Graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA (diploma magna cum laude, 1965, specialty "British History"). Ph. D. in British History (University of Chicago, 1972). Improved his qualifications at Darwin College (University of Cambridge, 1969–1970, 1976), and was a visiting fellow for one year at Harvard University (1984).Twice was a Fulbright Scholar. First at the University of Tokyo and at International Christian University Tokyo (Japan, 1999–2000). Second at St. Petersburg University (Russia, 2004–2005). Author of eight books and numerous articles.
Vestnik (Bulletin) of St Petersburg StateUniversity , 2024
As this paper argues, Adam Smith may have been familiar with Daniel Bernoulli's 1738 essay on ris... more As this paper argues, Adam Smith may have been familiar with Daniel Bernoulli's 1738 essay on risk and may have changed his views on risk while teaching law to two Russian students. The point is important because W. S. Jevons certainly read Adam Smith closely, but he did not read Daniel Bernoulli. Jevons convinced Alfred Marshall that the concept of marginal utility did not require the mathematical analysis or the advanced mathematics of probability that they could find in Bernoulli. Jevons believed that arguments in English literature like Smith's, together with the very simple mathematics of Gregory King, were sufficient to discuss moral expectation (what was later called marginal utility). It has been suggested that Adam Smith modeled his famous concept of the "invisible hand" on Daniel Bernoulli's also famous essay on risk. The similarities between the two were striking. Among experts, the ideas expressed in Bernoulli's essay have been called the "St. Petersburg paradox" because the author was at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg when he wrote the essay, and because he published his essay in a collection of works by the same Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg. However, the evidence for a connection between Bernoulli and Smith is only indirect. In this study, we present this indirect evidence by comparing passages from Bernoulli's essay on risk with those from Smith's essay on the "invisible hand" and what Smith called the labor lottery.
Attendance in England at Church of England (CofE) services has collapsed in this century. Meanwhi... more Attendance in England at Church of England (CofE) services has collapsed in this century. Meanwhile, the CofE increasingly adopted new theology, revising the beloved traditional Book of Common Prayer so that its language reflected this new theology. The CofE also ordained women as priests in 1992 and then as bishops in 2008. Anglicans in Africa and Asia found these and other changes dis-tasteful. They exhibit a sincerity and a deep spirituality which earn them a high reputation, and they threatened to split the world-wide Anglican Communion. It might seem that opposition of the same kind at home in England itself also accounts for a decline in daily Anglican church attendance in England, but that places too much emphasis on changes in supply. This essay on the contrary emphasizes changes in demand. The revised theology and the ordination of women did not cause the decline in CofE attendance in England, this essay argues. Instead, changing theology and the ordination of women, on the one hand, and declining church attendance, on the other hand, were both dependent variables, and the independent and causal variable was the change in demand which in turn was caused by changes in English social structure. The decline in fertility, the decline in household size, the fall in the number of children, the rise in the number of elderly persons, the rise in single-person households – all these things changed demand, this essay says, and the liberalization of theology and the decline in Anglican church attendance were both results of diminished demand.
The 19th-century English economist W.S.Jevons revisited the work of Gregory King. A seventeenth-c... more The 19th-century English economist W.S.Jevons revisited the work of Gregory King. A seventeenth-century follower of Sir Francis Bacon, King had described in a brief empirical observation how price correlated with supply. The history of seventeenth-century commercial mathematics, this essay suggests, provides essential background for understanding the empirical observation which Jevons received from King. The 17th century was the pivot time during which new techniques appeared in higher mathematics, calculus and mathematical probability among them. Higher mathematics incorporated innovations which had previously appeared in commercial mathematics, Arabic numerals, pen and paper calculations, new notations, etc. At the same time, ancient Greek higher mathematics continued for a while, and Gregory King also borrowed some calculations from James Ussher who used ancient Greek higher mathematics. King learned Bacon's empirical method from John Graunt and Sir William Petty, and all three represented a stage of political arithmetic which was midway between Bacon's simple empiricism on the one hand and later mathematical probability and random sampling on the other hand. In this midway stage, statesmen made policy while taking care to obtain data from professional advisors whom they employed. The advisors based their advice at first on a combination of observation, skill, and intuition, but then later they added commercial arithmetic.
