John Lloyd Ackrill 1921–2007

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Judson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
De Interpretatione ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University ◽  
Paul Grice ◽  
The Way

John Lloyd Ackrill (1921–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a powerful and far-reaching influence on the way ancient philosophy is done in the English-speaking world and beyond. In his first article, he interpreted Plato's claim at Sophist 259e, in the process confronting what would have been at the time the authoritative interpretation, that of W. D. Ross. Ackrill was born in Reading to Frederick William Ackrill and Jessie Anne Ackrill. He was educated at Reading School and at St John's College in the University of Oxford; his philosophy tutors at St John's were Paul Grice and John Mabbott. Ackrill's first book was Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione. He also published a pair of seminal articles on Plato's Sophist. Perhaps the most important aspect of Ackrill's enduring influence was his editorship of the Clarendon Aristotle Series.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

scholarly journals XV. A new demonstration of the binomial theorem, when the exponent is a positive or negative fraction. By the Rev. Abram Robertson, A. M. F. R. S. Savilian Professor of Geometry in the University of Oxford. In a letter to Davies Giddy, Esq. F. R. S

1806 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 305-326 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Mathematical Science ◽  
Binomial Theorem ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

Dear Sir, Being perfectly convinced of your love of mathematical science, and your extensive acquirements in it, I submit to your perusal a new demonstration of the binomial theorem, when the exponent is a positive or negative fraction. As I am a strenuous advocate for smoothing the way to the acquisition of useful knowledge, i deem the following articles of some importance ; and unless I were equally sincere in this persuasion, and in that of your desire to promote mathemati­cal studies, in requesting the perusal, I should accuse myself of an attempt to trifle with your valuable time. The following demonstration is new only to the extent above mentioned ; but in order that the reader may perceive the proof to be complete, a successive perusal of all the articles is necessary. As far as it relates to the raising of in­tegral powers, it is in substance the same with one which I drew up in the year 1794, and which was honoured with a place in the Philosophical Transactions for 1795. If, therefore, you think the following demonstration worthy the attention of mathematicians, you will much oblige me by presenting it to the Royal Society.

Libraries in Africa: Pioneers, Policies, Problems. By ANTHONY OLDEN. Lanham, MD., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1996 (UK agent: Shelwing Ltd., Folkestone). Pp. xx + 170. £35.65 (ISBN 0-8108-3093-0).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
A. D. ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Carnegie Corporation ◽  
Library Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Per Se ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

This expensive little book, originally a thesis for the University of Illinois, is an artless but sometimes perceptive account of certain library endeavours in British East and West Africa, based on archival and library research in Britain and the United States. It is not a history of libraries per se so much as a study of instances of external aid to the development of libraries beyond the sphere of teaching institutions. In the 1930s, one such source – as in so much of the English-speaking world – was the Carnegie Corporation. Grants to Kenya underpinned a system of circulating libraries, the depot for which was housed in the McMillan Memorial Library, Nairobi; membership was confined to whites until 1958. In Lagos, Alan Burns, as chief secretary, secured a grant to start an unsegregated but fee-charging library: in 1934 just 43 of its 481 members were African. The grant ended in 1935, but the library was still going forty years later.

scholarly journals Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790–1835

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350
Author(s):  
BILL JENKINS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

AbstractThis paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

Banditry Unleash'd; or, How The Robbers Reached the Stage

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
George W. Brandt
Keyword(s):  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Senior Research Fellow ◽  
Senior Research ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
University Of Bristol ◽  
The University ◽  
Don Carlos

Friedrich Schiller – poet, historian, and philosopher as well as dramatist – is acknowledged to be a towering figure in German-language theatre, yet has had only a fitful impact on the stages of the English-speaking world, where such of his works as Don Carlos, Intrigue and Love (Luisa Miller in the operatic version) and William Tell are better known through the filters of Verdi and Rossini than in their original form. But there were signs in 2005 – the bicentenary of Schiller's death at the tragically early age of forty-five – that the English theatre was taking more notice of this major playwright, with Phyllida Lloyd's production of Mary Stuart and Michael Grandage's of Don Carlos both well received. In the article which follows, George W. Brandt traces Schiller's troubled breakthrough into professional theatre as a young man with his first play, The Robbers – which, while significantly different from his later work, does anticipate his lifelong preoccupation with the theme of freedom. George W. Brandt, Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus in the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, has previously contributed to NTQ with articles on Bristol's Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory Company (NTQ 72), and Iffland's 1796 guest performance in the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller (NTQ 77).

