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News
News: Spring 1998
Philosophy Cafés arrive in the UK • Hume tomb to bloom • Aristotle gold row • Animal rights legal landmark • Philosophy Now editor goes on holiday
Gold mine row hits Aristotle’s home town
A row over gold mining has shaken the small town of Olympiada in northern Greece, which was the birthplace of Aristotle. A Canadian mining corporation, TVX, has spent $130 million to massively expand existing gold mines near the town, bringing employment for more than 800 local residents. It has also spent $7 million to repair environmental damage inflicted by earlier mining conducted by the Greek Government. However, locals fear that toxic waste from the mines will pollute their town and deter overseas visitors. ‘Community leader’ Nikos Mitsios told the Guardian newspaper: “Please tell the English that this is all about Aristotle, the man who taught Alexander. Tell them the great philosopher’s birthplace may soon be destroyed by gold-diggers.” The row has increasingly turned violent, with mining equipment being destroyed and shots being fired at police.
Down on the pharm
The promised medical advances from animal cloning experiments showed their first practical result in December. The team which had earlier stirred worldwide controversy by cloning a sheep (Dolly) announced that it had now cloned some more, which were carrying a human gene for a protein treatment for haemophilia B. The idea is that medicines which are too difficult or expensive to manufacture in the laboratory can instead be ‘pharmed’ in this way, and the desired protein extracted from the milk of the cloned sheep.
Record sentence for animal rights bomber
The extreme wing of the animal rights movement was thrown into the spotlight by a trial in Britain in December. Barry Horne of Swindon was jailed for 18 years for a two-year campaign of arson attacks on pharmacists, cancer research charity shops and fishing equipment shops across the south of England. Horne used firebombs concealed in cigarette packets. He was arrested following a tip-off while planting one in Broadmead shopping centre in Bristol. The judge accepted that Horne “did not intend an attack on human life.” The sentence is believed to be a record for animal rights-related attacks.
Hume statue unveiled
In November, a statue of David Hume was unveiled in High Street, Edinburgh. In his lifetime the genial Hume was revered by society in general but his irreligious views made him deeply unpopular with the city and university authorities and the Church, with the result that it has taken 200 years for Britain’s greatest philosopher to be commemorated in his home town. The statue was erected by the Saltaire Society, which raised the necessary £130,000 mainly by public subscription. The sculptor was Alexander Stoddart, of Paisley, whose design was chosen in a competition. Based on contemporary images of Hume, the head of the statue is nonetheless seen as being an idealised representation of the philosopher. This has caused some controversy; he may have a good-looking statue, but Hume was no oil painting.
The Saltaire Society now faces the mammoth task of raising another £130,000 to restore Hume’s tomb in Calton Cemetary. Contributions should be sent to:
The Saltaire Society,
David Hume Fund,
9 Fountain Close, 22 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TF
(make out cheques to the Saltaire Society).
The Society also hopes to set up a David Hume Trail in Edinburgh, linking the Advocates’ Library where he worked to Hume-related sites in the New Town and the High Street.
Wittgenstein and Hitler
According to the Sunday Times (London, March 8), Ludwig Wittgenstein was unwittingly responsible for the Holocaust. Wittgenstein’s family were Jewish converts to Christianity, and apparently the young philosopher went to the same school as Adolf Hitler in Linz, Austria in 1904/5. On this slender basis of fact, the paper stated that obviously Hitler must have met Wittgenstein, disliked him and as a direct result conceived a violent desire to destroy all the Jews. This tasteless piece of nonsense was borrowed from a new book by Australian author Kimberley Cornish entitled The Jew of Linz, which also claims that Wittgenstein was a Soviet spy in the 1930s.
News in brief
• Italy
THE SUCCESSES of Prime Minister Prodi’s Olive Tree party in Italian mayoral elections have seen the re-election of Professor Massimo Cacciari, the blackbearded philosopher-king of Venice who is currently pushing for a federal constitution for all Italy. This is the philosopher’s last term of office in Venice – he may well be looking at the national arena in 4 years time. Umberto Bossi, leader of the separatist Northern League saw his vote sink to less than 10% – while Cacciari got more than 50% of the vote.
• UK
MARTIN HOLLIS of the University of East Anglia in Norwich died in February aged 59. A leading figure in the philosophy of the social sciences, he was interested in the models of rationality upon which they depend. He wrote a number of popular works: Invitation to Philosophy and The Philosophy of Social Science. One of his main concerns was the fight against cognitive and cultural relativism.
THERE WILL be a memorial service for Professor Peter Winch in the Chapel at King’s College London on April 27 at 5.30pm. Peter Winch was the author of Ethics and Action and The Idea of a Social Science, and was head of the philosophy department at King’s College for many years.
