In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh This Girl I Lost Touch With This girl, who was afraid to enter a room— a girl born in the woods, on moss, whose family dreamt under quilts, who wore dresses that matched anything fabric in the house, even the dresses without loneliness— I held her hand in the corridor-dark until the speaking-in-tongues at (...) the community college dispersed into prayers with too many gerunds and too much fervor that wouldn’t adjust if you got a thousand dollars in the mail or jury duty, faith subtle as a crucifix the size of God on the highway. I waited with her until it was over, although the prayer group was never really over. Over rooms of crowded, faith-based humidity, she loved corridors of woods, the rushes of running away. This girl and I, we were cult-lured, but then the leader stepped down—was it porn, alcohol? He drove us around in a red jeep without doors— the first time I drove in a man’s car, I was eighteen so I fell in love: looking straight ahead together, arm hair touching, the cathedral of autumn anticipating a shape to hold you, the wind that you sometimes hollered over. What happened I can’t see, but when he left the group, I left: the death of visions. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh 95 This girl could long for a man in her fingernails, and, without talking, take a man from his pregnant wife’s side, have his even newer children, this girl who wouldn’t go in a room all alone, walked right in, somewhere we’ve not been, and never left. Monostich in Praise of Four Missed Foul Shots in a Row, Ending with a Line by Shaquille O’Neal —Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets, Game 1, NBA Final, 1995 Each mistake at the foul line longs to be its own distinct trip-up, divorced from the tragic-comic failure automatic-reflex of a protagonist on a shame-rampage; each delicate flaw of glass, net, rim wants to be denied once at the charity line, once and only once of red-lipsticked points, the naive purity of one aberrant error in calculation—not bring bleacher-crowds to their feet, posterless hands in the vaulted air before tallying Nick Anderson up as Brick Anderson, most hated NBA player of all time, and by his own fans not believing their own eyes as a series of empty arcs toward scoring dovetails into quadruple humiliations and a goofy smile of gutted hopes and boyish fear-tangled awe that any brain so practiced (for this and what else?) could fail so many times in a row, each fail better and Beckett-harder until the last exit out of obliterating loss is part of the abyss too, unless you are quick on your feet for sports broadcasting... but there is no end to swindled championships if you are a man who’s never had to face the extinction of his early twenties or suck the aftertaste of multi-millionaire juice cocktails poured with a legend’s touch, but in the soapy-sweet glass of your Dixie cup liquor, however close to the sound of Shaq’s name spoken in every language, stares your same lovesick reflection in the welt of that shot-glass mirror, mouthing the bitters of paranoid distraction, unripe manhood, aged ingratitude, and a starless Orlando Magic blue diamond broomed over by nursery-rhyme witches brushing out the cobweb-haze because the crowd is always the same crowd calling you swept... each fumbling error of pressure you let get to you, if only it could be a plotless, lyric monostich without arc, not driven to the plot that is your grave, where the unfaithful, the murderers, liars, and cheaters are defined by threads, no, snapped pieces, of seconds and, as Dante would have it, sorted in hell by a singular thought or deed so 96 Hannah Baker Saltmarsh transformative as to name you; the blue and white jersey on the floor, fists and feet, knees and elbows vacuumed in tantrum, hyped up in the court glare and... (shrink)

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher (...) had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe. (shrink)

Given Bernard Suits’ stature in the philosophy of sport, his take on strategic fouling, surprisingly, hasn’t been given much attention in the literature. Rather than relying on a purely empirical or ‘ethos’ approach to justify the Strategic Foul he provides a mixed justification. Suits’ account combines a priori and a posteriori elements. He introduces a third kind of rule, which appears to be unlike rules of skill or constitutive rules, into his conceptual scheme. Suits claims that it is sometimes (...) tactically correct to break such a rule in order to gain an advantage. I will argue that the a priori element in his justification of strategic fouling is unconvincing because there is nothing special about ‘third type’ rule-violations, which incur a ‘fixed penalty’. Furthermore, the a posteriori element ultimately reduces to a rule of skill, and it is doubtful whether it has sufficient normative force to warrant breaking a rule. But, most importantly, the a posteriori element degrades the power of the a priori element. (shrink)

