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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Hannah Arendt's Political Action: A Dialectic Of Expression And Deliberation, Paul Richard Leisen
Hannah Arendt's Political Action: A Dialectic Of Expression And Deliberation, Paul Richard Leisen
Dissertations
Commentators disagree about what Hannah Arendt means by political action. One interpretation emphasizes that political action is rational deliberation, another interpretation identifies political action with expressiveness or the performative expression of personal virtuosity and greatness. Both interpretations fall short. The deliberative model captures the aspect of constituting political power through collective agreement based on reason-giving (combining a plurality into a polity). The expressive model captures the aspect of natality, originality, spontaneity, and freedom from conventional ways of reasoning. The deliberative and expressive models of Hannah Arendt's political action can be reconciled contrary to a claim that her theory is incoherent. …
Character Luck And Moral Responsibility: The Character Of The Ordinary Person In Aristotle's Rhetoric And Politics, Marcella Linn
Character Luck And Moral Responsibility: The Character Of The Ordinary Person In Aristotle's Rhetoric And Politics, Marcella Linn
Dissertations
There are many significant factors, such as one’s natural temperaments and upbringing, that are outside of one’s control and affect one’s character. This calls into question one’s responsibility for one’s character, and if we are not responsible for our characters, then it seems we cannot be held responsible for the many actions that stem from them. I will show how a person can be responsible for her character and actions stemming from it despite the pervasiveness of character luck. To do this, I develop an account of character and responsibility from various passages in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics. …