This latest volume in the acclaimed Ruffin Series in Business Ethics brings together the contributions to the annual Ruffin Lecture series, in which some of the leading scholars in business ethics addressed the question: Can business, and business education, be considered one of the humanities, or is it in a class by itself? At a time when business is coming under attack for its apparent transgressions, this book iluminates the special values that inhere in the business world. Arguing all sides (...) of the issue, the distinguished contributors include Richard DeGeorge, Ronald Green, Thomas Dunfee, Robert Solomon, Edwin Hartman, Peter French, Patricia Werhane, Clarence Walton, W. Michael Hoffman, David Fedo, Kenneth Andrews, Joanne Ciulla, Manuel Velasquez, and George Brenkert. The editors contribute an informative Introduction and an Epilogue to set the debate in its proper context. (shrink)

We review both the aspects of values-related research that complicate ideations of what we ought to do, as well as the psychological impediments to forming beliefs about the way things are. We find that more traditional moral theories are without solid empirical footing in the psychology of human values. Consequently, we revise the notion of values to align with their socially symbolic utility in self-affirmation and reformulate our understandings of moral agency to allow for the practicalities of context, circumstance, and (...) connectedness. We close by discussing the research and practical implications for these revisions. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

Fossil fuel divestment movements have gained momentum since 2011, aimed at ending fossil fuel use and a move toward a cleaner, affordable, and sustainable energy system, for business and society. The present study investigates the direct impact of fossil fuel divestment announcements on stock prices of firms listed on the United States' stock exchanges. Using an event study and guided by the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs), we test the effects of 116 divestments announcements between 2014 and 2019 on (...) 51 publicly traded fossil fuel companies. Our results suggest that there is a negative effect of these announcements on fossil fuel firm stock prices. Also, we find that the type of fossil fuel firm (coal or oil and gas), the type of divestment (partial, coal only, or full), the timing of the announcement, and the size of the divesting investor have some explanatory power in relation to the (cumulative) abnormal returns following the divestment announcements. While the negative impact on stock prices is not surprising, the reaction from the divested firms after such large divestitures is not consistent with what may be expected, given past reactions to divestitures seeking to achieve different social goals. Given the SDGs, it seems clear why investors are divesting themselves from fossil fuel firms, but why has the reaction to the 116 divestments led to very little change in the way these publicly traded fossil fuel firms do business given their direct and growing impacts on society? We conclude the study with some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This book celebrates the work of Patricia Werhane, an iconic figure in business ethics. This festschrift is a collection of articles that build on Werhane’s contributions to business ethics in such areas as Employee Rights, the Legacy of Adam Smith, Moral Imagination, Women in Business, the development of the field of business ethics, and her contributions to such fields as Health Care, Education, Teaching, and Philosophy. All papers are new contributions to the management literature written by well-known business ethicists, such (...) as Norman Bowie, Richard De George, Ronald Duska, Edwin Hartman, Michael Hoffman, Mollie Painter-Morland, Mark Schwartz, Andrew Wicks, and others. The volume is comprised of articles that reflect on Werhane’s work as well as build on it as a way to advance further research. At the end of the festschrift, Pat Werhane provides responses to each chapter. The first chapter of the book also includes the overview of Patricia Werhane’s work and her academic career. The book is written to appeal to management scholars and graduate students interested in the areas of Business Ethics, Modern Capitalism, and Human Rights. Patricia Werhane is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of business ethics. She was a founder of the field, she is one of its leading scholars, and she has had a profound impact on the world of business practice. Among her many accomplishments, Pat is known for her original work on moral imagination, she is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, and she is one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith. Having been active in Academia for over 50 years, Werhane is a prolific author of over a hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of twenty-seven books, including Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, and co-authored books Organization Ethics in Health Care, Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making, Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, and Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. (shrink)