Who was responsible for the murder of Sennacherib? This question fascinated Assyriologists for most of the twentieth century, until a new interpretation of an obscure, fragmentary letter convinced many that a disenfranchised elder son of Sennacherib, Urad-Mullissu, had hatched the conspiracy. Since the publication of this text in 1980 by Simo Parpola, near consensus has developed about these events. In this paper I reexamine the issue and revive the theory that Esarhaddon, Sennacherib’s son and successor, may have been (...) behind the assassination, rather than his elder brother. I do not question the coherence of Parpola’s interpretation, but I suggest that the field may place undue confidence in a single broken, decontextualized letter. More importantly, the evidence implicating Esarhaddon is ample. I extend six arguments that point toward Esarhaddon’s guilt, most of which are derived from Esarhaddon’s own account of events in his famous Nineveh A inscription. I do not propose that we can establish Esarhaddon’s guilt conclusively at this remove, but I conclude that the weight of this evidence equals, if not surpasses, that which points to a plot concocted by Urad-Mullissu. (shrink)

In this Article I will challenge the tendency to discount the severity of domestic homicide, a phenomenon I call "the domestic discount." I will argue against automatic mitigation-the imputation of provocation or diminished capacity-simply or merely because the relationship" between victim and defendant is domestic or sexually intimate. I will argue that the traditional hot blood/cold blood dichotomy is an imperfect guide to the moral grading of homicide offenses. In particular, reliance on it has led to the under evaluation of (...) the seriousness of some domestic homicides. It is my contention, or hypothesis, that the conclusions I draw from the study of capital domestic cases can be generalized to the entire domain of domestic homicides: If homicide laws were purged of patriarchal values, the remaining principles that underlie our grading of homicide offenses would be consistent with the rejection of a domestic discount; the worst domestic murders like the worst predatory murders would rank among the most reprehensible crimes. (shrink)

It is not unusual to speculate on the contrary-to-fact implications of political assassinations. Lincoln's is the classic case in point, but we need only think of Julius Caesar, Gandhi, or John Kennedy, if we require further examples. One totally neglected case in this context is that of Moritz Schlick. One of the remote consequences of his murder, on June 22, 1936, which was most definitely a political assassination, is that today's academic world may well have been an entirely (...) different one if he had gone on to lead the Vienna Circle into exile. That group of young philosophers of science had formed as he assumed the University of Vienna's chair of natural philosophy in 1922. A quarter of a century later, the entire English-speaking world (and Scandinavia) was in thrall to “logical positivism,” a caricature of scientific philosophy as the circle conceived it but an incredibly powerful intellectual standpoint, for all that. The view that all genuine knowledge can be quantified not only dominated philosophy but transformed the nature of universities to the point of threatening the very existence of the humanities, which could scarcely meet this demand. The polemical and oversimplified view of Rudolf Carnap's strong program for scientific philosophy simply found no place for disciplines based on mere description (ethnology) or on understanding complex interlinked constellations of events as they develop over time (history and its myriad allied disciplines).The die was cast, and the humanities became saddled with an inferiority complex that, even today, they have only partially shaken off. Only disciplines that employed mathematical methods in aid of rigorous explanation, working collectively in networks like those of physics or chemistry, were worthy of being institutionalized at universities. Since the humanities were, for the most part, embodied in individual researchers burning the Midnight Oil as they pondered the Eternal Verities, they were disqualified as sciences. They would have to reform themselves radically or disappear. The battle commenced, and sensitive observers can attest that, administrative rhetoric to the contrary, it still goes on. Had Schlick lived on, the pluralism and tolerance that was part of his view of the world might well have carried more influence than the more radical elements in the group ultimately did, and so the humanities might well have fared better in a more secure environment than they have done.Edmonds's The Murder of Professor Schlick does not venture into such speculations. Instead, it offers us a vibrant, suspense-filled narrative replete with as much information as the reader can digest (and more). Briefly, Edmonds presents a fully detailed, complex version of the high drama of the rise and decline of logical positivism in both its philosophical and its political dimensions, complete with vivid portraits of the characters whose thought and personalities supplied that movement with its dazzling dynamism. They include such characters as Schlick himself; the irrepressible Otto Neurath, who had been a minister in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic; Rudolf Carnap, the circle's standard-bearer; Ludwig Wittgenstein, its unwilling ideal; Bertrand Russell, its Promethean inspiration; the eccentric Kurt Gödel; the rabbi Josef Schächter; the clever Englishman A. J. Ayer; America's rising star, W. V. Quine; the perennial contrarian, Karl Popper; the unfortunate Friedrich Waismann, doomed to failure in all his efforts; the tragic Edgar Zilsel, who committed suicide in American exile; and several frequently neglected women, such as Rose Rand, Olga Hahn, Marie Reidemeister, and Olga Taussky. In addition, the strong Jewish presence in the circle and the surrounding anti-Semitism that was a continuing stumbling block to it are clearly and powerfully described.These are but highlights of Edmond's narrative, but they are proof positive that his study is where to begin an encounter with the Vienna Circle and thus with the philosophical view that, more than any other, has conferred its character on modern thought and deeply molded people who have never heard of it. (shrink)

