THE MORAL SYSTEM OF SHAKESPEARE INTRODUCTION WHAT IS IMPLIED IN "THE MORAL SYSTEM OF SHAKESPEARE " The title of this work, The Moral System of Shakespeare,..

This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history (...) and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history. (shrink)

Until now, no one has unlocked the profound secrets of this wise and witty adventure tale. If you've wondered why men of action shouldn't lie, how the Battle of Wits could have turned out differently, what a rotten miracle would look like and whether it would amount to malpractice, or how Westley could have killed a lot of innocent people and still be a good guy, then The Princess Bride and Philosophy has all the answers"--P. [4] of cover.

Philosophers explain and criticize many controversial aspects of the ambitious new TV show, His Dark Materials.

Part I : The metaphysics of spoilers. A brief history of spoilers -- What are spoilers? -- Things that can never be spoiled -- What else can be spoiled? -- Vagueness and spoilers -- Part II : The ethics of spoilers. Is it bad to spoil? -- The badness of spoiling -- When is it wrong to spoil? -- When you should spoil -- The timing of spoilers -- The ethics of spoiler alerts -- Part III: The pragmatics of spoilers. (...) Paradoxes of spoiling -- Spoiling remakes and some other tricky cases -- Are our reactions to spoilers justified? -- Culture, relativism, and spoilers -- What to do when you encounter someone who spoils. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Playing the Blues Defining the Blues Wittgenstein to the Rescue Good Blues, Bad Blues, Walking Dead Blues Notes.

We review articles about corporate political activity published in Business & Society since its beginnings 60 years ago and in a set of other leading management journals over the past decade. We present evidence that most studies of CPA use the political markets’ perspective. Under the premise that the contemporary political environment has changed significantly since the inception of the political markets’ perspective, our review asks two interconnected questions. First, to what degree have changes in the political environment challenged the (...) ability of the political markets’ perspective to understand the pillars of politics: issues, institutions, interests, and information? Second, to what degree have CPA scholars augmented or diversified their theoretical arguments to accommodate these changes in the political environment? We document the CPA literature across these dimensions and questions and note that many scholars are already adopting other theories side by side with the political markets’ perspective. (shrink)

This study examines firms that have experienced an industrial and/or environ-mental crisis and proposes that top management team (TMT) characteristics will affect a firm's ability to minimize the severity of these crisis events. Specifically, heterogeneity in the TMT will exhibit a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with the severity of firm crises. Our results suggest that a moderate level of age and tenure heterogeneity are positively related to a firm's ability to successfully minimize the severity of crises. Variance in educational backgrounds was (...) unrelated to crisis severity. Functional background heterogeneity exhibited a curvilinear relationship with crisis severity but was not U-shaped as hypothesized. (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

"A collection of essays that addresses philosophical aspects of the films of Quentin Tarantino, focusing on topics in ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, language, and cultural identity"--Provided by publisher.

This work presents an approach to the study of comparative politics that builds on the assumption that political actors and institutions operate within constructed communities of meaning, which in turn interface with other such communities.

In this paper we reach back to an earlier generation of discussions about both linguistic meaning and moral language to answer the still-current question as to whether and in what way some special non-descriptive feature comprises part of the semantics of identifiably ethical terms. Taking off from the failure of familiar meta-ethical theories, restricted as they are to the Fregean categories of Sense and Force (whether singly or in combination), we propose that one particular variety belonging to Frege’s humble semantic (...) category of Farbung –– what Dummett calls Tone –– holds the key. Specifically, the kinds of expressions that Dummett dubs “expressives”, when properly understood as representing a speaker’s sentiment, solve the mystery not only of moral discourse, but of evaluative language, broadly construed. On this basis we account for moral language’s special relation to action motivation in ways that avoid Moore’s paradox and honor, in unasserted contexts, what Geach calls ‘the Frege point’. Commitments to the public and social character of natural language are also respected. (shrink)

An assortment of different points of view on conspiracy thinking and conspiracy theories, pro and con.

One class of argument against cloning human beings in the contemporary literature focuses on the bad consequences that will befall the clone or “later-twin.” In this paper I consider whether this line of argumentation can be blocked by invoking Parfit’s non-identity problem. I canvass two general strategies for solving the non-identity problem: a consequentialist strategy and a non-consequentialist, rights based strategy. I argue that while each general strategy offers a plausible solution to the non-identity problem as applied to the cases (...) most frequently discussed in the non-identity problem literature, neither provides a reason for puttingaside the non-identity problem when applied to cloning. I conclude (roughly) that the non-identity problem does serve to block this class of argument against cloning. (shrink)

The macaronic poem beginning “Syng y wold, butt, alas!” given the title On the Times by Thomas Wright, has not attracted much notice, but those who have chosen to comment on it do not seem seriously to have questioned Wright's dating of 1388. In what follows I hope to show that this date is wrong and that On the Times was probably written some eight years earlier. Though such redating is hardly likely to enhance the poem's literary reputation, which is (...) deservedly modest, the historical importance of its satire on contemporary abuses is considerably increased once we accept that it was composed on the eve of the Peasants' Revolt. (shrink)

Mr. Robot has been hailed, not only as one of the most haunting and unnerving dramas ever to appear on television, but also as the first accurate popular presentation of how computer hacking and cyberterrorism actually work. This book is aimed at thoughtful fans of this addictive show who will welcome the opportunity to explore Elliot Alderson's world from a philosophical perspective.--Publisher's description.

Looks at the philosophy behind some of the biggest names in pop culture, including movies, video games, music groups, and more.

An investigative team of philosophers uncovers the hidden meanings of this weird and puzzling television show.

The Princess Bride is the 1987 satirical adventure movie that had to wait for the Internet and DVDs to become the most quoted of all cult classics. The Princess Bride and Philosophy is for all those who have wondered about the true meaning of “Inconceivable!,” why the name “Roberts” uniquely inspires fear, and whether it’s truly a miracle to restore life to someone who is dead, but not necessarily completely dead. The Princess Bride is filled with people trying to persuade (...) each other of various things, and invites us to examine the best methods of persuasion. It’s filled with promises, some kept and some broken, and cries out for philosophical analysis of what makes a promise and why promises should be kept. It’s filled with beliefs which go beyond the evidence, and philosophy can help us to decide when such beliefs can be justified. It’s filled with political violence, both by and against the recognized government, and therefore raises all the issues of political philosophy. Westley, Buttercup, Prince Humperdinck, Inigo Montoya, the giant Fezzik, and the Sicilian Vizzini keep on re-appearing in these pages, as examples of philosophical ideas. Is it right for Montoya to kill the six-fingered man, even though there is no money in the revenge business? What’s the best way to deceive someone who knows you’re trying to deceive him? Are good manners a kind of moral virtue? Could the actions of the masked man in black truly be inconceivable even though real? What does ethics have to say about Miracle Max’s pricing policy? How many shades of meaning can be conveyed by “As You Wish”? (shrink)

This work deals with questions that range across the traditional disciplines of natural science and philosophy. Of these questions, some are about things usually thought of as scientific, such as embryonic development and evolution; others are about things, such as human language, intelligence and learning, which have been the concern if both scientists and philosophers.