Oxford University Press's Blog, page 458

October 3, 2016

Hey, language-learning platforms!

Maybe you can help?


I’ve recently been using one-to-one language-learning platforms online to explore Hindi. I’ve really enjoyed the experience. It’s fabulous to be able to video chat with native Hindi speakers to learn about a new language and culture. I used my time to study the menu of my favourite Indian restaurant and translate the lyrics of the mega-hit, Bollywood song, “Gerua”, featuring Shah Rukh Khan, billed as the biggest star in the world.


So, a thought occurred to me. For me, learning Hindi is wonderful fun and just a hobby. For so many learning a language is the key to unlocking a specific future.


This includes aspiring scientists facing the need to master English.


I’ve been having discussions with scientific colleagues in Indonesia and Korea about the challenges of learning Scientific English.


Even when speakers are proficient in English, Scientific English can still present challenges. Some bill it as ‘a foreign language’ even for native English speakers. Anyone who has learned how to use it might first laugh at that comparison and then grit their teeth on the grain of truth. Learning conversational English is a big enough task. Getting good enough to build a career in science fluently using Scientific English is a Herculean task.


Many do rise to the challenge. I have many colleagues who have managed admirably. Most have considerable advantages, like living in the most English literate countries (i.e. Scandinavia) or having been able to do part of their education or graduate work in English or an English-speaking country.


I have huge admiration for these bilingual, and sometimes polyglot, scientists.


It is a great help to the scientific endeavour to have a language all scientists can communicate in. If the public understands this lingua franca, the advantages telescope.


Math is acknowledged as a universal language, along with love, but we still need words to go further, especially to describe abstract concepts.


Today, for better or worse, English has emerged as the lingua franca of science like before it German, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit.



2349630643_52f4f12da9_o2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) – 19 by Nic McPhee. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

So, I was thinking. What if I wanted to help out and teach Scientific English to young scientists from around the world? What if I wanted to do it for free and try to get a bunch of my colleagues to join?


I would ideally need a platform in which to nucleate this community. I could turn to the Facebook juggernaut, and I could launch a bespoke “Scientific English” website. But how would I coordinate and schedule actual lessons?


Maybe you can see where I am going here?


Might an existing language-learning platform be willing to shave off a bit of its bandwidth to help in democratising science for all and help out?


If we could mobilize the scientific community on both sides of the language barrier, might funding agencies turn their talk about meeting the needs of non-native English speakers into funds for lessons? Or might the program founders forgo their platform costs, as the contributing scientists would do?


I would contribute time. I would love engaging with bright sparks who love science over the intersection of communication, culture, language, global collaborations, and science. In fact, I’d suggest it will be the native English speakers who end up learning the most about the world at the end of this type of exchange.


No scientist doing good science should be hindered by a language barrier.


Until Google perfects Google Translate, or we can all talk telepathically in some universal math-based language, we will need to communicate science the best we can.


Right now, this seems to involve English – and the intersection of English with pretty much every other language on Earth.


If you’d like to explore this idea, you know where to find me.


Featured image credit: Flags by vanna44. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.


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Published on October 03, 2016 03:30

Barriers to sexual freedom in assisted living

The baby boom generation came of age at a time that pushed boundaries of sexual freedom. Changes in attitudes and behaviors about sexuality were framed by the sexual revolution, women’s rights, gay rights, and the birth control pill. Decades later, the first wave of this generation is now turning 65. While most boomers still have a decade or more before they consider moving into assisted living facilities, a study suggests that sexual freedom is difficult to come by for those who currently reside in a structured environment such as assisted living. Today about one million Americans reside in assisted living facilities and this number is expected to increase. As boomers age and need additional support, how will they maintain the sexual freedom they have enjoyed in the past?


In order to understand current attitudes about sexuality in assisted living, we conducted a qualitative study including interviews and participant observation in six assisted living facilities in and around a large southeast city.


Focusing on findings from staff and administrator interviews and focus groups, we found that they routinely emphasized the assisted living facility was the residents’ home, which is in line with the philosophy of assisted living, and they could do what they pleased. However, we also found a tension between affirming the autonomy and sexual rights of residents and explanations of when those freedoms should be limited. The justifiable concerns about older adults’ sexual behaviors in this setting include a responsibility to keep residents safe, address family concerns about residents’ well-being, and make sure that older adults engaging in sex are willing and able to consent to these activities.


Yet at the same time, AL staff, sometimes directed by administrators, acted in subtle and nuanced ways to create an environment that discouraged sexual behavior. Unlike living in a private residence, older residents live in space managed by others with schedules to keep and multiple residents to help. As a result, staff and administrators work to minimize conflict and maximize efficiency, which can limit the opportunities for residents to engage in sexual behaviors. For example, staff frequently gave a cursory knock before entering a closed room to provide necessary care and support, such as light housekeeping. This unlimited access to resident space meant true privacy was hard to achieve.


There are clear state-level policies that hold facilities responsible for the safety and well-being of residents, but the details of how these policies are implemented and enforced is handled by individual facilities and vary widely. In this sample, we found an absence of facility-level policy about sexual behavior. The lack of discrete policy creates a challenge for staff, residents, and families as they negotiate the boundaries of sexual freedoms.


