Tragic Fanaticism: Milton’s Motions

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-144
Author(s):  
Ross Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Problem ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Passive Action

Chapter 4 argues that polemics attempting to claim Milton’s Samson Agonistes as either a celebration or condemnation of terrorism profoundly mistake the value of the play’s literary and philosophical investigation into fanaticism. Milton’s play inherits the problem of “passive action” that Donne brought into view and Hobbes attempted to dismiss. Developing a new theory of tragedy to address the problem of fanaticism, Milton bars his audience—and Samson himself—from knowledge of whether or not Samson is an organ of divine might. This tragic unknowability is the major aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical problem with which the witness of fanatical violence confronts modernity.

The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
First Person ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

Feminist Cyber-Artivism, Musicing, and Music Teaching and Learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-312
Author(s):  
Marissa Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Music Teaching ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Voice

This chapter asks an important, yet seemingly illusive, question: In what ways does the internet provide (or not) activist—or, for present purposes “artivist”—opportunities and engagements for musicing, music sharing, and music teaching and learning? According to Asante (2008), an “artivist (artist + activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation” (p. 6). Given this view, can (and should) social media be a means to achieve artivism through online musicing and music sharing, and, therefore, music teaching and learning? Taking a feminist perspective, this chapter interrogates the nature of cyber musical artivism as a potential means to a necessary end: positive transformation. In what ways can social media be a conduit (or hindrance) for cyber musical artivism? What might musicing and music sharing gain (or lose) from engaging with online artivist practices? In addition to a philosophical investigation, this chapter will examine select case studies of online artivist music making and music sharing communities with the above concerns in mind, specifically as they relate to music education.

Automated argument adjudication to solve ethical problems in multi-agent environments

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 310-335
Author(s):  
Selmer Bringsjord ◽  
Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu ◽  
Michael Giancola
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Problem ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Artificial Agent ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
Multi Agent

Abstract Suppose an artificial agent a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} , as time unfolds, (i) receives from multiple artificial agents (which may, in turn, themselves have received from yet other such agents…) propositional content, and (ii) must solve an ethical problem on the basis of what it has received. How should a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} adjudicate what it has received in order to produce such a solution? We consider an environment infused with logicist artificial agents a 1 , a 2 , … , a n {a}_{1},{a}_{2},\ldots ,{a}_{n} that sense and report their findings to “adjudicator” agents who must solve ethical problems. (Many if not most of these agents may be robots.) In such an environment, inconsistency is a virtual guarantee: a adj {a}_{\text{adj}} may, for instance, receive a report from a 1 {a}_{1} that proposition ϕ \phi holds, then from a 2 {a}_{2} that ¬ ϕ \neg \phi holds, and then from a 3 {a}_{3} that neither ϕ \phi nor ¬ ϕ \neg \phi should be believed, but rather ψ \psi instead, at some level of likelihood. We further assume that agents receiving such incompatible reports will nonetheless sometimes simply need, before long, to make decisions on the basis of these reports, in order to try to solve ethical problems. We provide a solution to such a quandary: AI capable of adjudicating competing reports from subsidiary agents through time, and delivering to humans a rational, ethically correct (relative to underlying ethical principles) recommendation based upon such adjudication. To illuminate our solution, we anchor it to a particular scenario.

Samson on the Yard: Teaching Milton’s Samson Agonistes in an Arizona Prison

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
David Hawkes ◽  
Joe Lockard
Keyword(s):  
Samson Agonistes

Samson Agonistes 1665-6.

1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Albert S. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Samson Agonistes

A Classical Ethical Problem in Ancient Philosophy and Rabbinic Thought: The Case of the Shipwrecked

2013 ◽  
Vol 106 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katell Berthelot
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Ethical Problem ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Jewish Ethics ◽  
Philosophical Texts

The story found in Sifra Behar 5.3 and in the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Meṣi'a 62a, about two persons traveling in a desert and having a quantity of water that allows only one of them to reach civilization and survive, is well known and frequently referred to in books and articles dealing with Jewish ethics. The rabbinic texts raise the question: Should the travelers share the water and die together, or should the person who owns the water drink it in order to survive? This story reminds one of the case of the two shipwrecked men who grasp a plank that can bear the weight of only one person and therefore enables only one of them to reach the coast, a case referred to in philosophical texts from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The similarities between the issues dealt with in the rabbinic texts and the Greco-Roman ones have indeed been noticed by several scholars working on rabbinic literature (whereas specialists of ancient philosophy generally ignore them). However, a systematic comparative analysis of the rabbinic tradition and the philosophical texts has not been undertaken so far, nor have previous studies paid much attention to the issues at stake within the Greco-Roman texts themselves, to their inner logic and relationships with one another.

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