'For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination' Thomas De Quincey's three essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' centre on the notorious career of the murderer John Williams, who in 1811 brutally killed seven people in London's East End. De Quincey's response to Williams's attacks turns morality on (...) its head, celebrating and coolly dissecting the art of murder and its perfections. Ranging from gruesomely vivid reportage and brilliantly funny satiric high jinks to penetrating literary and aesthetic criticism, the essays had a remarkable impact on crime, terror, and detective fiction, as well as on the rise of nineteenth-century decadence. The volume also contains De Quincey's best-known piece of literary criticism, 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth', and his finest tale of terror, 'The Avenger', a disturbing exploration of violence, vigilantism, and religious persecution. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

It is possible to defend the death penalty for aggravated murder in more than one way, and not every defence is equally compelling. The paper takes up arguments put forward by two very distinguished advocates of the death penalty, Mill and Kant. After reviewing Mill's argument and some weaknesses in it, I shall sketch another line of reasoning that combines his conclusion with premisses to be found in Kant. The hybrid argument provides at least the basis for a sound (...) defence of execution for the most serious murders. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Murder in the Garden? The Envy of the Gods in Genesis 2 and 3 Paul DuffJoseph Hallman George Washington University University of St. Thomas According to Walter Brueggemann, "No text in Genesis (or likely in the entire Bible) has been more used, interpreted and misunderstood" than the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. "This applies to careless, popular theology as well as to the doctrine of (...) the church"(41). Augustine attempted to explain the first few chapters of Genesis on no fewer than five different occasions throughout his career. Based on his reading ofPaul, Augustine and Western Christianity after him believed that the entire human race inherited the disobedience ofAdam and Eve. The story in Genesis 2-3 represents the beginning ofthe J narrative, the so-called Yahwist account of the creation which originated in the early years ofthe Israelite monarchy.8 Commentators have long acknowledged a variety ofelements in the Yahwist creation account which complicate its interpretation and defy any satisfactory explanation. Among the more puzzling elements in the story are, first, the implication in Gen. 3:22 of a plurality of divine beings, a fact which seems to contradict the rest ofthe narrative and which also flies in the face of Israelite monotheism. Second, according to Gen. 2:17, God threatens Adam with the punishment of 8 The Yahwist document, originally independent, was later combined with three other strands of ancient material to form the Pentateuch. For a recent study ofthe "Documentary Hypothesis," see Richard Friedman. 1 84Paul DuffandJoseph Hallman immediate death for transgressing the deity's prohibition (cf. 3:3, 3:4). God does not carry out the threatened punishment, however, nor does the text offer the reader an explanation for the deity's commutation ofthe sentence (Westermann 224-5). Third, the origin and nature ofthe serpent in the story is unclear. Where did he come from? The identification ofthis figure with Satan in the later tradition has no support in the text (Westermann 237-9). Finally, the prohibition not to eat ofthe single tree in the garden appears to be arbitrary. Hence the crime of Adam and Eve is obviously contrived. Despite the fact that the original sentence of death for their disobedience was not carried out, the curses invoked on Adam and Eve seem hardly warranted by the offense. Consequently, some sections ofthe text depict the deity as a petty tyrant, certainly a very different picture than that given by other scriptures ofthe Jewish and Christian traditions. We believe these difficulties can be overcome by approaching Genesis 2-3 from a Girardian perspective.9 We propose that this story has evolved10 in order to hide its original meaning. As a result—following Girard's understanding of the function and evolution of mythology—we will endeavor to "deconstruct" Genesis 2-3 in order to trace the evolution ofthis myth from its origin in a primal crime. This will enable us to explain the inconsistencies in the text as it stands and to appreciate the final revisions made by the biblical author(s). We will begin with a brief discussion of Girard's understanding ofmyth. Then we will turn to the problems ofthe Genesis text. Girard on myth According to Girard, myth is, quite simply, a narrative about a primal murder, rewritten from the vantage point ofthe killers (1977a, 64-7, 91-5; 1986, 24-44). As such, mythology covers up the role of the victimage mechanism as the basis ofculture. Myths which disguise or cover up such a crime can take many forms. For instance, the foundational murder of an 9 In his recent book on Paul, Robert Hamerton-Kelly presents a Girardian interpretation of this passage which is completely different from ours (92-7). Since Hamerton-Kelly appears to read the myth at face value without a sense of development, he, like most interpreters, ends with somewhat tortuous conclusions. 10It is virtually certain that the account found in Gen. 2 and 3 did not come into being as a free composition of the Yahwist. But, as Claus Westermann has pointed out in his history ofthe exegesis ofthis passage (186-91), despite the fact that most see it as a product of a long... (shrink)

