Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2008 March 11

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March 11

Philosophy of Law

I got three questions: 1) In the 1950s, the federal government enacted legislation that forcibly removed some Inuit groups from their land and relocated them to Ellesmere and Cornwallis islands in the Far North a) What argument would Cicero have offered against such legislation? b) According to John Austin, why would such legislation be acceptable? c) Would this plan be contrary to John Stuart Mill's theory of utilitarianism? Explain d) Thomas Hobbes and Aquinas would have had opposing views on this issue. What would they have said about this legislation?

2)During WWII, the Cdn. gov't enacted legislation that put many Japanese in prisoner-in-war camps and confiscated their property, fearing they might be spies, or might collaborate with the enemy. What would Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero have thought about such legislation? Explain.

3)In the Murdoch case in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that Ms. Murdoch was not entitled to receive a share of the family property after her husband sold their farm and their marriage broke down. What would Cicero and John Austin think of this law?

By the way, this is not homework but, opinion questions.

Don Mustafa Toronto, Ontario, Canada 20:15 UTC —Preceding unsigned comment added by Don Mustafa (talk • contribs) 00:15, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to the Wikipedia Reference Desk. Your question appears to be a homework question. I apologize if this is a misevaluation, but it is our policy here to not do people's homework for them, but to merely aid them in doing it themselves. Letting someone else do your homework does not help you learn how to solve such problems. Please attempt to solve the problem yourself first. If you need help with a specific part of an aasignment, feel free to tell us where you are stuck and ask for help. If you need help grasping the concept of a problem, by all means let us know. Thank you.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:02, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I do not for a moment think this is a homework assignment; or, if it is, it is in the form that might have been handed out in Plato's Academy! Anyway, it's hopelessly ambitious. It would require an enormous amount of basic research to formulate an answer. But, to be frank, I suspect there is a certain amount of 'playing' here; a tune to which I, for one, am not prepared to dance. It strikes me as being altogether bogus. I am sorry to be so direct. Clio the Muse (talk)

Actually, it kind of does sound like the type of homework assignment a Canadian teacher might give. Canadians, of course, have to find a Canadian angle to everything, including Plato! -- Mwalcoff (talk) 02:41, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah it does sound like that (argh, the memories!), but not quite, since it's kind of impossible to answer. Did Don have a class where all this was specifically taught? Otherwise what on earth do any of these things have to do with each other? Don doesn't usually ask homework-ish questions, but he does always ask pretty bizarre ones... Adam Bishop (talk) 04:05, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Are these really like canadian homework questions - wow - is this how the canadian mind works?

With all respect to the original poster - too many questions at once, and too obscure to expect people to give opinions on all of them. Note: you would be asking for example to give opinions based on 'moral systems' set out in books to various cases. Saying 'what would cicero think' sounds very schoolish - why not try again with 'comment on this using Thomas Hobbes work as a specific reference' - it might not be your homework - so please don't give us uneccessary homework to do too!87.102.14.194 (talk) 08:30, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, not exactly, but we like to think there is a Canadian connection to everything. Canada's role in world history is often extremely overstated. You know, we burned down the White House, we won both World Wars, that kind of thing. Adam Bishop (talk) 09:03, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

No, you burned down the Pink House, and then we white-washed it - forever sealing pink's demise as a fashionable colour. 206.252.74.48 (talk) 15:52, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

"Canada's role in world history is often extremely overstated". I don't think that's what you meant. It implies everyone thinks Canada had a bigger role than it really does. DJ Clayworth (talk) 16:06, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I believe that is exactly what he meant. 206.252.74.48 (talk) 18:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

For "everyone", read "all Canadians". Canadians think Canada has had a wide impact on the world stage. BrainyBabe (talk) 23:59, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

history of languages - a 'taxonomy'

Hi.! Can someone link me to a 'taxonomy' of human languages, or the relavent page, specifically I'm trying to find a page that describes a link (if any) between the indo-european languages, and the other language groups (chinese or whatever) - is there a common root etc. Just a link would do - I just seem to get lost when searching as I'm not very knowledgeable on this subject. Thanks.87.102.14.194 (talk) 08:43, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

The possibility of a link between all languages is a very controversial subject in linguistics. We have lots of articles about it though - Nostratic, Proto-World, etc. Adam Bishop (talk) 09:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

ok that got me going - thanks.87.102.14.194 (talk) 09:28, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

indo / turkic / sino

1. Does turkic/altaic language in any way form a link between the two others?

2. The difference between 'east' and 'west' seems to go back a long way - is there anything other than speculation that can be solidly said about this human separation (either in terms of language or genetics?

