John V. Taylor was a missionary statesman, ecumenist, Africanist, onetime General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and later Anglican Bishop of Winchester. His work offers a theology and practice of Christian mission which is faithful to scripture while fully facing the facts of the contemporary world at the beginning of the third millennium. Does Christian evangelism promote sectarianism and violence, or can it contribute to harmony and peace in the global village? Can Christians extol the true significance of Jesus (...) Christ without demeaning others? Who is God and how does God's nature shape ours? This book tackles these and other vital issues by giving the first major account of the life and thought of one of the 20th century's greatest religious thinkers. Here is an example and tutor to any thoughtful Christian. Consistently incarnational and sacramental in his approach, Taylor seeks to live out the truths he discovers in his daily ministry as poet, priest and prophet - inviting those around him to share the way of Christ. Taylor is also author of major works such as "The Go-Between God", his book on the Holy Spirit, and "The Christlike God", where he outlines the distinctive Christian insight into God as the patient, generous, self-sacrificing love we see in Jesus. (shrink)

Probably no doctrine has excited as much horror and abuse as atheism. This first history of British atheism, first published in 1987, tries to explain this reaction while exhibiting the development of atheism from Hobbes to Russell. Although avowed atheism appeared surprisingly late – 1782 in Britain – there were covert atheists in the middle seventeenth century. By tracing its development from so early a date, Dr Berman gives an account of an important and fascinating strand of intellectual history.

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a (...) vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis. (shrink)

Ethical dimensions of friendship have rarely been explicitly addressed as aspects of friendship quality in studies of children's peer relationships. This study identifies aspects of moral virtue significant for friendship, as a basis for empirically investigating the role of ethical qualities in children's friendship assessments and aspirations. We introduce a eudaimonic conception of friendship quality, identify aspects of moral virtue foundational to such quality, review and contest some grounds on which children have been regarded as not mature enough to have (...) friendships that require virtue, and report a qualitative study of the friendship assessments and aspirations of children aged nine and ten. In focus group sessions conducted in ten schools across Great Britain, moral qualities figured prominently in children's assessments of friendship quality. The findings provide evidence of children having friendships exhibiting mutual respect, support, and valuing of each other's good character. (shrink)

How do we know that God exists? One of Britain's greatest 18th-century philosophers addresses the age-old question in this timeless dialogue. Equally captivating as a philosophical argument and as a work of literature, this classic is particularly relevant in terms of its criticism of the reasoning behind Intelligent Design.

Wordsmiths and Warriors explores the heritage of English through the places in Britain that shaped it. It unites the warriors, whose invasions transformed the language, with the poets, scholars, reformers, and others who helped create its character. David and Hilary Crystal drove thousands of miles to locations throughout Britain, David providing the descriptions, Hilary the full-colour photographs. Their book reflects the language's history starting with Anglo-Saxon arrivals and ending in London with apps for grammar. In between (...) lie encounters with places associated with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Johnson, Murray, and numerous others. Among its many joys are the unexpected discoveries the authors make at every stage of their epic journey. (shrink)

This paper critically examines how senior figures in the UK Labour Party and wider labour movement discussed the topic of immigration in the immediate aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach, the paper is based on an analysis of 86 public interventions by Labour figures, over a 6-month period, delivered in speeches, articles and essays. The paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – including Members of Parliament, advisors (...) and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. Foregrounding their commitment to progressive politics, Labour politicians argued that restricting the number of migrants entering Britain was democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to the interests of working-class people. Nevertheless, it is the contention of this paper that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class. (shrink)

Two contemporary strategies in cadaver organ transplantation, both with the potential to affect significantly expanding organ transplant waiting list sizes, have evolved: elective ventilation and use of nonheart-beating donors. Both are undergoing a period of critical review. It is not clear how widely EV is practiced around the world. In Great Britain, the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital was the first hospital to develop an EV protocol, in 1988, after which other British hospitals followed suit. In the 1980s, new (...) NHBD protocols of two distinct types were implemented worldwide, although both rely on death confirmed by traditional cardiopulmonary criteria. The first type involves the removal of organs immediately after death, the preeminent example being the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Protocol. The second involves the perfusion and cooling of kidneys immediately following death and subsequent organ removal. Protocols of this type have sprung up in Holland, Great Britain, Italy, France, Spain, Japan, and the United States. (shrink)

