Bacon and Darwin

                At age 35, Bacon engaged in the courtship of Elizabeth Hatton, a young widow of 20. Reportedly, she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to a wealthier man, Edward Coke. Years later, Bacon still wrote of his regret that the marriage to Hatton had not taken place. At the age of 45, Bacon married Alice Barnham, the 14-year-old daughter of a well-connected London alderman and MP. Bacon wrote two sonnets proclaiming his love for Alice. The first was written during his courtship and the second on his wedding day, 10 May 1606. When Bacon was appointed lord chancellor, “by special Warrant of the King,” Lady Bacon was given precedence over all other Court ladies. Reports of increasing friction in his marriage to Alice appeared, with speculation that some of this may have been due to financial resources not being as readily available to her as she was accustomed to having in the past. Alice was reportedly interested in fame and fortune, and when reserves of money were no longer available, there were complaints about where all the money was going. Alice Chambers Bunten wrote in her Life of Alice Barnham that, upon their descent into debt, she actually went on trips to ask for financial favours and assistance from their circle of friends. Bacon disinherited her upon discovering her secret romantic relationship with Sir John Underhill. He rewrote his will, which had previously been very generous to her, leaving her lands, goods, and income, revoking it all.

                On 2^nd of October 1836, Darwin was already a celebrity in scientific circles as in December 1835 Henslow had fostered his former pupil's reputation by giving selected naturalists a pamphlet of Darwin's geological letters. Darwin visited his home in Shrewsbury and saw relatives, then hurried to Cambridge to see Henslow, who advised on finding naturalists available to catalogue the collections and agreed to take on the botanical specimens. Darwin's father organised investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded gentleman scientist, and an excited Darwin went round the London institutions being fêted and seeking experts to describe the collections. Zoologists had a huge backlog of work, and there was a danger of specimens just being left in storage. Charles Lyell eagerly met Darwin for the first time on 29 October and soon introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist Richard Owen, who had the facilities of the Royal College of Surgeons to work on the fossil bones collected by Darwin. Owen's surprising results included other gigantic extinct ground sloths as well as the Megatherium, a near complete skeleton of the unknown Scelidotherium and a hippopotamus-sized rodent-like skull named Toxodon resembling a giant capybara. The armour fragments were actually from Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like creature as Darwin had initially thought. These extinct creatures were related to living species in South America.

Freud and Plato

Freud spent most of his life in Vienna. From 1891 until 1938, he and his family lived in an apartment at Berggasse 19 near the Innere Stadt or historical quarter of Vienna. As a docent of the University of Vienna, Freud, since the mid-1880s, had been delivering lectures on his theories to small audiences every Saturday evening at the lecture hall of the university's psychiatric clinic. He gave lectures in the university every year from 1886 to 1919. His work generated a considerable degree of interest from a small group of Viennese physicians. From the autumn of 1902 and shortly after his promotion to the honorific title of außerordentlicher Professor, a small group of followers formed around him, meeting at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon, to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society (Psychologische Mittwochs-Gesellschaft) and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement. This discussion group was founded around Freud at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel had studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His conversion to psychoanalysis is variously attributed to his successful treatment by Freud for a sexual problem or as a result of his reading The Interpretation of Dreams, to which he subsequently gave a positive review in the Viennese daily newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt.

Plato makes it clear in his Apology of Socrates, that he was a devoted young follower of Socrates. In that dialogue, Socrates is presented as mentioning Plato by name as one of those youths close enough to him to have been corrupted, if he were in fact guilty of corrupting the youth, and questioning why their fathers and brothers did not step forward to testify against him if he was indeed guilty of such a crime. Later, Plato is mentioned along with Crito, Critobolus, and Apollodorus as offering to pay a fine of 30 minas on Socrates' behalf, in lieu of the death penalty proposed by Meletus. In the Phaedo, the title character lists those who were in attendance at the prison on Socrates' last day, explaining Plato's absence by saying, "Plato was ill." (Phaedo 59b.) Plato never speaks in his own voice in his dialogues. In the Second Letter, it says, "no writing of Plato exists or ever will exist, but those now said to be his are those of a Socrates become beautiful and new" if the Letter is Plato's, the final qualification seems to call into question the dialogues' historical fidelity. In any case, Xenophon and Aristophanes seem to present a somewhat different portrait of Socrates from the one Plato paints. Some have called attention to the problem of taking Plato's Socrates to be his mouthpiece, given Socrates' reputation for irony and the dramatic nature of the dialogue form.

Margret Mead and Virginia Woolf

Mead’s book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies became a major cornerstone of the feminist movement, because it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli, or Chambri Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea The lack of male dominance may have been the resulted in the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia, although some believe that female witches have special powers. Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of New Guinea. Anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead. Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, although she noted that they do on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different.

