Oxford University Press's Blog, page 672

The truth will set you free

First of all, gratitude. Gratitude to Opera Parallèle for its consistently high quality productions of contemporary works, and for their extensive educational outreach program; more specifically, for its new production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, featuring revised scoring for smaller orchestral ensembles—a revision that loses nothing and makes the piece more accessible for smaller companies. The venue was big enough to encompass its large cast, yet sufficiently intimate so that each nuance may be seen, heard, and appreciated. The orchestra played elegantly under Nicole Paiement’s leadership; director Brian Staufenbiel guided an enormously talented cast.

One of the greatest satisfactions of this production was the high quality of the leads, demonstrated by fine voices and convincing portrayals throughout. A few of the stand-outs were Catherine Cook as Mrs. De Rocher, Talise Trevigne as Rose (whose large, warm honey-smooth sound made her second act duet with Helen memorable), Philip Skinner as George Benton (who created a warden of real interest). Even Robert Orth, the father of the murdered girl, burned with intensity without over-singing or over-acting, making his ultimate softening completely convincing.

Jennifer Rivera handled her role as Sister Helen with authority and liquid beauty, though I would have appreciated a greater variety of vocal color to support the many facets of Helen’s personality. I find, however, no fault with the complexity of her suffering in De Rocher’s confession scene. Indeed, what a fine rendering it was, with Michael Mayes expressing Joseph’s defiance, bravado, quandary, and agony at a stunning level of intensity, believability, and beauty.

A scene from Dead Man Walking. Used with permission from Opera Parallèle.

My attention was captured by how richly, responding to Heggie’s setting, the cast worked the word “sister.” It was alternately a word of endearment, hope, derision, scorn, disgust and love. The handsome and flexible set facilitated the perfectly rehearsed choreography of the suspended panels; Helen’s walk through the rows of cells was particularly memorable, as the panels around her were constantly reconfigured to create a gauntlet of terror. Projections, another major element, transformed the space in magical ways, with Helen’s long drive evoked by visuals of speeding pavements.

However, even in a production so deserving of praise, there were inevitably some things that worked better than others. Unfortunately, the projections were sometimes distracting, particularly with the use of the road’s dotted white line at slower speeds; the alternating flashes repeatedly pulled my eye up to the screens and away from the action. Moreover, the costuming—though it accurately reflected the time, place, and period—was occasionally odd. Why was Helen dressed so differently from the other nuns, and in a dress that did little to support her character? It was also confusing that family members always wore the same clothes, though the opera spans a period of several months.

Used with permission from Opera Parallèle.

Two choices were particularly disturbing. Why, in the large and gorgeous ensemble after the Pardon hearing, would one stage the singers in an (admittedly staggered) line facing out to the audience? It is true that they are singing their inner thoughts, but those thoughts are based on their relationship to others. Their motivations could so easily be kept alive by grouping the characters so that they faced each other ever so slightly. The other choice that did not work so well was Staufenbiel’s decision to have the murdered boy and girl appear repeatedly throughout the piece. Most often the logic was clear, even if their presence was distracting, but sometimes the reasoning seemed obscure. For instance, I could understand why the boy and girl might be riding in the back seat of Helen’s car, as they were on her mind. I was even mostly okay with the boy representing a hitch-hiker. But why did the girl exit, following the cop after he let Helen off with a speeding warning? Was she no longer part of Helen’s motivation for continuing toward the prison? More distressing was the boy and girl’s presence in the execution scene. Yes, it was appropriate that they escorted De Rocher to the land of death to which he had consigned them, but it was much too self-conscious to be worth it.

Even so, these quibbles are minor. I could only wish that every composer had his opera realized with such understanding, clarity, and beauty, and that every audience could have opera-going experiences as fulfilling and stimulating as this. The biblical quote Sister Helen used to unlock de Rocher’s confession, “the truth will set you free,” was also applicable to the production itself. It manifested the freedom made possible by a commitment to quality—the freedom to create, and the freedom to enjoy and be moved by such a production.

Image Credit: “Theatre Royal Panorama, Brighton, UK” by Ian Mattoo. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The post The truth will set you free appeared first on OUPblog.

The life of Colonel William Eddy

Missionaries and US Marines? It did not seem a natural combination. But while working on a book about American Protestant missionaries and their children I came across a missionary son who became a prominent officer in the USMC and one of the most effective agents of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Col. William Eddy was in charge of the OSS operations in North Africa, where he led a life filled with Nazis and spies and Vichy officials that seemed to flow directly out of Rick’s Café in Casablanca, the classic Humphrey Bogart film of that era. When Susan Ware heard me telling friends about this part of my research, she invited me to write the American National Biography (ANB) article on Eddy. I was delighted to do so.