This study is a start to the conversation. However, policies vary across facilities and regulations vary from state to state. Future research needs to explore how these issues vary across the country. Furthermore, most older adults don’t live in assisted living. What does privacy and opportunity mean for the majority living at home? What roles do family and healthcare providers play in shaping, monitoring, and managing sexual freedoms of all older adults?


In the coming decades, baby boomers will seek assistance in environments such as assisted living, and the current climate does not guarantee that they will be able to maintain the same sexual freedoms that they fought for as young adults. Unless there are policy changes and attitude shifts regarding sexual freedom of older adults, it is possible the boomers of today will also experience barriers in the future.


Featured image credit:Couple happy old by miltonhuallpa95.  Public domain via Pixabay.


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Published on October 03, 2016 01:30

Air quality law in the United Kingdom at a crossroads

UK air quality law now finds itself at a crossroads. Air quality law is a well-established area of environmental law, having been at the vanguard of much of it. It is a well-established area across multiple levels of governance, with local and national regulation in the UK operating against a backdrop of binding EU standards and an international law framework for transboundary air pollution (the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP)). This multilevel body of law highlights that air pollution is a problem that has many sources – local, transboundary, stationary, mobile, manmade, natural – which act and interact via complex pollution pathways, leading to a range of regulatory responses within and beyond jurisdictional boundaries.


However, whilst well-established, air quality law is not static. In recent years, scientific developments and public interest pressure have animated UK air quality law, particularly through public interest litigation, and now political events question its legal foundations. The June 2016 UK referendum vote to leave the European Union calls into question the central role of EU law in setting and enforcing air quality standards in UK law (through the provisions of Directive 2008/50/EC on ambient air quality and cleaner air for Europe [2008] OJ L152/1, and particularly through its directly effective requirements to produce national plans to bring air quality levels into compliance). The prospect of upheaval of the well-established multi-level framework for UK air quality law now raises the question of what kind of law we should have for the problem of UK air pollution. This is the crossroads at which UK air quality finds itself.


As the UK government considers how it might exercise its sovereignty in this policy area after withdrawal from the EU, the layers of governance that have defined UK air quality law since the 1970s are unlikely to stay in place in their current form. On one view, the potential release from EU legal control in this area creates an opportunity for the UK to exert control over its air quality policy, and particularly over decision-making in relation to the causes of air pollution, which often involves complex socio-political choices that are typically matters reserved for domestic executive government (which urban transport systems to build or prioritise, what planning policy priorities to pursue, decision-making on major infrastructure projects such as airports, and so on). However, as Liz Fisher and James Harrison point out, regaining control through assertion of national sovereignty is not the only narrative around environmental law and the implications of Brexit.



Air pollution. Public Domain via word.Air pollution. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.


One lesson we can draw from the current legal landscape of air pollution law is that the boundaries of air quality control – both legal and geographical – are far from obvious. Any shift of legal control back to the UK is not a straightforward one when one considers the nature of air pollution as a problem. As a purely practical matter, transboundary sources of air pollution contribute to our UK air quality problems and mean that the UK is not in a position to regulate its air quality with no consideration of air quality control beyond its borders. Equally the UK’s polluting activities have impacts on people and environments in neighbouring countries, and our responsibilities under CLRTAP force us to take responsibility for those impacts.


Our international law obligations remind us that current EU air quality standards are in fact the product of negotiations to which the UK has been party over many years (as a contracting state of CLRTAP, as a Member State of the European Union, and through individual expertise that has contributed to bodies of scientific standards including those of the World Health Organisation) and that their enforcement by citizens is also supported by the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. If we are to think again about what standards we want to subscribe to as a nation and how to enforce these, this does not happen in a vacuum of legal development and expertise once we leave the European Union. Furthermore, if we are encouraged to think about the kinds of legal obligations and mechanisms we should adopt in relation to air quality with a sense of flexibility in policy terms, again we are not working with a blank slate. There are compelling reasons of science, public awareness, philosophy and good regulatory practice that would inform our thinking.


Air quality now represents a public health crisis in major cities in the United Kingdom, as is well recognized by scientific researchers and increasingly by the general public. Scientific advances in understanding the causes and impacts of air pollution not only indicate that we need rigorous quality standards but also that there could be opportunities in revisiting our air quality regulatory framework, for example, by exploring regulatory models that centre around individual pollution exposure levels rather than ambient air quality. Equally, there are opportunities to improve the coherence of the current patchwork of UK air quality legislation, which is poorly coordinated in certain respects that can undermine its effective implementation. More fundamentally, as a matter of social justice, we have moral duties to those people in areas that suffer the worst effects of air pollution (often in vulnerable areas socio-economically) and to future generations to take tackling air quality problems seriously, including through legal frameworks.


It is not a bad thing to have to think about why we have the laws that we do, and to consider whether they could be improved, albeit that such reflection can be fraught with political risk. In all likelihood, the UK government will initially adopt domestic legislation that mirrors current EU air quality standards and requirements when it legally separates from the European Union, but there are difficult issues of enforcement and accountability in relation to those laws that will require careful consideration even with that apparently simple legislative step. As UK air quality law continues to evolve, the intersection of multi-level legal frameworks will continue to feature as a part of this landscape but the role of UK law will become even more important in determining how these layers of governance meet the local problems of air pollution in the UK, and particularly in determining the rights of UK citizens to pursue legal remedies when air quality falls below legally recognised and socially acceptable standards.


Featured image credit: Chimney. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.