The Origin of the Term pien-wen: An Alternative Hypothesis

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.H. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Academic Effort ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Selection Of

No one has done more over recent years to promote the study of the genre of Chinese literature known aspien-wenin the English-speaking world than Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. Since the discovery of this type of T'ang popular tale among the Tun-huang manuscripts which were recovered at the start of this century, a considerable body of scholarship has been produced to explain its origins and affiliations. The results of all this academic effort are now surveyed in three volumes by Mair: one a selection of translations, one a survey of comparable phenomena outside China, and one (dealt with here) addressed to the main problems raised by the Chinese materials.

J. L. Austin

Philosophy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Longworth
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
John Langshaw Austin ◽  
The University ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Perception Action ◽  
The Way

John Langshaw Austin (b. 1911–d. 1960) was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the use of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin drew in his work on speech acts—in particular his distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—have assumed something like canonical status in more recent work. His work on knowledge and perception figures centrally in some recent work on these topics, especially with respect to questions about the nature of episodes of seeing and the way they can figure in enabling us to know things about our environments. His work on meaning and truth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions. His work on action and freedom has played a role in some more recent discussions. However, Austin is often aligned with an approach to philosophical questions that focuses heavily on the way we use ordinary language. Many philosophers who are skeptical about the value of that approach are therefore skeptical about the worth of some of Austin’s work.

The Trial of Socrates That Never Ends: An Introduction to the Socrates Tenured Symposium

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-39
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World View ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

This introduction to the Socrates Tenured symposium reflects on the history of philosophy’s institutionalization as a specialized academic discipline, noting its relative recency in the English-speaking world. Despite occasionally paying lip service to its German idealist origins, philosophy in the United States is best understood as an extension of the Neo-Kantian world-view which came to dominate German academic life after Hegel’s death. Socrates Tenured aims to buck this trend toward philosophy’s academic specialization by a strategy that bears interesting comparison with the anti-professionalism of Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago.

Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Williams
Keyword(s):  
Legal Systems ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
World Today ◽  
Legal Writing ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Way ◽  
English I

AbstractIn many countries in continental Europe the simple present is extensively used in main clauses in legislative texts to express obligation. Several English-speaking legal systems have witnessed an increased usage of the simple present in legal English over the last few decades, largely at the expense of shall. I examine the continuing debate among law scholars and writers of legal drafting manuals over the adoption of the simple present in prescriptive texts in English. I conclude by observing that the decision in some countries to do away with shall would appear to be linked principally to socio-pragmatic factors relating to the way this modal auxiliary is perceived in many parts of the English-speaking world today, that is, as being outdated and smacking of “legalese”, a style of legal writing that plain language exponents have been trying to eliminate.

scholarly journals Ali Kouaouci Normes familiales isJamiques et fecondite en Jordanie, en Indonesie et au Pakistan. Recherches demographiques cahier nr 5. Departement de demographie, Universite catholique de Louvain. Louvain-Ia-Neuve, Belgium: Cabay Ltbraire-Editeur S. A., 1983.236 pp.B francs 500 paperback. ISBN 2-87077-143-6

1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-101
Author(s):  
Karol J. Krotki
Keyword(s):  
Economic Planning ◽  
African Population ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
University Of Alberta ◽  
Analytic Methods ◽  
Type C ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

If the editor of this journal was given to that type C?f language slant, this review could begin with the question "Why is Pakistan fertility as low as it is?", or with the statement "Forty percent of Pakistan infertility is due to sterility"; or still differently "Pakistani mothers of sons are less fertile than those of daughters". However, as matters stand, we have to begin more soberly. 'This book has been there now for six years and it is rather late in the day to review it. Yet, it probably remains unknown to many readers and it does contain unusual information. The work is strong methodologically, and it applies in parts analytic methods not ordinarily used among demographers and social scientists in the English-speaking world. Most importantly, it relates Islam with fertility - analytically, seriously and respectfully. 'This reviewer is no judge of the religion-related parts of the book, but he knows the author personally. In fact, Kouaouci, a professor of demography and economic planning at the University of Algiers, spent the summer of 1988 at the University of Alberta preparing his paper for presentation to the Second African Population Conference at Dakar the following November. The author displayed not only all the external symptoms of a pious person, but carried the inner dignity and all-round friendliness of a truly religious man. More convincingly and objectively, all his important statements are generously documented in footnotes for experts to review.

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