Obituary: 1899

Work by historians, geographers and others has examined the role of memory and of commemoration in understanding social meaning and identity. Memory has been shown to be an active constituent of the ways in which meaning is invested in space and place. This paper examines the appeal to memory in Donald MacLeod's Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland, a text written to understand social and geographical change in the nineteenth‐century Scottish Highlands and, in revised form, to counter the alternative views expressed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sunny Memories. In discussing MacLeod's use of memory in Highland history and with reference to examples of memory's use in texts and other representations, the paper contributes to debates on how memory ‘works’ in geography and in history.     

Migration and adaptation of popular Balladry in the US Appalachian region

Scottish ballads were carried to isolated hamlets in the Appalachian Mountains of North America through successive waves of migration in the 17th and 18th centuries. The cultural diffusion of ballad singing underwent divergence as the songs were transmitted orally. Place names, local festivals, and current events were especially plastic components of this process. In the beginning of the 20th century, the intrusion of the radio and rural disturbances brought about by the coal industry functioned as barriers to cultural transmission of the ballads. Even so, songs were kept alive as evidenced by the metamorphosis of My Boy Tammie into Billy Boy and the more recent resurrection of The Elfin Knight into popular culture as Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel. The relationship between orality and literacy is multi‐faceted and difficult to categorise and evaluate.     

French Foreign Policy Elites and the Crises in the Former Yugoslavia

An examination of Orestes Brownson's understanding of Providence suggests that, for Brownson, not only the American Founders, but also the "pagan" political philosophers—that is, the original founders of the idea of natural right—"built better than they knew." Tocqueville, in comparison, trusted less in Providence than Brownson and offers himself as a kind of mediator between reason and history, the universal and the particular.     

Friendship as a Political Challenge

Abstract

Blitz argues for the necessity and possibility of political philosophy by uncovering its origins in the thought of Plato. By tracing its emergence from the political and moral, Blitz explains the nature of philosophy.     

A Realist Response to the Appeal for Pacifism

Abstract

Political philosophy is a discipline related to all other disciplines in a manner that prevents it from becoming autonomous but at the same time not absorbed into other disciplines. When political philosophy ceases to be itself, other disciplines rush in to take its place and thereby themselves undermine their own being.     

The Platonic Enlightenment

Abstract

Mark Blitz has written an analysis of Plato’s political philosophy that engages with a large proportion of the Platonic corpus. His examination is orientated by Plato’s intention of expressing his views in dialogue form, and animated by Plato’s principle that political philosophy must emerge from the attentive critique of ordinary or political experience. This article raises the question whether Blitz has done justice to the “poetic” (constructed, historical, etc.) character of ordinary experience or doxa, and so of the radical nature of Plato’s political thought.     

At the origins of a tenacious narrative: Jacob Thomasius and the history of double truth

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the origins of the historiographical notion of double truth, a prominent and controversial category in the modern study of medieval philosophy. I believe that these origins are to be found in a short text by Jacob Thomasius from 1663, entitled De duplici & contradictoria veritate, which stands as a very early and highly original example of a history of double truth. I propose a detailed analysis of this document in order to shed light on the mechanisms that transformed duplex veritas from a keyword in Thomasius’s Protestant milieu into a historiographical category. As I show, the De duplici & contradictoria veritate provides a historical legitimation of Thomasius’s own brand of Lutheran Aristotelianism. It does so in a highly ambiguous fashion, namely by bringing together the Lutheran theologian and proponent of double truth Daniel Hofmann with anonymous medieval “Averroists”. I venture an explanation for Thomasius’s line of action by uncovering two of his implicit sources.     

Origins of Molecular Neurobiology: The Role of the Physicists

The revolution in the foundations of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century suggested to several of its most prominent workers that biology was ripe for something similar. In consequence, a number of physicists moved into biology. They were highly influential in initiating a molecular biology in the 1950s. Two decades later it seemed to several of these migrants, and those they had influenced, that the major problems in molecular biology had been solved, and that it was time to move on to what seemed to them the final problem: the nervous system, consciousness, and the age-old mind-body problem. This paper reviews this “double migration” and shows how the hopes of the first generation of physicist-biologists were both realized and dashed. No new physical principles were discovered at work in the foundations of biology or neuroscience. On the other hand, the mind-set of those trained in physics proved immensely valuable in analyzing fundamental issues in both biology and neuroscience. It has been argued that the outcome of the molecular biology of the 1950s was a change in the concept of the gene from that of “a mysterious entity into that of a real molecular object” (Watson, 1965 Watson, JD. 1965. The Molecular Biology of the Gene, New York: Benjamin.  [Google Scholar], p.6); the gates and channels which play such crucial roles in the functioning of nervous systems have been transformed in a similar way. Studies on highly simplified systems have also opened the prospect of finding the neural correlatives of numerous behaviors and neuropathologies. This increasing understanding at the molecular level is invaluable not only in devising rational therapies but also, by defining the material substrate of consciousness, in bringing the mind-body problem into sharper focus.     

‘They shut them out the road’: Migration,mental health and the Scottish highlands

There is a small literature tackling migration and mental health, but less is said about the migration of people with mental health problems (incipient or diagnosed). The present paper considers what might be claimed about such migration, particularly when entailing movement into rural and remote areas where lack of anonymity, high social visibility and certain differences in how ‘locals’ and ‘incomers’ are treated may have serious consequences for those displaying psychological and behavioural differences. Drawing upon qualitative evidence from in‐depth interviewing of in‐migrants with mental health problems living in the Scottish Highlands, light is thrown on the connections between their problems and the decision to relocate to this predominantly rural region. Attention also focuses on dissonances between expectations regarding their new situation and their actual experiences of it in terms of both natural landscapes and, more importantly here, social milieux. There are further implications for changing regional attitudes towards mental health, suggesting certain impacts that arise not just from the in‐migration of people themselves who have mental health problems, but also from the ideas and practices that they often carry with them.     

Scottish landform examples 45: Sgriob na Caillich: a landslide-sourced medial moraine on the Isle of Jura

ABSTRACT

Medial moraines deposited by former glaciers and ice sheets are rare in Scotland. The most prominent example is the Sgriob na Caillich moraine, which consists of two to four parallel belts of angular quartzite boulders that extend northwestwards for over 3.5?km from the SW flank of Beinn an Oir on the Isle of Jura. The boulder belts extend to within 300?m of the present coastline, where they are truncated by a low bluff and raised marine terrace. The source of the moraine coincides with bedrock gullies and cliffs that represent the scars of former rock-slope failure(s), indicating that the moraine debris was sourced by one or more rockfalls or rockslides onto the ice surface after Beinn an Oir had emerged from the thinning ice cover as a nunatak. Exposure dating of boulders on the moraine indicate that it formed at 16.6?±?0.8?ka, consistent with the timing of ice-sheet retreat in this sector. The alignment of the moraine indicates ice-margin retreat to the SE; as regional ice-sheet retreat across the adjacent offshore shelf was to the NE, this anomaly implies that a residual icefield became stranded on Jura during ice-sheet retreat.