Online research in philosophy

This is the first modern book to describe Francis Bacon's jurisprudence. He has long been famous as a scientist, philosopher, politician and literary giant, but his career as one of England's greatest lawyers and jurists has been largely overlooked. Bacon's major contribution to Anglo-American jurisprudence is presented in such a way as to be suitable to specialists and non-specialists alike. The purpose is to restore Bacon to his rightful place as England's first true critical and analytical jurist, and to describe how his legal thought related to his other great intellectual achievements.

This work provides an original account of Francis Bacon's conception of natural inquiry. P'erez-Ramos sets Bacon in an epistemological tradition that postulates an intimate relation between objects of cognition and objects of construction, and regards the human knower as, fundamentally, a maker. By exploring the background to this tradition, and contrasting the responses of major philosophers of the 17th century with Bacon's own, the book charts Bacon's contribution to the modern philosophy of science.

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling to be classified as thing or property. As I engage selected passages and key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics ..

THE LIFE Of FRANCIS BACON, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND. THE ancient Egyptians had a law, which ordained that the actions and characters of their dead ...

Descendants of people buried in cemeteries on private property have a common law right to access that property to visit the cemetery. That right, which is akin to an implied easement in gross, is recognized by statute in about a quarter of states and by case law in many others. Grave Matters explores the origins, nature, and scope of the little-recognized right and its implications for property theory. It discusses the right as part of well-established property doctrine and its relationship to recent takings cases, as well as the corollary graveyard right against desecration and the correlative right of communities to relocate cemeteries. The right of access, which traces its roots to the early the nineteenth-century, is important because it is one of the few implied rights of access to private property. It limits, by implication, the right to exclude, which is at the core of property rights. Thus, it offers a way of getting access to property without facing a takings claim. Moreover, the right is important because it reminds us that there are limits of the right of exclusion, which were recognized at common law. The right of relocation further illustrates the careful balancing of property rights with the community's right. Thus, the graveyard rights together emerge as vestiges of the nineteenth-century's consideration of community and property. A final section suggests the importance of the right of access for recent discussion about reparations for the era of slavery, for the right of access provides a property right (an easement) in descendants of slaves buried on plantations to access those plantations. The property held by descendants provides important symbolic connections between the past and present and offers hope of a lawsuit for reparations that is not barred by the statute of limitations.

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces?institutions?geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo?history in terms of racializing spatialities.

A compartmental model is described for the spread of Gambian sleeping sickness in a spatially heterogeneous environment in which vector and human populations migrate between two "patches": the village and the plantations. The number of equilibrium points depends on two "summary parameters": gr the proportion removed among human infectives, and R0, the basic reproduction number. The origin is stable for R0 1. Control strategies are assessed by studying the mix of vector control between the two patches that bring R0 below 1. The results demonstrate the importance of vector control in the plantations. For example if 20 percent of flies are in the village and the blood meal rate in the village is 10 percent, then a 20 percent added vector mortality in the village must be combined with a 9 percent added mortality in the plantations in order to bring R0 below 1. The results are quite insentive to the blood meal rate in the village. Optimal strategies (that minimize the total number of flies trapped in both patches) are briefly discussed.