Some people believe that God made it a condition for His forgiveness even of repentant sinners that Jesus died a sacrificial death at human hands. Often, in the New Testament, this doctrine of Objective Atonement seems to be implied, as when Jesus spoke of his blood as ‘shed for many for the remission of sins’ , or when St Paul said that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures’ . And for many centuries the doctrine was indeed accepted (...) by most if not all Christian theologians. It seems in fact to be an essential part of Christianity, which adherents of that religion cannot reject without undermining the authority both of their scriptures and of a very long tradition. It looks then as if objections to the doctrine are objections to the Christian scheme itself. Here is one of them. As the Gospels present it Jesus was murdered, by one or more of Pilate, the Sanhedrin and the Jewish mob. Given Objective Atonement, God ordained the sacrificial death of Jesus, and so, as it seems, this murder. Murder requires freedom on the killer's part. And many have doubted that an action can be both free and ordained by God. Leave that aside. A good God would in any case not make it a condition for our forgiveness that someone acquired the guilt of murder. (shrink)

Research on perpetrators of genocidal processes and especially of the Holocaust is still puzzled by the fact that most of the atrocities and killings have been executed by ‘ordinary men’, i.e. by persons with a self-concept which would not have indicated that they could become killers. The guiding question of research on genocidal perpetrators is therefore how given moral inhibitions and moral values could have been overcome, or, to put it simply, how good people could have been turned into (...) bad ones. The following article proposes the opposite question: Is it possible that particular moral commitments and principles gave the perpetrators a sense of continuing moral integrity that enabled them to carry out the killings? This socio-psychological proposal is first elaborated theoretically and then illustrated with a case study on Franz Stangl, the commander of the extermination camp of Treblinka. (shrink)

This research study was aimed to examine the cross-national coverage and framing patterns about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in international media through focusing on newspapers. Khashoggi; an internationally acclaimed US based Saudi journalist was brutally assassinated at Kingdom’s consulate in Turkey which created the global outcry. As this issue made headlines worldwide for several months, the media from USA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Turkey; the most substantially and politically involved countries presumably used certain framing patterns in their coverage. (...) To find out the difference in coverage intensity and media frames, a content analysis based comparative study of US, Saudi and Turkish newspapers was conducted which is guided by the framing theory of Mass Communication. The results showed that the media from three selected countries dealt the same issue with significant differences in coverage and framing patterns. We concluded based on our findings that such differences in cross-national coverage patterns were influenced by the respective state’s ideology, interests, governance system, public narrative, or media settings. This study also explored some facts regarding freedom of expression and about journalists who have been targeted in reprisal of their professional work all over the world. The findings of the study elaborate that most of the newspapers used anti-Saudi frames in their coverage. So far as overall coverage is concerned Turkish and US papers provided a significant coverage to the issue while newspapers from Saudi Arabia provided least coverage to the issue as their media are highly state bound. (shrink)

