Lunch hour lectures repository Spring 2010
- Beating cigarette addiction – the latest evidence
- Interpreting opera through economic theory
- Deconstruction today
- See no evil...: The (Im)morality of denying genocide
- Genetic testing for heart disease risk: fact or fiction?
- What would an alien look like?
- Wet dreams: making urban water systems sustainable
- Jeremy Bentham and UCL: Corpse and corpus
- Venomous Women: Poison murderesses in nineteenth-century Germany
- Smartcities + eco-warriors
- Energy and climate; clearing the fog
- Love, death and the pursuit of happiness: How evolution invented Hollywood
- The end of Roman Britain: what ended, when and why?
- Do books have a future?
- Sex, drugs, and rock and roll: Who is doing what in England?
- The social brain
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Jeremy Bentham and UCL: Corpse and corpus
22 February 2010
Thursday 11 February 2010
Professor Philip Schofield (UCL Bentham Project)
What is Jeremy Bentham’s corpse doing in the South Cloisters? Did he provide the financial backing for the foundation of UCL? Was he a professor in the Department of Laws? Does his ghost trundle around the College at night? Does he attend Council meetings, and is he recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’?
As for the corpus, this consists in 60,000 folios of manuscripts deposited in the College Library. For fifty years the Bentham Committee has been overseeing the editing and publication of a new edition of Bentham’s works. Is this extraordinarily large collection of material, much of it in barely decipherable handwriting, as dead as the philosopher himself? Or is it still relevant today?
This lecture marks the anniversary of UCL’s foundation on 11 Feb 1826
Page last modified on 27 nov 09 08:44