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Published on October 03, 2016 00:30

October 2, 2016

Tightrope walking: The future of political science

Imagine standing at the edge of a precipice. A combination of forces are pushing at your back, biting at your heels and generally forcing you to step into an unknown space. A long thin tightrope without any apparent ending stretches out in front of you and appears to offer your only lifeline. Doing nothing and standing still is not an option. You lift up your left foot and gingerly step out….


Such dramatic prose is rarely associated with the study of politics but it strikes me that the notion of being forced to walk a tightrope is strangely apt at the present time. Having spent the last three weeks travelling around Western Europe and contributing to debates and discussions about the future of political science it seems that, from Manchester to Milan, and from Prague to Porto, the discipline finds itself on the cusp of a distinctive new phase in its history.


Let us, for the sake of simplicity, refer to this as ‘the impact phase’ and define it as being marked by the imposition of external requirements to demonstrate the relevance and direct effects of scholarship beyond the lecture theatre and seminar room. What my recent travels have revealed is that although ‘the impact phase’ has emerged very rapidly and aggressively in the United Kingdom, it is emerging— albeit in a softer, less instrumental, ‘impact-lite’ version — as a key issue in a host of countries. Moreover, those countries are well aware of the UK’s historical role as a testing ground for New Public Management inspired reforms within higher education that frequently ripple-out across the world.


‘Impact’ as one conference attendee suggested to me ‘seems to have emerged as the dominant paradigm and challenge for political science’ and in this regard she was probably correct. This is the brave new world into which political science—and all the social sciences—is being nudged, pushed, and shoved into.


There is, however, little point challenging the unhelpful arguments about academics and their ivory towers. Nowadays many academics would be lucky to have an office, and many sub-fields of the discipline have always been deeply rooted and visible beyond academe. But the tragedy of political science—to paraphrase the title of David Ricci’s very fine book of 1984 —has been that large sections of the discipline did embark upon what might now be termed ‘a road to irrelevance’ founded upon notions of ‘scientization’, ‘professionalization’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ that led to the faux depoliticization of political science. Political science not only became inaccessible to a public audience, but the social relevance of its research was also unclear.


But now the public demands accessibility and clarity in relation to two questions – (1) ‘what does a publicly funded political scientist actually do?’ and (2) ‘why does what they do actually matter’?


Now I have heard enough ‘senior professors’ snort and snuffle at the audacity of the public to dare to ask such questions but asking them they certainly are. What we do and why it matters are the questions that have coalesced to form this new ‘impact phase.’ How then can this ‘impact phase’ be conceptualized and understood as part of a disciplinary agenda? My recent discussions offer at least three responses.


 Political science not only became inaccessible to a public audience, but the social relevance of its research was also unclear.

First and foremost, the ‘impact phase’ is not an unknown professional space for political science. From the emergence of political science as a self-standing discipline, many of its leading exponents were public figures who were able to combine their academic duties with public service. If anything, the evolution of mass-marketized higher education squeezed-out any capacity for significant non-academic public service, as the role of a university professor became more internally focused. Even then many sub-fields, notably but not exclusively gender studies, did remain both socially embedded and socially aware. Learning from the past may therefore offer some clues for the future.


Secondly, following on from this, what the impact phase is really (re)introducing within academe is a focus on the professional responsibilities of academics to the public. In this regard Heather Douglas has usefully identified and dissected two types of responsibilities to which scholars are subject: role responsibilities that are specific to a particular profession or discipline, and general responsibilities that extend beyond a professional arena and that benefit the rest of society. In this regard the impact phase is asking academics to balance their role responsibilities with their general responsibilities in a way that achieves a new equilibrium.


And yet I think that political science does face a quite unique challenge in terms of navigating the ‘impact phase’, that revolves around the fact that moves ‘against the tide of depoliticisation’ cannot simply promote a raw or blunt form of politicization. Put differently, political science may well want its research to reach a wider audience and for its relevance to be far clearer, but it does not want it to become politicized in a partisan sense. Political scientists are arguably unique, however, in the sense that their research is likely to be devoured by politicians, candidates, parties, think tanks, pressure groups, etc. as part of the ongoing partisan battle. Research results will rapidly become co-opted, misinterpreted, rejected and denied, and blame games and credit claims will swirl around those academics who dare to suggest their research can help inform a specific debate or way of viewing the world.


This is the challenge of the ‘impact phase’: to set out the political relevance of your work without being politicized; to be ‘political’ in the ‘small ‘p’’ sense of the term without dirtying your hands in the worldly art of politics; to craft a new politics of resistance against the instrumentalization of academe, whereby every new idea and finding must be translated into some dubious new ‘product’ or ‘output’, while acknowledging the need to demonstrate some broader form of social value; and to walk along an ambiguous and increasingly frayed professional tightrope while a multitude of hands reach-up from the ‘big ‘P’ political abyss and attempt to pull you down.