This book, formed as a series of essays in honour of Professor Carl Baudenbacher, addresses the very art of judicial reasoning, and features contributions from many of the foremost current or former national, supranational, or international judges. This unique volume is intended first and foremost for legal scholars, but its approachable style makes it readily accessible for students and for those with a general interest in the application of the law and justice in today's multi-layered world. The collection of essays (...) is rather more philosophical and reflective as opposed to doctrinal. Each contribution focuses on the nature and operation of justice, the independence of the judiciary, and on judicial style primarily from the perspective of the judges themselves. The book provides perspectives on what it means to be accountable and independent as a judge, the role of language and languages in the quest for justice, while other contributions acquaint readers with the some of the structures of courts themselves, or indeed question for whom judgments are written. Each chapter has been written by a presiding judge, or head of an institution and the book is divided into three parts: - Part I Art and Method - Part II Justice and the Judiciary - Part III Reasoning and Language(s). (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

In this collection of essays written over a period of twenty years, Solomon Feferman explains advanced results in modern logic and employs them to cast light on significant problems in the foundations of mathematics. Most troubling among these is the revolutionary way in which Georg Cantor elaborated the nature of the infinite, and in doing so helped transform the face of twentieth-century mathematics. Feferman details the development of Cantorian concepts and the foundational difficulties they engendered. He argues that the (...) freedom provided by Cantorian set theory was purchased at a heavy philosophical price, namely adherence to a form of mathematical platonism that is difficult to support. -/- Beginning with a previously unpublished lecture for a general audience, Deciding the Undecidable, Feferman examines the famous list of twenty-three mathematical problems posed by David Hilbert, concentrating on three problems that have most to do with logic. Other chapters are devoted to the work and thought of Kurt Gödel, whose stunning results in the 1930s on the incompleteness of formal systems and the consistency of Cantors continuum hypothesis have been of utmost importance to all subsequent work in logic. Though Gödel has been identified as the leading defender of set-theoretical platonism, surprisingly even he at one point regarded it as unacceptable. -/- In his concluding chapters, Feferman uses tools from the special part of logic called proof theory to explain how the vast part--if not all--of scientifically applicable mathematics can be justified on the basis of purely arithmetical principles. At least to that extent, the question raised in two of the essays of the volume, Is Cantor Necessary?, is answered with a resounding no. -/- This volume of important and influential work by one of the leading figures in logic and the foundations of mathematics is essential reading for anyone interested in these subjects. (shrink)

This is a sequel to our article “Predicative foundations of arithmetic” (1995), referred to in the following as [PFA]; here we review and clarify what was accomplished in [PFA], present some improvements and extensions, and respond to several challenges. The classic challenge to a program of the sort exemplified by [PFA] was issued by Charles Parsons in a 1983 paper, subsequently revised and expanded as Parsons (1992). Another critique is due to Daniel Isaacson (1987). Most recently, Alexander George and (...) Daniel Velleman (1996) have examined [PFA] closely in the context of a general discussion of different philosophical approaches to the foundations of arithmetic. (shrink)

This book is a unique collection of essays by the leading scholars in business ethics. The purpose of the volume is to examine the emergence of business ethics as an important element of managerial practice and as an integral area of scholarship. The four lead essays--by Norman Bowie, Kenneth Goodpaster, Thomas Donaldson, and Ezra Bowen--are examples of some of the best thinking about the role of ethics in business. These essays examine such issues as the nature of scholarship and knowledge (...) in business ethics, how ethics is a central factor in managerial leadership, the complexities of ethics in multinational and multicultural settings, and the problems of ethical literacy and moral debate in a free society. Each lead essay develops several themes which are then explored by other prominent thinkers, including Robert Solomon, Richard DeGeorge, and Joanne Cuilla. (shrink)

