‘Cato means well: but he does hurt sometimes to the State; for he talks as if he were in the republic of Plato and not in the dregs of Romulus.’
– Marcus Cicero, as quoted by Francis Bacon in Wisdom of the Ancients
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General store on the main road at Kenel, a community in Standing Rock Reservation, South Dakota, as seen through the windshield.
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Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North and South Dakota, morning and early afternoon of July 25th, 2017
I wake up at Prairie Knights Casino and Resort at the north end of Fort Yates in Standing Rock Reservation, on the North Dakota side. It’s by far the nicest place I’ve stayed during this trip and one of the cheapest. Thanks, gamblers, for subsidizing my roomy bed, my nice bathtub with its complimentary tasty-smelling chokecherry bath products, and my ultra-clean room!
I head south on Highway 1806, otherwise known as the Native American Scenic Byway, towards the tiny unincorporated community of Kenel, in search of the site of old Fort Manuel. Counting from the road just across from Kenel’s general store, I turn left on the third road, a dirt road, guided by a little brown road sign. Then I head straight, past the turnoff that curves off to the left back towards Kenel. After a little while, this road curves to the left as well and arrives at a simple, tall, broad gateway made of three large poles with a pair of antlers in the center of the crossbeam, indicating the entrance to someone’s private property, likely a farm or ranch. The place for which the gate marks the entry is encircled by a thick grove of trees. I pull off to the right of the road in before I reach the gateway. Then I look around and see what look like historical marker signs in the field around and beyond the left side of the wooded boundary. There are some wood structures rising from the grass beyond that. I take the little footpath heading in that direction… Read the written version here
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Hannah Arendt, born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany, was one of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers about political philosophy and the nature of evil. In the one and only filmed interview with her that survives, Arendt objected to being called a philosopher; she said she doesn’t feel like a philosopher, and that she thinks she has not been accepted in the philosophical community. We’re still hashing out what she meant by these statements to this day: some believe that she didn’t feel, as a woman, that the traditionally male-centric philosophical circle had room for her, so she did her work in another arena of thought; some believe since she emphasizes action and responsibility in her ethics and political thought, she felt this did not fit into the abstract nature of the accepted philosophical canon. However, her latter remark has proved no longer true, if it ever was: she is not only accepted into the philosophical circle, she has earned a prominent place in it.
Arendt completed her doctoral degree in philosophy in 1928. By 1940, she was forced to flee the Nazi’s persecution of intellectuals, first as a refugee to Paris, then to the United States, where she arrived in 1941. She settled in the U.S. for good, became a naturalized citizen, and taught at the University of Chicago and then at New York City’s New School for Social Research. Arendt established herself as a major political thinker with her 1951 book Origins of Totalitarianism, and a controversial one with her series of articles for The New Yorker about the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial. She used this series as the basis for her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Among Arendt’s major themes is the idea that evil is not so much the result of an active malevolence but of thoughtless complacency. She distills this idea in her concept the banality of evil, which made people very uncomfortable at that time and ever since. Many hate this idea in part because they detect in it an element of victim-blaming, such as in Arendt’s including in her discussion the supposed cooperation of many Jewish community leaders in the massive and efficient deportation of the Jews to Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers. But I believe people hate Arendt’s concept more because of its implication that it’s so very easy for every single one of us to participate in great evil through our own carelessness and laziness.
Arendt’s philosophy of action and personal responsibility, problematic as it might be in some particulars, presents an important challenge even as it lays on all of us what might feel like an intolerable burden. She demands that we shake off complacency every moment of our lives, that we resist the temptation to thoughtlessly participate in harmful practices and ways of thinking. In an age where mass consumption has become the norm, even the source of meaning and impetus for most of our actions, regardless of its ravages on the beautiful world that gives us life, there are few ideas that are more timely or more important.
Learn about the life and thought of the courageous and brilliant Hannah Arendt:
Hannah Arendt ~ Interview with Gunter Gaus for Zur Person
Hannah Arendt ~ by Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Hannah Arendt ~ Melvyn Bragg talks to Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, and Robert Eaglestone for In Our Time
Hannah Arendt: American Political Scientist ~ by the editors for Encyclopædia Britannica
Hannah Arendt and the Hierarchy of Human Activity ~ by Finn Bowring for The Times Literary Supplement
Film Review: Hannah Arendt ~ Yasemin Sari for Philosophy Now
The Trials of Hannah Arendt ~ Corey Robin for The Nation, May 12, 2015
Why Do Hannah Arendt’s Ideas about Evil and the Holocaust Still Matter? ~ An interview with Michael Rosenthal for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington
Various articles ~ by Hannah Arendt for The New Yorker magazine
Various articles featuring Hannah Arendt ~ Maria Popova for Brain Pickings
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Gwendolyn Marie Patton, photo from Trenholm State Community College Libraries
To celebrate the memory of activist and scholar Dr. Gwendolyn Marie Patton, born October 14, 1943, I share here an excellent article by Ashley Farmer, assistant professor at Boston University and a regular contributor to the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog Black Perspectives. By the way, if you also seek to learn more about the contributions of great thinkers like Dr. Patton who are not widely known or celebrated enough in popular culture, Dr. Farmer is an excellent author to follow.
Remembering Gwen Patton, Activist and Theorist, by Ashley Farmer
‘“Ideas are powerful,” Dr. Gwendolyn Patton used to say when she talked to the younger generation about civil rights and political organizing. This simple but powerful notion undergirded Patton’s incredible activist life, one that spanned much of the late 20th century and many different facets of the Black Freedom Struggle. Patton always contended that access to knowledge, and in particular, theoretical frameworks for understanding oppression and liberation, were key sites of protest and contestation. Weaving together a powerful life of theorizing and activism, she was and remains one of the most profound black thinkers of our lifetimes.
Patton was born outside Detroit, Michigan in 1943. Her early childhood was characterized by the dialectic between the trappings of middle-class life and insurgent black politics. She grew up in a comfortable black neighborhood and spent her summers with her grandmother in Montgomery, a hotbed of civil rights activism in the early 1950s. In 1960, after her mother passed away, she became a full-time Montgomery resident. As a teenager, she volunteered with the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization responsible for the Rosa Parks-led boycott in 1955. When Patton went off to college at nearby Tuskegee University, she brought this zeal for activism with her. She joined several student-led organizations and protests and eventually became the first woman student body president of the university.
At Tuskegee, Patton was part of what she called a “close-knit, intellectual student movement” that engaged in public accommodation desegregation battles and voter registration work…’ Read more:
And to learn more:
Dr. Gwendolyn Marie Patton, 1943-2017 ~ by Brian Jones via Academia.edu
Gwendolyn M. Patton ~ Interview for the Civil Rights History Project conducted by Joseph Mosnier in Montgomery, Alabama, 6/1/2011 for the Library of Congress
Gwendolyn M. Patton ~ Bio and interview at The HistoryMakers website
Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!