Eddy was born and raised in Lebanon as the son of Presbyterian missionaries, and acquired a fluency in the Arabic language that was all too rare in the United States when it entered World War II. A major theme I was developing for my book was the importance that missionaries and their children achieved in many domains of American life during the era of World War II, when the world beyond the North Atlantic West suddenly mattered. Missionary-connected individuals were among the few Americans who knew the languages and cultures of Japan, China, the Middle East and other areas relevant to the war effort and to the greater global involvement of private as well as governmental agencies in the 1940s and after. Eddy’s name first came to my attention when trolling for missionary connections in the Foreign Service and in the intelligence agencies. There, I read of a Marine officer who translated a conversation President Franklin D. Roosevelt had with the King of Saudi Arabia in February of 1945. He was the only person around who could speak both English and Arabic.

FDR Meets with King Ibn Saud, of Saudi Arabia, on board USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, on 14 February 1945. The King is speaking to the interpreter, Colonel William A. Eddy, USMC. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Eddy’s Arabic and his feel for Middle Eastern life were so good that he could recite long passages from the Quran in three dialects. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the Army General in charge of the OSS, grabbed Eddy as soon as he learned that the Marines had an officer supremely qualified for covert operations in the Arabic speaking, Islam-intense territories of North Africa. Once there Eddy, who was also fluent in French and German, consorted by day with Vichy officials and Wehrmacht officers and, by night, worked in secret with communist refugees from Franco’s Spain, eager to help topple the Axis. It was Eddy who personally briefed General George Patton prior to the American landings in North Africa in 1942. Later, Eddy was sent to Saudi Arabia as the American envoy there, and charmed King Ibn Saud with his idiomatic Arabic and his deep knowledge of the history and cultures of the Arab world. After the war Eddy was called back to Washington and was among the designers of the Central Intelligence Agency, and among that Agency’s first officers to advise President Truman on Middle Eastern affairs. Annoyed at what he saw as the short shrift Truman gave to the Arab peoples while recognizing the state of Israel, Eddy resigned from government service and spent the rest of his life as oil industry executive.

Many missionaries leaned toward pacifism in their outlook on world politics, but quite a few missionary sons served in uniform, especially as intelligence officers. Eddy was right at home as a Marine in both world wars. Indeed, it was in the context of his service in World War I (he was decorated for valor in combat at Belleau Wood) that he was eager to re-enlist in 1941 after a two-decade career as a professor of English at Dartmouth and other colleges. Yet Eddy had his own version of the Protestant conscience. In autobiographical writings shortly before his death he remarked that men like himself — perhaps all CIA agents, he said — should “go to hell” for their deceits and double-dealings.

Eddy felt especially guilty about the anti-Franco communists who were allowed to believe that the United States would facilitate the deposing of Franco’s version of fascism once the Axis was defeated. He knew that no such thing was going to happen. Always devout religiously, Eddy in his final fragments said of his betrayal of the brave Spaniards that he reminded himself of Peter, denying Christ in Mark 14:71: “I know not this man of whom ye speak.” When he died in 1962 Eddy was buried, in keeping with his instructions, in an Arab Christian cemetery in Lebanon where the only other American graves were of his missionary parents whom he revered and saw as his own models for serving the peoples of the world beyond American shores.

The post The life of Colonel William Eddy appeared first on OUPblog.

The evolution of Taiwan statehood

Taiwan easily satisfies the traditional requirements for statehood: a permanent population, effective control over a territory, a government, and the capacity to interact with other states. Yet the realities of global power politics have kept Taiwan from being recognized as such.

The past thirty years have witnessed a profound and persistent movement of democratization—and Taiwanization—that runs counter to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) unfounded claims over the island. Under present conditions, Taiwan’s statehood is best understood in the context of an ongoing process of evolution propelled by the desire and action of the Taiwanese people for self-determination and democracy.

Historical landscape

Formal Chinese control over Taiwan was historically tenuous and short-lived. It was not until 1887 that the Qing dynasty formally made Taiwan a province. Following the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, China ceded Formosa (Taiwan) and the Pescadores (Penghu) to Japan in perpetuity under the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

In 1945, at the end of the war in the Pacific, Japan ceded control of Taiwan to the Allied forces, who delegated responsibility of military occupation over the island to the army of the Republic of China (ROC) led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, after the ROC’s defeat in the Chinese civil war, Chiang and his Kuomintang (KMT) supporters fled from mainland China to Taiwan and established a regime in exile, imposing martial law, which lasted for 38 years.

In spite of the ROC’s military occupation, Taiwan remained a Japanese territory until the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect in 1952. The Treaty, signed by 48 nations, superseded wartime declarations such as the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation. Today’s controversies about “one China,” “one China—but not now,” “two Chinas,” and “one China, one Taiwan” stem from uncertainties about Taiwan’s status after the Treaty. Under Article 2(b), “Japan renounce[d] all right, title and claim” to Taiwan. The Treaty’s drafters were deliberately silent as to whom Japan was ceding the territory.