This book celebrates the work of Patricia Werhane, an iconic figure in business ethics. This festschrift is a collection of articles that build on Werhane’s contributions to business ethics in such areas as Employee Rights, the Legacy of Adam Smith, Moral Imagination, Women in Business, the development of the field of business ethics, and her contributions to such fields as Health Care, Education, Teaching, and Philosophy. All papers are new contributions to the management literature written by well-known business ethicists, such (...) as Norman Bowie, Richard De George, Ronald Duska, Edwin Hartman, Michael Hoffman, Mollie Painter-Morland, Mark Schwartz, Andrew Wicks, and others. The volume is comprised of articles that reflect on Werhane’s work as well as build on it as a way to advance further research. At the end of the festschrift, Pat Werhane provides responses to each chapter. The first chapter of the book also includes the overview of Patricia Werhane’s work and her academic career. The book is written to appeal to management scholars and graduate students interested in the areas of Business Ethics, Modern Capitalism, and Human Rights. Patricia Werhane is one of the most distinguished figures in the field of business ethics. She was a founder of the field, she is one of its leading scholars, and she has had a profound impact on the world of business practice. Among her many accomplishments, Pat is known for her original work on moral imagination, she is an acclaimed authority on employee rights in the workplace, and she is one of the leading scholars on Adam Smith. Having been active in Academia for over 50 years, Werhane is a prolific author of over a hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of twenty-seven books, including Adam Smith and his Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making, and co-authored books Organization Ethics in Health Care, Alleviating Poverty Through Profitable Partnerships, Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making, Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, and Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. (shrink)

For more than thirty years the writings and influence of one man in particular have dominated and directed the field of modern business ethics. We are indebted to two of his fellow‐Americans for this portrait of Richard T. De George. R. Edward Freeman is the Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration and Director of the Olsson Center for Ethics at The Darden School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22906‐6550; and Martin Calkins, SJ, is a Research Assistant (...) in the Olsson Center and a doctoral student in business ethics at the Darden School. (shrink)

For more than thirty years the writings and influence of one man in particular have dominated and directed the field of modern business ethics. We are indebted to two of his fellow‐Americans for this portrait of Richard T. De George. R. Edward Freeman is the Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration and Director of the Olsson Center for Ethics at The Darden School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22906‐6550; and Martin Calkins, SJ, is a Research Assistant (...) in the Olsson Center and a doctoral student in business ethics at the Darden School. (shrink)

This is perhaps the richest book on emotions I have read. It is also a very frustrating book. It appears to be—and Elster more or less suggests this—a series of quite different kinds of essays, connected by somewhat confusing cross references and a general concern for the nature of emotions and their transformations. The first chapter is a position paper on explanation in the social sciences, a plea for “mechanisms” as opposed to law-like principles and straightforward causal accounts. The second (...) chapter is an edifying romp through three very different periods and styles of writing about the emotions. Elster begins with Aristotle’s powerful theory of the emotions, in rich detail and with considerable sympathetic insight. The next section fast-forwards two thousand years and provides us with some of the most challenging remarks and aphorisms of the French moralists of the seventeenth century, Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucault, and La Bruyére. Their wit and sometimes cynicism is delightful, particularly on the subject of hidden and hypocritical self-interest. In their often contradictory insights Elster finds apt examples of his emotional “mechanisms.” Finally, the chapter considers several of the great literary masters and their depiction of the emotions in action. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Stendhal are obvious choices. The discussions of Racine, De Lafayette, and George Eliot tend to be, like their work, a good bit more prosaic. (shrink)

From the Federal Theater Projects of the Great Depression to the disruptive performances of the 1960s and 1970s, theater has played an important role in American radicalism. This special issue of_ _Theater_ reports on socially conscious, politically active theaters in the United States. Despite the evaporation of Cold War passions and the rise of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, such theater work remains a persistent and evolving presence on the political landscape. Since the first inauguration of George W. (...) Bush, new opportunities have arisen for political performance and for significant new challenges to these artists. T_heater and Social Change_ not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text. _Contributors include:_ Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno. (shrink)

Is belief in God rational? Over a century ago, Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard established one set of parameters for discussing that question, but in a language that appears opaque to many philosophers today. Very recently, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross, and George Mavrodes have been debating similar issues in a modern analytic idiom. In this essay, I want to use this modern philosophical language in an attempt to clarify certain issues surrounding the relevant notion of “rationality” and related notions essential (...) to the natural theologian, and in so doing attempt to make presentable the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard.For our purposes here, I take “rationality” to be predicated of an epistemological concept of belief, even if, as I believe, any such notion would have to be a special case and a logical derivative of a more general notion of “rationality” as primarily practical. (shrink)