3. Any theories that make a connection between the 'naturally developed language' and 'race' eg does a language preference have racial underpinings - is there any evidence that a person of a particular type would prefer to speak a specific language eg tongue structure making one language easier or more natural to speak?87.102.14.194 (talk) 09:34, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

1) Linguists have not been able to make any real progress in substantially reconstructing proto-languages before about 5000 B.C., and all the "macro" hypotheses such as Nostratic etc. remain unproven.

2) There is absolutely no necessary correlation between language and "race" -- babies of any "race" can learn any language, if brought up surrounded by that language. Furthermore, since the days of Franz Boas, it has been recognized that there's no such thing as a "primitive language" among natively-spoken human languages (i.e. not contact pidgins). AnonMoos (talk) 09:46, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking of a predisposition to certain vowel/consonent sounds - that over time might cause languages to diverge - otherwise I totally accept your answer. Thanks87.102.14.194 (talk) 10:38, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

There is no reason to believe any such predispostion exists. It is not unusual that you think it might: Korean parents are so keen to get their kids to learn prefect English pronunciation that they pay for oral surgery to cut the frenulum, the membrance that restricts the tongue, in the quest for the L and R sounds. [1] But you know what? Ethnic Korean kids born into the Anglosphere have perfect English pronunciation. It isn't any putative racial difference in tongues that matter. It is the sounds and language(s) one is exposed to as an infant and child. BrainyBabe (talk) 14:51, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Re. #2—East and West correspond to the directions the sun rises and sets, the major time-setting event in human lives (and one that has many cultural manifestations, even today, when nighttime no longer means total darkness for most). That's probably the major reason for the universal(?) distinction. Re. #3—I can't think of a plausible reason for there to be anything like a correlation between biological notions of race and language. Infants babble in all phonemes, I recall reading once. --98.217.18.109 (talk) 16:03, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Mhm I think you answered a different question in No.2 than the one I had in mind, never mind - I was sort of asking the reverse question - ie what can we tell about a ('hypothetical') parting of the peoples into different 'races' (ie people living in the east ie asia and west ie europe etc) in terms of their language ie can language be used as a archaeological tool in terms of prehistory of human migration.. It wasn't very clear I can see that now.

If it's true that all babies babble the same that would be most interesting..87.102.74.53 (talk) 18:32, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, if you're asking about whether linguistic information can be used to tell us about human evolution, that's certainly been studied very intensively. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has done some interesting work correlating linguistic, archeological, and genetic information about humans to try and create a comprehensive synthetic treatment to the question of human migrations. It's controversial, of course, to link something as cultural as languages with biology, but there is some serious study of it. His The History and Geography of Human Genes is an interesting read even if you skip the hardcore science sections. --98.217.18.109 (talk) 13:12, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Cavalli-Sforza's broad sweeping linguistic conclusions have been considered unconvincing by most linguists... AnonMoos (talk) 15:22, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I noted it was controversial. :-) But I don't know of anyone else who is well known for trying to do that sort of thing since the development of modern genetics. --98.217.18.109 (talk) 00:57, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

yes that was what I was asking for, thanks.87.102.17.32 (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Physical geography shows why links between East and West have followed just three channels. The Burma-Assam tropical link, with the Tibetan barrier north of it; the Silk Road link, probably as old as Homo erectus, with impassable desert north of it; the Eurasian steppe, a grassland connector for herders, with tundra north of it, a barrier which requires specialists. All cultural history uses these three routes until sea routes open. --Wetman (talk) 18:31, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Napoleon in 1813-14

Considering that the Russian campaign had been such a serious disaster for France I would be interested to know how and by what means Napoleon was able to recover to fight the campaign of 1813-14? Where did the troops come from? Did he try to keep his allies onside? What military tactics did he follow and what were the factors leading to his ultimate downfall?217.42.109.254 (talk) 11:59, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

The new army in 1813, and it was essentially a new army, came from a variety of places. First of all, there were the remnants of the old army, largely the parts which had never gone into Russia since little came out, but much of that was under siege in Danzig and the rest. The next step was to collect all of the soldiers who were left in depots in France, certainly these ran into the tens of thousands. Next, the navy, especially the corps of naval gunners who were more soldierly than the rest, provided thousands of men. The 1813 class of conscripts, and many who had been exempted in earlier years, were called up. Most of the Italian army was sent to Germany. Troops were collected from Spain. The Saxons and Bavarians and the rest of France's German allies were expected to provide sizable new contingents. Poles, Spanish and Neapolitans also formed part of the Grand Army in 1813. The army in 1814 was mainly French, no more Dutch or German or Italian "Frenchmen" then, and included lots of underage conscripts, the Marie Louises.

War of the Sixth Coalition and the various battle articles explain what happened. The introduction to the Sixth Coalition gives you an idea of what to expect: "The final stage of the war, the defence of France, saw the Emperor temporarily regain his former mastery; he repulsed vastly superior armies in the Six Days Campaign, which many believe to be the most brilliant feat of generalship of his illustrious career." Hmm, so how come this genius lost?

Well, it's a fair question. He lost in 1814 because no matter how clever he was, and how well he did in one minor battle, while he was winning that pointless victory other Allied armies were plodding on towards Paris. And when he moved to the next one, the one he'd beaten got moving again. The explanation is not unlike why the Confederates lost when Grant came on the scene: by 1814 nothing short of a miraculous destruction of an Allied army would stop it picking itself up after a defeat and advancing again.

The problem in 1813 was not dissimilar, especially after the Austrians joined the war. There was only one Napoleon, the rest of the French high command were fairly ordinary. Take the victory at the Battle of Dresden at the end of August. Yes, that's a significant win for Napoleon, but a week earlier Oudinot had lost at the Battle of Großbeeren, and in the week that followed MacDonald lost badly at the Battle of Katzbach and Vandamme lost half his army at the Battle of Kulm. The week after that the last French advance on Berlin ended with a defeat for Ney's army at the Battle of Dennewitz. This led to the Bavarians joining the Allies. Like Lee in Virginia, Napoleon could usually do well in battles where he was present, but the 1813 campaign was fought over a very large area, the "German front" extending from around Hamburg to near Breslau (modern Wrocław) with other armies in Italy and Spain, so he usually wasn't present.

1813-1814 didn't see any tactical innovations. The French army was much less professional and the Allies didn't have any particularly innovative commanders. It did see one technical innovation. Congreve rockets were used at the Battle of Leipzig, their first major land battle, with rather mixed results. Angus McLellan (Talk) 00:13, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Why did Napoleon lose? Like Hannibal he couldn't be everywhere at once. A good way to defeat a military genius is to attack at several fronts at the same time. Flamarande (talk) 00:49, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I have one or two additional points. Napoleon hoped to raise a new army of 650,000 men, of which only 140,000 would be recruited in France itself. As well as drawing from every available pool, including the gendarmerie and the National Guard, he trawled the French peasantry once again, moving further and further down the age scale. The whole thing was deeply unpopular, as was the additional burden of taxation. By in large it was an army of older men and raw recruits, with few experienced officers. There was also a serious shortage of horses for the cavalry to replace the huge losses suffered during the Russian campaign.

He managed to preserve his alliance with most of the minor German states, though he lost Prussia and then Austria. The Prussian change of side was particularly serious because, thanks to the brilliant planning and organisation of August von Gneisenau, they were immediately able to raise an additional force of 80,000 men to join with the 200,000 advancing westwards from Russia and 40,000 Swedes under Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, the renegade Marshall. Napoleon did try to keep Austria 'onside', as you have put it, 217.42, but the terms offered by Metternich were framed in a way that would have been impossible for him to accept.

The counter the forces moving against him on a wide front from the east he attempted to use his old tactic of divide and rule, with rapid marches and maneuvers, with the intention of defeating each of the hostile forces in detail. He behaved with his usual boldness and élan, hoping to bring superior force to bear to destroy one enemy army before moving on to another, the tactic that had served him so well in the campaign of 1805. But the Allies had developed an effective counter-strategy-the Trachenberg Plan-which required each army when under attack to withdraw and liaise with the others. Napoleon also made some serious errors, especially in the wide dispersal of his armies, and in his over reliance on inferior commanders. It added to his misfortune that the Allies possessed in Gebhard von Blücher a skilled old war-horse-and an innovative commander-, who played a brilliant cat-and-mouse game. In the end Napoleon simply could not get the kind of knock-out victory that he so desperately needed. As Blücher's army surged back and forward across Germany, by October 1813 the only ally Napoleon had left was Saxony.