Most people agree that murder is wrong. Yet, within computer games virtual murder scarcely raises an eyebrow. In one respect this is hardly surprising, as no one is actually murdered within a computer game. A virtual murder, some might argue, is no more unethical than taking a pawn in a game of chess. However, if no actual children are abused in acts of virtual paedophilia (life-like simulations of the actual practice), does that mean we should disregard (...) these acts with the same abandon we do virtual murder? In this paper I shall outline several arguments which attempt to permit virtual murder, whilst prohibiting virtual paedophilia. (shrink)

Antonin Artaud was a poet, theorist, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor and director, and one of the 20th century’s most important theoreticians of drama. His theory of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ has influenced playwrights as diverse as Beckett, Genet, Albee and Gelber. Magic was always a central concept for Artaud, and in nearly all his writing it is given the most positive force, as something capable of healing the rift between words and things, culture and life. But during his (...) nine years of incarceration in mental asylums, magic seemed to lose its illuminating transformative power and to become demonic and persecutory. Artaud entered the realm of spectres and vampires which he believed were sucking the vitality from his mind and body. Artaud later filled twelve little exercise books with an account of his struggles to escape this physical, psychological and artistic hell. The first eleven books are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches of totemic figures, pierced bodies and enigmatic machines. Two months before his death, he took a twelfth exercise book and wrote a remarkable, incantatory text, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. It was the last thing he wrote. (shrink)

Most studies on the reception of Darwinism in France focus on the scientific community. This essay investigates the popular press. Widely discussed in French newspapers in 1878, Darwinism was connected with a sensational murder case in which two well-educated young men, Aimé Barré and Paul Lebiez, killed an elderly woman. Before his arrest, Lebiez had given a public lecture on the Darwinian “struggle for life.” Competing factions of the press explicitly linked the case with Darwinism to advance either (...) conservative or republican political agendas, which brought Darwinism into the public eye. This essay argues that Charles Darwin’s instrumentalization was decisive in spreading his theory in French society. That same year, the Academy of Sciences elected Darwin to membership after six failed attempts. (shrink)

Commentators on strategic fouling have not focused on what is most ethically relevant. I contend that strategic fouling in basketball is unethical in all of its forms because it violates the essence or true ethos of the sport: the display of the full realization of the skills of the game. I give an account of the essential skills, how they are determined, and how historical rule changes about fouling have principally been directed toward rewarding skill and increasing freedom of (...) player movement. I explain why the disciplined restraint from strategically fouling is a competitive virtue as well as a way to show full respect to opponents. Moreover, I contend that the physical contact involved in strategic fouling can elicit a desire to retaliate, an indication of an ethical aspect of strategic fouling that has been overlooked in the scholarly debate. (shrink)

The State may require an autopsy when foul play is suspected in the death of one of its citizens.[1] This is so regardless of any objections to such invasive procedures expressed by the deceased before their deaths or afterward by their families. There is not even a religious exemption. The most obvious explanation for why consent is not needed is that apprehending a murderer with information obtained from the autopsy can save lives. However, taking organs without consent from (...) the deceased for transplantation into those suffering vital organ failures can also save lives. But doing so is considered beyond the pale. The question then becomes why are mandatory autopsies permitted but organ conscription prohibited? Our aim is to explore whether such divergent attitudes can be justified. (shrink)