Brain illustration from The Principles and Practice of Medicine…’ by W Osler, 1904, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The thirst for knowledge is one of humankind’s noblest appetites. Our desire to sate it, however, sometimes leads us to imbibe falsehoods bottled as truth. The so-called Information Age is too often a Misinformation Age.
There is so much that we don’t know that giving up on experts would be to overreach our own competency. However, not everyone who claims to be an expert is one, so when we are not experts ourselves, we can decide who counts as an expert only with the help of the opinions of other experts. In other words, we have to choose which experts to trust in order to decide which experts to trust.
Jean-Paul Sartre captured the unavoidable responsibility this places on us when he wrote in Existentialism and Humanism (1945): ‘If you seek counsel – from a priest, for example – you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise.’
The pessimistic interpretation of this is that the appeal to expertise is therefore a charade. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the power of motivated thinking and confirmation bias. People cherry-pick the authorities who support what they already believe. If majority opinion is on their side, they will cite the quantity of evidence behind them. If the majority is against them, they will cite the quality of evidence behind them, pointing out that truth is not a democracy. Authorities are not used to guide us towards the truth but to justify what we already believe the truth to be.
If we are sincerely interested in the truth, however, we can use expert opinion more objectively without either giving up our rational autonomy or giving in to our preconceptions. I’ve developed a simple three-step heuristic I’ve dubbed ‘The Triage of Truth’ which can give us a way of deciding whom to listen to about how the world is. The original meaning of triage is to sort according to quality and the term is most familiar today in the medical context of determining the urgency of treatment required. It’s not infallible; it’s not an alternative to thinking for yourself; but it should at least prevent us making some avoidable mistakes. The triage asks three questions:
In many cases there is no simple yes or no answer. Economic forecasting, for example, admits of only very limited mastery. If you are not religious, on the other hand, then no theologian or priest can be an expert on God’s will.
If there is genuine expertise to be had, the second stage is to ask what kind of expert is trustworthy in that domain, to the degree that the domain allows of expertise at all. In health, for example, there are doctors with standard medical training but also herbalists, homeopaths, chiropractors, reiki healers. If we have good reason to dismiss any of these modalities then we can dismiss any particular practitioner without needing to give them a personal assessment.
Once we have decided that there are groups of experts in a domain, the third stage of triage is to ask which particular ones to trust. In some cases, this is easy enough. Any qualified dentist should be good enough, and we might not have the luxury of picking and choosing anyway. When it comes to builders, however, some are clearly more professional than others.
The trickiest situations are where the domain admits significant differences of opinion. In medicine, for example, there is plenty of genuine expertise but the incomplete state of nutritional science, for example, means that we have to take much advice with a pinch of salt, including that on how big this pinch should be.
This triage is an iterative process in which shifts of opinion at one level lead to shifts at others. Our beliefs form complex holistic webs in which parts support each other. For example, we cannot decide in a vacuum whether there is any expertise to be had in any given domain. We will inevitably take into account the views of experts we already trust. Every new judgment feeds back, altering the next one.
Perhaps the most important principle to apply throughout the triage is the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s maxim: ‘A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence.’ Trust in experts always has to be proportionate. If my electrician warns me that touching a wire will electrocute me, I have no reason to doubt her. Any economic forecast, however, should be seen as indicating a probability at best, an educated guest at worst.
Proportionality also means granting only as much authority as is within an expert’s field. When an eminent scientist opines on ethics, for example, she is exceeding her professional scope. The same might be true of a philosopher talking about economics, so be cautious about some of what I have written, too.
This triage gives us a procedure but no algorithm. It does not dispense with the need to make judgments, it simply provides a framework to help us do so. To properly follow Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment injunction ‘Sapere aude’ (Dare to know), we have to rely on both our own judgment and the judgment of others. We should not confuse thinking for ourselves with thinking by ourselves. Taking expert opinion seriously is not passing the buck. No one can make up your mind for you, unless you make up your mind to let them.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
~ Julian Baggini is a writer and founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. His latest book is A Short History of Truth (2017). (Bio credit: Aeon)
Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!
Antique firearms at the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh
As have many Americans, I’ve been mulling over the issue of ‘gun rights’ quite a bit recently. It’s a pressing issue in the United States since more people are injured and killed by citizens wielding guns than in any other state with a stable government and a thriving economy.
It’s also a divisive issue, as it’s generally argued in terms of liberty, a core value in our culture and politics. One side emphasizes the right to self-defense, the other the right to freedom from fear and from the pressure to join the arms race. And whether or not people chose to arm themselves, their fellow citizens feel that they are placed under some kind of obligation or burden as a result.
From the anti-gun perspective: if at least some of your fellow citizens are armed, then you are forced into a position where you must arm yourself too whether you’d like to or not, or remain at their mercy. After all, in a moment of greed, anger, zeal, fear, mental illness, hate, or accident, one person with a gun can permanently remove all freedoms that another could ever enjoy, within seconds, with the simple squeeze of a trigger. When another is armed, they have the potential power to wield complete control as to whether you live or die, and to force you to act according to their will, and against your own.
From the pro-gun perspective: if your fellow citizens choose not to arm themselves, you leave all the work of crime deterrence up to gun owners. Not only that: since a gun is the most effective weapon which can be wielded by a person of nearly any degree of strength, it’s the only available method for many who feel the need to defend themselves and others. In other words, it’s the one real equalizer: anyone with a gun has as much power as any other, so long as they know how and when to use it.
What would help us decide how to settle this, since the freedom to live the life we want, and the freedom to live at all, are in direct conflict here? We’re still figuring it out here in the US. Some nations have chosen in favor of individual gun rights, and others have disarmed their citizens, with varying results. While, generally speaking, nations and states with low gun ownership rates have much lower rates of gun violence, there are some exceptions. The gun rights dilemma, therefore, is not simply and immediately solved through legislation designed in favor of one set of rights issues over another.
Putting the conflicting liberty and rights issues aside for the moment, perhaps it would help to consider the relevant moral issues. Here, we can look beyond local, cultural considerations to a broader source of guidance as to what we should do about guns. What does it mean to be a good person, a virtuous person, and how do we cultivate that in ourselves and in each other? How does a society cultivate that in its citizens? Can these and other considerations help us decide what’s right, morally, when it comes to the rights and responsibilities of owning a gun? What should we do about it? Is it right or good for people to hold so much power over life and death? Permissive gun laws, which make it easy for responsible gun owners to trade in guns, also make it easier for members of drug cartels and other criminals to get their hands on them, too; that being known, are those laws right?
I think two of the greatest thinkers on morality and virtue, David Hume and Aristotle, can do much to help us discover some answers to these questions. Let’s explore their ideas, look for some answers there, and see how they fit with modern discoveries in behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience.