It is possible that Napoleon could have won if the Allies had behaved in the same amateurish fashion as they had during the War of the Third Coalition; but they did not. At the Battle of Leipzig his army was faced with a concentrated and superior force, the nightmare he had tried to inflict on others. Clio the Muse (talk) 01:44, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Minor point: weren't Congreve Rockets used at the Battle of New Orleans? Rhinoracer (talk) 09:40, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Possibly, but that was two years after Leipzig. The War of 1812 was rather longer than its name suggests!

Being and Nothingness: political commentary?

Considering Sartre's magnum opus was published in 1943 during the occupation I was wondering if it had anything to say about the political situation of the day? Do any of Sartre's other works have any bearing here? Why were the Germans so indulgent towards expressions of French intellectual life? F Hebert (talk) 13:09, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Envisage, if you can, Paris in 1943: a bleak place, one where the arena of personal freedom was growing more circumscribed by the day. In the streets, alongside the German occupiers, there were French Fascist auxiliaries of one kind or another, with links to Marcel Déat and others among the so-called Paris Collaborators. The previous year all French Jews had been required to wear the yellow star, not by order of the Germans, but on the initiative of Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy's Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Round-ups and deportations were now a regular occurrence. Through the city German propaganda, evoking final victory, was an ever-present feature of life in public places. Denunciations, anonymous letters and police raids wee a constant threat. France has been seized by a Judeo-Bolshevik phobia. The atmosphere is stifling.

So, for Sartre, and every other Frenchman, objective freedom has all but gone. It is against this background that Being and Nothingness, was published, a profoundly Cartesian work, one where subjective forms of freedom find their greatest defence. There, in subjective consciousness, lies the origin of one's absolute freedom, one that is shaped in a state of permanent criticism. All labels are rejected-"How them shall I experience the objective limits of my being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, kind, a civil servant, untouchable, etc.-when will speech have informed me as to which of these are my limits?" It is from these labels that alienation and inauthenticity are created: "Here I am-Jew or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one armed etc. All this for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and still, more important, with no hope of changing it...in a more general way the encounter with a prohibition in my path ('No Jews allowed here')...can only have meaning only on and through the foundations of my free choice. In fact according to the free possibilities which I choose, I can disobey the prohibition, pay no attention to it, or, on the contrary, confer upon it a coercive value which it can hold only because of the weight I attach to it."

Sartre's theory of freedom is expressed, for the most part, in highly abstract terms, but it still has to be read against a specific historical background. The call for freedom, and the parallel denunciation of all forms of bad-faith, was never more meaningful in Nazi France.

Why did the Germans allow this, F Hebert? Well, because they operated in some areas a fairly relaxed censorship policy, especially over such abstract works as Being and Nothingness. It also helped if the author expressed an anti-German message which the Germans themselves could not understand, as Sartre did in his play, No Exit, which concludes with his most famous quote "Hell is other People", or "l'enfer, c'est les autres" in French. By this time the French ad long ceased to refer to the occupiers as Boches-they were, quite simply, Les autres. Clio the Muse (talk) 02:39, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Clio. Arising from that, why weren't the Germans (Nazis) even a little bit suspicious if it was something intellectual that they couldn't understand? Was this a blindness in occupied France but not in other countries they occupied? I might have missed the point, though Julia Rossi (talk) 02:49, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, the censors in Paris probably could understand Being and Nothingness reasonably well, Julia; it was really a question of what kind of impact such am abstruse work was likely to have. It has to be said that the German authorities, in Paris at least, acted with quite a high degree of liberality when it came to certain areas of French intellectual life, much more so than they did elsewhere in Europe, especially in places-like Poland-where all intellectual freedom was ruthlessly suppressed. Clio the Muse (talk) 03:11, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Thinking Poland, was there a reason for this difference, or was there nothing as abstruse being published in Poland? Julia Rossi (talk) 06:49, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid that the Polish experience of the war was much harsher than that of Western Europe. It's relatively easy to find the pages (eg. Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, but the German occupation of Poland began with mass arrests of intellectuals and the ghetto-isation of the Jews, and things got very much worse from there. By the end of the war, Poland had lost between 20-25% of her population. There wasn't much scope for an intellectual life, but you might want to check Józef Czapski and Pope John Paul II (who was a seminarian in Krakow at the time). --Major Bonkers (talk) 11:12, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I would endorse what Major Bonkers has written here, Julia. Like almost everything else in the Nazi scheme of things, there was no consistency in occupation policy, which varied quite widely from country to country, and even from region to region. But it was unremittingly harsh in Poland. The long-term intention was to turn what was left of the country into a source of helot labour for the Thousand Year Reich, people who would only need the most basic levels of education. Soon after the victory over Poland in 1939 intellctuals, university teachers and specialists of all sorts were rounded up and murdered, some in concentration camps, others by Einsatzgruppen. The aim was to deprive the Polish people of any kind of leadership, or leadership potential.

