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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy

Who Needs Blame?: Answerability Without Expressed Blame, Sarah Gokhale May 2019

Who Needs Blame?: Answerability Without Expressed Blame, Sarah Gokhale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that we can hold other agents morally responsible without expressing blame and, more strongly, that doing so is preferable. I first argue that blame is fundamentally retributive, and that blame’s retributive foundation is incipiently present even in civilized guises. As such, even though some forms of expressed blame are quite civilized, expressed blame always involves a risk of emotional damage, entrenchment, and escalation. To make things worse, I argue that anger is an exacerbating feature of blame’s retributive foundation. I then argue that, generally speaking, cases of public blame involve higher stakes than cases of private judgments …


An Exposition And Analysis Of Kant’S Account Of Sublimity, Paulina Simone Calistru Feb 2019

An Exposition And Analysis Of Kant’S Account Of Sublimity, Paulina Simone Calistru

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I begin by providing an exposition of Kant’s cognitive and phenomenological trajectory during experiences of mathematical and dynamical sublimity. I use this moment of elucidation to highlight certain implications of Kant’s account which reveal a necessary crutch on sublimity’s self-preservationist motivations, concluding realization of the judging subjects as superior to the power intuited and emphasis on the feeling and apprehension of infinity. This skeletal view of Kant’s argument allows for the argument of my three main criticisms: (i) the incoherence of his sublime feeling with other recounted phenomenologies of the experience, (ii) the fallibility of his key premise which states …