Tag Archives: Jeremy Bentham

lifeboat: someone send an SOS

Lifeboat ethics. Over the centuries people have invented countless metaphors for the earth they live upon, calling it everything from a bountiful mother to a spaceship. A relatively new phenomenon is, with regard to population growth and our ability to … Continue reading

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darwin: insufferable biding of time

…The voyage of the Beagle was, as he said himself, the formative experience of Darwin’s life. He lived hard, working in the cramped conditions of a sailing ship, rounding Cape Horn and making expeditions hundreds of miles inland through dangerous … Continue reading

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decided and optimistic views

Josiah Wedgwood and his friends were the most brilliant group in England in the eighteenth-century- brilliant if highly eccentric. Most are forgotten today, but collectively they changed the world… Devotion to science and a respect for the arts were not … Continue reading

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catch one if you can

Catchpenny prints, like those below were done by anonymous artists of the day and peddled for small change, usually for the tourist trade. As far as the middle of the eighteenth century goes, they reveal much about dress and costume … Continue reading

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the odd couple: birds of a leather

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle…. …Jane whose character included a certain touch of masochism, held a certain profound relish for the domestic drama. She had thought of writing a novel, she admitted, about the “mysteries” of Number 6, her … Continue reading

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you can flee but you can’t hide

The first utopia was the Garden of Eden, but since no person knew what it was like, anyone may create it in their own image, the reason being an unhappiness with the world as it exists, pushing efforts to imagine … Continue reading

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nihilism : brave new world

Seduced. The abolition of logic and its replacement by spontaneity. The will to nothing. No permit requited. The strange guest, nihilism, at the door. Somehow the grain of the new, a weird perversion of creationism which combines the anxiety of … Continue reading

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the poor don’t need your pity

…But John Galsworthy’s concern with the suffering of others was occasioned more by the pain knowledge of it gave him than by the pain experience of it gave them: It was the sensitive liberal’s position in succinct form.But once awakened … Continue reading

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the good angels gulp and groan

In general, the notion that Heinrich Heine represented a “wound” became common currency in Germany after 1945, reflecting the German wound of the war and the country’s subsequent division; all interpretations have transformed themselves into a cultural problem and a … Continue reading

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LETTING YOUR HAIR DOWN WITH THE “HYENA IN PETTICOATS”

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797 ) was a radical in the sense that she desired to bridge the gap between mankind’s present circumstances and ultimate perfection. She was truly a child of the French Revolution and saw a new age of reason … Continue reading

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