1.3 Eugenics Just as anti-Semitism was not unique to Nazi Germany, neither were ideas of racial superiority or attempts to create a society peopled by ‘better’ human beings. Politicians, scientists and social commentators in many European countries expressed concern about the ‘degeneracy’ of their respective ‘national stock’ in the years before World War I. Sir Francis Galton – scientist, anthropologist, cousin of Charles Darwin and inspired by his work – had coined the word ‘eugenics’
6 Conclusion William Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, two days after hearing that the legislation for the abolition of slavery in British dominions had successfully completed its passage through the House of Commons, a fitting conclusion to the work he had begun nearly half a century before. The Practical View both reflected and contributed to a major shift in religious consciousness of which the continuing growth of the Evangelical movement was the most striking manifestation. Methodist num
5.2 Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign in context Certainly the outcome was a positive one from Wilberforce’s point of view in that abolition of the slave trade in British ships and colonial possessions passed rapidly through both Houses of Parliament, and became law in March 1807. This result in part implied an increased receptivity to Wilberforce’s religious arguments against slavery, but there were also other factors at work. These included the advance of liberal ideas of justice and toleration, themselves reflecting the influence of
4.5 The interaction of religion and society Now read the previous extract again with the associated commentary which draws out the key points and their significance, particularly in helping to understand the interaction of religion and society at thi 4.4 Political implications In chapter VI of A Practical View Wilberforce broadens his perspective from the primarily spiritual emphasis of the earlier chapters to a consideration of the political implications of his analysis. In so doing he contributed to the ongoing debate on the French Revolution and the changing nature of British society and politics.
A Practical View can usefully be compared here with another work that gave considerable prominence to religion in the aftermath of 1789, Edmund Bu 1.7 Kepler and logarithms Kepler was precisely the kind of practitioner for whom logarithms were of greatest benefit: a professional astronomer (and, of course, competent Latin scholar) driven at times to distraction – he tells us – by the magnitude and complexity of the calculations he needed to do. So when he was able to study a copy of Napier's Descriptio in about 1619 he welcomed it warmly, dedicating his next book to Napier (not realising he had been dead for two years); and he went further. Napier's b Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: understand the significance of John Napier's contributions to mathematics give examples of the factors that influenced Napier's mathematical work. Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to 2.3.5 History The census of 1911, the year of MacLean's birth, recorded 200,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic. Fifty years later, the number had dropped to 81,000. If MacLean's vision is frequently pessimistic, this must surely derive at least in part from the dwindling of the culture and language to which he had committed himself as poet. Please now read ‘A Highland Woman’. Click to view the poem ‘Author(s): 2.3.4 War MacLean's love poems present a situation where the speaker is baffled by stasis. He cannot act. Frustration in love is involved with political frustration. Gaelic tradition values men of action – often heroes who died in defeat. The battle cry of the MacLeans, ‘Fear eile air son Eachainn’ (‘Another One for Hector’), recalls the battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, when the seventeenth chief of the clan, ‘Red Hector of the Battles’, fell in action. Clansman after clansm 2.3.2 Love Please now read ‘Dogs and Wolves’. This poem is amazing in its forceful, simple-seeming expression of an extraordinarily complex combination of thought and emotion. The ‘dogs and wolves’ are the speaker's ‘unwritten poems’. Why ‘unwritten’? One infers that other matters take priority over love poems. But – ‘unwr 2.2 Background and recordings Sorley MacLean, 1911–98, is now regarded as one of the greatest Scottish poets of the twentieth century. Until the 1970s, his verse was known by very few people. In that decade, publication of English translations and the impact of his public readings established him in the eyes of poetry lovers in Scotland, Ireland and England, as well as further afield, as a major poet. Yet, curiously, this impact depended on work that mostly derived from a very specific conjunction of personal and 2.1.1 Aims The aims of these recordings, in which Sorley MacLean is interviewed by Iain Crichton-Smith, are to: (a) help you to sense the power of MacLean's poetry in its original Gaelic; (b) assist your understanding of the English texts of the poems, translated by MacLean himself. Acknowledgements This course was written by Maria Kasmirli Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the follo References 1 Approaching philosophy The 1960s show Beyond the Fringe included a sketch satirizing philosophy. In it, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett play two Oxbridge philosophers discussing the role of philosophy in everyday life. It concludes like this: Jon: … the burden is fair and square on your shoulders to explain to me the exact relevance philosophy does have to everyday life. Alan: Yes, I can do this quite easily. This mo 1 'The Enlightenment' What a change there was between 1785 and 1824! There has probably never been such an abrupt revolution in habits, ideas and beliefs in the two thousand years since we have known the history of the world. (Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare, 1825; 1962 edn, p. 144) This course looks at a period of 50 years or so during which European culture underwent one of the most profound and far-reaching Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: understand the cultural climate that existed as the Enlightenment began understand the main characteristics of the Enlightenment demonstrate an awareness of the cultural shifts and trends leading from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Acknowledgements This course was written by Ms Eva Solzman Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the follo 7 Other rhyming techniques Near- or half rhymes are words or combinations of words that achieve only a partial rhyme. Half rhymes can be between words with just one syllable, or between parts of words, for example where the accented syllables rhyme with each other, but other syllables in the word don't rhyme. For instance: cover–shovel; wily–piling, calling–fallen; wildebeest–building. Assonant rhyme refers to echoing vowel sounds, either in
Exercise 4
Study another free course