"Der Artikel befasst sich mit den spezifischen Materialien, die dem Zauberkünstler und Kinopionier Georges Méliès seine Illusionen ermöglicht haben. Die Materialität, die die von ihm auf Bühne und Leinwand geschaffenen Illusionen bewerkstelligt, besteht gleichermaßen aus dem Einsatz von Elektrizität, Mechanik, Pneumatik, Optik, Akustik und Chemie. Der Einsatz dieser Ressourcen lässt sich nicht nach Theaterillusionen und Leinwandillusionen unterscheiden, vielmehr ist die Kopräsenz von theatralen und filmischen Techniken in der Reflexion über die von Méliès geschaffenen Effekte des Verschwindens zu berücksichtigen. The article (...) deals with the specific materials that enabled the Magician and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès to produce his illusions. The materiality that accomplished the illusions created by him on stage and screen consists equally of the use of electricity, mechanics, pneumatics, optics, acoustics and chemistry. The use of these resources can not be divided into theater illusions and screen illusions; on the contrary, any reflection on Méliès’ effects of disappearance has to consider the co-presence of theatrical and cinematic techniques. ". (shrink)

At the end of the Scholium Newton includes a long paragraph about two globes revolving around their center of gravity and held together by a tensed cord. It has been interpreted as a thought experiment (Sect. 6.2) meant to show how the properties of true circular motion defined as absolute motion can be determined in a three-dimensional empty universe. I start by showing that this reading of Newton’s example as a bona fide thought experiment is riddled with interpretation problems and (...) that it is less straightforward than so far assumed (Sect. 6.3). (shrink)

