This week in philosophy: 31 October to 6 November

Each week we mark a handful of anniversaries from the history of philosophy: births, deaths and first publications that fall in the coming seven days. This week, from Saturday 31 October to Friday 6 November, runs from Algiers to Oxford, by way of a London bookshop in 1790 and a shoemaker's house in Lincoln. Every date below is checked against the sources listed at the end; where we could find only one reliable source for a detail, the entry is marked †.

31 October and 1 November

31 October 1973: Malek Bennabi dies in Algiers. † Born in Constantine in 1905, Bennabi was an Algerian thinker whose work on civilisation and colonialism is still read and discussed across North Africa and beyond. In Les Conditions de la renaissance (1949) and later works he argued that a civilisation is built from three elements, the human being, the soil and time. He is best known for the concept of colonisabilité, "colonisability": the claim that colonisation succeeded not only because of the coloniser's strength but because of an inner condition of the colonised society, which independence alone would not cure. It is an uncomfortable thesis, and it drew sharp criticism.

1 November 1790: Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France. † The book began as a reply to a sermon that the Welsh dissenting minister Richard Price had preached in London a year earlier, welcoming the Revolution. Burke defended inherited institutions, gradual reform and the wisdom stored in custom against what he saw as the abstract rights of the revolutionaries. Replies came fast: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men within weeks, and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man the following year. Read it in the Book corner: Reflections on the Revolution in France, or start from Burke's page.

1 November 1935: Edward Said is born in Jerusalem. A literary scholar who spent his career at Columbia University, Said influenced how several disciplines think about knowledge and power. Orientalism (1978) argued that Western scholarship, fiction and politics had together produced an image of "the Orient" that said more about the West than about the peoples it described. The book is widely treated as a founding text of postcolonial thought, and the arguments it started about who gets to represent whom have never really stopped.

2 to 4 November

2 November 1815: George Boole is born in Lincoln. The son of a shoemaker, Boole was largely self-taught and became the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork. In The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) he treated logic as a kind of algebra, with classes and propositions combined by operations like multiplication and addition. In his MIT master's thesis, signed in August 1937, published in a revised form in 1938 and accepted for the degree he received in 1940, Claude Shannon showed that the same algebra describes electrical switching circuits, which is one reason Boole's name is now so closely tied to digital computing. See George Boole and the card on propositional logic.

4 November 1873: G. E. Moore is born in Upper Norwood, south London. † With Bertrand Russell, Moore led the Cambridge revolt against idealism. In Principia Ethica (1903) he argued that goodness cannot be defined in natural terms, using what became known as the open-question argument, and named the naturalistic fallacy. Later papers, "A Defence of Common Sense" (1925) and "Proof of an External World" (1939), defended ordinary certainties, famously by holding up his hands. See G. E. Moore.

4 November 1995: Gilles Deleuze dies in Paris. Born in Paris in 1925, Deleuze wrote his first book on Hume and went on to distinctive readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson. Difference and Repetition (1968) tried to think difference in itself rather than as a gap between things already identified. With Félix Guattari he wrote Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and late in life, What Is Philosophy?, which defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. See Gilles Deleuze.

5 November

5 November 1931: Charles Taylor is born in Montreal. Taylor has spent a long career arguing that modern identity has a history, and that the history matters. Sources of the Self (1989) traces the making of the modern self; "The Politics of Recognition" (1992) asks what a liberal society owes to cultural identities; and A Secular Age (2007) asks how belief in God went from being the default to being one option among others. See Charles Taylor.

5 November 1997: Isaiah Berlin dies in Oxford. Born in Riga in 1909, Berlin came to England as a boy. His inaugural lecture of 1958, "Two Concepts of Liberty", set out the distinction between negative liberty, freedom from interference, and positive liberty, being one's own master, and warned how the second could be turned into a justification for coercion. Central to much of his work is value pluralism: the view that genuine goods can conflict, with no master scale to settle every conflict. Read Four Essays on Liberty and see Isaiah Berlin.

Know of an anniversary we have missed this week, from any tradition? Tell us below, with a source, and we will consider it for a future list.

Sources

† marks a date or place for which we found only one reliable source; it is named below.