In 1971, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, expelling Chiang’s representatives (the ROC was a charter member) and making the PRC the only lawful representative of China in the UN. In 1979, the United States switched diplomatic recognition to the PRC, opting to maintain unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan. Congress codified the terms of unofficial relations in the Taiwan Relations Act.

In 1987, the KMT government lifted martial law, and a gradual process of transformation began. In 1988, after the death of Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, native-born Taiwanese Vice President Lee Teng-hui acceded to the presidency. Lee, popularly known as “Mr. Democracy,” oversaw great strides in democratization in Taiwan. In 1991, the original members of the Legislative Yuan and of the National Assembly (known as the “Old Thieves”) were forced to retire as a result of the Wild Lily student movement. These original, exiled members were elected in 1947 to represent constituencies on the Chinese mainland and had assumed life tenure without reelection in Taiwan ever since.

Taiwan’s embrace of democracy is evident in its lively presidential elections. In 1996, Lee became the first president in Taiwan to be democratically elected by the people of Taiwan. In 2000, power was peacefully transferred to Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after his election as president. For the first time in more than half a century, the KMT did not control the island. The KMT returned to power in 2008 with the election of Ma Ying-jeou. Voters dealt the KMT a crushing defeat in the crucial, island-wide nine-in-one elections in November 2014. The opposition party is now poised for a strong showing in the 2016 general elections for president and members of the Legislative Yuan.

A people-centered approach to international law

Unlike in bygone eras, international law no longer conceives of territories as mere pieces of property to be traded or conquered. Today, human beings are properly held to be at the center of international law.

Technical questions about Taiwan’s status under the San Francisco Peace Treaty should not overshadow the fact that it is the Taiwanese people who have the right to determine their future. The inhabitants of a disputed territory, through collective effort, can develop their distinctive political, economic, social, and cultural system. This is effective self-determination—self-determination in action. When the international legal status of a territory is in dispute, an internationally-monitored plebiscite provides an ideal means of resolving the dispute peacefully.

The New Haven School of international law emphasizes the pursuit of our common interests. In a world of increasing globalization and interdependence, we see a gradual expansion in identifications – more and more, members of the world community identity with the most inclusive community of humankind and a deepening perception of shared humanity.

A new world order should be a new order of human dignity, in which persuasion prevails over coercion and in which the widest shaping and sharing of all cherished values are secured and fulfilled. It should be a new world order embracing both minimum and optimum world order, in which human beings are at the very center, and where human security is supreme.

Genuine protection and fulfillment of human dignity values—in Taiwan or anywhere—will be possible only when individuals are enabled to be effective, active, equal participants at different community levels and in different social settings. Most fundamentally, it requires education. Not in the narrow construction of classroom teaching, but in the broadest possible sense.

Featured image: Taipei, Taiwan. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post The evolution of Taiwan statehood appeared first on OUPblog.

Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer

Nathaniel Hawthorne famously commented that Anthony Trollope’s quintessentially English novels were written on the “strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale … these books are just as English as a beef-steak.” In like mode, Irish critic Stephen Gwynn said Trollope was “as English as John Bull.” But unlike the other great Victorian English writers, Trollope became Trollope by leaving his homeland and making his life across the water in Ireland, and achieving there his first successes there in both his post office and his literary careers. Feeling, at 26, that he was in a dead-end as a post office clerk in London and having as yet failed to actually finish a work of fiction, Trollope believed he had little to lose in accepting a posting that nobody else wanted in the remote County Offaly town of Banagher. Over the following 15 years he would get to know the whole of the island, living in working in Clonmel, Mallow, Cork, Belfast, and Dublin. Once in Ireland, however, he was a man transformed and hardly off the boat, he began to apply himself to his twin trades with great industry. His own words about one of his political heroes, Lord Palmerston, perfectly fit Trollope himself from this time on: “Hard work was to him the first necessity of his existence.”

It was in Ireland that his mighty literary talent finally began to emerge. Even if most of his greatest novels are undeniably English in setting and theme, and are dominated by English characters, his early works were Irish and he would return to Irish subject matter sporadically, if with mixed success, throughout his long career. His Irish writings constitute both a vital and distinct group of works, add significantly to our overall vision of the writer, and represent a rich and underestimated contribution to the canon of the nineteenth century Irish novel tout court, complicating the sometimes arbitrary divisions that are drawn between the English and the Irish traditions. Trollope felt that he was in a unique position as a cultural mediator between Ireland and England, with both the advantages of living for so long in Ireland and the moral obligations that this sojourn imposed upon him. And so he attempted, times over, to give narrative shape to the complexities of  a country whose voice – feeble in Famine-dominated mid-century – was none too willingly heard in Britain.