Featured image credit: Balancing act by Quinn Dombrowski. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on October 02, 2016 03:30

Seeing in the dark: Catholic theology and Søren Kierkegaard

In a candid interview with Stephen Colbert, Vice President Joe Biden gave a moving testimony about his faith amid the pain of recently losing his son to brain cancer. In the past, both Colbert and Biden have been open about their Catholic faith, but in this moment both men found themselves reflecting upon how they have struggled with their faith after losing loved ones very close to them. During this emotional interview, Colbert asks: “I know you’re a man of deep faith—but how has your faith helped you respond to having lost your first wife, and your daughter and now your son?” Vice President Biden replied:


“Loss is serious and it’s consequential, but there is so many other people going through this. But for me, you know my wife (she’s a professor), when she wants to leave me messages, she literally tapes them on my mirror when I’m shaving and she put up a quote from Kierkegaard who said ‘faith sees best in the dark.’ And for me my religion is just an enormous sense of solace … And all the good things that have happened have happened around the culture of my religion and the theology of my religion, and I don’t know how to explain it more than that. But it is just the place that you can go. And by the way, a lot of you have been through this; the faith doesn’t always stick with you. Sometimes, it leaves me.”


One does not expect that a Danish Protestant from the 19th century would be cited by a Catholic public official on prime-time television in the United States. But as Joe Biden reminds us, there is a spiritual and edifying light in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings that some fail to notice. Biden speaks about something that is recognizable to many people: there are periods in life when faith appears and then others when it seemingly disappears. But Biden finds solace in Kierkegaard’s reminder that “when in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark.”



kierkegaard Sketch of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on a sketch by Niels Christian Kierkegaard (1806-1882). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In Catholic Theology, the traditional definition for faith comes from the Bible: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 NRSV). This firm yet unseen hope characterizes the goal of the Catholic faith, which is communion with God and each other. This communion takes the form of friendship and involves publicly reasoning—believing and knowing—about the object or goal of this faith. Now, the truth to which one intellectually assents is not initially apparent to everyone in plain sight but is discovered as intelligible and credible because the God who has revealed it is trustworthy. Thus, the knowledge of God that is received and believed by faith at once invites and resists intellectual mastery.


In St. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, he commends Kierkegaard to his readers (n. 76). For John Paul II, Kierkegaard understood the epistemic humility that is required when contemplating the God who is revealed intelligibly as mystery: “the knowledge proper to faith does not destroy the mystery; it only reveals it the more, showing how necessary it is for people’s lives” (n. 13). Thus, the light of faith that shines in the dark is paradoxical: the mystery of faith that is believed is also the faith by which one believes.


Yet, faith is often misunderstood as if it was a technological apparatus like night-vision goggles. Instead, the Bible speaks of faith as coming from a word that is heard: “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17 NRSV). Faith requires the patience for one’s eyes to adjust to the dark so that one may hear and see God’s self-disclosure to humanity—like the solar illumination of the moon, faith is lit up with borrowed light.


But for Kierkegaard, what does faith see in the dark? Kierkegaard’s theology of faith appears most visibly in his Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (1843-44). In this work, one of Kierkegaard’s favorite passages from Scripture keeps re-surfacing throughout these reflections: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17 NRSV). For Kierkegaard, the theme of receiving life as a gift from God is very important and this theme is often illustrated in one of Kierkegaard’s prayers:


“From your hand, O God, we are willing to receive everything. You reach it out, your mighty hand, and catch the wise in their foolishness. You open it, your gentle hand, and satisfy with blessing everything that lives. And even if it seems that your arm is shortened, increase our faith and our trust so that we might still hold fast to you. And if at times it seems that you draw your hand away from us, oh, then we know it is only because you close it, that you close it only to save the more abundant blessing in it, that you close it only to open it again and satisfy with blessing everything that lives. Amen” (EUD 31).


Another aspect of Kierkegaard’s view of faith pertains not just to recognizing our life as a gift from God, but also to recognize our need for God. Normally, people think of the state of being in need as a negative form of dependence that runs at cross-purposes with the goal of becoming an independent and mature adult. However, Kierkegaard argues that our need for God is our greatest independence and our highest good:


“In a human being’s relationship with God, it is inverted: the more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends that he is in need of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is” (EUD 303).


To sum it up briefly, Kierkegaard’s view of the Christian faith is informed by Scripture. For Kierkegaard, despite one’s circumstances in the dark, faith is a humble trust in the goodness of God who says “See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5 NRSV).


Featured Image Credit: “A candle for a prayer” by Brendan Ross. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on October 02, 2016 02:30

Cartesian plasticity: The curious case of Henricus Regius

“Last year [Henricus Regius] published a book entitled Fundamenta physicæ [sic] in which, concerning physics and medicine, it seems he has taken everything from my writings, those I have published as well as a still imperfect work on the nature of animals that fell into his hands; nevertheless, because he transcribed it poorly and changed the order, and denied certain truths of metaphysics on which all physics must be founded, I am obliged to disown the work entirely.” (Descartes, Preface to the French translation of Principia Philosophiæ, 1647)


René Descartes (1596–1650) is well known to the general public as “the father of modern philosophy,” the creator of that paradigmatically modern movement, Cartesianism. By contrast Henricus Regius (Henrik de Roy; 1598–1679) is known for the most part only to dedicated specialists. Yet a consideration of the case of Regius can serve to illustrate the extent to which Descartes did not have complete control over his creation.



henricus_regiusHenricus Regius. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This case is a curious one. Regius was a professor of medicine at the University of Utrecht. He was much taken with the views he had read in the scientific essays accompanying Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637), and was one of the first to introduce Descartes’s new mechanistic account of the material world into the Dutch academy. Regius also was the point man for the defense of Descartes against the attacks of his traditionalist critic, the Utrecht Rector Gibertus Voetius. Descartes subsequently wrote concerning Regius that he is “so confident of his intelligence” that there is nothing in his writings that “I could not freely acknowledge as my own” (Epistola ad Voetium, 1643). Yet a mere four years later, in the passage from his preface cited above, Descartes angrily denounces Regius, charging him with plagiarism, and incompetent plagiarism at that. So how is it that in such a short period of time we go from Regius the trusted Cartesian disciple to Regius the despised Cartesian outcast?