Malek Bennabi †
– Death date (31 October 1973), one source only: Usman Syihab, "Agama dan Perubahan Masyarakat Menurut Malik Bennabi", AFKAR 10 (2009). https://adab.um.edu.my/index.php/afkar/article/download/5839/3571/12909
– Death in Algiers, one source only: Moh. Nurhakim, "Malik Bennabi dan Strategi Pembangunan Peradaban Alternatif bagi Dunia Ketiga". https://ejournal.um.edu.my/index.php/JAT/article/download/7873/6061/17913
– Birth in Constantine, 1905; the human being, soil and time; colonisability: Juan A. Macías Amoretti, "La nahḍa como despertar político en el Magreb: … el pensamiento de Mālik Bennabī", Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 24 (2013). https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/artpub/2013/214677/anaestara_a2013n24iSPA.pdf
– Dates (1905–1973); Les Conditions de la renaissance (1949); colonisabilité and its critics: Christian Lochon, review of J. El Hamri, La vocation civilisationnelle de l'islam dans l'œuvre de Malek Bennabi, Académie des sciences d'outre-mer (January 2022). https://www.academieoutremer.fr/images/files/20220210_d98402570b9cbbe7e11adffbbfff14b5.pdf
– Dates (1905–1973); "man + soil + time": Fawzia M. Bariun, Malik Bennabi's Life and Theory of Civilization, PhD thesis, University of Michigan (1988). https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/161992

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France †
– Publication on 1 November 1790, one source only for the day: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Edmund Burke". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/burke/
– Publication in November 1790: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (RRCHNM/ASHP). https://revolution.chnm.org/d/985 ; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Paine". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paine/
– Publisher J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, 1790: UVA Anthology. https://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Burke/burke-reflections
– Price's sermon, 4 November 1789, Old Jewry, London: Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue. https://catalog.folger.edu/record/818760
– Price, Welsh dissenting minister: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Richard Price". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Price ; SEP, "Richard Price". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/richard-price/
– Replies by Wollstonecraft (late November 1790) and Paine (1791): SEP, "Mary Wollstonecraft". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/ ; Britannica, "Reflections on the Revolution in France". https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reflections-on-the-Revolution-in-France ; SEP, "Thomas Paine" (above)

Edward Said
– Columbia College Today, November 2003. https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct_archive/nov03/quads10.html
– International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Honorary Fellows: Edward Wadie Said. https://iss.nl/en/about-iss/organization/honorary-fellows/edward-wadie-said
– Penguin Random House, author page (Columbia from 1963; Orientalism 1978). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/26689/edward-w-said/
– Al Jazeera, "Palestinian scholar Edward Said dies" (25 September 2003). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/25/palestinian-scholar-edward-said-dies

George Boole
– Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "George Boole". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boole/
– Encyclopaedia Britannica, "George Boole". https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Boole
– MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, "George Boole". https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Boole/
– Shannon's thesis: the thesis itself, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, title page dated 10 August 1937, degree year 1940 (MIT DSpace). https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173 ; the revised version in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57, no. 12 (December 1938), 713–723 (Crossref record). https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1109/T-AIEE.1938.5057767 ; his master's and doctoral degrees (the doctorate for a separate thesis, An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics), both 1940: Britannica, "Claude Shannon". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Shannon

G. E. Moore †
– Birth in Upper Norwood, one source only: Cambridge University Archives (ArchiveSearch), "Moore, George Edward". https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/agents/people/8744
– Birth date; works and dates: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "G. E. Moore". https://www.britannica.com/biography/G-E-Moore ; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "George Edward Moore". https://iep.utm.edu/page/moore ; SEP, "George Edward Moore". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/

Gilles Deleuze
– Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Gilles Deleuze". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gilles-Deleuze
– Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Gilles Deleuze". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/
– Philosophy Now, News, Winter 1995/96. https://ftp.philosophynow.org/issues/14/News_Winter_1995_96
– Encyclopædia Universalis, "Gilles Deleuze". https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/gilles-deleuze/

Charles Taylor
– Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Charles Taylor". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Taylor
– The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Charles Taylor". https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/charles-taylor
– Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (Princeton UP, 1992), library records: https://lib.ecu.edu/catalog-preview/catalog/440761 ; https://vufind.lboro.ac.uk/Record/262233
– Harvard University Press, A Secular Age (2007). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674026766

Isaiah Berlin
– Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Isaiah Berlin". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaiah-Berlin
– Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Isaiah Berlin". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/
– Isaiah Berlin Legacy Fellowship, Wolfson College, Oxford: home page and "25th anniversary of the death of Isaiah Berlin". https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/ ; https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/news/saturday-5-november-2022-marks-25th-anniversary-death-isaiah-berlin