Anthropologists have tended to treat dreams as private fantasies arising from restless libidos struggling with reality. In this view, the dreamer is a victim of what she or he does not want, the intentions of the dreamer, and dreamed of, are often confused or illusory, and what happens in the dream is subj ect to a more primary, more objective, waking reality.The Barok people of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, define dreams as both sleeping and waking experiences. Their dreams are (...) expressions of spiritually powerful persons who deal with a spiritual reality.In waking and real, but substantially dreamlike experiences such as one I describe in this paper, the desires and intents of all involved were perceived as wild possibilities. In the three sleeping dreams that I describe, the desires and intents of the dreamers were true, clearly expressed, and effective in creating or foretelling reality.Describing such subjective and willful experiences entails personal and professional risk. But toward understanding what happened, I undertake this in personally revealing terms, and I recommend Barok and other Native perspectives for the light they shed on dreams and reality.Social science has, for the most part, left dream analysis to the psychologists, and dreaming experiences to "the natives.” People educated in modern European traditions, and especially in academe, learn to not talk plainly or too much about their more subjective experiences or awarenesses, e.g, sex, emotions, and dreams. This applies not only to our lives as fieldworkers, but to our private lives in Western culture.Even recent publications1 still define dreams as a softer and more subjective, or even false, too private, in contrast to the harder and more objective, true reality of waking life (see Tedlock 1987). From this perspective, the accepted truth of there being an objective, socially defined, wakeful reality is not seriously called into question.Fieldwork experiences have shown me different distinctions between dreaming and not‐dreaming realities. I have learned to both expect and get more from dreams. I did not seek nor intentionally precipitate these experiences. They were a congruent part of my learning during four different periods of fieldwork.These experiences suggest a link between the ambiguity of intent in western style, non‐Native2 dreamers, and a lack of creative power. This contrasts with the clarity in the intent of Native style dreamers, and a real creative power.This link short‐circuits conventional academic distinctions between dreaming and waking experiences. For this reason, people like myself have not paid attention to these kinds of field experiences, much less written them up. We fear being disbelieved and discredited. Treating dreams on a comparable footing with objective reality is tantamount to "going native.”3 As Katherine Ewing has stated it, the problem is how to believe the Native meaning of dreams in defiance of the taboo against anthropologists' accepting the "temptation to believe" that "the subjects of one's research actually know something about the human condition and an encompassing 'reality'"(Ewing 1994:572).The field experiences I describe here have made me a believer of both the Native version of what happened, and the truth of there being an encompassing (Native) reality.4 They also convinced me of the necessity of trying to deal openly with what I know of the internal, private, libidinous, and willful stuff that is a part of these dreaming experiences. I reveal my own intent, desires, and needs, in both personal and professional terms, in order to lay some of the cards on the table, in order to look at them from both Native and non‐Native perspectives on what happened.I have learned that the difference between dreams and reality is not what it has been made out to be. On the one hand, the conventional definition of reality too strongly limits my ability to talk about my subjective experiences of it. On the other hand, the conventional definition of dreams does not make enough sense of my real experiences.By describing the real, non‐dreaming experience in which my subjective feelings are centered, the problematic issues of my own wakeful intent as a person and as an anthropologist are centered. This allows comparison of what is supposedly the nature of waking reality with what I experienced in the three sleeping dreams (hereafter "sleepdreams") which follow.The first three sleepdreams were experienced when I was living among Barok people at New Ireland, PNG, between 1979 and 1985. The fourth occured at Taumako, Solomon Islands, in 1993. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veils: The Poetics of John Rawls*George Armstrong KellyPlutarch recounts in Sais, a holy place of Egypt, the image of Isis, understood by the Greeks to be a version of Pallas Athena, bore the inscription: “I am everything that has been, that is, and that shall ever be: no human mortal has discovered me behind my veil.” 1 This recalls a very different god, Yahweh, whose claim is also (...) to compress all knowledge into an eternal present and whose dwelling, in Solomon’s temple, is in a special sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, also guarded by a veil.There, one might say, the similarity ends. Yahweh is a masculine diety (“the father of his people”), though imagistically he remains a space or an absence filled by a name (“I Am That I Am”) indicative of the transcendent distance of the eternal. Isis is a female shape imaging carnal knowledge behind her veil (with its Machiavellian, Baconian temptations). Her truth, as Plutarch makes clear, is driven by desire, truth being a “desire for divinity,” “a study... and work more holy than the vow and obligation of chastity or the guarding and sealing of any....” 2 The almost certain wages, however, for the would-be ravisher is unfulfillment and death, whereas Yahweh, having become the God of the Christians, promises eternal life through the sacrifice of his only-begotten son and a truth above knowledge “that shall make you free” (John 8:32). [End Page 343]To the Semitic mind the name expressed and represented the power of the person: God was present in a special way wherever the “Name of Yahweh” was. 3 The content of the Holy of Holies, originally portable in the ancient Ark of the Covenant, was the two stone tablets of the Law received by Moses at Horeb (1 Kings 8:9). God’s presence, once installed in the Temple of Jerusalem, was represented as “a cloud [that] filled the house of the Lord” (ibid, 8:10; cf. 2 Chronicles 5:10, 13). God was cloud; knowledge was duty. Of the physical place of this indwelling principle of knowledge, Jesus said (John 2:19): “Destroy this sanctuary: within three days I shall raise it up again.” The evangelist explains that his metaphor is transferred to the new Christian idea of the word made flesh. 4 John’s gospel does not cite the rendering of the veil of the temple, but the synoptic gospels all recount that it was “rent in twain from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51, Mark 16:38, Luke 23:45) at Christ’s Crucifixion. The idea is essentially that knowledge as command and duty has been surpassed by a knowledge that is love in the crucified revelation of the Son of God. This returns us, ambiguously, to the image of the goddess Isis; for even in Hebrew scripture it is foretold: “The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me” (Song of Solomon 5:7). If there is here a clear prefiguration of the fate of both Christ and the temple, there is also an echo of the likely fate of the harlot Rahab, who let Joshua’s spies into Jericho, had God not saved her from the ruin of that city (Joshua 6:17).The purpose of this essay is not to dwell on obvious imagistic and psychological attachments between wisdom and sexual knowledge, but early notice of this liaison is needed to connect the philosophical discourse on veils with motifs disclosed in figurative literature. For the veil that hides the object of desire may also hide the reality of the name or of naming; preserving the veil may be a mode of love, just as challenging it is also. For example, when John Rawls writes: “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances,” 5 what does his image of the veil intend to convey? What exactly is on each side of this veil? From... (shrink)