IN AN unusual step a political philosopher, Hillel Steiner, has been appointed head of Jews College, a seminary founded a century ago to produce rabbis for the British Empire. While one or two philosophers haunt the sacred precincts in North London, the College specialises in studies of Chaldean legal texts written some 1500 years ago – a far cry from Dr Steiner’s published works on Mill and Liberty!
• Norway
THE NORWEGIANS are officially trying to find the Meaning of Life. The new Prime Minister, the Lutheran theologian Kjell Magne Bondevik, has formed a Values Commission to work out by the year 2000 what it is that Norwegians believe in. The initiative has had rave reviews from the press. The commission will also attempt to give people ideas on which to reflect to help them to tackle modern problems such as the breakdown of the traditional family, the rise of the media and the Internet and economic globalisation.
• France
MARC SAUTET, the philosophy teacher who founded the first regular Philosophy Café in Paris five years ago, and thus launched an international phenomenon, died at the beginning of March after a long illness. (Philosophy Cafés arrive in UK – see report on page 11.)
APA Conference Sketch (or What I Did on My Holidays)
The American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting must be one of the world’s biggest annual gatherings of philosophers. Nearly 2000 philosophers converged on the Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia at the end of December for four days of meetings, lectures, debates and networking. In Starbuck’s coffee shop, a long line of existentialists waited for coffee and cakes, but the pragmatists had already grabbed all the seats, and experts in decision theory hovered uncertainly laden with plates and cups.
The meeting consists of a series of major lectures on different aspects of philosophy, but simultaneously there are all sorts of side meetings running for special interest groups and annual meetings of more specialised societies such as the Society for Women in Philosophy, the Society for Business Ethics and the North American Nietzsche Society. The meeting is also a job fair – everywhere you look there are worriedlooking research students waiting to be interviewed for university jobs by even more worried-looking academics.
Special events and seminars cover a very wide variety of themes, and as there are usually three or fours events running simultaneously, it is impossible to see everything that the Eastern Division meeting has to offer. At all the events which I attended, it was very encouraging to observe the enthusiastic engagement of philosophers with their subject matter. The seminar on making philosophy videos was itself videoed. In the seminar on the philosophy of sex and love, the couple seated in front of me spent the entire two hours snogging. I’m just glad I didn’t go to a seminar on the ethics of euthanasia.
The conference ended with a Presidential Address by Robert Nozick. Nozick rose to philosophical fame in the 1970s with his libertarian manifesto Anarchy, State and Utopia. It was a little weird, therefore, to see him lecturing in a hotel function room which with its huge scale, leaden modernism and chandeliers and enormous, respectful audience sitting in neat rows of hotel chairs, was strongly reminiscent of a Communist Party of the Soviet Union meeting circa 1975. Not that the distant figure of Nozick, with his wild shock of grey hair, animated hand-gestures and 200 word-per-minute delivery, could ever be mistaken for Brezhenev. One of the great characters of modern philosophy, Nozick has never been solely a political philosopher, and gave a highly thoughtprovoking talk on objectivity.
After the APA finished I went off to visit various bookstores and magazine wholesalers in Philly and New York, to give Philosophy Now’s sales in the area a bit of a boost. I also did some sightseeing. Philadelphia’s old quarter was a fascinating concentration of history into a very small space, with the hall in which the Declaration of Independence was signed jostling shoulders with the original home of the US Congress and with the headquarters of the country’s oldest learned society. In New York I climbed up inside the embodiment of a major concept in political philosophy. At the start of the climb, in the old fort on which the Statue of Liberty rests, there was an uncharacteristic lack of signposting, with unlabelled staircases leading off in several directions. I overheard a baffled-looking man say to his wife: “But.. they don’t tell you what to do… ”
Isn’t that the whole point?
R. Lewis
US Board of Editors
There was a 2 hour ‘Talk with the APA’, scheduled for and held in Philadelphia on Monday, December 29, 1997. Entitled ‘Developing a Philosophy Magazine for the Educated Public’, it was chaired by APA Executive Director Eric Hoffman and Philip Quinn, and included as participants Professors Raymond Pfeiffer, Jonathan Adler, Charles Echelbarger and Peter Hare. Also on the program was Rick Lewis, editor of Philosophy Now. Approximately thirty-five philosophers attended and expressed strong general support for the idea of a philosophy periodical presenting philosophical ideas and arguments in a non-technical way to the educated public. After hearing presentations by Rick Lewis and Raymond Pfeiffer, many thought that philosophers should support Lewis’ endeavor and try to help improve and build it.
After the meeting, Eric Hoffman encouraged Pfeiffer to talk with Lewis and help organize U.S. support and development of Philosophy Now. As a result, a U.S. Board of Editors has been formed. In addition a U.S. Board of Editorial Advisors will be set up soon.
Anyone interested in contributing time and effort should send Pfeiffer a copy of their vita and a statement of interest.