The main clue to the answer lies not in Descartes’s charge of plagiarism (which Regius vigorously denied), but rather in his claim that Regius went astray in denying “certain truths of metaphysics on which all physics must be founded.” The reference here is to the fact that in a draft of his Fundamenta physices—the work that prompted Descartes’s denunciation—Regius disputes both Descartes’s arguments for the existence of God and his claim that reason alone can reveal that mind and body are distinct substances. When in a 1645 letter Descartes reacted with “astonishment and grief” to this disavowal of his metaphysical views, Regius attempted to placate his former promoter by excising the offending elements from the published version of his Fundamenta (1646). However, matters had gone too far for such gestures to have any effect. Even in the sanitized version of Regius’s text, Descartes could see only a dangerous repudiation of his view that physics must be founded on secure metaphysical foundations


Subsequent to Descartes’s denunciation of Regius in his 1647 preface, the rift between the two only widened. That same year one of Regius’s medical students circulated a pamphlet that outlined Regius’s differences with Descartes, including the ones excluded from the Fundamenta. Descartes immediately responded by insisting again on the soundness of the metaphysical foundations for his physics. Soon after Descartes’s death his literary executor, Claude Clerselier, criticized Regius in print for his ingratitude toward Descartes and exhorted him to return to the Cartesian fold by embracing Descartes’s conclusions regarding God and the human soul.


On the narrative we find in Clerselier, Regius was a rebel against the Cartesian cause. But it is important to recognize another side to the story. For instance, there is a reference from the Rotterdam physician James de Back to “the most learned H. Regius, Professor of Physick in the University of Utrecht, and a notable follower of de Cartes” (“Discourse on the Heart,” 1653). Though he undoubtedly was aware of Descartes’s public repudiation of his fellow Dutchman Regius, De Back was concerned here with Descartes’s controversial view that the motion of the heart consists in the diastole, a view that Regius developed in an original way. In this medical context such physiological issues would be more to the point in determining an ideological connection to Cartesianism than the sort of metaphysical issues that separated Descartes from Regius. With respect to the former, Regius did indeed adhere—and was recognized as adhering—to a distinctively Cartesian line. In fact, Regius was at the center of a network of Dutch Cartesian physicians and medical professors who owed their training in mechanistic physiology either directly or indirectly to him.


At this point one might well protest that the question of whether or not one should apply the label ‘Cartesian’ to Regius is merely a verbal one. However, I think there is a substantive issue here concerning our understanding of Descartes’s influence on modern thought. One can view him as bequeathing a complete and seamless system, acceptance of which is essential for someone to be considered a follower. But another perspective is provided by David Hull’s clever and instructive attempt to understand the nature of the conceptual system “Darwinism” in terms of a Darwinian analysis of biological species. According to this analysis, there is no expectation that there will be a set of phenotypic traits that all and only members of a particular biological species possess throughout time. A species is rather a population likely to be marked by considerable phenotypic plasticity. What unites the diverse members of a species is a particular historical origin and line of descent. It is similarly the case, Hull claims, with respect to Darwinism as a conceptual entity (“Darwinism as Historical Entity: A Historiographical Proposal,” 1985). What I am suggesting here, in a preliminary way, is that the curious case of Regius indicates that we also should view Cartesianism as akin to an evolving historical species, one diverse enough to include the views of a person Descartes himself disowned.


Featured image: The disbanding of the ‘waardgelders’ (mercenaries in the pay of the town government) by Prince Maurits in Utrecht, 31 July 1618, by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 


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Published on October 02, 2016 00:30

October 1, 2016

Country house visiting: past, present, and future

From every window there were beauties to be seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor; but Elizabeth saw with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice).


Such were Elizabeth Bennet’s impressions on her visit to Pemberley House with her uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Gardiner. This was part of their ‘northern tour’ of England taking in country houses, towns and landscapes, a popular pastime in Austen’s time. Writing as they travelled these people, often women such as Lybbe Powys, recorded their impressions of the taste and refinement (or lack thereof) reflected in the rural mansions they encountered.


In many ways country house visiting was, in Georgian England, what it is now – a glimpse at wealth and all its associated finery, a peek into the lives of the rich and famous, into the architecture and formal gardens that only those people could afford. It was a way for the aristocracy to display their power, taste and refinement. Visitors, then and now, were restricted in the areas of the house they could enter and guided around the spaces of the house, carefully schooled as they went in the meaning and significance of the objects they saw. From the 1760s some houses, such as Stowe House and Blenheim Palace, even printed guidebooks for visitors.


Now, of course, it is a glimpse at a past world when yawning oceans lay between rich and poor, and in which privilege and rank were ascribed according to birth. This was a world far removed from the principles, if only barely the reality, of the modern. In Georgian England the power of the aristocracy and gentry was only infrequently questioned, and then only by the most radical of radicals. Fun could be poked at the social hierarchy, questions could be asked, as Austen did, but the reality was largely inescapable.