How can the Church of England retain its special place in English life? Will the church remain es... more How can the Church of England retain its special place in English life? Will the church remain established by law? The Church of England can move forward only after it has answered these important questions, this essay says. Since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and aside from a brief period in the seventeenth century, the Church of England has always been the state church. Its representatives conduct many solemn public ceremonies especially those connected to military commemorations. The church is often present at royal ceremonies also. It provides chaplains to public institutions such as hospitals and schools. Those people who defend continued church establishment usually acknowledge that only a small minority of English persons attend the Church of England’s services on an average Sunday, but these defenders say, the church’s tolerance is its special contribution to English life. That tolerance permeates English society, bringing a peaceful tone and good public order. This benefits all, even those of other religions or of none, the defenders say. This argument has merit, but is tolerance enough to support an argument for continued establishment? Based on tolerance, the argument for establishment resembles the case made by Roman writers for the Roman state’s establishment of pagan sects. That Roman argument was not compatible with the fervor of Christian believers. Their fervor is still incompatible with some discourse about toleration today. All this makes necessary a fuller discussion of English church establishment. This essay contributes to that fuller discussion.
This essay discusses first English and then world economic history, starting with the Black Death... more This essay discusses first English and then world economic history, starting with the Black Death of 1348-1400AD. When the English population and wealth both increased after 1400, the structure of English development by the year 1700 became a little bit like a spiral, this paper says. The aggregate size of wealth increased, but there was little commensurate change in the distribution of wealth. The eighteenth-century English elite absorbed the elites of Wales and Scotland, and then the Protestant elite of Ireland. Then, on the same model of absorption, an English-speaking elite later came to dominate world wealth. As the world population increased in the early modern period, and as aggregate wealth increased apace, the distribution of world wealth became approximately what the distribution of wealth had been in England in 1700. A tiny group of very wealthy people had controlled the wealth of England in 1700. In the late twentieth century, the English elite absorbed the world elite many of whom adopted the English language and much of English culture. They often sent their children to study in Britain or America. Now this tiny elite group, English in language and usually English in culture, controls much of the wealth of the world while at the same time the ongoing increase in population has produced a huge number of very poor people.
Joseph Schumpeter said that Adam Smith was sincere and very influential, but Schumpeter also said... more Joseph Schumpeter said that Adam Smith was sincere and very influential, but Schumpeter also said that Smith's "Wealth of Nations" nevertheless was neither original nor brilliant. As for moral philosophy, Schumpeter hardly read "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". Smith was an Aristotelian and a scholastic, Schumpeter said. These interpretations of Smith became standard, but were they correct? This paper argues instead that Smith was brilliant and original because his moral philosophy provided a capstone or crowning argument for seventeenth-century political economy. This connection of Smith to seventeenth-century sources is not entirely new of course. Karl Marx already said that "Wealth of Nations" depended largely on seventeenth-century writers such as Sir William Petty. Yet Marx saw only part of the picture because he, like Schumpeter later, undervalued Smith's moral philosophy. Predecessors in seventeenth-century political economy deeply influenced Smith, true, but he was not a passive recipient of this seventeenth-century influence. Instead, this paper argues, Smith labored to free political economy from its seventeenth-century reputation for atheism and immorality. Petty and his friend Thomas Hobbes and many other seventeenth-century practitioners of political economy had an infamous reputation as being empiricists who were hostile to moral philosophy in general and to Christian theories of right action in particular. Smith freed empirical political economy from its reputation for atheism.
ФИЛОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ НАУКИ. ВОПРОСЫ ТЕОРИИ И ПРАКТИКИ Издательство: Общество с ограниченной ответственностью Издательство "Грамота" (Тамбов) ISSN: 1997-2911
Детективный роман Уильяма Годвина «Калеб Уильямс» занимает особое место в истории литературы Ве... more Детективный роман Уильяма Годвина «Калеб Уильямс» занимает особое место в истории литературы Великобритании. Писатель изначально предназначал это произведение для элитарной публики, составлявшей в XIX в. традиционный круг читателей художественной литературы, намереваясь сочувственно рассказать ей о жизни простого народа. Однако впоследствии читательская аудитория романа расширилась, книга стала пользоваться популярностью у массового читателя XIX столетия, принеся автору коммерческий успех и превратившись в образец массовой литературы как для издателей, так и других писателей.
The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
What would macroeconomic theory be like now if Adam Smith had based his moral philosophy on Georg... more What would macroeconomic theory be like now if Adam Smith had based his moral philosophy on George Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, Arnold Geulincx, Nicholas Malebranche and others? Smith used all his life the same moral philosophy which he learned at university from his teacher Francis Hutcheson. I call this philosophical system “utilitarian” although Hutcheson and Smith did not themselves use that word. Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and other later writers used it. By this system, pity was an involuntary moral restraint on greed. Benevolence was the result of pity. By extension, Smith argued that nature could sometimes produce benevolence even when pity was not available for that work. The problem for macroeconomics is that this moral philosophy based on pity no longer persuades most people, and many economists think Smith advocated an unlimited or natural liberty for greed. We live anyway in a society awash with greed. If we imagine a macroeconomic system based on occasional philosophy, then we can also imagine that economists would now have different theories of causation in nature, different theories of luck or chance, a different set of tools for mathematical analysis, and above all different theories of the role of moral philosophy in macroeconomics. https://www.publicacoesfacfil.pt/product.php?id_product=1356&id_lang=1 Book Title The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
This essay analyzes one story toward the end of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The story tells ... more This essay analyzes one story toward the end of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The story tells us about a fisherman Abdullah who met a merman or man from the sea. My analysis finds in this story two striking accounts, first of causation in nature and, second, of the connection of economic value to human labor. As for the first, I think the story's account of causation in nature was close to philosophical occasionalism. Seen from a 21st century perspective, this story also had a little bit of economics. Value was only contiguous with human labor, the story said, or in other words labor was only next in sequence to value, not the cause of value.
This printed book is available here as a free download. The book is a summary of a course about ... more This printed book is available here as a free download. The book is a summary of a course about Adam Smith. The course is offered in English at the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University Russia.
The greatest artists possess an inborn genius which guides them in their creative work. Lesser ta... more The greatest artists possess an inborn genius which guides them in their creative work. Lesser talents by contrast are often guided by the circumstances of the times in which they live, and economic considerations are foremost among these circumstances. Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
Writing in the year 1696, Gregory King estimated the population and wealth of England. His number... more Writing in the year 1696, Gregory King estimated the population and wealth of England. His numbers enable us to observe several things about work and leisure in 17th century England. King estimated the total population to be 5.5 million, and he divided the whole population into two groups, one group able to obtain secure subsistence and the second group able to subsist only with help from other people. The two groups were approximately equal with the poor group slightly larger in size than the rich group. People lived in households. Fifty pounds sterling per year was the annual income of those at the bottom of the rich group. People in the poor group lost their households if they had less than twenty pounds per year income. You can judge from this that the very poor were irrelevant in terms of work or leisure. They lacked employment, but they were not at leisure of course. The rich were for the most part middling people who lived from wages they earned by work. At the top were a small handful of very wealthy people who also were not idle. England had a ramshackle administrative system which used the very wealthy as unpaid state servants.
Fingers crossed. I am 80 years old and physically weak but not senile, yet. Despite the uncertain... more Fingers crossed. I am 80 years old and physically weak but not senile, yet. Despite the uncertainties of deep old age, I am happier and better off now than ever before. I would like to share with you my story and my way of doing things. Join me. Together, we can make a success of old age, and we will go forward in life and death with courage and dignity.
