Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

A Good Place For Moral Philosophy: Associate Professor Lydia Moland On The Good Place And Why All Of Her Students Should Be Haunted, Gerry Boyle Dec 2021

A Good Place For Moral Philosophy: Associate Professor Lydia Moland On The Good Place And Why All Of Her Students Should Be Haunted, Gerry Boyle

Colby Magazine

Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland recently moderated a WBUR CitySpace event featuring producer Michael Schur and actor William Jackson Harper of the NBC comedy The Good Place. The award-winning show is about a character, Eleanor, who is mistakenly sent to “the good place” in the afterlife and then has to figure out how to become a better person. Moland spoke with Colby Magazine Editorial Director Gerry Boyle ’78 about television, morality, and how the most important ideas should fit on a bumper sticker.


Socrates And The Divine Mission Of Political Friendship, Ronahn I. Clarke Jan 2021

Socrates And The Divine Mission Of Political Friendship, Ronahn I. Clarke

Honors Theses

Plato is widely regarded as an authoritarian political thinker on account of Socrates’ endorsement of rule by philosopher kings in the Republic. Yet the Republic should not be mistaken for a political treatise or the entirety of Socrates’ political theorizing. Each of the Socratic dialogues is concerned with the political endeavour of reorienting souls within communities of souls toward virtue via philosophical discussion. This project examines the Lysis, the Gorgias, the Symposium, the Republic, and other dialogues in the context of the philosophical mission Socrates establishes in the Apology. Socrates’ philosophical work expresses a …


The Transcendental Foundation Of Kant's Cosmopolitanism, Daniel J. Ellison Jan 2021

The Transcendental Foundation Of Kant's Cosmopolitanism, Daniel J. Ellison

Honors Theses

Scholarship on Kant’s philosophy of history has insufficiently considered its place in the larger system of transcendental idealism. In this project, I argue that Kant’s guarantee of progress in history is grounded in his universal characterizations of human nature, which he makes both explicitly, as with the notion of “unsociable sociability” put forth in “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” and implicitly, as with what I term a responsiveness to reasons. These characterizations are grounded, I claim, in an attribution of reason which is always already achieved to the constitution of human beings, which emerges out of …


The Tetralemma Of Nothingness, Samuel O. Sessions Jan 2021

The Tetralemma Of Nothingness, Samuel O. Sessions

Honors Theses

Grammatically, the question is rather simple. It is when we set out to answer the question that it suddenly becomes complex. What is nothing? Its very asking seems almost impossible because the ‘is’ within it brushes up against its meaning, producing paradox. How do we even begin to get at a something that is not a something? Immediately, you remark how similar this task is to a child chasing fairies in the forest or hunting for ghosts in the attic. Will we be doomed from the outset? If so, then what is the point? Our many predecessors have had varying …