According to David Hume, morality originates in the ‘passions’, or feelings. We can see ourselves as naturally moral creatures, since we come equipped with those emotions, those motivations, that make morality possible. We demonstrate altruistic, ‘pro-social’ (not Hume’s term, a more modern one), even as children, though we develop our moral character as we grow, through life experience, conversation with other moral beings, and by acquiring and developing the use of reason. For example, from the earliest age, we approve of kindness and disapprove of cruelty. We desire happiness, love, and generosity, and detest pain and avoid selfish people; we crave learning, and enrichment, and the approval of others. Those ‘sentiments’ ennoble us, and are responsible for that which is best in our characters. Yet the emotions we come equipped with are not sufficient, in themselves, for a morally developed person. Reason also plays a key role, enabling us to universalize and expand morals, and to apply these needed in any given situation.
Yet morality cannot be founded on reason alone: as Hume points out, reason is the means to means to link one true proposition with another, but cannot, on its own, show us what to value, or make us care about each other or anything else. It’s moral feeling, the passions, that provide the motivations, and provide reason the materials to work with to develop our morality. So as we grow up, we learn to develop our moral instincts, to ‘expand our moral circle‘ through conversation and the use of reason. By spending time with others, by being exposed to diverse ways of thinking and being, we learn that others have emotions and interests just like we do, that are just as important to them as ours are to us. Emotionally, we empathize with others; rationally, we know that what we expect of others is no more or less than what we must demand of ourselves. A very young person has the instincts for morality, but prior to experience of the world and the use of reason, it’s a very limited morality, or can even be considered a sort of proto-morality. Experience of other moral agents, through discourse with them, reveals there are others whose feelings and interests matter just as much to them as ours do to us, and finally reason shows that there is not particular reason to favor oneself over another when determining moral rules and guides of behavior. A morally good person, then, will seek to be pleasant and generous, to make others happy and improve their well-being, to respect and protect their interests as much as possible, just as we desire and expect they will do for us.
Hume’s account of how morality works, combined with the body of knowledge we’ve discovered since his time, reveals that it’s as much a natural part of the makeup of the human personality as any other, as are creativity, romantic passion, mother love, curiosity, and hunger, as well as (sadly!) rapacity and cruelty. A natural explanation of morality does not require a complex suite of arguments to found its origins in logic and reason, nor does it require some cause outside of ourselves, as traditional explanations claimed. To find out what morality is and how it works, we observe human beings, how they act and how they desire themselves and each other to act; we explain how and why morality developed as a natural adaptation for human beings; and we apply reason to determine what kinds of mindsets, rules, and behaviors lead to their flourishing.
Behavioral, biological, and evolutionary sciences have, over the years, lent support to Hume’s explanation of morality. Rebecca Saxe and Alison Gopnik, among others, has closely observed the behavior of infants and very young children over time, and has gathered a large body of evidence that people demonstrate moral instincts from the very earliest age, recognize that others are moral beings with their own interests and emotions just like us, and make moral judgments accordingly. Evolutionary psychology (Darwin considered Hume one of his great influences), in which morality is considered as much an adaptation as our opposable thumbs and long limbs, inherit much from Hume’s account. In fact, Hume is widely considered a founder of naturalistic moral theory, and a father to modern cognitive science.
Aristotle’s grounds the origin of morality more on reason, though his theory is founded, like Hume’s, from his observation of the world and how people behave. His elegant ‘function argument’ is the centerpiece of his moral theory. When you consider what something is for, and observe what it does and how it functions, you’ll know where to start. The quality of goodness in material things is closely related to the quality of goodness when it comes to actions and moral feelings. A musical instrument is for making music; therefore, an excellent, or good, musical instrument is that which produces the best music. Further, if we consider a case in which we’re deciding who the musical instrument should belong to, it would be the right thing to do to give it to the best musician. Not to the nicest person, or the one who can pay the most for it, or even to the person who made it; those considerations are irrelevant since none of those have anything to do with the proper function of the instrument.
To Aristotle, reason is the one definitive human trait that no other creature on earth possesses. That’s what we do uniquely, and what we’re best at, or at least, that’s what we do when we’re at our best. So what we should do, the moral thing to do, is what’s most reasonable, what’s most in keeping with our nature as reasonable beings. What helps us recognize that, in turn, is called the ‘Golden Mean’: consider all those traits we have, see how they fall on a spectrum, and we will see that the virtue consists of the happy medium between extremes. For example, bravery would be the virtuous golden mean between cowardice and recklessness, love between disdain and fawning or obsession, and so on. (Fun fact: Hume himself placed great importance on moderation, temperance, and fairness, eschewing divisive party politics, for example, as if it was part of his mission to live out the ideal of the Golden Mean!)
Making the leap from the function of a thing which is an artifact of intentional human creation, to the function of a human being itself, is quite a leap. Aristotle recognized this and sought to address it, but did not yet have the modern knowledge of the theory of evolution, and of evolutionary psychology, and how well they account for the origin and development of moral virtues such as kindness, sympathy, generosity, bravery, and so forth. Nor did Hume, but he did not consider it justified to form conclusions by building a logical case as far removed from original observations as many who followed Aristotle later. Hume saw human beings as much a product of the natural world as any other, and their nature as fully explicable in those terms. So leaving the function argument aside for the time being, let’s consider another important contribution of Aristotle’s to moral philosophy: the importance of habit.To Aristotle, habit is essential to the practice of virtue. By emulating virtue, we habituate ourselves to it. Over time, morality, the practice of virtue, becomes second nature. Here, Aristotle proves himself a keen observer of human psychology, and his emphasis on habit as a central driving force behind human thought and behavior, as well as something which can be deliberately instilled through practice, is confirmed by the findings of modern psychologists and neuroscientists. A recent article in Scientific American outlines some of the ways in which habits are formed, and how necessary they are if we wish to improve our behaviors systematically. Cognitive behavioral therapy, now widely considered among the most effective ways to overcome addiction and anxiety-depression, among other disorders, is also founded on these scientific discoveries.
Here’s where I find a link between these two moral theories: Aristotle’s emphasis on habit works hand in hand with Hume’s account of how moral sentiments arise from human psychology. Whether it be from habit or other mental processes we are naturally equipped with when we achieve consciousness, moral behavior is largely a spontaneous reaction to the situation at hand. Early in our development, as Saxe and Gopnik describe, a basic set of moral instincts are included in human consciousness in its earliest stages. As Hume observes, experience and reason help us expand, develop, and perfect our moral characters over time; the moral character, as Aristotle recognizes, is the set of, and relationships between, the virtuous habits we’ve cultivated through practice.
