The ethics of diet : a catena of authorities deprecatory of the practice of flesh-eating / Howard Williams ; introduction by Carol J. Adams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams, Howard, 1837-1931.

Contributor:

Adams, Carol J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Vegetarianism.

Diet.

Physical Description:

xxxiii, 394 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2003]

Summary:

Ethical vegetarianism is not a recent development, as this unrivaled historical anthology dramatizes. When The Ethics of Diet was first published 120 years ago, thoughtful people read and endorsed it. But then it became a rare book, hard to find even in libraries. With this new edition, it is at last available again. As Carol J. Adams writes in her new introduction, "Now we can join Gandhi and Tolstoy and nameless others who encountered this vigorous and invigorating book. Welcome to a company of radicals who believed we could and should stop eating nonhuman animals. They brought vegetarianism out of history and into the here and now. Williams tried to ensure that this is where vegetarianism would stay: embodied in the present. That is his legacy and his challenge to future generations."

A classic of vegetarian writing, The Ethics of Diet is unrivaled in its identification of the ideas of "Humane Living" within "the known history of our world." Howard Williams presents a line of thought, a continuous thread, a tradition, a catena, of protestation against living on "Butchery." What he finds striking is the variety of the witnesses. Among the prophets of "Reformed Dietetics" who have "shrunk from the regime of blood" he includes Siddhartha Gautama, Pythagoras, Plato, Hesiod, Epicurus, Seneca, Ovid, Thomas More, Montaigne, De Mandeville, Pope, Voltaire, Swedenborg, Wesley, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Lamartine, Michelet, Bentham, Sinclair, Schopenhauer, Thoreau, and many others. Their words are accompanied by the vigorous narrative voice of Williams himself, who put to rest, once and for all, the idea that vegetarianism is a fad. The Illinois edition reprints the first edition, of 1883, and adds an appendix containing new material introduced in the 1896 edition.

Contents:

I. Hesiod 1

II. Pythagoras 4

III. Plato 12

IV. Ovid 23

V. Seneca 27

VI. Plutarch 41

VII. Tertullian 51

VIII. Clement of Alexandria 56

IX. Porphyry 63

X. Chrysostom 76

XI. Cornaro 83

XII. Thomas More 90

XIII. Montaigne 94

XIV. Gassendi 100

XV. Ray 106

XVI. Evelyn 107

XVII. Mandeville 113

XVIII. Gay 115

XIX. Cheyne 120

XX. Pope 128

XXI. Thomson 134

XXII. Hartley 138

XXIII. Chesterfield 139

XXIV. Voltaire 141

XXV. Haller 156

XXVI. Cocchi 157

XXVII. Rousseau 159

XXVIII. Linne 164

XXIX. Buffon 166

XXX. Hawkesworth 168

XXXI. Paley 169

XXXII. St. Pierre 173

XXXIII. Oswald 179

XXXIV. Hufeland 184

XXXV. Ritson 185

XXXVI. Nicholson 190

XXXVII. Abernethy 199

XXXVIII. Lambe 198

XXXIX. Newton 205

XL. Gleizes 208

XLI. Shelley 218

XLII. Phillips 235

XLIII. Michelet 243

XLIV. Cowherd 249

XLV. Metcalfe 251

XLVI. Graham 256

XLVII. Lamartine 262

XLVIII. Struve 270

XLIX. Daumer 281

L. Schopenhaur 286

I. Hesiod 293

II. The Golden Verses 294

III. The Buddhist Canon 295

IV. Ovid 299

V. Musonius 303

VI. Lessio 305

VII. Cowley 308

VIII. Tryon 309

IX. Hecquet 314

X. Pope 318

XI. Chesterfield 320

XII. Jenyns 322

XIII. Pressavin 324

XIV. Schiller 326

XV. Bentham 327

XVI. Sinclair 329

XVII. Byron 331.

Notes:

Originally published: London : F. Pitman, 1883.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0252028511

0252071301

OCLC:

50773643