H O V E R N O T E S

F O R C A L L I N G P A G E

#1 (of 5)

I have been working on — “I” being Deborah Taylor-Pearce, founder, publisher & editor of She-philosopher.com, first launched in April 2004 before the advent of Google and other Big Search tools for the Web. In the beginning, visitors to She-philosopher.com came because of my posts to various listservs and Usenet newsgroups, or because I had invited them by passing out URLs, or because of word-of-mouth. In other words, they either knew me or knew of me before visiting.
Having been at this for so long now, I tend to forget that not everyone who will land on this page in 2017 (or later) knows my identity. Moreover, I have less of an online presence now that I am no longer active in discussion forums (other than an occasional post to GitHub or other tech-support hang-outs), having chosen not to make the move to such popular social networks as Facebook and Twitter.
In March 2017, I was told by a new visitor to this website that it “comes across as a bit odd” to alight on this home page and be addressed by an anonymous she-philosopher who never introduces herself. Longship Captain Fred Blonder is right about that, and this note is intended to correct that oddity. Thank you, Fred, for the constructive criticism! ::

#2 (of 5)

another kairic moment — From the encompassing term, kairos.
The classical term, kairos, is of obscure origin and etymology, and difficult to define.
“It is translated in English as ‘the right time,’ ‘due season,’ ‘occasion,’ ‘opportune,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘suitable,’ ‘the fitting,’ ‘the propitious moment,’ ‘arising circumstances,’ and ‘opportunity.’” (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane, 2001, 413) ::

#3 (of 5)

I settled on Thomas — Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680).
I have reason to think that Chambers’ source for the mid-17th-century complaint about the growing number of Danish druggists competing with physicians for market share, professional status, and perquisites, was Bartholin’s Cista medica Hafniensis, variis consiliis, curationibus, casibus rarioribus, vitis medicorum Hafniensium ... Accedit ... Domus anatomica brevissime descripta (Copenhagen: Matthias Godicchenius, 1662), but I do not presently have the time or resources to verify this scholarly intuition. ::

#4 (of 5)

one of six guiding principles — The preamble to The Constitution of the General Government (1789) lists 6 founding principles, and reads in full: “We, the people of the UNITED STATES, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, DO ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of AMERICA.” (as printed by William Kilty in 1799, “under the authority of the legislature” for the state of Maryland, with text “copied from [that] published during the year seventeen hundred and ninety-nine by order of the house of representatives”) ::

#5 (of 5)

whose personhood is beyond dispute — Those who believe that “personhood begins at conception” have been emboldened by the fall of Roe v. Wade to push for “personhood” laws, giving legal rights to unborn children.
   While the legal fiction of fetal personhood does indeed date to the 17th century (at which time laws were passed protecting the fetus’s private property rights), supposing the fetus “in law to be born for many purposes” — so that “It is capable of having a legacy, or a surrender of a copyhold estate made to it. It may have a guardian assigned to it; and it is enabled to have an estate limited to it’s use, and to take afterwards by such limitation, as if it were then actually born.” (William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols., 3rd edn., 1768, 1.130) — is not the same thing as bestowing personhood upon it. Cf. Virginia’s 1699 and 1705 statutes disenfranchising women, Roman Catholic recusants, and “infants” (minors under 21 years of age).
   Indeed, through at least the 18th century, the fetus — corporeal, but irrational and not yet individuated — was by definition not a “person,” which “Word came at length to import the Mind, as being a Thing of the greatest Regard and Dignity among human Matters”: “PERSON, an individual Substance, of a rational or intelligent Nature.” (Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 2 vols., 1728, s.v. Person, 2.793).
   “Person is defin’d an individual, reasonable, or intellectual Substance; or, an intellectual and incommunicable Substance.” (E. Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 2 vols., 1728, s.v. Trinity, 2.251) ::