This also consistent with other findings of modern neuroscience and psychology. The way we tend to act in any given situation, the emotions and motivations that arise in us as we respond to stimuli, are formed as we react to circumstances, and by engaging in patterns of action, reactions, thoughts, behavior, we create mental channels, so to speak, or ‘paths of least resistance’, which predict our reactions, our thoughts and behavior, given similar circumstances. We usually act and think in accordance with how we’ve been given to act and think before, and only change when some new consideration(s) arises that makes us stop and consider whether to do something else this time. These considerations, the combination of reason and emotion (how do I act that will make me feel good about it, given the consequences of my actions for myself and others? How did the decisions I made last time the sort of thing came effect me and the world around me? How do others act in these situations, and what are the effects then?) inform how we habituate ourselves to new and improved moral actions and reactions.
Let’s pause for a moment. So far, we have these two thinkers’ descriptions of morality and virtue, supported by the findings of modern psychology and neuroscience. Hume and Aristotle show us where they think we should look for virtue, how to recognize it, how to describe and explain it, and where it originates. In other words, they are engaged in metaethics. But as you may have noticed, this tells us only how people actually do think and behave; what about telling us what we should do? What are the criteria for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong?
Arete (Virtue)
I think Hume and Aristotle point us in this direction: human beings not only do, but should habituate themselves to those practices which form in us the best moral character. While both men don’t explicitly tell how we can definitely say what’s right and wrong, they go to great lengths to show us what an admirable character looks like, and how they think and behave. I think they do so in order to reveal to us not only how we could be, but how we should be. In his writings as well as by example (he was widely known to have a particularly admiral character), Hume emphasizes such virtuous sentiments as sympathy, sociability, amiability, beneficence, generosity, and so on, and advocates the cultivation of these traits, especially through conversation and spending time in the company of others, especially those who can broaden your understanding of the world, and by avid reading and study of philosophy, literature, and history. Aristotle emphasizes the virtue of moderation in all things, of wisdom, self-control, courage, and nobility. Both men emphasize, to the highest degree, the use of reason, and the value of its careful and consistent application in all matters of life. It appears that they go through all this trouble not only to show us what a good person looks like, but to offer us something to aspire to: the formation of an excellent, moral character, which leads to the best life a person can achieve.
So, finally, we return to the gun issue. What does all this have to do with owning them, and using them? What does this have to do with what we observe in human behavior when people own guns? How about when people value, or even glorify, guns?
Let’s return to the consideration of the evidence, which can reveal how attitudes and practices relating to guns manifest themselves in human behavior; in other words, what habit or habits does a gun-owning society promote?
There are conflicting statistics to when it comes to gun-related behavior. For example, people in the United States own almost twice as many guns per-capita as Canadians and Germans. Canada and Germany, in turn, have a much higher rate of gun ownership compared to most other developed nations. Yet among these three nations, the United States has a far higher gun-related death rate, about four times that of Canada, and about 8 times that of Germany, though the three share many key cultural and political traits: they are democratic, capitalistic, and culturally and historically Christian. There are also examples where lower gun-related death rates correlate with higher per-capita gun ownership. This is the case for some states in the U.S, and for Switzerland, a country that, interestingly, imposes a requirement on all households to own a gun.Yet given such outliers, most states in the US, and most countries in the world, see a strong correlation between lower rates of gun-related death and injury and lower rates of gun ownership. The U.S. ranks near the top in gun-violence rates, just under Mexico’s, a country overrun with trigger-happy drug cartels, and outranked almost entirely by countries with weak, unstable governments, poor human-rights records, and high rates of poverty and income inequality. The very lowest rates of all, by contrast, are enjoyed by those countries who possess a high degree of personal liberty and human-rights protections while at the same time restrictive gun-ownership privileges, or none at all. Even in Switzerland, often cited by gun-rights advocates as an example of how high rates of gun ownership can correlate with low levels of violence, there are 16 times as many gun deaths as in the U.K, and 64 times as many as Japan. The rates are low in Switzerland only as compared with the most violent countries, but not in comparison with the least violent.
Antique long guns at the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh
Returning to the liberty issue for a moment, it seems that overall, since you must be alive to enjoy any liberty at all, liberty is best served when there aren’t many guns around. When a fight ensues, or the home is broken into, or a child has figured out how to get into a locked cabinet, or a person goes on a violent rampage due to mental illness, few, if any, people actually end up dying or disabled when there’s no guns nearby to reach for. It’s relatively difficult and messy to kill someone with a knife and other non-gun weapons, and the planning that goes into other kinds of homicide, like poisoning, gives people more time to consider the consequences of their action, decreasing the chance they’ll go through with it, or decreasing the chances of success at homicide.
As we’ve seen, however, the liberty issue can’t be the only determining factor in deciding the gun issue, since liberty considerations conflict so sharply when one’s liberty interests run counter to another’s. There are still compelling arguments to be made that individual liberty requires the right for each person to make their own decision in the matter, from the right to self-protection and self-determination. There’s also the fact that there are some states and countries where higher rates of gun ownership do correlate with low gun violence, especially in places where the population is more homogeneous, ethnically, religiously, racially, economically, and so on, even if they are relatively few. Conversely, there’s the liberty considerations of those who wish to be free from the fear of coercion and bodily harm, ever-present dangers that usually result from a heavily armed population, as the statistics reveal.
This is where the law comes in. One main purpose of the law is to defend the rights and liberties of the citizenry at large, and this involves protecting citizens from each other. A population is always composed of people who have conflicting interests, needs and desires, so to keep a society functioning, prosperous, and harmonious as possible, the law (ideally) is crafted to balance the rights, responsibilities, and interests of each citizen, impartially, with the other.Another purpose of the law is to codify, universalize, and enforce the mores of a given society, or at least those that harmonize with the principles of justice, equality, liberty, and so on that are central to the political system of that society.And last but not least, the law encodes a system of rights, responsibilities, and prohibitions, the practice of which is requisite to being a good citizen. In other words, the law is a society’s (in a democracy, the people’s) way to habituate its citizens to those practices which form a virtuous, a good citizen.
Gun law is no exception. Prior to passing laws relating to gun ownership, there are societal attitudes towards guns that people possess, cultivate, and enforce not only through custom and discourse, but eventually through law. Famously, in the 1990’s, the Australian government, with widespread support from its citizens, collected and destroyed a large proportion of the country’s firearms, and imposed restrictive gun laws. These laws were a direct result of the public’s horrified reaction to a series of gun-related mass murders that had happened in the decade prior. The public’s new attitude towards guns was made manifest in the law. It’s still in debate whether the sharp decline in gun violence that followed the new laws were a result of the laws, or vice-versa. It appears most likely that it’s some combination of the two: after all, as we’ve observed throughout history, there’s a feedback loop between the law and a society’s moral progress.
