scholarly journals A MAN IN THE COURT: EXPLORING THE THEME OF JUSTICE IN AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 051-062
Author(s):  
Sistiadinita Sistiadinita

Having to interact with crime fiction which presumably is considered as ephemeral literature, cannot be an excuse to dissolve the theme of justice inside the plots. Agatha Christie as the Mistress of Complication and Mystery, has written series of murder and mystery fiction since the beginning of twentieth century. And Then There Were None or entitled Ten Little Niggers, one of her masterpieces depicts Christie’s unique disposition of turning perception from ‘detective as criminal solver’ into ‘murderer as justice protector’. This paper seeks to analyze how justice is portrayed and challenged by looking at the characters created by Christie as well as making a more thorough analysis of the symbols and dialogues. The result of this paper portrays that the idea of justice, just like human beings, can be flawed or misinterpreted even by the so- called a man in the court.

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338
Author(s):  
Daniel Del Gobbo

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.


Author(s):  
Paul Franks

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.


Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Mathias Daven

If we wish to understand a totalitarian system as a whole, we need first to understand the central role of the concentration camp as a laboratorium to experiment in total domination. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in the twentieth century shows how a totalitarian regime cannot survive without terror; and terror will not be effective without concentration camps. Experiments in concentration camps had as their purpose, apart from wiping out any freedom or spontaneity, the abolishing of space between human beings, abolishing space for politics. Thus, totalitarianism did not mirror only the politics of extinction, but also the extinction of politics. As a way forward, Arendt analyses political theory that forces the reader to understand power no longer under the rubric of domination or violence – although this avenue is open – but rather under the rubric of freedom. Arendt is convinced that the life of a destroyed nation can be restored by mutual forgiveness and mutual promises, two abilities rooted in action. Political action, as with other acts, is identical with the ability to commence something new. Keywords: Totalitarisme, antisemitisme, imperialisme, dominasi, teror, kebebasan, kedaulatan, kamp konsentrasi, politik, ideologi, tindakan


Author(s):  
James Gouinlock

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood. Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence. Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy. The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself. Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.


2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Tze Ming Ng

AbstractThis article aims to apply the concept of 'glocalization' to the study of theology and culture. China is chosen as a case study, with particular focus on a Chinese theologians discussion of the interplay between Christianity and Chinese Culture in the early twentieth century China. Francis Wei was the first Chinese President of Huazhong University in Wuhan, 1929–1952, and he was appointed as the first Henry Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity in 1945–46. Wei's conviction was that Christianity and Chinese culture could be complementary. He held that China needed Christianity for a better understanding of God's nature and the way human beings could communicate with God, while maintaining that Christianity needed China to move beyond western denominationalism. Moreover, Christianity could not become a universal religion without including China. This article argues that Wei's work is relevant to the contemporary discussion about interaction between globalization and localization, known as 'glocalization'.


1992 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir A. Uspensky

There are human beings whose intellectual power exceeds that of ordinary men. In my life, in my personal experience, there were three such men, and one of them was Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov. I was lucky enough to be his immediate pupil. He invited me to be his pupil at the third year of my being student at the Moscow University. This talk is my tribute, my homage to my great teacher.Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was born on April 25, 1903. He graduated from Moscow University in 1925, finished his post-graduate education at the same University in 1929, and since then without any interruption worked at Moscow University till his death on October 20, 1987, at the age 84½.Kolmogorov was not only one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. By the width of his scientific interests and results he reminds one of the titans of the Renaissance. Indeed, he made prominent contributions to various fields from the theory of shooting to the theory of versification, from hydrodynamics to set theory. In this talk I should like to expound his contributions to mathematical logic.Here the term “mathematical logic” is understood in a broad sense. In this sense it, like Gallia in Caesarian times, is divided into three parts:(1) mathematical logic in the strict sense, i.e. the theory of formalized languages including deduction theory,(2) the foundations of mathematics, and(3) the theory of algorithms.


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