Parents in Arab society did not take any responsibility for their children in the pre-Islamic era. The husband, as the head of the family, used to treat family members as his servants and forced them in the direction of his interests. No matter the rationale behind it, the burial of daughters in the pre-Islamic era is an outrageous and ill-treated tradition. In this study, it is possible to see which tribes in the Arab society started this repellent custom and which (...) ones were more common. In the society, it is possible to find that there were conscientious and virtuous people trying to prevent these events which can be called as a shame of this humanity, which does not approach the events with the value judgments of that day. Before shedding light on the motivations behind this tradition in the Jahiliyyah Arab society, the examination of the treatment towards daughters in other parts of the World in the same era, would be meaningful in terms of enlightening the phenomenon. This study aims to crystallize the causes, extent, and responses by wise people towards the burial of daughters in the pre-Islamic and Prophetic era.Summary: The burial of daughters or their slaughter in a variety of ways was not unique to the Arabs. At that time people and animals in many parts of the world were sacrificed to give thanks to the gods and to ease their anger. When the killings of girls are considered, Arab society comes to mind. In that time, other countries and nations in the world were not different from the Arabs. During this period, daughters were killed in different ways, not through the burial of living alive.During the Jahiliyya period, among the Arabs who murdered the children of the boys, the girls, and children who were considered to be the weakest members of the family were conducted with this treatment. Men who were the head of the family could tolerate having one or a maximum of two girls. When the number of girls increased, they regarded it as a matter of honour so that when a new daughter was born, the inevitable attempt was to murder her.In the Arabian peninsula - rich merchant families exceptional - families were trying to survive with scarce opportunities. The food and clothing materials used were usually exported and extremely expensive. Therefore, there was a necessity for male members of the family who would provide for the family. From this perspective, so many sons meant dignity. The economy of the day was based on looting and pillaging except for the trade of the elite. Therefore, one had to be strong. The birth of a daughter meant shame, sadness and grief instead of joy and happiness for them. The man would wait excitedly for good news. If the baby was a boy the family rejoiced. However, if it was a daughter the father would be upset. When a person said, “She was a daughter” she could not know what to do with her shame and how to hide from people.When the Arab tribes were examined in general, the burial of daughters was not extended to the whole population. The question of murdering the girl by burying her child was common among Bedouin Arabs who lived in the desert rather than the city. It was extremely difficult to see this tradition in the tribe of Quraish, which were regarded as the masters of the Arabs. When we look at the sources of Jahiliyya and Islamic history, it is observed that the examples of this outrages customs were generally realized in the near term. It is understood that the memory of society is not rich enough to comment. The main reason for this is that Arab society has not a written culture.For the Jahiliyya Arabs, her daughters were ashamed. If they married their daughters even before they had married their daughters into adultery, seeing it as lighter than their children. One of the main reasons was jealousy. The data show that this style was applied more intensely among the Bedouin tribes and especially the tribes of Temim, which is considered to have started the process of burying girls. It is also said that the most jealous tribe of the Arabs is the Rebia tribe. Because of this feature, it is accepted that the first burial of the girl was started in this tribe.Although the Arab society before Islam was known by the atrocities of ignorance and weakness, there were people who were not completely dead and consciously dead. Even though they buried girls alive in society, some people who were disturbed by this rite that destroyed human dignity were trying to prevent ignorant and cruel fathers. The most well-known of the these was the famous poet Ferezdak, grandfather Sasaa b. Naciye.One of the main reasons for the behavior of burying girls alive before Islam was the fear of poverty. Most of them were living in the midst of starvation, and they were considering their daughters as burdens for the family. So they were burying their daughters because of poverty and hunger.One of the reasons for the murder of girls was the sense of honour. In Jahiliyya when a man marries a woman does not come to mind this sense, while marrying his own daughter to someone else sees this as a matter of dishonesty and and he says “it was more sweet to me to bury my daughter with my own hands rather than to marry my daughter. The idea of honour among the Arabs was the idea that their daughters and women would one day be in the hands of the enemy and thus would become a concern for themselves.One of the attributes of the nobles of Arabs was pride and vanity. If someone become arrogant to him and he doesn’t reply, he would be considered a coward. This arrogance dominated the movements of the people of the ignorance. In their eyes, it was so bad to marry someone who was not equal, that they were more likely to die than marrying someone. They were doing this because they had a bit of compassion for them. According to them, girls could not shoulder the heavy burden of life. There were many ways to kill the girl before Islam. But the most common of these was to push him into a hole he had dug before and to throw soil over her and bury her alive. The most commonly used method of killing girls by dumping them in the pits, though, was that they were drowned in the water or strangled. (shrink)