The main hallway of Chatsworth House. Photo by Martin Hartland. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.The main hallway of Chatsworth House. Photo by Martin Hartland. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Why then, given all the changes since Jane Austen’s time, does the country house’s appeal endure given how difficult many of us presumably find the hierarchies that underpinned them? Again we find both change and continuity. Power can be intoxicating, both for the Georgians and for us. Country houses were ‘power houses,’ emanating authority and influence. There was, and is, a sense that their owners ‘shaped’ the world around them. They were also ‘social houses,’ centres of sociability for local elites and social climbers. We visualize dances and lavish meals through period dramas but these events probably also played out in the minds of Georgian visitors as they wandered through ballrooms and dining rooms. Perhaps most of all they contained the glittering prizes of wealth, objects evoking foreign worlds. Rare and untouchable commodities were these to the Georgians, but so too are they now, ‘national treasures’ speaking of Britain’s history.


Perhaps the real change has been the way that country houses have become part of English ‘national identity’ and part of the ‘national heritage,’ a notion that would have been unfamiliar to the Georgians. To them, country houses were private family homes, part of the ‘private interest’ of their owners momentarily flung open for discerning visitors. Only in the nineteenth century, at the birth of ‘heritage,’ were country houses woven into the ‘national history’ of England and even then only tentatively so. In fact, our perception of the country house as ‘national heritage’ is largely a product of post war Britain. Emptied of their owners and no longer targets for political attack, country houses were acquired by agencies such as the National Trust for the benefit of the ‘nation,’ in effect ‘nationalised’ and ‘owned by us.’ The twitter bio for Stowe House reflects this new outlook:


“Built as a pleasure palace by the Dukes of Buckingham & Chandos. Now owned by the Stowe House Preservation Trust and opened for the public to enjoy.”


We should, of course, ask some probing questions about the way this process of nationalization formed a kind of ‘welfare state’ for the aristocracy. But the political tone of democratization is clear. A far wider section of today’s population will have seen the interior of Stowe than in the eighteenth century when Sophia Newdigate the wife of Sir Roger Newdigate of Arbury Hall, in Warwickshire, visited the house in 1750 and noted these observations in her travel journal:


“There are two noble apartments newly built…a drawing room furnished with Crimson velvet and hung with whole lengths of all ye Grenville family.”


Although the emptying of the wealthy occupants of country houses brought them into the ownership of heritage organisations, it also brought challenges. How can they attract visitors who have little interest in Rembrandts or japanned furniture to make lengthy journeys to uninhabited houses? In recent years the response has been innovative. Art history has become social history, country houses have become lived spaces again as owners have attempted to re-animate them. The focus has shifted from the aristocracy to the servants, the everyday tasks they performed to keep the house running. I recently attended a dramatization, staged by the pupils of Broadclyst Community Primary School, of Lloyd George’s 1925 speech on land nationalisation at Killerton House, the former home of the Acland family in Devon. The audience met the family in the sitting room, the gardeners in the grounds, the laundry maids singing in the laundry and the butlers greeting Lloyd George as he approached the house. Then they heard his speech on the need for land to be brought into public ownership. This was a fascinating journey for the visitors and a valuable experience of ‘lived history’ for the children. In a society in which ‘national identity’ should focus on democracy and equality, agencies reflecting our ‘national heritage’ should be helping to tell the broader history of country houses. So too should historians, from the glittering to the seemingly mundane.


Featured Image Credit: Blenheim Palace. Photo by Darling Starlings Flying the Nest. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on October 01, 2016 03:30

Human-animal chimeras and dehumanization

The US government recently announced that it was lifting its moratorium on funding certain experiments that use human stem cells to create animals that are partly human. At present scientists are only interested in creating entities with some human qualities, but which remain “mostly” animals. For example, some scientists want to create a chimeric pig with a human-enough heart to transplant into a human.


Distinguishing between humans and other animals is common in most cultures and is certainly central to Western intellectual and religious traditions, so the idea of a part-pig part-human is very unsettling to many people. Warnings about the dangers of mixing animals and humans are also a classic theme in Western culture with novels like the Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells.


We can all agree that the world is not ready for a talking pig, and there is clearly a dystopian novel waiting to written about the pig given human consciousness but without the ability to interact. Moreover, an entity with a human body but a pig brain, which would be useful for human transplants, would certainly be controversial. But, what would make one of these entities human and another not human?


There are three major definitions of a human in Western thought. The first is based on Christianity, following Judaism, and concludes that a human is that which is made in the image of God. The second, based in biology, is that a human is that with a human DNA sequence, and this sequence is largely shared with other animals. The third is based in philosophy, which is that a human is that with certain capacities like consciousness and rationality. (Philosophers call this personhood.)


Those who believe humans are made in the image of God would be opposed to chimeras because one of the central themes in the Christian narrative is that humans were created to be distinct from the other animals. Those who would define humans by their DNA would probably not inherently oppose chimeras because DNA sequences are already shared with other animals, and, biologically, we are just another animal. Finally, the definition based on capacities would generate opposition if the chimera had some important human capacity. From this view, having a human pancreas does not make a pig human, but a pig able to voice opposition to having their pancreas removed would be human.



pigs-1507208_960_720Pigs pen livestock by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

Much of the concern with chimeras is with creating entities with ambiguous human status, like the pig with some human-like cognition. If we create an entity that is considered “human enough,” then our intended purpose for such an entity – such as harvesting their organs – would be “dehumanizing.” We would not be treating them like the humans they (ambiguously) are. Thus, the government is closely regulating experiments that could change anything in the brain of animal, for fear that we could create human-like behaviors in them.