In relation to the last point I made above about Nazi censorship policy in Paris, I may have conveyed the wrong impression in saying that it helped if the Germans did not understand an author's inner meaning. It would be better to say that, in the age old battle between censorship and freedom, the subtleties of language have been used to overcome artificial obstacles of all sorts. In hearing that hell was 'the others' a French audience at the time would have been fully aware of the author's true meaning. But if challenged by the Germans it would be easy enough for Sartre to pass it off as a simple statement, fully consistent with the theme of the play. So far as I am aware, he never was challenged. Clio the Muse (talk) 00:06, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Henry Rudolf de Salis, UK, businessman and author, 1866-1936

I am looking for biographical information about the life, career and family of Henry Rudolf de Salis. I know that the de Salis family originated in Switzerland and has branches in the UK and Australia. Henry Rudolf de Salis was a director and the Chairman of an English canal carrying comany called Fellows, Morton & Clayton. He wrote "Bradshaw's Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales" first published in 1904. Andries van de Boom Andries van de Boom (talk) 16:17, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

We have an article on John Francis Charles, 7th Count de Salis-Soglio, who appears to be Henry Rodolph's brother. It contains some outline information about Henry Rodolph, and some of the references at the bottom of the article may be useful. Gandalf61 (talk) 16:51, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Saints: Black Madonna of Częstochowa

Does anyone know the saints by our lady the Black Madonna of Częstochowa in this mosaic ? Bewareofdog 17:28, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Researching... but here is a photo showing the mosaic on the outside of the basilica. SaundersW (talk) 17:52, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

From the attributes, and from the various histories of the icon, my guess is that the figure on the left with the book is St Luke the Evangelist who is supposed to have painted the icon of the Black Madonna in the basilica, and the figure to the right in monk's robes is Saint Paul of Thebes after whom the order of monks who held the icon is named. Sorry, no positive information. SaundersW (talk) 18:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I can't tell you for sure, Bewareofdog, and maybe SaundersW is right, but considering that the two men have no halos, they might not be saints at all. It could be that they are King John II Casimir of Poland (though you can't be sure as he's not wearing a crown) and Abbot Augustyn Kordecki. — Kpalion^(talk) 20:40, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Good point. There are very few clues to their identity, and apart from the book, no strong reason to identify the left hand figure as an evangelist. Neither have enough attributes to make any positive identification. The date on the mosaic is 2000 and the signature if "FAVRET - ITALY". SaundersW (talk) 01:35, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

That is Fabiano Favret from Pietrasanta.[2]  --Lambiam 22:29, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

And the link that Lambiam provided confirms my guess: the two men in the mosaic are King John Casimir and Father Augustyn Kordecki. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:43, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

EEUU: meaning of this abbreviation?

Why does this redirect to USA? What does it stand for? - Kittybrewster ☎ 17:37, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

"Estados Unidos" is abbreviated as "EEUU" (also: EE. UU.) because in Spanish the abbreviation for a plural item doubles the letter of the abbreviation. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:39, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

We have a section of an article about plural acronyms, although the doubling thing only gets one paragraph: Acronym_and_initialism#Representing_plurals_and_possessives. --Allen (talk) 22:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

This only works if each of the pluralized terms is abbreviated into one single letter (as is this case, in which E stands for Estados and U for Unidos. The correct form of the abbreviation is "EE. UU.".

Another example is FF. AA., Fuerzas Armadas (Military Forces). Pallida  Mors 22:58, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Similarly, in English, we write "pp." for "pages", and "Ss." for "Saints". There are probably other examples. -- Coneslayer (talk) 13:25, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

A case in which a two-letter abbreviation is pluralized by the doubling of only one letter is MSS for "manuscripts." Deor (talk) 15:57, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

And there's "opp.", the plural of "op." (opus). -- JackofOz (talk) 22:25, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Just to clarify my previous statement: I was speaking of Spanish rules of pluralization. Pallida  Mors 16:14, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I knew that; my comment was a tangential observation rather than an attempt to contradict you. (I certainly don't want to get on the wrong side of pallida mors.) Deor (talk) 16:25, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

LOL... Greetings. Pallida  Mors 18:04, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Dickens on Social Class

What was Charles Dicken's views on social class? How are these views expressd in his novels? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrs 'Arris (talk • contribs) 19:03, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