One of the most enduring contributions of the Middle Ages to the history of Western intolerance is the myth that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian children. From the twelfth century to the twentieth and from eastern Europe to North America Christians have accused Jews of conducting sanguinary rituals. These have included charges of sacrificing Christian children and collecting their blood for ritual purposes, as well as the commonly associated accusation of desecrating the body of Christ in (...) the form of the host sanctified in the mass. Not surprisingly the recent flowering of scholarly interest in the history of anti-Semitism and Christian-Jewish relations has yielded numerous studies of these charges in both medieval and modern times. (shrink)

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators . In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. :πότομος ατη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ς (...) εκς κα θανεν τν Μελάνθιον, ε κα ποιητς κα ατ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful. (shrink)

As with most great works of art, great films are typically amenable to multiple interpretations, and there need be no determinate answer to which interpretation is ‘right’ or even the ‘best’. Yet some interpretations can render a work more compelling—perhaps more morally or religiously deep—than others. And that might be one reason for preferring the interpretation in question. This article focuses on Woody Allen’s "Crimes and Misdemeanors", which has often been construed as an attempt to illustrate the thesis that (...) crime sometimes pays. I call this the unjust reading of the film and contrast it with the just reading. I argue, however, that both these readings presuppose a consequentialist conception of justice that is not the only conception available. Reinterpreted from a perspective of intrinsic justice, the film gains a depth that is unavailable in the light of the other interpretations. (shrink)

Most reasonable people acknowledge that Karl Helge Hampus Hellekant has committed a grave moral offense: the 33-year-old Swede, also known as Karl Svensson, was convicted of killing trade unionist Björn Söderberg in 1999 at the behest of the Swedish neo-Nazi movement. What is not so clear is whether Hellekant, who is currently free on parole, should be permitted to become a physician. The former extremist was admitted to the medical school at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute in 2007, but later expelled—following (...) considerable public debate—after school officials discovered that he was temporarily unable to verify his academic records. Sweden’s most prestigious medical school, Uppsala, subsequently confirmed these records and matricatulated him in 2008. (shrink)

It is the argument of this paper that many aspects of Lucan's characterization in the Bellum Civile of Caesar and Pompey, and of the conflict itself, reflect a ritual combat for kingship such as the combat and murder codified in the myth of Romulus and Remus. It was a well-established convention by Ennius's time, further developed in the late Republic, that the conflict between the founding brothers over control of Rome was the ultimate cause for the Civil Wars. The (...) religious basis of this myth can be found in the rites of the priest of Diana at Aricia, the rex nemorensis, which were still extant in Lucan's time. The evidence for Lucan's use of this paradigm is reviewed, and Book 3 of the Bellum Civile is then reassessed in the terms that it suggests. The themes of sacred place , scared combat, and the necessary murder are most clearly presented in Book 3. It is further argued that seeming inconsistencies in the nature of the gods in Lucan's epic can be at least partially resolved if we understand that the gods must remain aloof and outside the action while the ritual takes place, even though they themselves have instituted the ritual of kingship murder, and will, when it is completed, receive the murderer as their ritually validated priest-king. In the conclusion, ways are suggested in which this paradigm, if accepted, begins to clarify various puzzling choices Lucan has made elsewhere in the epic regarding his narrative of events, his development of character, and the recurrent images of lightning, tree, and blood-sacrifice owed to the gods. (shrink)

Few challenges facing Kantian ethics are more famous and formidable than the so-called "case of the inquiring murderer." It appears in some form today in most introductory ethics texts, but it is not a new objection. Even Kant himself was compelled to respond to it, though by most accounts his response was embarrassingly unpersuasive. A more satisfactory reply can be offered to this old objection, however. It will be shown here that Kantian ethics permits lying to inquirers asking (...) wrong questions, and that, therefore, it can be right to lie to a murderer inquiring whether his intended victim is hiding in your house. We begin by reviewing a now popular and plausible-sounding defense of the right to lie. Finding it unsuccessful, we turn next to scrutinize the type of question asked. The case of the inquiring murderer cannot be presented without supposing that the murderer's inquiry is unevadable. As we shall then see, in Kantian ethics it is usually wrong to ask such questions. (shrink)

The concept of conditional intent is pervasive in practical reasoning and action. Although conditional intent has not received the detailed attention it deserves, it is worth remarking that much if not most of the intentions we formulate and on the basis of which we act or try to act are conditional in logical form.