Besides the risk of dehumanizing the chimeric entities, other critics are concerned that creating chimeras would actually dehumanize the present human population. Present humans would be dehumanized by the mere discussion of chimeras. Critics claim that the philosophical definition of a human teaches us that we are of unequal value, and that the biological definition teaches us that we are like animals, and can be treated as such.


Other concerns are that chimera research focuses on the capacities of the chimeras, such as whether they would have human levels of rationality. This teaches us that humans are those with rationality. If the public thinks that a human is a compilation of capacities, those existing humans with fewer of these valued capacities will be considered to be of lesser value. As critics note, this was the logic of the eugenics movement.


Similarly, chimera research teaches us that there is not much of a distinction between humans and other animals. Critics are concerned that if we think of humans as just another type of animal, like a pig, we will in an extremely small and subtle way begin to treat existing humans like we currently treat pigs – which is obviously not good given how many animals we eat. It has been shown that members of the public who believe in extreme versions of the biological and philosophical definitions of the human view existing people as having less intrinsic value, and are also less concerned with human rights.


Society should debate whether to create chimeras like pigs with human qualities. But, we should also be aware that how we talk about humans during this debate may inadvertently change how we look at ourselves. Perhaps some simple counter-programming is in order. In my view, people who say humans are like animals should also say we should not be treated like how we treat animals; and people who say we are compilations of capacities should say that those with fewer capacities have no less value than those with more.


Featured image credit: piglet wildpark poing baby by Alexas_Fotos. Public domain via Pixabay.


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Published on October 01, 2016 02:30

Philosopher of the month: al-Kindī

This October, the OUP Philosophy team honors al-Kindī (c. 800-870) as their Philosopher of the Month. Known as the “first philosopher of the Arabs,” al-Kindī was one of the most important mathematicians, physicians, astronomers and philosophers of his time. He composed hundreds of treatises, using many of the tools of Greek philosophy to address themes in Islamic thought.


Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb b. Isḥāq al‐Kindī was born to a noble family of the Kinda tribe at the start of the ninth century, amid a period of abundant Islamic theological speculation, ḥadĪth scholarship, and the development of sophisticated Arabic literature. Al-Kindī’ was raised in Basra, an important cultural center for the study of Islamic theology and Arabic literature and grammar, and educated in Baghdad, where he likely met Syrian and Persian scholars who pursued the new learning of Greek sciences in the new capital. Having earned the support of the caliphs al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim, al-Kindī was appointed as the private teacher of Ahmad, the son of al-Mu‘tasim. He also served as the leader of the “Kindī Circle,” a group of mostly Christian scholars who translated works of Greek philosophers and scientists into Arabic—including Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Plotinus’s Enneads and the Elements of Theology of Proclus.


Al-Kindī’s own philosophical work primarily took the form of epistles. From the inventory of tenth-century bookseller Ibn al‐NadĪm, we know that al-Kindī authored nearly 300 titles, much of which has been lost. The works comprising his extant corpus demonstrate al-Kindī’s depth of knowledge in an array of fields, ranging from philosophy and mathematics to astrology and gemology. Al-Kindī’ produced mathematical writing on topics such as astronomy, optics, and music. One of his major scientific contributions, De aspectibus, on the Optics of Euclid, influenced Roger Bacon. His study of mathematics led al-Kindī to a Euclidian philosophical method, and his philosophical writings were influenced by Platonist, Aristotelian, and even Stoic traditions. Al-Kindī was the first Islamic philosopher to offer systematic explanations for some of the widely debated theological issues of his time, such as creation, immortality, God’s knowledge, and prophecy. He saw the universe as an architectonic whole, not as something to be observed piecemeal to discover causality. His On First Philosophy, of which only the first four sections survive, was the first Arabic work on syncretic metaphysics.


The metaphysics of al-Kindī described a universe in which everything radiates its power in all directions, and his claim that each point on the surface of a body sends radiation in all directions, independently of other points—a novel insight that influenced optical studies in Islam and in western Europe. On First Philosophy draws on Christian Aristotelian critics to argue for the eternity of God, and against the eternity of the cosmos. Elsewhere, in his writing on natural philosophy, al-Kindī draws on works of Aristotelian physics in his account of meteorological occurrences including rain and the color of sky.


The first to introduce the immateriality and substantiality of the soul to Islamic theology and philosophy, al-Kindī, in his treatise That There Exist Substances Without Bodies, refuted the materialistic ideas of the Epicureans and the Stoics who believed in the material nature of the soul. Al-Kindī describes the soul as an immaterial substance which, though it exists in the body, does not merge with it but rather uses it as its instrument and window on the material world. This mystic understanding of the soul became an important concept for many Muslim philosophers and Sufis after al-Kindi


Al-Kindī influenced generations of philosophers after him, including al-Saraḫsī, al-ʿĀmirī, Miskawayh, and Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, who drew on al-Kindī’s writings in their work, and have been described as part of a “Kindian tradition” in contrast to the more Aristotelian thinkers of the Baghdad school. But al-Kindī’s wider and more enduring legacy is his incorporation of Greek works into the Arabic language.


