Malthus, Medicine & Morality: Malthusianism After 1798

Front Cover
Brian Dolan
Rodopi, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 232 pages
Thomas Robert Malthus's reputation has lately been rehabilitated in the fields of social biology, demography, environmentalism, and economics. In the midst of this current interest and with the chance to mark the occasion of the bicentenary of the first edition of the Essay on Population (1798), the contributors to this volume take this timely opportunity to examine the historical conditions in which Malthus constructed his theory, and in which the concept of a 'Malthusian' and 'Neo-Malthusian' philosophy first emerged. The essays redress the balance between Malthus's original argument, the immediate responses to Malthus by medics and theologians in Britain and on the Continent, and some of the ways that his ideas were later attacked, appropriated, or misrepresented. Included here are essays that not only re-evaluate the development of Malthus's theory, but also offer critical perspectives on the generation of the 'Malthusian league' and debates about birth control in Britain and on the Continent, and Malthus's influence on the emergence of social science and Darwinian evolutionary biology.

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Contents

The Metaphysical View of Meaning Examined
70
Meaning Without Religion
127
The Possibility of Religious and Secular Ascriptions of Meaning
166
The Quest for Meaning as the Quest for God
193
Index
249
Brian Dolan 1
7
The critique
Moral Restraint at Haileybury College
5
The Malthusian Moment
Malthus on Man In Animals No Moral Restraint
4
Political Economy Medicine
The Changing Politics
7
Paul Robin and NeoMalthusianism
31
Reactions to
Index 223
25
Copyright

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Page 102 - Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Page 232 - Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy" are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.
Page 115 - Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time ! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Page 37 - The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.
Page 136 - This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...
Page 102 - I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
Page 218 - If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Page 112 - A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
Page 111 - A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense," sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us...
Page 240 - Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?

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