Anthony Trollope c 1870s. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

While it is true that in Ireland, as the early twentieth century scholar John Sadleir put it, Trollope became “an ambassador of England, living in disputatious amity with one of the most race-conscious nations in the world,” he equally became an envoy of his second country, Ireland. Side by side with our appreciation of  Trollope as an acclaimed English novelist, we need to take stock of Trollope as an honorary Irish writer of considerable achievement, one who never shied away from the great and sometimes terrible issues, such as land agitation, Home Rule, starvation and Famine that affected the country at all social levels during and after his long sojourn there.   It is chiefly in his Irish novels that a lesser-known, more unconventional Trollope emerges, a conflicted and sometimes almost subversive figure caught between his ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ opinions as he vacillated between endorsing standard English views about Ireland and offering his own alternative, sometimes awkward, counter readings. By accident rather than design he became a border crosser, one who would have to accept that, following his initiation as a successful public servant and writer in Ireland, he would always be betwixt and between, caught by sometimes conflicting loyalties to both cultures. This would prove to be a creatively productive situation for Trollope even if he would gradually rein in his sympathy for the Irish point of view and retreat to a more defensive ‘English’ position.

But his Irish literary ‘journey’, one that his publishers advised him against,  is one that readers would do well to follow him on today, beginning with the tragic The Macdermots of Ballycoran (1847), which offers a penetrating discussion of the causes of Irish rural agitation, and the far more optimistic and comic The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848), a valuable prototype for some of Trollope’s later (and greater) marriage plot novels. Worthy of attention, even if its politics is at best questionable, is Trollope’s often deeply moving Famine novel, Castle Richmond (1860) along with the second and fourth Palliser novels, Phineas Finn; The Irish Member (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874), which have as their hero the Irishman, Phineas Finn, struggling to make his way in the English political world and caught between the contrasting pulls of possible marriage in Ireland and England.

The entire series challenges Irish stereotypes and meditates on two of the most common images of Irishness, that of the Stage Irishman and that of Ireland as a feminized victim. His final two Irish novels, the admonitory An Eye for an Eye (1879) and his posthumous and problematic The Landleaguers, deserve to take its place among the series of courageous if flawed attempts to contain the matter of Ireland in novelistic form and serve, in the darkening last decades of the nineteenth century, as a warning to his English readers that to fail to take Irish problems seriously will inevitably result in instability, insurrection, and violence which might well spill across the Irish Sea.

The post Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer appeared first on OUPblog.

Play it again (Uncle) Sam: continuities between the adoption and renewal of Trident

In March 2007 the British government of Tony Blair officially decided to extend the life of the Trident submarine deterrent through a ‘life extension programme’ whilst also placing before parliament the need for a successor system. This essentially began the debate on a successor system. Despite Liberal-Democrat opposition, the Conservative-led coalition government of David Cameron agreed with these plans with the likelihood that the follow-on force would be a like-for-like replacement but scaled back to house a smaller number of missiles and a reduced warhead stockpile. This would reflect both changes in the international security environment as well as helping towards nuclear non-proliferation as part of Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments. Renewing Trident requires continuing agreement from the United States government under the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement for nuclear warhead collaboration (with a 1959 amendment covering nuclear propulsion) and 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement for the transfer of Trident submarine technology. This is a decision that will have to be made by 2016, the so-called ‘Main Gate’ decision, and will be a feature of the 2015 General Election campaign.

The maintenance of these Anglo-American agreements remains pivotal to future negotiations. Without it the British government is unable to request any new information from the United States regarding successor systems. Both agreements are crucial mechanisms for the continuation of the ‘special nuclear relationship’ and remain central to the replacement debate as Britain has neither the industrial base nor financial resources to mount an indigenous successor programme.  This policy is a continuation of the original Trident agreement made by the Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher in July 1980. In pitching a case for Trident replacement there has been a clear recognition that the strategic environment has changed substantially in the twenty first century but there remains a remarkable continuity with the adoption of Trident.

In the lead up to the 1980 decision the outgoing Labour government had done a great deal of work on the replacement of the deterrent leading to the Duff-Mason Report. It recommended that the submarine based deterrent be retained if it could be afforded. The Duff-Mason Report is very revealing of the Ministry of Defence’s attitude towards the replacement debate in 1980 and finds echoes in the 2007 Trident White Paper. As with 2006/7 Select Committee debates and the 2013 Liberal-Democrat Trident Alternatives Review, air-launched and ground-launched systems were discounted on grounds of vulnerability and not capable of the ‘global reach’ of Trident with its 4,000+ mile range.

