Legitimation and delegitimation in early modern Europe: The case of England

In the year 1640, the government of England was monarchical; and the King that reigned, Charles, the first of that name, holding sovereignty, by right of a descent continued above six hundred years, and from a much longer descent King of Scotland, and from the time of his ancestor Henry II, King of Ireland …     

Dimensions of Darwinism. Themes and counterthemes in twentieth-century evolutionary theory

This article explores the critical history and reception of Charles Churchill, the mid-eighteenth century satirist, looking in particular at his skepticism towards all authority as a questioning of traditional ideas of `enlightenment', and at the reasons for the meteoric but short-lived nature of his poetic success.     

Warlords and Holymen. Scotland AD80-1000

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it—an understanding profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action.     

Why foragers choose acorns before salmon: Storage,mobility, and risk in aboriginal California

Despite the enormous potential of anadromous fish, foragers do not mass extract and store salmonids until very late in the archaeological record of California. Acorns, by contrast, were intensively used quite early in the record. Salmon are traditionally viewed as a low cost, high ranking resource, and acorns as a high cost, low ranking resource. The question thus arises: why were salmon not used and stored en masse much earlier? We offer a solution using a simple foraging model that distinguishes resources on their storage as well as overall cost, making it possible to calculate the risk of resource caching, which appears to have delayed intensive salmon procurement in California.