Author: Samuel Woodall
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R. A. Fisher, Statistics and the Political History of Eugenics
R. A. Fisher helped transform statistics and genetics while advocating eugenics. This essay examines how scientific authority, heredity and social hierarchy became intertwined.
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Edinburgh before Darwin: Lamarckism, Natural History and Evolutionary Debate
Edinburgh’s student societies, anatomists and geologists debated species change long before Darwin. This essay reconstructs the Lamarckian world that helped shape his questions.
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Making Nature Historical: Darwin, Revolution and the Politics of Evolution
Evolution made nature historical. This essay places Darwin within Victorian debates about revolution, religion, empire, industrial capitalism and the changing authority of science.
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Jeremy Bentham: Utility, Reform and the Problem of Empire
Bentham’s greatest-happiness principle made law answerable to human consequences. This essay examines utility, reform, manuscript transcription and the contradictions of empire.
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Beyond the Age of Reason: Constructing the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was not a single march of reason. This essay reconstructs its competing networks, reforms, religious arguments and later political mythologies.
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Natural Law and Natural Rights: Pufendorf, Sociability and Political Obligation
Pufendorf’s natural law joined self-preservation to sociability, duty and political authority. This essay traces the difficult path from early modern law to modern rights.
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Resistance and Reformation.
Acknowledgement of Supervision: Dr Karie Schultz The medieval period with its rediscovery of the ancients facilitated the rise of political science, synthesised with religious thought. This move can be seen as echoing through to the Reformation, the epoch of this week’s study. During the Reformation, we may observe trends across the realm of ideas and…
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Medieval Political Thought: Augustine, Aquinas and Aristotle
Explore Augustine, Aquinas and medieval political thought through the City of God, natural law, Aristotle’s reception and debates about intellectual change.
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Plato and Confucius: Justice, Virtue and Political Obligation
Read Plato’s Crito and Republic alongside Confucius’s Analects to explore justice, virtue, political obligation and the interpretation of ancient ideas.
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Skinner and Foucault: Genealogy and Historical Method
Compare Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault on genealogy, the modern state and power, and explore their different approaches to historical interpretation.