A 17th-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bac... more A 17th-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon with an early version of statistical science. William Petty, John Graunt, and Gregory King were leaders in this work. They used no higher mathematics but only what English-speaking people called shop arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They debated how far statistical data should inform the decisions of statesmen, and that debate prepared the British political elite for their acceptance of state financial reform under King William III. This essay now draws your attention to the parallel suppression of the same tradition of early statistical science in seventeenth-century France. Using shop arithmetic, Marshal Vauban proposed a reform of taxation, but King Louis XIV rejected the proposal. Not only that. The king dismissed Vauban from all his offices, and the king suppressed Vauban's book, The Royal Tenth, thus preventing any wide discussion of Vauban's suggestions. As a result, no one ever prepared the French public to understand simple statistical data or to accept financial reforms under the old regime. When John Law tried to implement other reforms during the regency which followed King Louis XIV's death, the reforms failed because of this absence of public understanding.
This is a lecture delivered at the British Book Center in St Petersburg. It celebrate dShakespea... more This is a lecture delivered at the British Book Center in St Petersburg. It celebrate dShakespeare's importance to Russian readers.
#7 da coleção "Filosofia ao Minuto", do Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos da Faculdade de Letras d... more #7 da coleção "Filosofia ao Minuto", do Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra.
Vestnik (Bulletin) of St Petersburg StateUniversity , 2024
As this paper argues, Adam Smith may have been familiar with Daniel Bernoulli's 1738 essay on ris... more As this paper argues, Adam Smith may have been familiar with Daniel Bernoulli's 1738 essay on risk and may have changed his views on risk while teaching law to two Russian students. The point is important because W. S. Jevons certainly read Adam Smith closely, but he did not read Daniel Bernoulli. Jevons convinced Alfred Marshall that the concept of marginal utility did not require the mathematical analysis or the advanced mathematics of probability that they could find in Bernoulli. Jevons believed that arguments in English literature like Smith's, together with the very simple mathematics of Gregory King, were sufficient to discuss moral expectation (what was later called marginal utility). It has been suggested that Adam Smith modeled his famous concept of the "invisible hand" on Daniel Bernoulli's also famous essay on risk. The similarities between the two were striking. Among experts, the ideas expressed in Bernoulli's essay have been called the "St. Petersburg paradox" because the author was at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg when he wrote the essay, and because he published his essay in a collection of works by the same Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg. However, the evidence for a connection between Bernoulli and Smith is only indirect. In this study, we present this indirect evidence by comparing passages from Bernoulli's essay on risk with those from Smith's essay on the "invisible hand" and what Smith called the labor lottery.
Attendance in England at Church of England (CofE) services has collapsed in this century. Meanwhi... more Attendance in England at Church of England (CofE) services has collapsed in this century. Meanwhile, the CofE increasingly adopted new theology, revising the beloved traditional Book of Common Prayer so that its language reflected this new theology. The CofE also ordained women as priests in 1992 and then as bishops in 2008. Anglicans in Africa and Asia found these and other changes dis-tasteful. They exhibit a sincerity and a deep spirituality which earn them a high reputation, and they threatened to split the world-wide Anglican Communion. It might seem that opposition of the same kind at home in England itself also accounts for a decline in daily Anglican church attendance in England, but that places too much emphasis on changes in supply. This essay on the contrary emphasizes changes in demand. The revised theology and the ordination of women did not cause the decline in CofE attendance in England, this essay argues. Instead, changing theology and the ordination of women, on the one hand, and declining church attendance, on the other hand, were both dependent variables, and the independent and causal variable was the change in demand which in turn was caused by changes in English social structure. The decline in fertility, the decline in household size, the fall in the number of children, the rise in the number of elderly persons, the rise in single-person households – all these things changed demand, this essay says, and the liberalization of theology and the decline in Anglican church attendance were both results of diminished demand.