Consider the history of civil rights legislation in the United States: desegregation and other civil rights protections happened gradually, with each disenfranchised group demanding the full rights of citizenship, despite the current will of the majority to keep those groups subjugated and oppressed. Over time, the use of reason (in these cases, legal reasoning) and consideration of the values underpinning the foundational political philosophy and documents (in this case, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) led to new laws which not only enforced better practices, but habituated citizens to more virtuous thought and behavior, often in spite of themselves. We see this time and time again in American history: the disenfranchisement and oppression of black people, religious minorities, the poor and non-landowners, women, Jews, gay people, and so on, once common practice, came to be looked upon with righteous distaste, worthy of contempt. In so many of these cases, it was the law that changed commonly held attitudes, more than the other way around, and the change in attitudes and behavior often happened far more quickly than it would have otherwise if the practice of virtue wasn’t inculcated through law.
In sum: Considering the lessons of history, the evidence of the current states of affairs in which high gun-ownership rates correlate strongly with destructive attitudes and behavior when the entirety of the evidence is considered, and how the wisdom of two of the greatest moral thinkers is confirmed by the findings of modern science, I think that laws restricting, even eliminating, gun ownership by most individuals help lead to a wiser, more prudent, more beneficent, more amiable, more free society.
What do you think?
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– I’d especially like to thank Guy Fletcher, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who kindly gave me some of his valuable time (despite it’s being finals week), invaluable insights, and excellent pointers regarding the subjects covered in this essay, especially in reminding me to make clearer the distinctions between meta-ethics, morality, and ethics.
Sources and inspiration:
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. About 350 BC.
Boseley, Sarah. ‘High gun ownership makes countries less safe, US study finds‘. The Guardian, Sep 18, 2013.
De Waal, Francis. The Bonobo and the Atheist : In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, 2013.
Gopnik, Alison. The Philosophical Baby, 1998.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind, 2013.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, Volume III – Of Morals. Printed for Thomas Longman in London, England, in 1740. (I had a glorious time referring to versions published in Hume’s own lifetime during my trip to Edinburgh!) Online version: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm
David B. and Stephen D’Andrilli. “What America can learn from Switzerland is that the best way to reduce gun misuse is to promote responsible gun ownership.” American Rifleman, Feb 1990
Kraut, Richard, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics‘. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014
Morris, William Edward. ‘David Hume‘. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009.
Saxe, Rebecca. ‘How We Read Each Other’s Minds‘. TED talk, 2009
Tucker, Abigail. ‘Are Babies Born Good?’ Smithsonian Magazine, Jan 2013.
Young Lady Writing in a Hymnal by Giacomo Pacchiarotto, turn of 16th c, Siena, Italy
Lucrezia Marinella was an Italian Renaissance writer of poetry, devotional literature, and philosophy. She was born in Venice on an unknown date in 1571, and lived a richly intellectual, family-oriented, long life there until her death on October 9th, 1653.
She wrote on a wide range of subjects, including Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, and Mary and her parents’ life family as she imagined it: happy, virtuous, a model for all families to emulate. She identified Mary closely with her beloved native Venice, that lovely city of elegance and refinement, incubator of knowledge and beauty, and welcome refuge to the traveler and those fleeing hardship and strife, referring to both as ‘La Serenissima’ (the Serene) and ‘Star of the Sea.’ Her Life of the Virgin Mary, Empress of the Universe was written two years after her most famous and influential work The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, published in 1600. Her book about the natural and superior virtues of women no doubt inspired her, in turn, to write another about the woman who most exemplified Christian and Renaissance ideals of femininity. Marinella’s conception of feminine virtue included those typical of her religion and culture, such as modesty and dedication to home and family, but went far beyond that, as it did later feminist thinkers and activists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Ernestine Rose.
Marinella’s Nobility was a response to Giuseppe Passi’s anti-woman polemic The Defects of Women, published the year before. Anti-woman treatises such as Passi’s had become a literary tradition at that point, but his stood out for its harshness, to the point that he advocated treating women as little better than other animals since they were likewise naturally devoid of reason and self-control. Defenses of womankind against such attacks had, in turn, also become a literary tradition, but Marinella’s stands out for its clarity, systematicity, and intellectual rigor, so much so that it achieved its standing as a foundational work in feminist philosophy.
Title page of 1601 edition of Lucrezia Marinella’s La Nobilita, et L’eccellenza delle Donne
One element of Marinella’s fascinating and innovative defense of femininity that stood out for me was her case for how the female body itself demonstrated the moral and intellectual superiority of women. Many anti-woman polemicists referred to Aristotle for their arguments to demonstrate the natural inferiority of women, and Aristotle bases many of his arguments on women’s supposedly inferior physical makeup. No doubt, such biological arguments stood out for Marinella; she was the daughter, sister, and wife of physicians, and she was an accomplished and virtuous intellectual, a living counterfactual to the negative conceptions of women of Passi, Aristotle, and their anti-woman ilk. So, she was not going to put up with silly arguments based on such demonstrably untrue empirical claims, from Aristotle or from anyone else. She uses Aristotle’s own arguments, invoked by Passi, against both of them, demonstrating how misogynistic ideas about women as the weaker, less rational, and less virtuous component of the human species are both inconsistent with Aristotle’s other arguments and with observable reality.
For example, Aristotle claims that women’s lower average body temperature revealed their weakness and passivity. Yet Aristotle elsewhere associates heat with vices such as anger and rashness. Marinella grants that women’s average temperatures were lower than men’s (we now know that this isn’t necessarily true), but she argues that this doesn’t at all show that women are less virtuous. In fact, according to Aristotle’s own ethical system, that would imply that women are more virtuous: more temperate, moderate, reasonable, and able to control their passions. For another thing, Aristotle argues that financial well-being, physical attractiveness, and other circumstances that promote happiness are important for promoting virtue. Financial security promotes and enables generosity; exterior beauty inspires appreciation of that which is noble, orderly, balanced, good. Well, Marinella replies, women are generally more beautiful than men, as poets and artists attest, and the beauty of their bodies both reflect the natural superiority of their inner natures as expressed by their divine designer, and the love and passion they evoke echo the love and passion of the soul’s for the ultimate Good.