Army Air Corps Apache And RAF Chinook Helicopters Practice Deck Landings Onboard HMS Illustrious by Defence Images. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr

There are three core ‘belief system’ components which are worth stressing in terms of continuity of the decision-making processes in 1978-1982 (when Trident D-5 was chosen over C-4) and from 2006 onwards. Firstly, successive Prime Ministers view Britain still as a ‘great power’ and a major load-bearing actor in the international system. Secondly, that possession of a world class nuclear capability is necessary to deter high end/existential state-based threats to the survival of the British Isles. Thirdly, that this provides an ‘insurance policy’, against such a threat occurring through a downturn in the international system (e.g. a new Cold War with Russia). This is an argument predicated on continuity and stability and the belief that because of an uncertain future and a changing security environment, Britain has a stabilising role to play in the international system.

Tony Blair’s statement to the House of Commons in 2006 would resonate both with David Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband. In it Blair argued: “In the early 21st century, the world may have changed beyond recognition, since the decision taken by the Attlee Government over half a century ago. But it is precisely because we could not have recognised then, the world we live in now, that it would not be wise to predict the unpredictable in the times to come”. In April 2013 David Cameron made similar points:

I know there are some people who disagree with our nuclear deterrent and don’t want us to renew it. There are those who say that we don’t need it any more, because the Cold War has ended. There are those who say we can’t afford Trident any more, so we either need to find a viable cheaper option, or rely on the United States to protect us. And there are those who say that we should just get rid of our nuclear weapons entirely, in the hope that it would encourage others to do the same. I recognise these are sincerely held views. But as Prime Minister, with ultimate responsibility for the nation’s security, I profoundly disagree with them.

He cited the risk of proliferation through states such as North Korea and Iran and that, for national security protection against such threats, the 5-6% of the defence budget it would cost was “a price which I, and all my predecessors since Clement Attlee, have felt is worth paying to keep this country safe”.

Indeed none of the three main political parties advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament and instead are debating the form rather than the function of the nuclear deterrent. This is not the view of the Scottish National Party who advocate the abandonment of a British nuclear capability and will likely be a significant factor before and after the general election — especially if Labour or the Conservatives are forced to seek coalition government.

Headline image: Successor Submarine by Defence Images. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Play it again (Uncle) Sam: continuities between the adoption and renewal of Trident appeared first on OUPblog.

A World Intellectual Property Day Quiz

Every year on 26 April, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) celebrates World Intellectual Property Day to promote discussion of the role of intellectual property in encouraging creativity and innovation. As the recent lawsuit between the Marvin Gaye estate and Pharrell Williams showed, intellectual property law is just as relevant as ever. Do you know your rights as a creator? How is technology challenging traditional conceptions of intellectual property? Put your skills to the test with our intellectual property law quiz!

Find out more about Creation and Validity of Intellectual Property Rights and Infringement, the Internet, and Broadcasting.

Featured image: Copyright symbol. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post A World Intellectual Property Day Quiz appeared first on OUPblog.

Thought experiments in philosophy

Philosophers love thought experiments. Many of us deploy them as our version of the scientific method. They isolate some feature of our experience and evoke intuitions about it, and these revealed verdicts enable us to adjust relevant theories in light of what we find.

The method goes back to Plato, who, for example, has a character in The Republic challenge Socrates’s view of morality by appealing to the possibility of a ring that could make its bearer invisible, in order to demonstrate that people are most fundamentally self-interested.

Here are some of the other famous philosophical thought experiments:

Suppose there were a planet that was a duplicate of Earth in every way except that the chemical compound of the colorless, odorless drinkable stuff in its lakes and rivers was not H20 but something else, XYZ. Would XYZ be water? (Hilary Putnam)
Suppose you knew absolutely nothing about your social status, race, ethnicity, gender, basic life plan, or prospects. Under these conditions, what political conception would you choose to live under? (John Rawls)
Suppose you are alone in a room, where sheets of paper with strings of Chinese characters written on them are slipped in, and you are supposed to write different strings of Chinese characters on a different piece of paper according to an extremely detailed set of instructions, which you then slip out the door. It turns out you are fooling those outside the door into believing there is a Chinese speaker in the room answering their questions. Does this room — allegedly akin to a computer — understand Chinese? (John Searle)
Suppose we could transplant one half of your brain into each of the skulls of your identical siblings (whose own brains were destroyed). Each resulting person would wake up thinking he or she is you, with all psychological connections to you preserved. Which one would be you? (Derek Parfit)
Suppose a goddess designs a zygote, combining its atoms in such a way that it grows into a person (Ernie) who eventually judges it best to perform precisely the action the goddess designed him to perform at that moment in time. Does he perform this action freely? (Al Mele)
Suppose a team of brilliant neuroscientists has the ability to manipulate Plum into deciding to kill White by producing in him a strongly egoistic neural state just before he reasons about whether to do so, a state that determines he will decide to do so. Is he morally responsible for killing White? (Derk Pereboom)

There are many worries one might have about this general method. The cases aren’t sufficiently detailed, they yield conflicting intuitions, they generate framing effects, the intuitions garnered for use in the theory are culturally bound, and so on. But the worry I want to focus on instead is that sometimes we appeal to these science fiction cases too quickly when there are plenty of real life cases all around us that are potentially more fruitful.

