Theoria

Monthly Archives: May 2009

The Human Question in Recent Social Thought

Monday, May 25, 2009

I have posted full-text of my presentation on “The Human Question in Recent Social Thought” [pdf] to be given on Friday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. I haven’t finished organizing the Locke presentation yet, but it will be on themes I’ve posted about here the past couple of weeks.

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Leo Strauss’s Legacy

Monday, May 25, 2009

Barret Weber, who blogs at The Yolk and Long Sunday, has a post up at the Telos blog, on “Strauss’s Legacy” in recent secondary literature, well worth reading.

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CFP: Canadian Initiative In Law, Culture and the Humanities

Saturday, May 23, 2009

VISION AND VOICE
3rd Biennial Conference of the
Canadian Initiative in Law, Culture and the Humanities
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
16-18 October, 2009

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Locke’s Naturalistic Understanding of Animals

Thursday, May 21, 2009

More complex than the theological version given in the First Treastise, §25, but the structure is more or less the same.

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John Locke: Elements of Natural Philosophy

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The full text of Chapter 10 “Of Animals” and Chapter 12 “Of the Understanding of Man” from John Locke’s Elements of Natural Philosophy can be found below. To the best of my knowledge, there are no current editions of this text.

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Summer Projects

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Because everyone else is doing it! What I’d like to accomplish this summer.
I. Writing
(1) Finish the damn dissertation. DissertationMaster.mellel is at 187 completed, formatted and mostly copy-edited pages. Two substantive chapters left (on Mandeville and Ferguson, roughly thirty pages formatted each), polish the introduction (mostly done except for the chapter summaries), and the short conclusion.
(2) [...]

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Mandeville

Monday, May 18, 2009

I’ve started re-reading Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees for the chapter I’ll write next. The ‘Preface’ added to the 1714 edition (note: The Fable of the Bees is second only to the Bible in the history of books when it comes to convoluted history of writing and printing) contains what is possibly the best [...]

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Locke on Dominion

Saturday, May 16, 2009

I feel safe in making the following claim: there is no one who has spent more time deciphering John Locke’s interpretation of Biblical dominion than I.

Wish I was able to draw better diagrams! Still piecing together what he understands the “creeping” animals to be (other than that they are reptiles and, presumably, bugs and amphibians).

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Vivisection; Seal Hunting

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Lot’s of animals in the news lately.
I have no idea what a “humanist” is (they seem to like “reason” and being “reasonable” and “discussing”), but there is a partially correct post here by Jeremy Strangroom who points out (correctly) that animal rights advocates can and should only oppose vivisection on the basis of morality. (Strangroom [...]

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Website for my EMCP Animals Course

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Can be found here. Some links need to be filled in and a couple files uploaded, but otherwise it is mostly complete. The course is for twenty kids, mostly in grade eight, and lasts the entirety of next week from 9:00AM to 3:00PM each day.