Learn more about the brilliant and fascinating Lucrezia Marinella’s case for the excellence of women, and about her life, ideas, and accomplishments at:
Lucrezia Marinella ~ by Marguerite Deslauriers for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Lucrezia Marinella ~ by Maria Galli Stampino for Oxford Bibliographies
Lucrezia Marinella ~ by Lindsay Smith for ProjectContinua.org
Who Is Mary?: Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary ~ by Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella
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More sources and inspiration:
Bodnar, Istvan, ‘Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy‘, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
‘Normal oral, rectal, tympanic and axillary body temperature in adult men and women: a systematic literature review’, by Märtha Sund-Levander, Christina Forsberg, and Lis Karin Wahren. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, Vol. 16, Issue 2, pages 122–128, June 2002
Parry, Richard, ‘Ancient Ethical Theory‘, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Price, A W. ‘Moral Theories: Aristotle’s Ethics.’ Journal of Medical Ethics, 1985, Vol. 11, p. 150-152
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Site of Stuart & Lincoln law office at Hoffman’s Row, Springfield, Illinois
Springfield, Illinois, Saturday, July 29th, 2017, continued
I leave the Myers Building at the former site of Joshua Fry Speed’s store and Abraham Lincoln’s last law office on S 5th Street, and head north, crossing E Washington St, and continue halfway up the block. On my left (west), at 109 N 5th St / NW Old State Capitol Plaza, is a historical marker for the Stuart & Lincoln Law Office. John Todd Stuart was Lincoln’s first law partner, the man from whom he borrowed the law books he needed for his legal training, and his future wife Mary Todd’s first cousin. Lincoln received his license to practice law two years after he began his studies, and joined Stuart’s law practice as a junior partner in April of 1837. He was living over Speed’s store, having moved here to Springfield to embark on his legal career, so he walked more or less the same route to get to work as I walk today from the Myers Building.
Sculpture of Lincoln as a soldier in the Black Hawk War at the Lincoln Tomb, Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield, Illinois
Stuart and Lincoln met in 1832 during the Black Hawk War and were friends and colleagues for many years after that. They served together in the same battalion, and their acquaintance turned to friendship when they both campaigned for, and served in, the Illinois State legislature in 1834. Stuart was only two years old than Lincoln, but like his cousin Mary Todd, he was the educated, sophisticated offspring of a well-to-do Kentucky family. So, he assigned himself a paternalistic role in their relationship. Perhaps it was this attitude that caused their friendship to erode once Lincoln eclipsed him in his success as a lawyer and then as a politician. They did not agree politically: Stuart was a Democrat sympathetic to the slaveowners’ cause, and as we all well know, Lincoln was most decidedly neither. But as the example of Joshua Speed demonstrates, Lincoln was ready and able to remain friends with political opponents. As many who knew them both well attest, Stuart was jealous of Lincoln, and at least one friend believed that Stuart even grew to hate him.
But during the years of their friendship, Stuart did much for Lincoln. He recognized Lincoln’s ability, despite his rough appearance and manners, and liked him personally. Stuart encouraged the precocious young entrepreneur and fellow budding politician to study law, a field that suited Lincoln’s natural abilities as well as the traditional field from which successful politicians so often emerged in those days. And after Lincoln received his law license and completed his last term in the Illinois State Legislature, Stuart accepted Lincoln as a junior law partner. Lincoln’s education in the law continued in Stuart’s practice. He observed Stuart closely and read his legal papers carefully, and during his first years as a lawyer, modeled his own legal practice and language on Stuart’s.
Clipping from Sangamo Journal, Mar 27, 1840 describing location of Stuart & Lincoln office, via the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America
Stuart & Lincoln’s office was also directly over a Sangamon County courtroom. The County occupied Hoffman’s Row starting in 1837, the same year that Lincoln joined Stuart’s practice here, until the first proper Greek-revival Sangamon County Courthouse was completed in 1845. As Lincoln was wont to do, he took advantage of this opportunity to learn by observation. There was a trap door in the floor of their office which communicated with the courtroom below, so Lincoln could easily hear the proceedings. As his later law partner and biographer William Herndon observed, Lincoln was not such an avid reader in the years succeeding his youth and early adulthood as he had once been. It seems Lincoln had become more of a listener.
Photo showing Hoffman’s Row, Springfield, IL 1859. Stuart & Lincoln’s office was located on the third floor from 1837-1841; many years later, Lincoln & Herndon’s office moved here after their tenure at the Tinsley Building. Photo from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; ‘X marks the spot’ and photo caption by the University of Chicago Libraries
John T. Stuart, Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries, Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, Allen County Public Library
During my research, I’m rather amused to learn that Stuart was once bitten by Stephen A. Douglas, now most famed for the series of debates between him and Lincoln which so well encapsulated the issues which were tearing the Union apart in the years leading up to the Civil War. Stuart and Douglas were also political rivals, both Democrats, so their political battles took place in the primaries. For the most part, their debates were civil, but on one occasion in the 1838 congressional race, Douglas said something that really enraged Stuart. So the tall Stuart picked up ‘The Little Giant’ and carried him around in front of the crowd. As you may remember, Douglas may not have been tall, but neither was he slim, so Stuart must have been fairly strong. Douglas repaid the insult by biting Stuart’s thumb so severely that infection later set in, and it took some time for that painful wound to heal.
During that healing time, as well as during much of the time Stuart was busy with politics, Lincoln took on more and more of their practices’ legal matters as well as the paperwork. I suppose that the jealous Stuart later regretted giving Lincoln that opportunity to master the skills that helped him eclipse Stuart’s own success later on. On one occasion, Stuart said to a friend, ‘…I believe I am going to live to posterity only as the man who advised Mr. Lincoln to study law and lent him his law books. It is a little humiliating that a man who has served his country in Congress and in his State, should have no further claim to remembrance than that, but I believe it will be so.’ It’s easy to understand, perhaps even forgive, Stuart’s developing antipathy towards his one-time protegee, given he believed Lincoln’s reputation obscured, even erased, his own hard-earned one. Stuart and Lincoln did keep in contact over the years and outwardly, their relationship remained cordial; Stuart visited the Lincolns at the White House on several occasions, as friend and as family. But according to some of those who knew both men, Stuart undermined and opposed Lincoln’s policies when he had the opportunity to do so covertly.
Building on the east side of North 5th St at former site of Logan & Lincoln law office, Springfield, Illinois
To visit the next site on my list, all I need to do is swing on my heels and head directly across the street. The large modular office building that I face stands on the site where the first Logan & Lincoln law office was located.
In April of 1841, Lincoln and Stuart dissolved their partnership, apparently over their political differences, and Lincoln joined Stephen T. Logan’s law practice. Their joint practice lasted three and a half years, until October of 1844. As you may remember from an earlier installment of this Springfield account, Logan was a circuit judge for a time, from 1835-1837, while Lincoln was still preparing to become a lawyer. Logan gave up his judgeship because it paid too little, and redirected all his efforts to making his practice successful and lucrative.
Stephen T. Logan, from the Helm and Todd Family Photographs and Papers at the Kentucky Digital Library
As Logan tells it, Lincoln showed promise very early. Despite his awkward and messy appearance in his too-short pants and coat, rough shirt, and tousled hair, Lincoln displayed the same ‘superior’ and ‘peculiar’ way of putting things, notable for its ‘individuality,’ that would characterize his public speaking throughout his career as a lawyer, a politician, and as President. Since the time Logan met Lincoln in 1832, the same year that Logan moved to Illinois from Kentucky, he acted as friend, mentor, promoter, and colleague. In some ways, they were political and legal rivals, but unlike Stuart, Logan did not let this interfere with his friendship with or political support for Lincoln. Lincoln reciprocated Logan’s ability to maintain a respectful friendship by keeping the personal and the professional separate, and, as President, repaid Logan’s personal integrity by awarding Logan with unsought but desired appointments.