Ancient writers tell conflicting stories of the last hours of Agrippina, the mother of Nero. Modern commentators have been equally at variance in their attempts to harmonize them. A consideration, however, of all the evidence makes a reasonable account of the tragedy seem even yet possible. Naturally, most confidence has been put in the more circumstantial narrative of Tacitus.

This article surveys the numerous philosophical themes Levinas attributes to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Detailed discussions are provided of the face as the temptation to commit violence and its prohibition, of the there is as the impossibility of an exit from existence, of the foundational role of con­science in ethics, and of the nature of the tragic hero who seeks to postpone the inevitability of death. I argue that it is only by treating the face as in some sense provoking violence can (...) we hope to understand how the character Macbeth finds it possible to murder Duncan while looking him in the face. This reading requires us to see him as ethically ambivalent, as one might expect from a play in which “nothing is but what is not.” The essay concludes with a brief reflection on why Macbeth manages to evoke our pity, even though we know him to be a murderer. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Philosophical Gaze into the Writings of the Zodiac Killer Who is the Zodiac Killer? Peek‐A‐Boo: You Are Doomed! This is the Zodiac Speaking Conclusion.

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less (...) urgent for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less (...) urgent for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

Attempts to understand visual attention have produced models based on location, in which attention selects particular regions of space, and models based on other visual attributes . Previous studies of inattentional blindness have contributed to our understanding of attention by suggesting that the detection of an unexpected object depends on the distance of that object from the spatial focus of attention. When the distance of a briefly flashed object from both fixation and the focus of attention is systematically varied, detection (...) appears to have a location-based component. However, the likelihood that people will detect an unexpected event in sustained and dynamic displays may depend on more than just spatial location. We investigated the influence of spatial location on inattentional blindness under precisely controlled, sustained and dynamic conditions. We found that although location-based models cannot fully account for the detection of unexpected objects, spatial location does play a role even when displays are visible for an extended period. (shrink)

In a recent commentary, Memmert critiqued claims that attentional misdirection is directly analogous to inattentional blindness and cautioned against assuming too close a similarity between the two phenomena. One important difference highlighted in his analysis is that most lab-based inductions of IB rely on the taxing of attention through a demanding primary task, whereas attentional misdirection typically involves simply the orchestration of spatial attention. The present commentary argues that, rather than reflecting a complete dissociation between IB and attentional misdirection, (...) this difference highlights potential grounds for delineating mechanistically distinct forms of IB: spatial inattentional blindness, which stems from the covert misallocation of spatial attention, and central inattentional blindness, which stems from disruption or preoccupation of perceptual mechanisms that interface with higher-level processes such as working memory. Recognition of such distinctions can help situate theoretical understanding of IB more firmly within the context of the broader attention literature. (shrink)

The article sets out to reinterpret Heraclitus' views on religion and, by implication, his position in the context of the Presocratic philosophers' relationship to the Greek cultural tradition. It does so by examining the fragments in which Heraclitus' attitude to the popular religion of his time is reflected. The analysis of the fragments 69, 68, 15, 14, 5, 96, 93 and 92 DK reveals that the target of Heraclitus' criticism is not the religious practices themselves, but their popular interpretation. Heraclitus' (...) fragments are simultaneously shown to identify the underlying structure of the 'unity of opposites,' inherent in various religious practices. Heraclitus appears to reinterpret religious practices in terms of the conceptual structures of his own philosophy. On the other hand, religion provides him with the categories for the construction of his philosophical theology. Thus Heraclitus' treatment of religion is shown to be analogous to his treatment of ethics and politics, which he also tries to incorporate into his highly integrated vision of reality. In contrast to Xenophanes' radical critique of the traditional religion, Heraclitus emerges not as a reformer or an Aufklärer, but as an interpreter, who tries to discern the structures of meaning inherent in the existing practices, and to assume them into his own philosophical project. (shrink)