Quest for the Meaning ofHistory," "The Fate of Progress," and "Hegel and the Christian Religion." Löwith is concerned (...) with the historical origins of the intellectual problems facing modern man, but is critical of many modern attempts to view philosophy and faith from an exclusively historical perspective. Löwith's thinking is throughout stimulating and original.—A. W. W. (shrink)

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