It seems that the main thing that ever came between them to a significant degree was money, with the possible exception of Logan’s rather high-handed style of running his law practice. Lincoln did chafe at times under Logan’s blunt and demanding manner, but Lincoln also considered this partnership a challenge and an opportunity to increase his still limited knowledge of the law. He certainly did rise to the challenge. Logan’s account of Lincoln’s reading habits during his years as a lawyer match Stuart’s and Herndon’s: Lincoln had let go of his old habit of steady book-reading. In his years studying and practicing law, Lincoln turned to learning by observation, by listening to cases as they were argued in court and by closely studying the cases that his law partners prepared, and through practice, by carefully and rigorously preparing for his own. Over time, according to Logan, Lincoln’s method proved itself effective, and he became a ‘formidable’ lawyer in his own right. He never became as knowledgeable about the law as the restlessly intelligent, well-read Logan, but he was often more effective. Lincoln was certainly more successful and effective than Logan politically. Unlike Logan, Lincoln was charismatic and ‘seemed to put himself at once on an equality with everybody,’ and was a popular man as a result. Many of Lincoln’s political races were won on this account alone; his very wide circle of friends and acquaintances would vote for him against their own party just because of the high regard they held him in personally.
Clipping from Sangamo Journal, Feb 18, 1842 describing location of Lincoln & Logan office, via Library of Congress’ Chronicling America
But to return to the subject of the dissolution of the Logan & Lincoln practice: the official reason that Logan gave for it was his wish to partner exclusively with his now-grown son David instead. But some who knew both men and their personalities attribute the end of their partnership primarily to Logan’s tightfistedness with money, which was a hardship for Lincoln. He had a new family to support and was probably still paying off some of his old debts incurred from his failed entrepreneurial efforts in New Salem. Secondly, Lincoln had gained a new confidence with his increasing success and knowledge as a lawyer. This, combined with his ambitious instincts, led to his desire to take the lead in his practice. So, as discussed in the previous installment of this Springfield account, Lincoln took on a young and inexperienced but bright and promising partner, just as Stuart and Logan had done with him. For any conflict they may have had as law partners, Lincoln retained his respect and regard for Logan, and they remained friends both publicly and privately for life.
Union Station and the park before it, with a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln sitting on a park bench to the left.
I continue my journey north towards Union Station, heading north on 5th St about a block and a half and then through the park south and in front of the station. The station and the park occupy the whole block bounded by 5th and 6th Sts to the west and east, and Washington and Jefferson Sts to the north and south. There are various plaques scattered around the building recounting interesting tidbits about Springfield history, but the station building itself is closed for the day. It’s no longer a train station: it’s been incorporated into the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum complex and serves as a visitor center and venue for special exhibits.
Acts of Intolerance by Preston Jackson, a commemorative sculpture for the 1908 Springfield Race Riots
Historical plaque for the 1908 Springfield Race Riot and Preston Jackson’s memorial sculpture
As I wander around the building and park, seeing what there is to see outside, my attention is caught by two sculptures, placed side by side at an angle, their shapes reminiscent of two giant, stylized, square-sided bottles, with images of people and objects over their surfaces in high relief. I read the large bronze plaque accompanying the sculptures, and learn that they are entitled Acts of Intolerance, a two-part sculpture commemorating the Springfield Race Riots of 1908. I’ve been noticing sites commemorating events and people related to the race riots all over downtown, and I’m glad to learn more about the story here since my curiosity has been aroused repeatedly throughout the day.
The shapes of the sculpture’s two parts, in fact, echo the shape of a burned-out home’s two remaining walls and chimneys in a photograph taken in the aftermath of the riot. This was only one of the multitude of homes and shops of Springfield’s black population that had been damaged or destroyed. The riot started on Friday evening, when the sheriff refused to release two black men, one jailed for the murder of a white man who caught him trying to assault his daughter, and another accused of attempted rape, to the justice of a gathering mob. (The second of these was later proved to be wrongly accused so as to divert blame from a white man.)
When they discovered that the sheriff had secreted the men away to a secure location, the mob decided to turn their rage on the entire black population of Springfield, shouting curses on the day that Lincoln freed their people from slavery. They lynched two black men. One was an elderly barber named Scott Burton, tortured and killed for daring to try and defend himself from the mob who were shooting at him and burning down his home. The other was 84-year-old William Donegan, strung up, his throat, body,and limbs sliced for the perceived crime of having been married for over 30 years to a white woman. There were tales of white heroism too, of which Lincoln, turning over in his grave, would surely have been comforted to hear. One was Henry Loper, who had his restaurant and car destroyed for daring to drive the accused black men to safety. Another was prohibitionist presidential candidate Eugene Chafin, who shielded a black man with his own body, his face badly bruised from the stones thrown by the crowd at the Court House Square.
Photograph showing the remains of a home in the aftermath of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot
Historian James L. Crouthamel writes that the mob
‘wrecked almost every building on Washington, Jefferson, and Madison Streets between Eighth and Twelfth Streets. It appears that the mob leaders were careful in destroying only homes and businesses which were either owned by Negroes or served a Negro clientele. (White handkerchiefs marked the homes and businesses of whites, and these were left untouched in the midst of the general destruction.)’
Around two thousand black people were driven from town, terrorized, their homes and means of making a living destroyed.
Although about 150 people were arrested for taking part in the riots, all escaped conviction and punishment except two: Kate Howard, who committed suicide by poison on her way to jail, and Roy Young, who confessed and was convicted of burglary, arson, and rioting. On the whole, sadly, the citizens of Springfield showed little remorse for their behavior, editorializing that the black people of Springfield brought it all on themselves. The press hailed Kate Howard as a ‘new Joan of Arc‘ for the role she played in attacking Loper’s restaurant and in lynching Burton. They certainly did no justice to the memory of their most famous and beloved citizen Lincoln.
The Lincoln Depot at 930 E Monroe St, Springfield, Illinois
Great Western Depot historical placard, which includes a photo of the depot more or less how it appeared in Lincoln’s time.
The last Lincoln site I visit for the day is the Great Western Railroad Depot, now called the Lincoln Depot. Since I’m heading back to my lodging directly afterwards, I take the car which I had parked near Union Station earlier today and zigzag a few blocks southeast to get here. This railroad station, at 930 E Monroe and the railroad tracks, is the site of Lincoln’s ‘Farewell Address’ to the city of Springfield. On February 11, 1861, Lincoln left for Washington, DC for his first inauguration as President. That morning, he delivered a speech of farewell to the city he had begun life in as a lonely and broke young man and was about to leave as a father, husband, successful lawyer, congressman, and President-Elect.
