Elizabeth C. Macknight, Nobility and Patrimony in Modern France

Elizabeth C. Raff

Crawford and his colleagues describe an analysis of frog species in El Cope, Panama. “We discovered that 30 species were lost, including five undescribed species, representing 41 per cent of total amphibian lineage diversity in El Cope. The irony of increased species discovery coupled with enigmatic population declines in amphibians was recognised at least 10 years ago, “yet until now we have l...

Alternative medicine in modern France.

Observers of the French medical scene may be struck by an apparent paradox. France is a major producer and consumer of nonconventional remedies, and by certain measures its use of alternative medicine ranks among the highest in Europe. Yet France stands out even among the countries of southern Europe, which have been less willing than those of the north to tolerate medical activities outside th...

Aristotle’s Magnanimity and Nietzsche’s Nobility

At first glance, a comparison between Nietzsche and Aristotle may seem improbable. If Nietzsche is indeed a moral relativist, as is often suggested, why is Nietzsche concerned with the development of human character? There are explicit instances of Nietzsche assessing the positive and negative, beneficial and injurious, traits of human character. In “What is Noble” of Beyond Good and Evil, Niet...

Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France

Georges Teissier (1900-1972) and the modern synthesis in France.

This Perspectives is devoted to the ideas of the French zoologist Georges Teissier about the mechanisms of evolution and the relations between micro- and macroevolution. Working in an almost universally neo-Lamarckian context in France, Teissier was one of the very few Darwinians there at the time of the evolutionary synthesis. The general atmosphere of French zoology during the 1920s and the 1...