My advice is to read them. Of course, if you only wan't to know for an exam or term paper, you won't bother, but it will be your loss. AllenHansen (talk) 20:15, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

His protagonists are almost always solid, hard-working middle-class types, such as would appeal in the Victorian reading public. Excepting Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, none of his novels has a central working-class hero or heroine; and even Oliver is found to come from solid stock in the end, and Pip is taken far beyond his lowly origins.. What his novels express above all, though, is the distaste the new aspiring middle-class have for traditional elites; either narrow in vision, like Sir Leicester Deadlock in Bleak House; predatory and treacherous, like Sir Mulberry Hawk in Nicholas Nickleby, or foppish and stupid, like Sir Mulberry's friend, Lord Frederick Verisopht. Even Steerforth, whom Dickens’s treats with a degree of sympathy in David Copperfield, has a languid and amoral quality that the author always associates with a certain kind of decadent upper-class seducer. Clio the Muse (talk) 03:00, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

On the other hand, there's Eugene Wrayburn... AnonMoos (talk) 12:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, Our Mutual Friend, my favourite! Eugene Wrayburn pursues Lizzie Hexam with the same selfish determination as Steerforth pursued Little Emily. The end result may have been the same but for the murderous attack of Bradley Headstone, which serves to redeem Eugene, who marries Lizzie on what he supposes is his death bed. A better example from the novel of a 'toff' with a degree of moral sense would have been Mortimer Lightwood, though he only ventures the mildest of criticism against his friend's earlier conduct. Clio the Muse (talk) 00:19, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Mortimer Lightwood is more of an ordinary conventional "young gentleman of leisure" character (without pronounced individual character traits or eccentricities) -- as opposed to Eugene Wrayburn's striking pose of a languid dandy -- and is also a less central character in the book's plot. Not sure I see too much in common between the basic personalities of Steerforth and Wrayburn, but there's only a little bit of difference between Eugene Wrayburn and Jem Harthouse... AnonMoos (talk) 11:49, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn't attempting to say that the personalities of Steerforth and Wrayburn were similar, merely their actions. Hmm...Jem Harthouse? Steerforth and Wrayburn do have redeeming qualities, but Harthouse is surely the 'cad' in the purest, most Platonic form! He would have seduced and abandoned Lizzie long before dear old Bradley caught up with him! Clio the Muse (talk) 23:28, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Jem Harthouse and Eugene Wrayburne are similar in being rather idle and indecisive characters who sometimes treat serious matters in a spirit of somewhat detached game-playing (not to mention that they both conceive a strong antipathy for the brothers of the object of their attentions). Jem Harthouse doesn't immediately act on a sudden impulse, but lays an elaborate plan which involves a significant element of waiting... AnonMoos (talk) 04:31, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Any heaven in Judaism? If not, why bother?

It is not very clear, from the articles I've looked at here, if there is anything like a heaven in Judaism. If there is not (either being nothing, or being the same for 'saints' and 'sinners') then what motivates Jewish people to continue with their religious observances? 80.0.102.233 (talk) 23:56, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Jewish eschatology#The afterlife and olam haba (the "world to come") might be useful. Algebraist 00:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

The second half of your question is interesting to me, though I come at it from a different angle: What are the different motivations for religious practice, and how do we predict who will share which motivations? I can't find much on Wikipedia about this question... I would have expected it to be at Psychology of religion, but there are only a few hints there. --Allen (talk) 01:46, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Generally, pressure from the family and community is what keeps Jewish people Jewish. And, of course, a genuine belief among many people that it's the right thing to do. Some Jewish people might believe that failing to abide by God's commandments may lead to divine punishment on this world, but I would guess that most people nowadays see the warnings of Deuteronomy as warnings to the community as a whole and/or warnings that people who abandon the Torah's moral principles will wind up screwing up their own lives. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:52, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest that many "Jewish people" identify as such with little or no regard for the religious aspect and its theological and eschatological framework. If the query is why Jews practice Judaism (the religion)— whether halachic or less so—consider that it has a great deal to do with how to live decently in this world. -- Deborahjay (talk) 23:18, 12 March 2008

If you want an interesting, funny, and certainly non-canonical take on it, get a copy of Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament, in which he compares Orthodox Judaism (a tradition in which he was raised) with Stockholm syndrome, prisoners held hostage by an angry God who in turn worship him. It's a really funny hilarious book, though probably less so if you are an Orthodox Jew! --98.217.18.109 (talk) 13:08, 12 March 2008 (UTC)