The Lincoln Depot is one of the few original buildings in Springfield to survive to this day to actually host Lincoln, though it’s quite altered. The red brick building was restored following a 1968 fire. The originally very small, one-story structure became the larger two-story structure we see here today around 1900. Though is it very much altered, it retains its original general shape and style, even to the curved metal supports for the roof.
Lincoln delivered a very moving speech that day, which moved very many in the sizable crowd to tears. We don’t have Lincoln’s original written text for this address, but several newspapers printed it, each with slight to moderate variations. One version is inscribed on a plaque in the Lincoln Tomb:
Abraham Lincoln Farewell to Springfield Address on a plaque at the Lincoln Tomb, Springfield, Illinois
It was understood and expected by all that Lincoln would return one day, including Lincoln himself. He did indeed return, but not in the way that anyone hoped or expected.
I’ll return to downtown Springfield tomorrow to visit a few more places on my itinerary. Stay tuned!
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Sources and inspiration:
Abraham Lincoln Online: Lincoln Family Timeline, Lincoln Legal Career Timeline, Lincoln Timelines and Highlights, and Three Versions of Lincoln’s Farewell Address
Andreasen, Bryon C. Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincoln’s Springfield. Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Brink, McCormick & Co. ‘Springfield Township, Springfield City.‘ from Atlas of Sangamon County, 1874.
Brown, Caroline Owsley. ‘Springfield Society Before the Civil War.’ Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984), vol. 15, no. 1/2, 1922, pp. 477–500. JSTOR
Burlingame, Michael, ed. An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays. Southern Illinois University Press, Jan 2006
Carwardine, Richard. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. New York: Random House, 2003
‘Central Springfield Historic District‘ National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Prepared by Nicholas P. Kalogeresis for the National Park Service.
Crouthamel, James L. ‘The Springfield Race Riot of 1908.’ The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Jul., 1960), pp. 164-181
Deming, Henry Champion. ‘Eulogy of Abraham Lincoln: before the General Assembly of Connecticut, at Allyn Hall, Hartford, Thursday, June 8th, 1865.’ Hartford: A.N. Clark & Co. State Printers, 1985
Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995
‘Elijah Iles‘. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Giger, Henry Douglas. ‘The Story of the Sangamon County Court House.’ Via the Sangamon County Circuit Clerk website, originally published Apr 29, 1901
Hart, Dick. ‘Lincoln’s Springfield: Hotels and Taverns.’ Lincoln’s Springfield blog
Havlik, Robert J. ‘Abraham Lincoln and the Reverend Dr. James Smith: Lincoln’s Presbyterian Experience in Springfield.‘ Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Vol. 92, No. 3, A Lincoln Issue (Autumn, 1999), pp. 222-237
Herndon, William H. and Jesse W. Weik. Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life. 1889
History of Sangamon County, Illinois; Together with Sketches of its Cities, Villages and Townships … Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens. Chicago: Interstate Publishing Co., 1881
Illinois, Springfield: Tinsley Building. Excerpts from newspapers and other sources compiled by the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1993
‘John Todd Stuart,’ Sangamon Link: History of Sangamon County, Illinois, Oct 6, 2013.
Lehrman Institute articles ‘The Lawyers: John Todd Stuart (1807-1885)‘ and ‘Stephen Trigg Logan’ from Mr. Lincoln and Friends, and Visitors from Congress: John Todd Stuart (1807-1885) from Mr. Lincoln’s White House
Lehrman, Lewis E. Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008.
Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Illinois. Website, National Park Service
Looking for Lincoln: various historical/informational placards throughout the Springfield, Illinois and surrounding areas about the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln at their associated sites
MacLean, Maggie. ‘Elizabeth Todd Edwards: Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.’ Civil War Women blog, Jul 28, 2013
‘Memorials of the Life and Character of Stephen T. Logan‘ by Stuart, John T.; Edwards, Benjamin S.; Cullom, Shelby; Davis, David et al. From Lincoln/Net by Northern Illinois University Libraries
Nicolay, John George. An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
‘Springfield Race Riot‘, in the Encyclopædia Britannica
Yu, Karlson. ‘Springfield Race Riot, 1908.’ BlackPast.org
Standing Rock Monument, Fort Yates, Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, ND. It’s a very odd monument to unfamiliar eyes: unglamorous, unprepossessing. It’s the beginning of a part of my tour where the monuments and significant places are less curated. It’s up to the looker to slow down and really look close.
Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes
~ Dedicated to Genessa Kealoha
Journal: Faith, South Dakota, early morning July 24th, 2017
I woke up in the backseat of the rental car this morning feeling just a little stiff. I drove late into the night last night so I could break up the long drive. I stayed alert enough to continue until a little after midnight, but then sleepiness began to give me that oddly swaying feeling; time to pull over. I chose a nice big gravel lot with a semi truck parked close to the road. I pulled into the other end of the lot near a row of colorful but rusted old tractors and other farm machinery, changed into my sleep clothes, and curled up in my backseat nest. I’ve decided to leave it ready for such impromptu car campings.
When I awoke, I stepped out to a soft cool morning. It had rained intermittently last night and there were still a few occasional drops falling. A man stepped out from a little garage in front of what I then observed was a little motel right next to the lot. He kindly invited me into the motel’s cafe for hot coffee and to freshen up, without rebuking me in word or in tone for spending the night for free right outside of his establishment. I thanked him but decided to push on. I had a little thermos with some coffee left and had felt the urge to keep going. But what a generous man! I did rebuke myself afterward for not stopping in just to show that I appreciated the invitation…. Read the written version here
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‘Philippa Foot [, born on October 3rd, 1920, was] a philosopher who argued that moral judgments have a rational basis, and who introduced the renowned ethical thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem…’ William Grime’s New York Times obituary of this philosopher, far less widely known than she is influential, is an excellent introduction to the life and ideas of the brilliant Foot.
You can also learn more about Philippa Foot at
Philippa Foot – by Martin L. White for Encyclopædia Britannica
Philippa Foot ~ Interview by Rick Lewis for Philosophy Now, conducted in the autumn of 2001
Philippa Foot (1920-2010) ~ by Lawrence Solum for Legal Theory Blog
Philippa Foot Obituary: A ‘Grande Dame of Philosophy’, She Pioneered Virtue Ethics – by Jane O’Grady for The Guardian, October 5th, 2010
Philippa Foot: Trolleys and Natural Goodness ~ by Edward Harcourt for Prospect magazine, Oct 7, 2010
Professor Philippa Foot: Philosopher Regarded as Being Among the Finest Moral Thinkers of the Age ~ by Peter J Conradi and Gavin Lawrence for The Independent, Oct 18th, 2010
and a multitude of citations in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries
Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!
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