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings—often wartime environments—of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKwQ8kBMuJw 

Mary Wollstonecraft  

From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue. One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors. There is a homely proverb, which speaks a shrewd truth, that whoever the devil finds idle he will employ. And what but habitual idleness can hereditary wealth and titles produce? For man is so constituted that he can only attain a proper use of his faculties by exercising them, and will not exercise them unless necessity, of some kind, first set the wheels in motion. Virtue likewise can only be acquired by the discharge of relative duties; but the importance of these sacred duties will scarcely be felt by the being who is cajoled out of his humanity by the flattery of sycophants. There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind are chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride.

Dewey and Montessori

Scientific pedagogy is a way of helping children with learning in school. Schools were at first furnished with the long, narrow benches upon which the children were crowded together. Then came science and perfected the bench. In this work much attention was paid to the recent contributions of anthropology. The age of the child and the length of his limbs were considered in placing the seat at the right height. The distance between the seat and the desk was calculated with infinite care, in order that the child's back should not become deformed, and, finally, the seats were separated and the width so closely calculated that the child could barely seat himself upon it, while to stretch himself by making any lateral movements was impossible. This was done in order that he might be separated from his neighbor. Freedom, like physical education, is also very important in education, giving time to rest the mind.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. Like his older brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, from which he graduated in 1879. In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago where he developed his belief in Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory. During that time Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Social Progress. Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the University, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Columbia University's Teachers College. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Adam Smith 

Laissez-faire philosophies, such as minimizing the role of government intervention and taxation in the free markets, and the idea that an "invisible hand" guides supply and demand are among the key ideas Smith's writing is responsible for promoting. These ideas reflect the concept that each person, by looking out for him or herself, inadvertently helps to create the best outcome for all. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest," Smith wrote. By selling products that people want to buy, the butcher, brewer and baker hope to make money. If they are effective in meeting the needs of their customers, they will enjoy the financial rewards. While they are engaging in their enterprises for the purpose of earning money, they are also providing products that people want. Such a system, Smith argued, creates wealth not just for the butcher, brewer and baker, but for the nation as a whole when that nation is populated with citizens working productively to better themselves and address their financial needs. Similarly, Smith noted that a man would invest his wealth in the enterprise most likely to help him earn the highest return for a given risk level. The Wealth of Nations" is a massive work consisting of two volumes divided into five books. The ideas it promoted generated international attention and helped drive the move from land-based wealth to wealth created by assembly-line production methods driven by division of labor. One example Smith cited involved the labor required to make a pin. One man undertaking the 18 steps required to complete the tasks could make but a handful of pins each week, but if the 18 tasks were completed in assembly-line fashion by 10 men, production would jump to thousands of pins per week. He applied a similar logic regarding wealth generation and efficiency to British rule over the American colonies. According to his calculations, the cost of maintaining the colonies was simply not worth the return on investment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqMK3LmHPZs

Galbraith and Reich

John Kenneth Galbraith was America's most famous economist for good reason. A witty commentator on America's political follies and a versatile author of bestselling books that warn prophetically of the dangers of deregulated markets, corporate greed, and inattention to the costs of our military power, Galbraith always made economics relevant to the crises of the day. This first full-length biography is, in Richard Parker's hands, an important reinterpretation both of public policy and of how economics is practiced. In 1938 he left to work in New Deal Washington, eventually rising to become FDR's "price czar" during the war. Following his years as a writer at Fortune, where he did much to introduce the work of John Maynard Keynes to a wide audience, he returned to Harvard in 1949 and began writing the books that would make him famous.

Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. As the nation’s 22nd secretary of labor, Reich implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, led a national fight against sweatshops in the U.S. and illegal child labor around the world, headed the administration’s successful effort to raise the minimum wage, secured worker’s pensions, and launched job-training programs, one-stop career centers, and school-to-work initiatives He has written 11 books, including “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers “The Future of Success” and “Locked in the Cabinet”; and his most recent book, “Supercapitalism.”

Marx and Carnegie

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published their tract, The Communist Manifesto, in February 1848, just months before much of Europe was to erupt in social and political turmoil, and the Manifesto reflects the politics of the period. In the summer of that year, youthful revolutionary groups, along with the urban dispossessed, set up barricades in many of Europe’s capitals, fighting for an end to political and economic oppression. While dissenters had been waging war against absolutism and aristocratic privilege since the French Revolution, many of the new radicals of 1848 set their sights on a new enemy that they believed to be responsible for social instability and the growth of an impoverished urban underclass. That enemy was capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. 

In The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie that describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich. Carnegie proposed that the best way of dealing with the new types of wealth inequality was for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner. This approach was contrasted with the traditional patrimony, where wealth is handed down to heirs. Carnegie argued that surplus wealth is put to best use when it is administered carefully by the wealthy. Carnegie also argues against wasteful use of capital in the form of extravagance, irresponsible spending, or self-indulgence, instead promoting the administration of said capital over the course of one's lifetime toward the cause of reducing the stratification between the rich and poor. As a result, the wealthy should administer their riches responsibly and not in a way that encourages "the slothful, the drunkard, the unworthy."