“sometimes we appeal to these science fiction cases too quickly when there are plenty of real life cases all around us that are potentially more fruitful”.

Consider the last two thought experiments. They are both intended to get us to think ultimately about whether freedom and responsibility are really possible in a fully determined world, as each of the external manipulators dramatically brings to life different features of a deterministic world.

They are also, more importantly, meant to isolate the relevant features in a way that will yield clear intuitions on our part. Neither Ernie nor Plum acts freely or is morally responsible, obviously. And the precisely-drawn nature of the cases, and our clear-cut responses to them, are what is supposed to enable us to see more clearly how to make judgments of agency and responsibility about actual people in the messier real world.

But the very messiness of the real world should perhaps give us some pause about this method. Responsibility, for instance, has attached to it a whole range of emotions and practices; anger, gratitude, admiration, disdain, praise, punishment, reward, criticism, withdrawal of trust or warm feelings, and so on. These are deeply ingrained human emotions and practices, typically with a long evolutionary or cultural history.

Consequently, it is hard to see how we might theorize about responsibility in the first place without taking seriously these deeply ingrained responses. But the fact that our responses are so messy when it comes to many real-life people might just mean that responsibility is messy, that perhaps it can’t be made as precise as the thought-experimental method would have us believe.

Numerous real-life cases illustrate the point. None of us are ideal agents, but we may still achieve insight into the nature of agency by investigating the many different kinds of nonideal agents among us.

For example, what are we to think of the responsibility of people with clinical depression, Alzheimer’s disease, OCD, kleptomania, psychopathy, intellectual disabilities, Tourette syndrome, or those from horrifying or morally deprived childhoods? Many of us either know people with these backgrounds or conditions, or we are such people.

These agents tend to elicit in us a profound unease. We may feel, for instance, that only some of our responsibility emotions and practices are appropriate for them. Or we may feel that some of these agents deserve very different responses than others. Or we may feel that “there but for the grace of God” considerations suggest we extend our unease about their responsibility to those without such disorders and backgrounds.

In any event, thinking hard about these cases may reveal that our commitments and dispositions with respect to real life agents are surprisingly complex and informative, so much so that our intuitions about thought experiments that abstract away from real life details are misleading or irrelevant.

And a bonus of focusing on real-life cases is that we can get help on their crucial empirical details from various sciences employing the actual scientific method (e.g., psychology, biology, neurophysiology), which enriches our theorizing in interdisciplinary ways. And why shouldn’t we approach the matter in this way if our aim is to understand human agency and responsibility?

Philosophical thought experiments are lots of fun to design and think about. But they may obscure reality or prevent progress when too removed from our actual experience. Perhaps, then, we should be appealing far more often to the wide variety of fascinating and complex real life cases near to hand.

Featured image credit: The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Public domain via Wikiart.

The post Thought experiments in philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

Guns, herbs, and sores: inside the dragon’s etymological lair

While St. George is widely venerated throughout Christian communities, England especially honors him, its patron saint, for St. George’s Day on 23 April. Indeed his cross, red on a white field, flies as England’s flag.

St. George, of course, is legendary for the dragon he slew, yet St. George bested the beast in legend alone. From Beowulf to The Game of Thrones, this creature continues to breathe life (and fire) into our stories, art, and language; even the very word dragon hoards its own gold. Let’s brave our way into its etymological lair to see what treasures we might find.

Dragon

A dragon may evoke fiery breath and taloned wings, but the origin of the word dragon conjures up a different feature: eyes. Dragon ultimately comes from the ancient Greek δράκων (drakon), which names a ‘dragon’ and, more generally, a ‘serpent.’ This word, in turn, derives from a verb, δέρκεσθαι, ‘to see clearly’. As etymologist Walter Skeat glosses it, δράκων literally means ‘sharp-sighted.’

The yellow, unblinking eyes of snakes have in part inspired the mythical beast, as dragon’s early 13th-century references to ‘snake’ and ‘python’ suggest. Ironically, snakes rely very little on their eyesight; their senses of smell and touch are what we should describe as ‘sharp.’

Draconian

‘Sharp-sighted’ also names a Greek statesman, Draco, who instituted severe punishments for minor offenses in ancient Athens. Draco enacted his cruel code all the way back in 7th century BC, but thanks to his legacy we still call extreme measures draconian today.

Drake

Historical linguists have taken the Greek δράκων back to the Indo-European root *derk-, ‘to see’, while Latin took up δράκων as dracō. As it passed into the Germanic languages, dracō eventually yielded English’s drake, an early name for ‘dragon.’ Far less terrifying—and mythical—is the male duck, drake, but that word has a different origin. Etymologist Ernest Weekley suggests drake’s Old English source, draca, was ‘an early church word,’ identified with whales, sharks, crocodiles, and other biblical leviathans.

