The laws of Venus, to give them their proper name, have a venerable and lengthy history and there are ample if now somewhat understudied records of their courts and practices. To gain an initial sense of the scope of this history and the nature of these practices we have to return to the philosophical tradition, to Plato, and there trace the roots of a law that later spanned the courts of Europe and gave rise to the most enduring of forms of poetic justice.
Alchemy has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. It has been present in almost every culture, from Old Kingdom Egypt and the China of Lao Tzu; from the Greece of Alexander the Great to the era of Islamic conquest; from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to the twilight world of Victorian occultism. It has been called ‘the mightiest secret that a man [or woman] can possess’, yet it has also been derided as ‘the history of an error’. It has often been portrayed as a fraudulent, delusional quest for wealth and worldly power through the attempt to transmute base metals into gold, but has also been regarded as a Divine art, the highest gift of God, one that should only be practiced by the sincere seeker and the pure of heart.
"In this book, I aim not to replace other histories of food but to offer readers a useful alternative: to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings with one another and with the rest of nature; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections, at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly. . . One can philosophize quite well while preparing supper.
When the Romans first started trying to map themselves into the larger Mediterranean world, their sense of where they belonged and how they fitted in was a challenge simultaneously to their sense of time and their sense of space; the charts they needed were geographical and chronological at once. Providing such charts was harder than it may appear, not least because charts of time and space do not always overlap harmoniously. Different parts of the world can appear to occupy different dimensions of time, “allochronies,” as Johannes Fabian (1983) calls them, niches where the quality of time appears to be not the same as “ours,” where the inhabitants are stuck in the past or are perhaps already ahead, in the future.
In Rationality and Logic, Robert Hanna argues that logic is intrinsically psychological and that human psychology is intrinsically logical. He claims that logic is cognitively constructed by rational animals (including humans) and that rational animals are essentially logical animals. In order to do so, he defends the broadly Kantian thesis that all (and only) rational animals possess an innate cognitive 'logic faculty.' Hanna's claims challenge the conventional philosophical wisdom that sees logic as a fully formal or 'topic-neutral' science irreconcilably separate from the species- or individual-specific focus of empirical psychology.