Featured image: River Scene on the Banks of the Tigris by  Abdul Qadir al-Rassam (1882 – 1952). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 


 


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Published on October 01, 2016 00:30

September 30, 2016

History in the courtroom: 70 years since the Nuremberg Trials

Seventy years ago, on 30 September 1946, Lord Justice Lawrence, the presiding judge of the International Military Tribunal, began reading out the judgement in the trial of the so-called major German war criminals at Nuremberg. For nearly a year the remnants of the Third Reich’s top brass, led by Hermann Goering, had stood trial for crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and a conspiracy to commit the aforesaid crimes. Against the backdrop of the sheer scope of Nazi criminality, it took two full days to summarize the findings of the four-power tribunal, constituted by the victorious Allies in summer 1945, before the sentences were finally handed down to Goering and his fellow defendants. Of the 24 men named in the indictment twelve were to be hanged, ten would serve long prison terms, some for life, and three were acquitted; one had been too ill to stand trial.


The panel of eight judges, four each from France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US, plus alternates, chose forceful, yet also sober words, signalling to the public in and outside the courtroom that their judgment resulted not from political determinations but from disinterested weighing of facts and literally judicial reasoning. For some members of the bench, though, the judgement was somewhat too sober, and the British alternate Norman Birkett bemoaned “the absence of the direct condemnation of the kind to be found in the pages of Gibbon.” Alas, the former star barrister and High Court judge in London noted, “there are but few Gibbons in this world, and they are not usually to be found among His Majesty’s Judges!”


Despite Birkett’s misgivings history – though not of Gibbon’s epic type – was very much present at Nuremberg. Both the International Military Tribunal and the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, the dozen war crimes trials held under American aegis from 1946 to 1949 in the same location as their famous predecessor, were underpinned by a strong historiographical current. This current condensed an understanding of German history which would come to be known as the Sonderweg theory, the idea that Germany had diverged from other European and North American societies and had embarked on a course of militarism and authoritarianism in politics, cartelization and state capitalism in economics, and various strands of Romanticism and Historicism in the humanities. Building on nineteenth-century works, and particularly on writings from World War I, a massive wave of ‘What is wrong with Germany’ publications had come out since the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 and kept flourishing well into the post-war years. Both of the pamphleteering and the academic kind, and available in various languages, these writings greatly influenced the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg who were looking for a comprehensive narrative to glue together wide arrays of crimes, very different types of perpetrators, and various crime scenes.



Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in their dock, circa 1945-1946. Work of the United States Government. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in their dock, circa 1945-1946. Work of the United States Government. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Possibly even more important, the Nuremberg trials’ very ambition to “give meaning to the war” as one influential prosecutor put it, while at the same time reforming Germans, made the special path paradigm so compelling. By integrating the literally incredible Nazi crimes into a larger narrative of historical deviation from standards which were attributed to ‘Western’ and ‘Modern’ societies, the moral downfall of an apparently civilized people could be explained.


At the same time, Allied ethical superiority was to be reaffirmed at Nuremberg, fending off arguments from the German defendants and their counsel that the Allied conduct of a war which was widely perceived to be “total” had not been all that different from that of their German counterparts: had British and American generals and admirals not engaged in aerial bombardment and submarine warfare, not to speak of nuclear bombs, too? And had Allied industrialists not mobilized their resources for war just the same as their peers in the Third Reich? The response to such arguments, known to lawyers as tu quoque – literally, ‘you, too,’ the words allegedly uttered by the dying Caesar to his treacherous son Brutus – was to be found in history: similarities between Germany and the ‘Western’ nations were formal and superficial only whereas profound differences characterized the two sides in all sphere of society. However, showing where Germans had gone wrong in the past by implication also pointed to how they could be corrected and brought back into the fold in the future. In this respect, Nuremberg was a constructive, reformist effort.


Theories are brilliant, particularly in theory. In court, however, the practicalities of criminal trials, especially due process and fair trial requirements and the need to prove individual guilt rather than historical shortcomings, resulted in mixed results for the prosecutors. In a handful of proceedings the evidence at hand actually defied special path narratives because for all that the prosecutors knew the differences between Germany and their own countries had often not been particularly remarkable. In other cases the prosecution stuck to the argument but found the judges unconvinced that the German defendants – say industrialists or military officers – had been all that different from their international peers. Still in others, the tribunals simply didn’t care too much for history but insisted on straight criminal law proceedings. If these standards weren’t met, the accused were duly acquitted.


The Nuremberg trials therefore do not only serve as an example of how historical readings may inform lawyers’ interpretations of the actions and crimes, the agents and contexts at hand. They also highlight the risks of under-reflected usages of history in the courtroom and the need for lawyers and historians to cooperate. This is particularly pertinent to transitional trials, i.e. those proceedings which are held in times but also as instruments of regime change. In these, there is no escaping history. Yet historians should also beware of rebound effects and circularity: feeding interpretations into legal proceedings whose sources will later be employed for historical analysis bears resemblance to self-fulfilling prophecies (if in reverse) and risks creating logical fallacies. With an eye to the tribunals and courts established at Arusha, Freetown, The Hague, and elsewhere, such reflections appear more pressing than ever.


Featured image credit: Palace of Justice, Nuremberg. Photo by DALIBRI. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


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Published on September 30, 2016 04:30

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