The 19th-century English economist W.S.Jevons revisited the work of Gregory King. A seventeenth-c... more The 19th-century English economist W.S.Jevons revisited the work of Gregory King. A seventeenth-century follower of Sir Francis Bacon, King had described in a brief empirical observation how price correlated with supply. The history of seventeenth-century commercial mathematics, this essay suggests, provides essential background for understanding the empirical observation which Jevons received from King. The 17th century was the pivot time during which new techniques appeared in higher mathematics, calculus and mathematical probability among them. Higher mathematics incorporated innovations which had previously appeared in commercial mathematics, Arabic numerals, pen and paper calculations, new notations, etc. At the same time, ancient Greek higher mathematics continued for a while, and Gregory King also borrowed some calculations from James Ussher who used ancient Greek higher mathematics. King learned Bacon's empirical method from John Graunt and Sir William Petty, and all three represented a stage of political arithmetic which was midway between Bacon's simple empiricism on the one hand and later mathematical probability and random sampling on the other hand. In this midway stage, statesmen made policy while taking care to obtain data from professional advisors whom they employed. The advisors based their advice at first on a combination of observation, skill, and intuition, but then later they added commercial arithmetic.
How can the Church of England retain its special place in English life? Will the church remain es... more How can the Church of England retain its special place in English life? Will the church remain established by law? The Church of England can move forward only after it has answered these important questions, this essay says. Since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and aside from a brief period in the seventeenth century, the Church of England has always been the state church. Its representatives conduct many solemn public ceremonies especially those connected to military commemorations. The church is often present at royal ceremonies also. It provides chaplains to public institutions such as hospitals and schools. Those people who defend continued church establishment usually acknowledge that only a small minority of English persons attend the Church of England’s services on an average Sunday, but these defenders say, the church’s tolerance is its special contribution to English life. That tolerance permeates English society, bringing a peaceful tone and good public order. This benefits all, even those of other religions or of none, the defenders say. This argument has merit, but is tolerance enough to support an argument for continued establishment? Based on tolerance, the argument for establishment resembles the case made by Roman writers for the Roman state’s establishment of pagan sects. That Roman argument was not compatible with the fervor of Christian believers. Their fervor is still incompatible with some discourse about toleration today. All this makes necessary a fuller discussion of English church establishment. This essay contributes to that fuller discussion.
This essay discusses first English and then world economic history, starting with the Black Death... more This essay discusses first English and then world economic history, starting with the Black Death of 1348-1400AD. When the English population and wealth both increased after 1400, the structure of English development by the year 1700 became a little bit like a spiral, this paper says. The aggregate size of wealth increased, but there was little commensurate change in the distribution of wealth. The eighteenth-century English elite absorbed the elites of Wales and Scotland, and then the Protestant elite of Ireland. Then, on the same model of absorption, an English-speaking elite later came to dominate world wealth. As the world population increased in the early modern period, and as aggregate wealth increased apace, the distribution of world wealth became approximately what the distribution of wealth had been in England in 1700. A tiny group of very wealthy people had controlled the wealth of England in 1700. In the late twentieth century, the English elite absorbed the world elite many of whom adopted the English language and much of English culture. They often sent their children to study in Britain or America. Now this tiny elite group, English in language and usually English in culture, controls much of the wealth of the world while at the same time the ongoing increase in population has produced a huge number of very poor people.
Joseph Schumpeter said that Adam Smith was sincere and very influential, but Schumpeter also said... more Joseph Schumpeter said that Adam Smith was sincere and very influential, but Schumpeter also said that Smith's "Wealth of Nations" nevertheless was neither original nor brilliant. As for moral philosophy, Schumpeter hardly read "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". Smith was an Aristotelian and a scholastic, Schumpeter said. These interpretations of Smith became standard, but were they correct? This paper argues instead that Smith was brilliant and original because his moral philosophy provided a capstone or crowning argument for seventeenth-century political economy. This connection of Smith to seventeenth-century sources is not entirely new of course. Karl Marx already said that "Wealth of Nations" depended largely on seventeenth-century writers such as Sir William Petty. Yet Marx saw only part of the picture because he, like Schumpeter later, undervalued Smith's moral philosophy. Predecessors in seventeenth-century political economy deeply influenced Smith, true, but he was not a passive recipient of this seventeenth-century influence. Instead, this paper argues, Smith labored to free political economy from its seventeenth-century reputation for atheism and immorality. Petty and his friend Thomas Hobbes and many other seventeenth-century practitioners of political economy had an infamous reputation as being empiricists who were hostile to moral philosophy in general and to Christian theories of right action in particular. Smith freed empirical political economy from its reputation for atheism.
ФИЛОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ НАУКИ. ВОПРОСЫ ТЕОРИИ И ПРАКТИКИ Издательство: Общество с ограниченной ответственностью Издательство "Грамота" (Тамбов) ISSN: 1997-2911
Детективный роман Уильяма Годвина «Калеб Уильямс» занимает особое место в истории литературы Ве... more Детективный роман Уильяма Годвина «Калеб Уильямс» занимает особое место в истории литературы Великобритании. Писатель изначально предназначал это произведение для элитарной публики, составлявшей в XIX в. традиционный круг читателей художественной литературы, намереваясь сочувственно рассказать ей о жизни простого народа. Однако впоследствии читательская аудитория романа расширилась, книга стала пользоваться популярностью у массового читателя XIX столетия, принеся автору коммерческий успех и превратившись в образец массовой литературы как для издателей, так и других писателей.
The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
What would macroeconomic theory be like now if Adam Smith had based his moral philosophy on Georg... more What would macroeconomic theory be like now if Adam Smith had based his moral philosophy on George Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, Arnold Geulincx, Nicholas Malebranche and others? Smith used all his life the same moral philosophy which he learned at university from his teacher Francis Hutcheson. I call this philosophical system “utilitarian” although Hutcheson and Smith did not themselves use that word. Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and other later writers used it. By this system, pity was an involuntary moral restraint on greed. Benevolence was the result of pity. By extension, Smith argued that nature could sometimes produce benevolence even when pity was not available for that work. The problem for macroeconomics is that this moral philosophy based on pity no longer persuades most people, and many economists think Smith advocated an unlimited or natural liberty for greed. We live anyway in a society awash with greed. If we imagine a macroeconomic system based on occasional philosophy, then we can also imagine that economists would now have different theories of causation in nature, different theories of luck or chance, a different set of tools for mathematical analysis, and above all different theories of the role of moral philosophy in macroeconomics. https://www.publicacoesfacfil.pt/product.php?id_product=1356&id_lang=1 Book Title The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
This essay analyzes one story toward the end of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The story tells ... more This essay analyzes one story toward the end of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The story tells us about a fisherman Abdullah who met a merman or man from the sea. My analysis finds in this story two striking accounts, first of causation in nature and, second, of the connection of economic value to human labor. As for the first, I think the story's account of causation in nature was close to philosophical occasionalism. Seen from a 21st century perspective, this story also had a little bit of economics. Value was only contiguous with human labor, the story said, or in other words labor was only next in sequence to value, not the cause of value.
This printed book is available here as a free download. The book is a summary of a course about ... more This printed book is available here as a free download. The book is a summary of a course about Adam Smith. The course is offered in English at the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University Russia.
The greatest artists possess an inborn genius which guides them in their creative work. Lesser ta... more The greatest artists possess an inborn genius which guides them in their creative work. Lesser talents by contrast are often guided by the circumstances of the times in which they live, and economic considerations are foremost among these circumstances. Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
Writing in the year 1696, Gregory King estimated the population and wealth of England. His number... more Writing in the year 1696, Gregory King estimated the population and wealth of England. His numbers enable us to observe several things about work and leisure in 17th century England. King estimated the total population to be 5.5 million, and he divided the whole population into two groups, one group able to obtain secure subsistence and the second group able to subsist only with help from other people. The two groups were approximately equal with the poor group slightly larger in size than the rich group. People lived in households. Fifty pounds sterling per year was the annual income of those at the bottom of the rich group. People in the poor group lost their households if they had less than twenty pounds per year income. You can judge from this that the very poor were irrelevant in terms of work or leisure. They lacked employment, but they were not at leisure of course. The rich were for the most part middling people who lived from wages they earned by work. At the top were a small handful of very wealthy people who also were not idle. England had a ramshackle administrative system which used the very wealthy as unpaid state servants.