Dragoon

As it evolved in the Romance languages, the Latin dracō eventually yielded the French dragon, hence English’s dragon. Dragons may have never actually killed anyone, but guns have. In the French warfare of the 1600s, soldiers likened the gunfire of a carbine to the fiery breath of dragons, which came to name this musket-like weapon. A kind of cavalry soldier noted for wielding this weapon also came to be known by this name, hence the English dragoon.

Rankle

A dragoon might well cause a festering sore, which English once called a rankle. You probably recognize the word in its milder, modern verb form, but you may not recognize its root: the Latin dracunculus, ‘little dragon,’ a diminutive form of draco. An ‘abscess’ or ‘ulcer’, a dracunculus may have burned like a dragon’s fiery breath, evoked its scaly skin, or suggested the creature’s purported venom, as etymologists have proposed. Drancunculus shed some syllables to yield the French draoncle, as well as its initial ‘d’ in a variant form, raoncle, from which English gets rankle.

Tarragon

Historically, physicians might have turned to herbs to treat a wound like a rankle. Here, the doctor might prescribe some tarragon. Known in scientific circles as Artemisa dracunculus (see rankle above), tarragon may have taken a rather sinuous route into English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), some etymologists propose that the name of this plant comes from the Latin tragonia or tarchon, adopted from the Arabic ṭarkhōn, which was in turn taken from the Greek δράκων.

Tarragon may not evoke might or magic, but the association between the mythical monster and the serpent-like appearance of some plants is observed in many dragon-related plant terms in English; dragonwort, dragon’s blood, dragon’s-claw, dragon’s-herb, dragon’s mouth, snapdragon, and green dragon all exemplify the connection, as the OED records. Different kinds of herbs and drugs, however, are behind puffing the dragon and chasing the dragon, the latter  being a phrase of Chinese origin involving a different tradition of dragon mythology than we see in the West.

Dracula

Tarragon pairs nicely with garlic, no? Not if you’re Dracula. Now, Dracula and dragons aren’t just kin as myths and monsters. They have a lot of history—word history that is. The name Dracula—Bram Stoker’s infamous vampire king in his 1897 novel of the same name—is taken from an epithet for Vlad the Impaler, a gruesome 15th-century Wallachian prince. According to the OED, this Dracula means ‘son of Dracul’ in Romanian. Dracul, in turn, means ‘dragon’, referring to Vlad’s father, who joined the Order of the Dragon, a Crusade-styled Christian fellowship. This order also adopted St. George as its patron saint, which brings us full circle. Just like the order’s symbol, the uroboros: the snake—or dragon—eating its own tail.

A version of this blog post first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Image Credit: “Bunting hung in preparation for the Lord Mayor’s Show in London” by traveljunction. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Guns, herbs, and sores: inside the dragon’s etymological lair appeared first on OUPblog.

DNA Day 2015: celebrating advances in genetics and gene therapy [infographic]

Today, 25 April is a joint celebration for geneticists, commemorating the discovery of the helix nature of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 and the completion of the human genome project fifty years later in 2003.

It may have taken half a century to map the human genome, but in the years since its completion the field of genetics has seen breakthroughs increase at an ever-accelerating rate. In 2015, gene therapy is fast becoming a viable option for the treatment of genetic diseases and will be a dominant focus for geneticists in the years to come.

But what is gene therapy and how does it work? Explore the infographic below to find out.

 

Download the infographic in pdf or jpeg.

Heading image: DNA by PublicDomainImages. CC0 via Pixabay.

The post DNA Day 2015: celebrating advances in genetics and gene therapy [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

Meeting and mating with Neanderthals: good and bad genes

Analyses of Neanderthal genomes indicate that when anatomically modern humans ventured out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, they met and mated with Neanderthals, probably in regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. We know that Neanderthals inhabited regions of Eurasia during the recent ice ages for a period of over 200,000 years and finally became extinct around 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Today, when we examine the genomes of Europeans and Asians, we find that about 2% of their genomes consist of Neanderthal fragments. Africans either do not have or have very small percentages of Neanderthal DNA, probably due to limited interbreeding between Eurasian peoples and Africans in more recent times.

In general, the fraction of Neanderthal DNA in Eurasians is very small, indicating that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals only over a limited geographic area and period of time, perhaps in the zone where we first met. Additionally, it is possible there was rather strong avoidance to mating, perhaps based on different appearances or social behaviors. Moreover, it is quite possible that hybrids between Neanderthals and modern humans suffered reduced fertility.

