Practical Necessity and Moral Heroism

Author(s):  
Kyle Fruh

Discussions of closely associated notions of practical necessity, volitional necessity, and moral incapacity have profited from a focus on cases of agential crisis to further our understanding of how features of an agent’s character might bind her. This paper turns to agents in crises in order to connect this way of being bound to the phenomenon of moral heroism. The connection is fruitful in both directions. Importing practical necessity into examinations of moral heroism can explain the special sense of bindingness moral heroes frequently express while preserving the status of heroic acts as supererogatory. It also helps explain how heroes persevere and act as so few others do. On the other hand, the context of moral heroism allows a fuller development of some features of the concept of practical necessity, shedding more illuminating light on the roots of practical necessity in character through recent findings in the psychology of moral exemplars.

1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

A strange contrast exists in the status of the Christian Church in the past seventy years. On the one hand the Church has clearly lost some of the ground which once appeared to be safely within its possession. On the other hand it has become more widely spread geographically and, when all mankind is taken into consideration, more influential in shaping human affairs than ever before in its history. In a paper as brief as this must of necessity be, space can be had only for the sketching of the broad outlines of this paradox and for suggesting a reason for it. If details were to be given, a large volume would be required. Perhaps, however, we can hope to do enough to point out one of the most provocative and important set of movements in recent history.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kader Konuk

AbstractThe place of Jews was highly ambiguous in the newly founded Turkish Republic: In 1928 an assimilationist campaign was launched against Turkish Jews, while only a few years later, in 1933, German scholars—many of them Jewish—were taken in so as to help Europeanize the nation. Turkish authorities regarded the emigrants as representatives of European civilization and appointed scholars like Erich Auerbach to prestigious academic positions that were vital for redefining the humanities in Turkey. This article explores the country's twofold assimilationist policies. On the one hand, Turkey required of its citizens—regardless of ethnic or religious origins—that they conform to a unified Turkish culture; on the other hand, an equally assimilationist modernization project was designed to achieve cultural recognition from the heart of Europe. By linking historical and contemporary discourses, this article shows how tropes of Jewishness have played—and continue to play—a critical role in the conception of Turkish nationhood. The status of Erich Auerbach, Chair of the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at İstanbul University from 1936 to 1947, is central to this investigation into the place of Turkish and German Jews in modern Turkey.


Proglas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Getsov ◽  
◽  
◽  

The paper is part of a series of publications that set out to examine various aspects in the analysis of appositive constructions. The purpose of this particular study is to reveal the multidimensional, diverse, and complex interaction between three types of syntactic relations – attributive, predicative, and appositive. The study offers a critical review of various theories on the status of the grammatical relation between the components of non-detached (close) appositive constructions. The main argument of this paper is that determining this status, on the one hand, is a function of the morphological and semantic characteristics of the components of the construction, while, on the other hand, it determines their syntactic status.


Author(s):  
Anne Knudsen

Anne Knudsen: The Century of Zoophilia Taking as her point of departure the protests against a dying child having his last wish fulfilled because his wish was to kill a bear, the author argues that animals have achieved a higher moral status than that of humans during the 20th century. The status of animals (and of “nature”) is seen as a consequence of their muteness which on the one hånd makes it impossible for animals to lie, and which on the other hånd allows humans to imagine what animals would say, if they spoke. The development toward zoophilia is explained as a a logical consequence of the cultural naturalisation of humans, and the author draws the conclusion that we may end up entirely without animals as a category. This hypothetical situation will lead to juridical as well as philosophical complications.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

AbstractIn seventeenth-century religious discourse, the status of solitude was deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, solitude was valued as a setting and preparation for self-knowledge and meditation; on the other hand, it had negative associations with singularity, pride and even schism. The ambiguity of solitude reflected a crucial tension between the temptation to withdraw from contemporary society, as hopelessly corrupt, and endeavours to reform it. Ecclesiastical movements which stood at the margins of confessional orthodoxies, such as Jansenism (especially in its moral dimension of Rigorism), Puritanism and Pietism, targeted individual conscience but also worked at controlling and disciplining popular behaviour. They may be understood as attempts to pursue simultaneously withdrawal and engagement.