Fingers crossed. I am 80 years old and physically weak but not senile, yet. Despite the uncertain... more Fingers crossed. I am 80 years old and physically weak but not senile, yet. Despite the uncertainties of deep old age, I am happier and better off now than ever before. I would like to share with you my story and my way of doing things. Join me. Together, we can make a success of old age, and we will go forward in life and death with courage and dignity.
A 17th-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bac... more A 17th-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon with an early version of statistical science. William Petty, John Graunt, and Gregory King were leaders in this work. They used no higher mathematics but only what English-speaking people called shop arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They debated how far statistical data should inform the decisions of statesmen, and that debate prepared the British political elite for their acceptance of state financial reform under King William III. This essay now draws your attention to the parallel suppression of the same tradition of early statistical science in seventeenth-century France. Using shop arithmetic, Marshal Vauban proposed a reform of taxation, but King Louis XIV rejected the proposal. Not only that. The king dismissed Vauban from all his offices, and the king suppressed Vauban's book, The Royal Tenth, thus preventing any wide discussion of Vauban's suggestions. As a result, no one ever prepared the French public to understand simple statistical data or to accept financial reforms under the old regime. When John Law tried to implement other reforms during the regency which followed King Louis XIV's death, the reforms failed because of this absence of public understanding.
This is a lecture delivered at the British Book Center in St Petersburg. It celebrate dShakespea... more This is a lecture delivered at the British Book Center in St Petersburg. It celebrate dShakespeare's importance to Russian readers.
#7 da coleção "Filosofia ao Minuto", do Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos da Faculdade de Letras d... more #7 da coleção "Filosofia ao Minuto", do Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra.
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revising the beloved traditional Book of Common Prayer so that its language reflected this new theology. The CofE also ordained women as priests in 1992 and then as bishops in 2008. Anglicans in Africa and Asia found these and other changes dis-tasteful. They exhibit a sincerity and a deep spirituality which earn them a high reputation, and they threatened to split the world-wide Anglican Communion. It might seem that opposition of the same kind at home in England itself also accounts for a decline in daily Anglican church attendance in England, but that places too much emphasis on changes in supply. This essay on the contrary emphasizes changes in demand. The revised theology and the ordination of women did not cause the decline in CofE attendance in England, this essay argues. Instead, changing theology and the ordination of women, on the one hand, and declining church attendance, on the other hand, were both dependent variables, and the independent and causal variable was the change in demand which in turn was caused by changes in English social structure. The decline in fertility, the decline in household size, the fall
in the number of children, the rise in the number of elderly persons, the rise in single-person households – all these things changed demand, this essay says, and the liberalization of theology and the decline in Anglican church attendance were both results of diminished demand.
Keywords: Church of England, church organization, Anglicanism, English society in the 21st century
https://religio.amursu.ru/index.php/en/new-archive/92-articles-en/3-2022/1257-the-structure-of-the-church-of-england
Book Title The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
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revising the beloved traditional Book of Common Prayer so that its language reflected this new theology. The CofE also ordained women as priests in 1992 and then as bishops in 2008. Anglicans in Africa and Asia found these and other changes dis-tasteful. They exhibit a sincerity and a deep spirituality which earn them a high reputation, and they threatened to split the world-wide Anglican Communion. It might seem that opposition of the same kind at home in England itself also accounts for a decline in daily Anglican church attendance in England, but that places too much emphasis on changes in supply. This essay on the contrary emphasizes changes in demand. The revised theology and the ordination of women did not cause the decline in CofE attendance in England, this essay argues. Instead, changing theology and the ordination of women, on the one hand, and declining church attendance, on the other hand, were both dependent variables, and the independent and causal variable was the change in demand which in turn was caused by changes in English social structure. The decline in fertility, the decline in household size, the fall
in the number of children, the rise in the number of elderly persons, the rise in single-person households – all these things changed demand, this essay says, and the liberalization of theology and the decline in Anglican church attendance were both results of diminished demand.
Keywords: Church of England, church organization, Anglicanism, English society in the 21st century
https://religio.amursu.ru/index.php/en/new-archive/92-articles-en/3-2022/1257-the-structure-of-the-church-of-england
Book Title The Insides of Nature: Causality and Conceptions of Nature
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