Contributors; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Instruments in Experiments: 1. Scientific instruments: models of brass and aids to discovery; 2. Glass works: Newton’s prisms and the uses of experiment; 3. A viol of water or a wedge of glass; Part II. Experiment and Argument: 4. Galileo’s experimental discourse; 5. Fresnel, Poisson and the white spot: the role of successful predictions in the acceptance of scientific theories; 6. The rhetoric of experiment; Part III. Representing and Realising: 7. ’Magnetic curves’ and the magnetic (...) field: experimentation and representation in the history of a theory; 8. Artificial clouds, real particles; 9. Living in the material world; 10. Justification and experimentation; Part IV. The Constituency of Experiment: 11. Extraordinary experiment: electricity and the creation of life in Victorian England; 12. Why did Britain join CERN?; Part V. Hallmarks of Experiment: 13. From Kwajalein to Armageddon? Testing and the social construction of missile accuracy; 14. The epistemology of experiment; Select bibliography; Name index; Subject index. (shrink)

Each year a national day of commemoration of the war dead is celebrated on 11th November in the United Kingdom. Despite public controversy about the nature and purpose of remembrance, there has been no significant discussion of the role schools should play in this event. In this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, with the government planning to send groups from every secondary school in Britain to tour the battlefields of the western front over the (...) next four years, the question of how war should be remembered in schools is more pressing than ever. In this bold and rigorous pamphlet, David Aldridge takes a hard look at the reasons usually advanced for involving children and young people in commemorating the war dead, and finds many of them wanting. He critically examines the high profile in schools of charities, like the Royal British Legion, with vested interests in certain kinds of commemoration. And he argues forcefully for a justification of remembrance in schools that requires a major rethink of established rituals and practices. This is a compelling treatment of a topic high on the agenda of teachers and education policy-makers and will be an invaluable resource for anyone involved in planning centenary commemorative events for children and young people. (shrink)

The history of British political thought has been one of the most fertile fields of Anglo-American historical writing in the last half-century. David Armitage brings together an interdisciplinary and international team of authors to consider the impact of this scholarship on the study of early modern British history, English literature, and political theory. Leading historians survey the impact of the history of political thought on the 'new' histories of Britain and Ireland; eminent literary scholars offer novel critical methods (...) attentive to literary form, genre, and language; and distinguished political theorists treat the relationship of history and theory in studies of rights and privacy. The outstanding examples of critical practice collected here will encourage the emergence of fresh research on the historical, critical, and theoretical study of the English-speaking world in the period around 1500-1800. This volume celebrates the contribution of the Folger Institute to British studies over many years. (shrink)

Two contemporary strategies in cadaver organ transplantation, both with the potential to affect significantly expanding organ transplant waiting list sizes, have evolved: elective ventilation and use of nonheart-beating donors. Both are undergoing a period of critical review. It is not clear how widely EV is practiced around the world. In Great Britain, the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital was the first hospital to develop an EV protocol, in 1988, after which other British hospitals followed suit. In the 1980s, new (...) NHBD protocols of two distinct types were implemented worldwide, although both rely on death confirmed by traditional cardiopulmonary criteria. The first type involves the removal of organs immediately after death, the preeminent example being the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Protocol. The second involves the perfusion and cooling of kidneys immediately following death and subsequent organ removal. Protocols of this type have sprung up in Holland, Great Britain, Italy, France, Spain, Japan, and the United States. (shrink)

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies’ open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