This long, multifaceted, and rich study of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is not only one of the best works dealing with what is surely the most intriguing and mystifying of major philosophical books, but it is, because of Solomon's persistent attempts to clarify Hegel's meaning in terms of contemporary patterns of thought, probably the first genuinely American interpretation of Hegel's obscure masterpiece.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Vexed Pharmacopeia: Musings on Two Thousand Years of Scholarship Regarding the Ancient Spice Trade ROGER MICHEL ALEXY KARENOWSKA GEORGE ALTSHULER MATTHEW COBB Alice went back to the table. She found a little bottle on it, and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME” beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say “Drink me,” (...) but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not.” However, the bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast), she very soon finished it off. “What a curious feeling!” said Alice. —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) যে ব্যামোর দেখবেন সাতান্ন রকমের ওষুধ, বুঝে নেবেন, সে ব্যামো ওষুধে সারে না।1 —Syed Mujtaba Ali, চাচা কাহিনী (1955) introduction Mankind’s fascination with spice dates back at least 8,000 years—both culinary and medicinal herbs are referenced in the Vedas, Hinduism’s oldest religious text. Spice is also peppered throughout the Old Testament.2 The Song of Solomon recites: “Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikearion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 2 a vexed pharmacopeia nard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.”3 Every one of these fruits, plants and spices remained popular in the West throughout antiquity, into the Middle Ages, and beyond. As early as 3000 bc, trade routes had connected the Mediterranean to the near east. Courtesy of this “Spice Road,” ancient Mediterranean civilizations had access to a wide range of horseradishes, mustards, peppers, gingers and other spices. The Greeks and Romans had a special relationship with black pepper—so much so that four out of five recipes in Apicius’s famous 1st century cookbook4 called for a sprinkling of this sometimes-costly commodity. It is perhaps not coincidental that black pepper contains heat-producing alkaloids very similar to those found in New World chili peppers. Much has been written about the important role of chilis in South and Central American culture—a region that, by the Middle Ages, was in many respects the equal of Europe in “artistic sensibility, social complexity, and political organization.”5 The habanero and its capsainoid cousins were at the heart of the culinary and ceremonial customs of Mesoamerica, their biting heat and florid livery an apt metaphor for the “extravagant feats of human butchery”6 —very much in the tradition of the spectacular venationes of ancient Rome—for which the Aztecs at least were well known. To what extent was hot spice also a significant part of the culinary, medical and cultural landscape of the Old World? At a conference hosted by the Institute for Digital Archaeology at the University of Oxford last December, experts from Europe and North America examined the literary, historical, archaeological and scientific evidence around these questions. Their inquiry received a boost from new and rapidly developing techniques for examining the physical evidence of ancient diet and food production—laboratory techniques not available even five years ago. There was also fresh medical evidence to consider: significant research is being done in the area of chemosensation in the context of spicy foods. This Roger Michel, Alexy Karenowska, George Altshuler, Matthew Cobb 3 includes trying to understand how different so-called “TRP channels” in the nervous system process spice information— in particular, the connection between spice and endorphin levels. It appears that many of the hot spices available in antiquity could potentially trigger the same TRP channels as the capsaicin-charged Mesoamerican peppers. This creates a nice connection between old and new world spice that helps to explain and contextualize both. However, in the end, firm conclusions at the Oxford conference were scarce. It quickly became clear that more work, a greater diversity of viewpoints, better refined questions, and a change of venue were required to make additional progress. To paraphrase William Boot, the accidental protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s autobiographical Scoop (wherein events around... (shrink)