Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 November 12

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November 12

Who was the first female governor?

Today I was reading about Beatriz de la Cueva, who was governor of the Captaincy General of Guatemala in 1541. I checked the List of first women governors and chief ministers and realized to my amazement that the first listed female governor in the list was Nellie Taylor Ross, who started her term almost 400 years afterwards, in 1925.

I am trying to verify, who was the first female governor (not head of state or national head of government) in the world? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 00:22, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy was Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands starting in 1507, but that kind of governor (basically a viceroy for a less significant realm, appointed by, and only responsible to, a king or high-ranking royal official) has very little in common with the governor of a U.S. state... AnonMoos (talk) 04:20, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

A brief search on the interwebs returns the following: 'A satrap was the equivalent of a governor of a region during the ancient Persian and Hellenistic eras, either male or female.' Thus, possibly:

• Mania (satrap) (c440 BC – c399 BC), although the article states that she was a sub-satrap (ie vice-governor). Slightly later satraps include:
  • Artemisia II of Caria (d. 351 BC)
  • Ada of Caria (fl. 377 – 326 BC)

MinorProphet (talk) 21:15, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Logic in the history of Chinese philosophy?

Has Chinese philosophy developed its own tradition of logic? 2A02:8071:60A0:92E0:813F:2BED:28FC:427D (talk) 20:06, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Warring States period philosohers later categorised as 名家 (School of Names) were famous for this, but logical thinking is also evident in the Xunzi, the Han Feizi, and other early works associated with Wuxing (Chinese philosophy).

I'm not sure if it was really formalised until maybe Zhu Xi, and I don't think the Chinese philosophical tradition ever developed their own formal logical grammar. I could be wrong about the stuff in this second paragraph. Folly Mox (talk) 21:26, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

There's a summary of traditional Chinese logic in an early volume of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. One of the most famous quasi-paradoxes is When a white horse is not a horse... AnonMoos (talk) 01:33, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Bank of France scope

Does the Bank of France serve as the central bank for metropolitan France only, or for those parts of France that use the euro (but not franc-using places like French Polynesia), or for all of France? This image highlights countries whose central banks are members of an international organisation, and none of overseas France is highlighted. I assume it's an error, but I don't want to change something and introduce an error, and the fact that different bits of France use different currencies makes the whole situation seem confusing. Nyttend (talk) 22:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The Bank's website has a section[1] where it seems to say that it has delegated some bits to something called IEDOM and IEOM (i'm inferring here). Nanonic (talk) 22:56, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Institut d'émission d'outre-mer/IEOM (English wiki) and fr:Institut_d'émission_des_départements_d'outre-mer/IEDOM (French wiki) Nanonic (talk) 22:58, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The BIS membership criteria is not the same as some one-nation-one-bank-one-currency situation, and it appears (from my reading) to have long abandoned its original purpose of a unified currency and inter-state credit (both of which have been superseded by other organizations). So to your question, to take an example per the article, the U.S. has two banks as members: the US Fed and the NY Fed (which is itself a member of the US Fed). And of course, a majority of the European nations' central banks represented are members of the ECB and lack an independent currency or monetary policy. I don't know exactly what criteria for "jurisdiction" are relevant for making a particular central bank a candidate to join the BIS, and I don't know how such a thing would be represented on the map.

It is especially interesting in the case of France in particular. France has IEOM which administers the CFP franc for some of the overseas collectivities, and IEDOM which administers the Euro for the others and overseas departments. Source: Seze, Marchand, and Bardy 2011.

France also administered the CFA franc (until announcing an exit in 2020) which is somewhat notorious in its role as an arm of Françafrique. Even though the former African colonies of France have no remaining political fealty to France (de juris, per se, ipso facto, etc), their use of a unified Euro-pegged currency (which is at many times an entirely reasonable choice for countries), formerly franc-pegged, that comes with added financial requirements determined by the ECB (such as minimum reserves), means greatly reduced monetary independence.

So if the mapmaker wanted to highlight the jurisdiction of the Bank of France alone, prior to 2020 at least they could have made a good case to include the overseas dependencies and 14 independent African nations. But again, for a BIS map that's apparently not the kind of jurisdiction that is relevant to highlight. A map is just another layer of abstraction though, so there's always going to be some inaccuracy. SamuelRiv (talk) 17:24, 14 November 2023 (UTC)