Propiedad y libertad: una crítica a la teoría de la justicia de Hume desde el pensamiento de Simone de Beauvoir y una respuesta humeana

David Hume and Simone de Beauvoir agree that human beings have a great deal of control over their moral and political lives, which is well captured in Hume’s assertion that “mankind is an inventive species”. But Hume argues that the most important thing needed to settle our social lives and determine justice is the agreement on rules of property, while Beauvoir thinks that the rules of property will never be enough to establish the best life, but rather that we should be focusing on freedom. In this article we reconstruct Hume’s argument for property, then develop a Beauvoirian critique of Hume that brings out the weakness of any theory of property that does not prevent inequalities of property from interfering with freedom. And then we give the last word to a Humean response to Beauvoir that would insist that there can be no freedom but only violence without rules of property, which she ignores. Both thinkers appeal to humanity as an overriding goal, and perhaps that is the way to reconcile the two: we need both property and freedom to achieve our humanity.David Hume y Simone de Beauvoir están de acuerdo en que los seres humanos tienen un grado muy importante de control sobre sus vidas morales y políticas; lo que está muy bien captado en la afirmación de Hume de que “la humanidad es una especie inventiva”. Pero Hume argumenta que lo más importante a la hora de constituir nuestras vidas sociales y establecer la justicia es el acuerdo sobre las reglas de la propiedad, mientras que Beauvoir piensa que las reglas de propiedad nunca serán suficientes para establecer la vida mejor, sino que más bien deberíamos centrarnos en la libertad. En este artículo reconstruimos el argumento de Hume a favor de la propiedad, para desarrollar después una crítica basada en la perspectiva de Simone de Beauvoir que saca a la luz la debilidad de cualquier teoría de la propiedad que no evite que las desigualdades de propiedad interfieran con la libertad, Y después damos la última palabra a una respuesta humeana a Beauvoir que insistiría en que no puede haber libertad –sino solo violencia- sin reglas de propiedad, algo que ella ignora. Ambos pensadores recurren a la humanidad como el objetivo predominante, y quizás esta es la forma de reconciliarlos: necesitamos tanto de la propiedad como de la libertad para lograr nuestra humanidad

General Climatic Conditions and Adaptive Strategies for the Alpine Economies (8th-19th centuries)

The paper presents a provisional outline of the chapter for the handbook “Economic History of the Alps in Pre-Modern Times”. Contrary to the contributions to the conferences Oeconomia Alpium I and II, it focuses less on case studies than on the overall structure of the chapter. Topics of the handbook chapter will be: a) General climatic conditions for Alpine economy • General short time and seasonal weather situation and long-term climatic developments in the Alpine regions (temperature, precipitation, phenology, e.g. snow and ice cover, plant cycles) • Hydrological regimes of Alpine rivers and lakes • Natural hazards in the Alps b) Economic adaptation strategies • Location of settlement places • Water use (irrigation, hydropower, etc.) • Seasonality of Alpine economic life (transhumance, travel and transport, etc.) • Building techniques • Risk management (floods, avalanches, landslides, droughts) • Sustainable and non-sustainable resource management (grain storage, deforestation, etc.) One of the main issues is to determine during the discussion, which content will be included in this chapter or in one of the adjacent topics (such as land-use changes, deforestation, food production and food security, transport, etc.)

Between astrological divination and local knowledge: Prognostics and „epignostics“ related to natural disasters in the Middle Ages

As the term “disaster” (a “corruption of the stars”) shows, the connection between comets, planetary/stellar constellations as well as solar and lunar eclipses on the one hand and (natural) disasters, diseases and other catastrophes on the other hand had been evident for pre-modern societies in Europe. This is particular true for those events that occurred suddenly and could not be explained by local knowledge. However, this relationship had been manifold. Some medieval authors used natural phenomena and disasters to serve as “markers” for a bad reign. Other events such as locust invasions were interpreted as divine punishment and portents of the Last Judgement. Comets such as the one appearing in 1337 were seen as the beginning of a chain reaction leading to locust invasions (1338-1341), extraordinary floods (1342-1343), earthquakes (1348) and Black Death (1347-1352). Therefore, many of the medieval treatises on nature also dealt with comets (Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Bede the Venerable, Honorius of Autun, Thomas of Cantimpré, and finally Konrad of Megenberg in his Buch der Natur) and their meaning. Finally, astrologers pronounced the coming of a new deluge based on the so-called Toledo Letters, such as for the year of 1524 (which was then actually a very dry year)

A landscape of fluvial transport routes. The Eastern Alpine section of the Danube river and its tributaries in pre-modern times