This book was written with three aims in mind. The first was to provide a reasonably concise account of Hume's social and political thought that might help students coming to it for the first time. The second aim was to say something about the relationship between philosophy and politics, with explicit attention to Hume, but implicit reference to a general issue. The third is to offer an integrated account of Hume's thought. The book accounts for the varying interpretation of the (...) conservative and liberalist traditions by arguing that the distinction between liberalism and conservatism had little application in mid-18th-century Britain. Hume's ideology contained elements that we should now identify as conservative and liberal respectively, and so by selective emphasis it is possible to make him seem a thoroughbred conservative or liberal according to choice. These two problems the relationship between Hume's philosophy and his politics, and the ideological character of his thought are pursued through the first and second parts of the book respectively. (shrink)

The extent to which British Idealism was heavily influenced by Scots has been little noticed, yet not only were they at the forefront of introducing Hegel into Britain in the work of Ferrier, Carlyle, Hutcheson, Stirling and Edward Caird, but they were also distinctive in locating themselves in relation to the Scottish philosophical tradition they sought to extend. The Scottish Idealists, among them Edward Caird, David George Ritchie, Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison, William Mitchell, John Watson, and the Welshman (...) Henry Jones who found his spiritual home in Glasgow, comprised a formidable force and dominated the philosophical professoriate in Britain, Australia and Canada from the late nineteenth century to the years leading up to the First World War. Its main centres were St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, Cardiff in Wales, and Oxford in England. This collection of readings, the first of its kind, has been chosen with a view to displaying the variety, richness and strength of the Scottish Idealist tradition, beginning with an essay from the famous Essays in Philosophical Criticism, a book that set-out the future direction of enquiry for this group of thinkers who shared a 'common purpose or tendency'. Scottish Idealism was immensely spiritual in character and recognized no hard and fast distinctions between philosophy, religion, poetry and science. It was a formidable force in social and educational reform.. (shrink)

"Hume's History of Great Britain, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, remained the standard work for well over a century. It is a masterpeice, even if its author is now better known for A treatise on human nature. Grounded on an almost sociological view of the 'progress of society', Hume's is perhaps the most European of all the classic narrative histories of Britain. Moreover it embraces far more than the merely political, and it was Adam Smith (...) who pointed out that Hume was the first historian to deduce political effects from commercial and industrial causes. The volume, covering the years 1603-49, was the first to be written and was published as a self-contained entity. Hume's own view was that it was 'by far the best', because the subject admitted of 'greater nicety of reasoning and more acute distinctions'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes to social change and law reform. Professor Lieberman's bold synthesis rests on a wide survey of legal materials and on a detailed discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries, the jurisprudence of Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment, the chief justiceship of Lord Mansfield, the penal theories of Eden and Romilly, and the legislative (...) science of Jeremy Bentham. The study relates legal developments to the broader fabric of eighteenth-century social and political theory, and offers a novel assessment of the character of the common law tradition and of Bentham's contribution to the ideology of reform. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the application of science to a practical activity. The story begins in the late eighteenth century, a period of agricultural innovation, with various authors urging that definite chemical knowledge should replace rule of thumb in the application of fertilisers. In the work of Archibald Cochrane, ninth Earl of Dundonald, we find this exhortation beginning to give way to descriptions of actual chemical experiments, and interpretations of equilibria in the soil. But it is only with Davy's (...) Agricultural chemistry of 1813 that we get clear descriptions of soil analyses that could be undertaken by a farmer, accompanied with a certain amount of biochemical information on the growth of plants. Davy's recommendations were essentially conservative; he provided support for the best practices already being recommended by innovators. His book is interesting too, for the light it casts upon his more theoretical writings. (shrink)

Writing in 1978, on the eve of Thatcherism’s political triumph, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (Hall et al., 2013, p. 193) claimed Britain was experiencing a ‘crisis of hegemony’; a political, e...