Though the fraction is small, genomes are vast. Thus, even 2% Neanderthal DNA in Eurasian genomes totals nearly 60 million bases of DNA – the A, C, G and Ts. So, what are the functional effects of this Neanderthal DNA on our biology? Was the DNA we inherited from our ancient Neanderthal parents harmful to us or was it beneficial to us?

In recent research by Svante Pääbo and coworkers, this question was approached by analyzing how the 2% Neanderthal DNA is distributed among the over three billion bases in our genomes. Through previous studies of our genome, we know that only a very small fraction is functional, meaning it codes or regulates proteins in our body. Instead, vast stretches of our genome seem to be non-functional and have no biological effects. If Neanderthal DNA was in general not harmful to us, we would expect nearly equal percentages in both functional and non-functional parts of our genome. Alternatively, if Neanderthal DNA is more detrimental, we would expect to see less of it in functional regions and more of it in non-functional regions. Indeed, this is exactly what is found. Pääbo and coworkers discovered significantly less Neanderthal DNA in functional parts of our genome and more of it in non-functional parts. Moreover, they found that the greatest “desert” of Neanderthal DNA in human genomes is on the X chromosome where they found five times less Neanderthal DNA compared to other chromosomes.

How did the Neanderthal segments become distributed in such a lopsided way within our genome? One way is through the action of negative selection, that process of natural selection that weeds out harmful DNA. Over the 2,000 generations since humans interbred with Neanderthals, negative selection seems to have been hard at work removing Neanderthal DNA from the functional parts of our genome though leaving it in regions where it has no biological effect. What could account for the dramatic reduction of Neanderthal DNA on human X chromosomes? The pattern could be explained if male hybrid offspring between mating’s of modern humans and Neanderthals had reduced fertility. Genes located on male hybrid X chromosomes may not have been compatible with the set of chromosomes inherited from the “other” parent. It is well known that hybrids of the heterogametic sex (the male sex in most mammals, having X and Y chromosomes) suffer reduced fertility much more than female hybrids do. The thinking is that because female hybrids have two X chromosomes, any one of these can cover up for harmful effects the other X chromosome might cause, whereas males with only one X chromosome are left “exposed.” Consistent with the idea that male hybrids had low fertility is the finding that human genes expressed in testes contain 20 to 100 times less Neanderthal DNA compared to genes expressed in other organs such as kidney, liver, heart, or brain.

Le Moustier Neanderthals by Charles R. Knight, 1920. American Museum of Natural History Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

There is additional evidence indicating that Neanderthal genes might be harmful in modern day peoples. A number of Neanderthal genes in Eurasians appear to contribute to various chronic diseases such as lupus, chronic inflammation of the bile ducts, Crohn’s disease, reduced optic disc-size, and type 2 diabetes. A quite tantalizing finding is that one Neanderthal gene inherited by some Europeans seems to decrease the ease of quitting smoking.

So, was any of the DNA we inherited from Neanderthals good for us? Modern humans spread relatively rapidly into territories of Eurasia, regions that Neanderthals had already inhabited for over 200,000 years. Therefore, it’s probably true that Neanderthals had already become sufficiently adapted to survive in Eurasian environments and that some of their genes would be beneficial to modern humans. Upon interbreeding with Neanderthals, these favorable genes could have spread within modern human populations by a second type of natural selection, called positive natural selection.

Although work is ongoing, and we undoubtedly have much to learn, when we analyze large numbers of genomes from Europeans and Asians (determined by the ongoing 1000 Genomes Project), certain regions inherited from Neanderthals bear signs that they are biologically functional in human individuals, and in some cases even became more common in Eurasian populations suggesting they were beneficial.

The list of potentially beneficial Neanderthal genes fall into several categories: genes coding for aspects of skin and hair, genes involved in galactose metabolism (possibly related to a newborn’s ability to digest mother’s milk), genes related to long-term depression (possibly related to cerebellar learning), genes involved in immune defense, and genes involved in lipid-digestion. That modern humans inherited immune defense genes and lipid-digestion genes from Neanderthals does not seem too surprising as humans would have benefited greatly from any genes that helped them fight new pathogens and or digest new foods they encountered as they colonized Europe and Asia. Skin and hair genes relate to pigmentation, skin-cell differentiation, and the skin-protein keratin. With regard to keratin genes, it appears that different sets of keratin genes from Neanderthals were greatly favored in different populations. We are not sure of the reasons, but Europeans seemed to have favored Neanderthal-derived genes coding for keratin filaments in skin, whereas East Asians favored genes linked to keratin filaments in hair.

There is much we have to learn about the Neanderthal DNA in us. Through investigating some its harmful effects, we might get a better handle on why Neanderthals ultimately vanished. On the other hand, it is heartening to know that at least some Neanderthal DNA in our genomes seems to have helped us along our evolutionary journey.

Featured Image: DNA. Micah Baldwin, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Meeting and mating with Neanderthals: good and bad genes appeared first on OUPblog.