This paper aims at looking at Shakespeare’s character Falstaff through the prism of some of the seven deadly sins. The paper doesn’t claim that it explores all the sins present in Falstaff’s personality. The main sins that this paper examines in Falstaff’s personality are the sins of gluttony, lust, avarice, sloth, and pride. The presence of so many sins in the personality of one character that are interconnected is known as concatenation of sins. As Bernard Spivack and David Wiles have (...) explained, in many ways Falstaff serves as the Vice figure from the morality plays tempting Prince Hal. Since in the morality plays the Vice figure stems and is associated mainly to the seven deadly sins, this paper will try to show that the fact that Falstaff possesses so many sins can facilitate the possibility of him being identified as stemming from the Vice figure from the morality plays. I will try to find each of the afore-mentioned sins by analyzing Falstaff actions and inactions and by trying to find characteristics of the sins present in Falstaff’s behavior. This paper will also look at Falstaff’s fate and whether there is any similarity between the fate of the Vice figure in the morality plays and the fate of Falstaff in the second part. (shrink)

Este artigo procura analisar o Livro IV da Ética, mostrando como Espinosa, ao pensar as noções de liberdade e servidão humana, escapa às críticas que buscam encontrar em sua filosofia uma contradição entre a idéia de uma natureza absolutamente necessária (“fatalismo”) e sua pretensão de afirmar a liberdade do sábio.

In Part IV of Book I of Hume’s Treatise Hume frequently appeals to an identity-ascribing mechanism of the imagination. A psychological mechanism of which it is a special case, to ‘compleat the union’, is also prominent. These mechanisms belong to the imagination narrowly conceived according to a distinction in section ix of Part III. The role and significance of these mechanisms in the development of Hume’s scepticism is explored. Appreciation of their significance is also argued to cast light (...) on Hume’s refusal to locate necessity in objects and to suggest a plausible explanation of his second thoughts about personal identity. (shrink)

So far we have considered what it means for something to be conscious. In this section we place these considerations in a larger framework, exploring the uses of consciousness. Thus we move away from a consideration of separate conscious events îï to a concern with conscious îaccessï, îproblem-solvingï and îcontrolï. Chapter 6 describes the commonly observed "triad" of conscious problem assignment, unconscious computation of routine problems, and conscious display of solutions and subgoals. This triadic pattern is observable in many psychological (...) tasks, including creative processes, mental arithmetic, language comprehension, recall, and voluntary control. It suggests that conscious contents often serve to assign problems to unconscious processors which work out routine details, constrained by a goal context. The interplay between conscious contents and goal contexts also provides a plausible account of the stream of consciousness. In Chapter 7, a contrastive analysis of voluntary versus involuntary actions leads to a modern version of James' ideomotor theory, suggesting that voluntary actions are also recruited by conscious goal images. This view fits smoothly into our developing theory. (shrink)