Antiquity ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 15 (60) ◽  
pp. 371-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Matheson

The rabbit shares one characteristic with the archaeologist—both dig into the earth. Hence the latter, contemplating some object or evidence revealed by his spade, may sometimes be viewing merely the result of the activities of a humbler but much more numerous type of excavator. Is he not warned to ‘always make sure that an apparent post-hole is not a rabbit- or rat-hole’? And does not Professor James Ritchie describe the rabbit as ‘a burrower and a vandal which makes short cuts through the neat layers and classifications of the excavator’? On the other hand, the rabbit's activity or lack of it may on occasion be of service; it was a long patch of virgin turf on Easton Down, untouched by rabbits or moles, which led Dr Stone in 1932 to remove the turf, thus revealing a layer of tightly packed flint nodules covering a Bronze Age urn-field. Hence no apology, we feel, is needed for an article on the rabbit in a journal primarily concerned with archaeological research; particularly as much of the article deals with the status of the rabbit in medieval times, a topic which has already figured briefly in ANTIQUITY.


Author(s):  
Sabahi Borzu

This chapter discusses ten important findings included in this book. One finding is the dual origin of the modern rules on State responsibility and reparation in both private law notions and public international law, resulting in the objective of reparation of putting the aggrieved party in the ‘hypothetical position’, that would have existed if the unlawful act had not occurred. This objective is mirrored in the modern Chorz ów Factory formula. Restitution, which seeks to re-establish the status quo ante, may need to be accompanied by additional compensation to fully reach the hypothetical position. The amount of compensation, on the other hand, based on the recent jurisprudence, may vary depending on whether the acts complained of were lawful or unlawful. Other important points arising from this study concerning the principles of reparation and compensation are also highlighted in the chapter.


1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Brian Langille

It is not transparently obvious why legal theorists are increasingly attracted to the ideas and methods of Ludwig Wittgenstein. After all, Wittgenstein’s writings are notoriously difficult and he said almost nothing, and certainly nothing sustained, about law. And why would self-proclaimed legal theorists be attracted to someone who was quite explicitly hostile to “theory”, who viewed philosophy as a sort of therapy, and who said, famously, “philosophy leaves everything as it is”? But a still more interesting question is, why has Wittgenstein received such curious and conflicting treatment at the hands of the critical legal theorists? On the one hand critical legal theory celebrates Wittgenstein’s work as a key to the dismantling of traditional jurisprudence, but on the other hand critical scholars bemoan his alleged debilitating endorsement of the status quo. It is this last question upon which this essay is focussed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 45-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irène Fenoglio

Abstract: Very little research has been devoted to the way in which the textual genetics approaches the manuscripts in the text processing. However the future of the genetics depends, partly, on the interest which one can carry to this new materiality of the manuscript. The notion of text, the concept of what text is, have they been changed, or at least modified by the use of text processing? To write a text is to elaborate a discourse in the form of an utterance and to record it. The order of the discourse, in other words, the semiotic (the linguistic recognizable) / semantic (the meaning expressed (uttered) in the discourse) ratio should in no way be modified by the use of text processing. What changes, on the other hand, it is the materialization of the paper support of the text and consequently the status of this materialization.


Polar Record ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Gillies Ross
Keyword(s):  

The search for Sir John Franklin (1847–59) coincided with a growing interest in mesmerism and modern spiritualism in Britain. Several clairvoyants, claiming to ‘see’ Franklin's ships and crews in the Arctic, made statements about the status and location of the overdue expedition, and at least three mediums described communications with Franklin’s spirit. Although the Admiralty provided assistance to Dr Haddock, the mesmerist of Emma, the Bolton clairvoyant, they did not take any action on the basis of her statements, probably because the various accounts were contradictory and could not be verified, and because the Admiralty Lords were sceptical of paranormal phenomena. Lady Franklin, on the other hand, visited clairvoyants and altered the plans for her search expeditions under Forsyth and Kennedy on the basis of a revelation. Recently, an American medium has described more than two dozen conversations with the spirits of Sir John and Lady Franklin.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document