Slippery slope arguments have been important in the euthanasia debate for at least half a century. In 1957 the Cambridge legal scholar Glanville Williams wrote a controversial book, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, in which he presented the decriminalizing of euthanasia as a modern liberal proposal taking its rightful place alongside proposals to decriminalize contraception, sterilization, abortion, and attempted suicide (all of which the book also advocated).1 Opposition to these reforms was in turn presented as exclusively religious (...) and particularly Roman Catholic. Thus Williams asserted that "euthanasia can be condemned only according to religious opinion" (1957, p. 312).The following year, in .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:76 Reviews PROPOSITIONAL ANALYSIS David Blitz Philosophy Dept. and Peace Studies / Central Connecticut State U. New Britain, ct 06050, usa [email protected] Graham Stevens. The Russellian Origins of Analytical Philosophy: Bertrand Russell and the Unity of the Proposition. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xii, 185. isbn: 978-0-415-36044-9 (hb). £80.00. us$155.95. Graham Stevens has written a short book on a diUcult subject: the unity of the (...) proposition. While the title of the volume is The Russellian Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the underlying theme is the comparatively little discussed problem of how the elements of a proposition come together to form a unity, as indicated in the book’s subtitle: “Bertrand Russell and the Unity of the Prop­ osition”. Stevens traces this concept, as a unifying thread or “central concern”, throughout Russell’s many philosophies which constitute for Stevens a “consis­ tent and constantly evolving philosophy” (p. 2) stretching from the earliest log­ ical writings to the later works of the 1930s and 1940s. This is an important and well written volume, which Russellians should have in their personal and uni­ versity libraries. That the “unity of the proposition” is a problem at all requires the reader to return to the neo-Hegelian idealism which Russell encountered as a student at Cambridge.1 Russell, inXuenced by Peano and Frege, broke with the doctrine of internal relations, defended by Bradley and others, according to which external relations are unreal and false appearance. However, an important element of idealism remains even during the Principia period, due to Russell’s continued belief that a proposition is a non-linguistic, non-mental, abstract entity; these elements are all of the same ontological kind, which can be identiWed through analysis and recombined so that their synthesis reconstitutes the original “unity of the proposition”. This turns out to be a very tall order which will occupy Russell for nearly half a century. Consider the standard example Russell gives: “Desdemona loves Cassio”. According to Russell, this proposition (independently of its truth or falsity) actually contains its “simple constituents”z—zwith “Desdemona” and “Cassio” being things and “loves” a concept. Russell, as a founder of analytic philosophy, has to defend the legitimacy of this analysis from the claim that it has reduced 1 Chapter 1: “Russell, Frege and the Analysis of Unities”. December 2, 2009 (5:28 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd Reviews 77 the structured unity of the proposition into an unstructured set of parts (or heap) where the original order of combination has been lost. The problem of is that merely listing “Desdemona”, “Cassio” and “loves” does not indicate the way in which the terms were originally combined or re­ lated. For reasons to be made clear later, this is referred to in the literature as the “narrow order problem”. In particular, the question arises as to how analysis enables us to assert that it is Desdemona who loves Cassio (supposing this to be the case), rather than the other way around (since love may not be requited). Stevens deals with logical form in a later chapter devoted to the problem of belief statements, but the notion applies here as well: analysis seems to have skip­ ped the logical form, the way in which the constituents are combined. But if the logical form is included, then there seems to be an extra constituent in the prop­ osition not given by direct inspection, and analysis would appear to have added something above and beyond what was there before the analysis. Adding linking relations to indicate how the components were originally combined does not help either. If there is some relation Lz which relates “Desdemona” and “loves” and another relation Rz which relates “loves” and “Cassio”, then there are Wve constituents, not three. Moreover, there is now room for inWnite regress, with a relation L2 linking “Desdemona” and L, R2 linking “loves” and “Cassio”, and so on. But without adding these additional items, there is an apparent failure of an­ alysis to fully provide the order of the elements present in the original... (shrink)

Summary Historians of science in Britain lack a firm institutional base. They are to be found scattered around in various departments in universities, polytechnics and museums. Their history over the last thirty-five years can be seen as a series of flirtations with those in more-established disciplines. Beginning with scientists, they then turned to philosophers, moving on to historians and then to sociologists: from each of these affairs something was learned, and the current interest determined which aspects of the history (...) of science were seen as most interesting. At first it was settling who really discovered what; then an interest in concepts, methods and case-studies; then understanding the broader historical context of science; and after that seeing science in its social context, with special emphasis on institutions and professionalization. Where we shall go next is unclear: these vagaries may be no more than examples of intellectual fashion, but we may hope that they represent a zig-zag route towards deeper understanding. (shrink)