Many European rivers have significantly shaped the nearby living societies and their economies in the past. This is also true for most parts of nowadays Austria, where numerous resources were produced in the Eastern Alps that were then transported on the major tributaries of the Danube river, such as the Salzach, Inn, Traun and Enns rivers. Along the salt trade routes, communities of shippers emerged. In other regions such as Eastern Upper Austria and Western Lower Austria, most of the crafts were dedicated to the procession of iron ore coming from the Erzberg mountain in inner-Alpine Styria. Firewood and timber has been drifted on the rivers and even on artificial canals (such as the Schwarzenberg drifting canal network) to the cities in the Austrian pre-Alpine foothills, both from the high Alps and the Bohemian Forest. The rivers did not only provide the network for trade and knowledge exchange, but also brought the risk of recurring floods to the mills and to the settlements in general. This paper tries to highlight the diverse roles of the Danube river and its tributaries for the development of regional and supra-regional economic networks from the High Middle Ages up to the first half of the 19th century

Urban and village fires as semi-meteorological events: the case of inner-Alpine Swiss settlements facing Foehn storms

Urban and village fires as well as forest fires are substantially influenced by meteorological conditions such as drought, strong winds and thunderstorms. It is therefore important to analyse such events also from an environmental and climate history point of view. This paper will deal with the so-called Foehn, a strong and warm katabatic wind in the central and northern Alpine valleys. Exposed to this frequent weather situation, mostly occurring in the winter half-year, the settlements in Switzerland (and also Austria) faced a permanent and increased risk of urban and village fires (and in some cases also forest fires). The paper will focus on the situation in Switzerland in the 19th and early 20th century, when many of the settlements affected still consisted of mostly wooden houses or stone houses with shingle roofs. It will be shown how the frequent experience of fires led to a learning process, but also a controversial discourse on local identity. On the one hand, besides local and supra-regional solidarity fire insurances became more popular during the 19th century, on the other hand, regulations to broaden the streets and to forbid wooden house and roof constructions were strongly contested. Small cities and villages like Glarus (great fire in 1861) and Meiringen, a tourist spot in the Bernese Alps hit twice by a destructive fire (1879, 1891), were rebuilt of stone with broad rectangular streets. Contrary, in the early 20th century, reconstruction with wooden houses became possible again in the canton of Valais, mostly due to the effort of the Heimatschutz, a trust to preserve old, traditional buildings and building techniques. In all of these cases, Foehn storms were the most important triggers to make small fires becoming catastrophic. In several communities, inhabitants had to serve as storm guards during Foehn events to avoid further fires

Writing a catastrophe: describing and constructing disaster perception in narrative sources from the Late Middle Ages

'Die Wahrnehmung von extremen Naturereignissen als Katastrophe erfolgt allein durch den Menschen. In schriftlichen Quellen des späten Mittelalters ist eine Repräsentation der Katastrophenwahrnehmung durch sprachlich-stilistische Mittel evident. Durch die Anlehnung an biblische Katastrophendarstellungen, wie dies etwa bei der Schilderung von Heuschreckenplagen geschieht, wird die Interpretation als Gottesplage oder apokalyptisches Vorzeichen evoziert. Durch einen 'Kanon' an Motiven werden Großüberschwemmungen als katastrophal gekennzeichnet, etwa durch Berichte von der Zerstörung von Brücken oder der Überflutung von Kirchenräumen oder durch den Hinweis, dass sich niemand mehr an ähnliche Ereignisse erinnern könne. Besonders in der gebildet-frühhumanistischen Literatur kommt es schließlich mitunter zur künstlerisch-künstlichen Übersteigerung des Ereignisses mittels eines Rückgriffs auf historisch-literarische Vorbilder. Das tatsächliche Ausmaß derart 'konstruierter' Katastrophen ist hingegen nur zum Teil über parallele Überlieferungen abschätzbar.' (Autorenreferat)'The perception of natural hazards as catastrophes is specific to humanity. In textual sources of the Late Middle Ages, a representation of catastrophic events is evident through the use of language and stylistic elements. Imitations of biblical depictions of catastrophes, such as the plague of locusts, serve to evoke interpretations of a coming apocalypse or punishment by God. Floods are presented as catastrophic through 'canonized' motifs in reports of destroyed bridges, flooded church buildings or through the consideration present in the text that the event was worse than any in living memory. Artistic and artificial hyperbolisms are especially frequent in educated early humanistic literature that depicts an event with reference to historical or literary examples. The actual extent of such 'constructed' catastrophes is only capable of being estimated through a comparison with other contemporary descriptions of the event.' (author's abstract