Aristotle

Aristotle thought that in a good government every class should be represented. he thought that a strong government should have a middle class that is in control and out numbers the other classes. If Aristotle saw Howard Chandler Christy's painting of the signing of the Constitution he probably would have a lot to say about it. He would see that all the men in the painting are not middle or lower class but rich because of the way they are dressed and the wigs they are wearing. Aristotle would be upset about the painting because he thinks it's wrong for only one class to be represented. When looking at Christy's painting, Aristotle would probably think that the government they are forming is oligarchy not democracy. In the painting the Constitution is being decided by a small group of people and all classes are not represented. In Aristotle's opinion, the upper class, middle class, and lower class should be represented to be called democracy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFW8GE9D1s

 

Make a comparison between Elizabeth Cady Stanton's declaration and Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson and Stanton's declarations are very similar. Both declarations are written mostly about the equality and natural rights that man should already possess and should never have taken away. Stanton's declaration was mostly based off of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and was accepted by the Seneca Falls Convention in July of 1848. Jefferson's declaration was more focused on rights against the British and to keep them from continuing their unjust actions. However, Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions is more focused on women's rights such as women have as equal rights as a citizen, what she wants to say, and any property or wage a woman earns she gets to keep. 

What risks did Elizabeth Cady Stanton take writing her declaration? Why did she take these risks?

In the eighteen hundreds writing something for women's rights was not something that was expected or for that matter accepted especially when written by a woman. Writing Stanton's declaration was a gamble whether it would be recognized as it should or if it would be ignored because it was such a radical idea that a woman should not be thinking much less writing. She risked social and public exile not that she would be executed but she would not be socially excepted. It turns out that her declaration is, in fact, recognized and accepted even though it was against the social expectancy.

Henry Thoreau: Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau: Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau views toward the government was to have less government which is a lot like Lao-Tzu. Thoreau's famous quote, "That government is best which governs least." In Thoreau's opinion if there is too much government the people being governed will become no more than slaves. Thoreau believed that going against the government was the best way to get a better government for the future. He also believed that it was mans obligation or duty to be against the unjust laws by the government. Thoreau's view for the best form of patriotism was to resist and stand up against any immoral laws. He also felt, like Lao-Tzu, that the government was not a helping factor but more of a hindrance. Thoreau was more toward the individual than a large group and he thought it disgraceful if everyone didn't feel the same. Machiavelli would've strongly disagreed for he thought the government should control everything and make sure everything that needs to happen in society happened.  

 

 

Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, and Machiavelli

Rousseau was very particular in the social contract on how the government should be run. In the social contract which was never finished went against the French monarchy of his age. Rousseau believed that government should always be changing. Government should not control it's people but should make sure the people know that they are not alone. To please Rousseau there is no such government exists. Government has not evolved as needed for any governed place.

Machiavelli unlike Rousseau was all about force, the people would always know that the government was there. Machiavelli wanted to rule not just govern the people and he would do anything he say necessary, no matter how unsociably excepted. In Jefferson's Declaration it says roughly that if there is an injustice you should be able to do what you think is right to correct it for independence. When it comes to war, civil disorder, injustice, and death how the Declaration treats them depends on the circumstances. Jefferson in his mind justified the means but everything was equal and can be changed. Jefferson would've not liked Machiavelli's advice. For Machiavelli was about the government making most decisions but for Jefferson people could chose for themselves.

                                     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ09XudWg_8

                                         

  

Machiavelli vs. Lao-Tzu

Machiavelli vs. Lao-Tzu on how a government should be run.

These two philosophers and writers have very different views on how to govern a country. Lao-Tzu had a very non- violent and very passive perspective. Lao-tzu would rather please the public rather than force them to do something even if it would help them. He was all about pleasing the people and having the likable vote even if that meant doing nothing when they needed it. Whereas Machiavelli had a much more forceful view. He would rather push and push to get where he thought was right for the country. Unlike Lao-tzu, Machiavelli was not liked very much some even called him evil. For Machiavelli, force was the only way to run a country and the only way to keep from being overthrown.

In ways both of them had right and wrong points. To sit back is cowardly and being too forceful does nothing but start a mess. For Lao-Tzu letting people help themselves and seeing what will happen is one way to look at it. That’s the problem with being the perfect leader not everyone is going to be happy it’s hard to find the happy medium between helping and forcing when it comes to government. For Machiavelli helping people even when they don’t want help can seem forceful. He could’ve been trying to do what’s best for the people but they did not want help. That can seem controlling but there’s a fine line between them and he might have crossed that line but that’s all up to interpretation. There has been more good leaders that have died with infamy because the people didn’t want to be forced to do something even if it was better for them in the end. Machiavelli always for war and assembling the troops.