Between 1825 and 1895, Victorian Britain witnessed a significant blossoming of interest in foreign theological literature. Much of this interest, together with a concomitant anxiety, focused on the negotiation of German biblical criticism and the new challenges and possibilities this criticism introduced. This article thematizes this transnational literary and theological encounter, paying particular attention both to the major book series that undertook to mediate (especially German) criticism to Britain, and to the burgeoning periodical literature that supplied ’foreign intelligence’ (...) and short translations. Translation served as both a liberalizing force as it introduced critical results that troubled some proponents of orthodoxy, but also offered a channel for resistance as doctrinally conservative strands of German biblical scholarship found a warm reception. The article is followed by a chronologically organized bibliography of translated works published in Britain from 1825 to 1895. (shrink)

During the Napoleonic Wars there was a shortage of suitable millstones for the British Ordnance gunpowder mills. John MacCulloch spent five summers searching Western Britain for a source of non-siliceous limestones to be used as gunpowder millstones. His search was authorized by the Board of Ordnance, which also paid all his expenses.By 1812 MacCulloch had found suitable limestones in Sutherland, Skye, and at Glen Tilt, but the Board of Ordnance were unable to exploit any of the sources until 1815 (...) when unsuccessful quarries were opened on Skye. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo the British millstone project was abandoned. The military objective of the millstone survey was not achieved, but MacCulloch learned much about the geology of the older rocks of Britain and he built a reputation as an expert geologist through the papers he submitted to the Geological Society of London. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how racial prejudice and selective, usually inarticulate, racial discrimination influenced attempts to conduct an objective examination of charges of cruelty in the training and exhibition of performing animals in Britain in the early twentieth century. As the debate intensified, and following the appointment of a parliamentary Select Committee, one explanation often given by both sides for shortcomings in the treatment of performing animals was the alleged cruelty particularly or exclusively attributable to the “alien enemy,” (...) “foreigners,” and distinct racial groups. The Committee faced the problem of assessing attributions of real cruelty as opposed to unproven charges that may have resulted from irrational, emotive, or strategic prejudice. This paper examines the context in which such charges were made, and the degree to which they might have been introduced or resorted to in order to serve the prejudices or interests of each side in the controversy. (shrink)

The bequest for the Church Peace Union—the predecessor of today's Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (and the publisher of this journal)—was given by Andrew Carnegie in February 1914. The Church Peace Union subsequently sponsored the first worldwide gathering of religious leaders, which was held in Constance, Germany, on August 2, 1914. Convened under the shadow of an impending war, not all delegates made it to the gathering. Six months previously, Carnegie had stipulated that the Church Peace Union devote (...) its funds to the deserving poor “after the arbitration of international disputes is established and war abolished, as it certainly will be some day.” This could happen, he noted, “sooner than expected, probably by the Teutonic nations, Germany, Britain, and the United States first deciding to act in unison, the others joining later.” The outbreak of war was a catastrophic blow to such hopes, as the very nations expected to be at the core of this civilized project descended into an orgy of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen. (shrink)

This book was written with three aims in mind. The first was to provide a reasonably concise account of Hume's social and political thought that might help students coming to it for the first time. The second aim was to say something about the relationship between philosophy and politics, with explicit attention to Hume, but implicit reference to a general issue. The third is to offer an integrated account of Hume's thought. The book accounts for the varying interpretation of the (...) conservative and liberalist traditions by arguing that the distinction between liberalism and conservatism had little application in mid-18th-century Britain. Hume's ideology contained elements that we should now identify as conservative and liberal respectively, and so by selective emphasis it is possible to make him seem a thoroughbred conservative or liberal according to choice. These two problems the relationship between Hume's philosophy and his politics, and the ideological character of his thought are pursued through the first and second parts of the book respectively. (shrink)