I argue against the halfer response to the Sleeping Beauty case by presenting a new problem for halfers. When the original Sleeping Beauty case is generalized, it follows from the halfer’s key premise that Beauty must update her credence in a fair coin’s landing heads in such a way that it becomes arbitrarily close to certainty. This result is clearly absurd. I go on to argue that the halfer’s key premise must be rejected on pain of absurdity, leaving the halfer response to the original Sleeping Beauty case unsupported. I consider two ways that halfers might avoid the absurdity without giving up their key premise. Neither way succeeds. My argument lends support to the thirder response, and, in particular, to the idea that agents may be rationally compelled to update their beliefs despite not having learned any new evidence.

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Theories of beauty normally engage with beauty in the abstract, or with reactions to beauty - beauty’s effect on others. This thesis considers how coquettish female beauty has been embodied in Victorian literature by the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and to a lesser extent women’s periodical literature. It argues that the figure of the coquette addresses antithetical discourses on the Victorian woman and assimilates them in such a way as to express a subversive beauty discourse, in which beauty consolidates differing female experiences and formulates the search for identity as a collective female effort. The coquette is linked with controversial women’s issues such as marriage failure, domestic abuse and female eroticism; the ambivalence of her relationship with the text’s heroine shows the scope and limits of female autonomy. The dialectic between rejection and acceptance in which the coquette participates in specific narrative strategies shows women engaged with women’s problems, their erotic potential, and their relationship(s) to each other. The thesis also reflects on feminist literary theory, especially current ideas on female writing, broadly defined as a search for female belonging. Recent criticism holds that the Victorian coquette operates either to show that eroticism was part of the Victorian woman’s identity, or as a passive surface upon which certain aspects of the protagonist are illuminated. This thesis argues that this is only part of the story; additionally, the issue of eroticism is installed within a framework of women’s social, political, and legal concerns, and the coquette can be read as an active site in which aspects of both the coquette and the protagonist are combined to form an innovative way of seeing the Victorian woman.

Love of the exterior world - beauty forever - woman forever - thoughts of walking and looking and how it all came back to my studio of two years.

The topic of this diploma work is about the reflections on biological and cultural determination of female beauty. By research of these two fields, this work is concerned with the inquiry of their correlative relation in the aesthetic ideal of the female beauty in nowadays, primarily in the expressions of the highest aesthetization nearly of its artificiality of body. This work examines to what extent the biological determination of the body interacts in the aesthetization process. First, the work outlines the biologically determinated preferences of the female physical attraction through the evolutionary process of sexual selection and it supports their relevance by the Darwinian theory about the existing taste in animal world. This work introduces the cultural determination on female beauty on the platform of society designated expressions of the aesthetization of female body, fully expanded from nineteenth century, and the reflection on correlative relation of these two inseparable fields is discussed on the background of the highest aesthetization process of female body in the context of its aesthetic ideal of nowadays. KEY WORDS body and corporeality, female beauty, biological determination, cultural determination, aesthetization, artificiality

呂廣花. / "2004年7月". / 論文(哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 2004. / 參考文獻(leaves 170-174). / "2004 nian 7 yue". / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Lü Guanghua. / Lun wen (zhe xue shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2004. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 170-174). / 中文摘要 --- p.i / 英文摘要 --- p.ii / 目錄 --- p.iii / Chapter 第一章： --- 硏究問題與分析架構 --- p.1 / Chapter (一) --- 由現象出發：美麗神話中的身體 / Chapter (二) --- 回歸理論：社會學理論中的身體 / Chapter (三) --- 爲甚麼是美容顧問？ / Chapter (四) --- 分析架構 / 身體資本 / Chapter (五) --- 章節鋪排 / Chapter 第二章： --- 硏究方法 --- p.31 / Chapter (一) --- 界定硏究範圍 / 美容顧問 / 化妝品美容顧問vs. 護膚品美容顧問 / 美容公司的分類 / 高檔品牌 / 中價品牌 / 大眾化品牌 / Chapter (二) --- 資料來源 / Chapter (1) --- 深入訪談 / 搜集樣本方法及被訪者資料 / 樣本之代表性及局限 / 訪談之形式 / Chapter (2) --- 文本分析 / 搜集樣本方法及培訓手冊之內容簡介 / 樣本之代表性及局限 / Chapter (三) --- 建立多重對照功能的資料架構 / Chapter 第三章： --- 展示的身體 --- p.55 / Chapter (一) --- 先天的圍栅：踏入美容業的門檻 / 均等機會？ / 年青、貌美 / 有興趣、有熱誠 / Chapter (二) --- 後天的改造：美容工序無間斷 / 公司的美容槪念 / 面孔 / 身型 / 儀表形像 / Chapter (三) --- 無間斷的美容工序 / Chapter (四) --- 監督凝視的壓力 / 同事 / 顧客 / Chapter (五) --- 柔馴的身體 / Chapter 第四章： --- 試驗的身體 --- p.94 / Chapter (一) --- 建立專業知識的困難：未被受確認的美容知識系統 / 輕視美容理論知識 / 失效的培訓課程 / 參雜混亂的美容資訊 / Chapter (二) --- 獨特的方式：身體作爲建立專業知識的基礎 / 體驗的身體 / 測試的身體 / 身體作爲練習場 / 身體作爲展示場 / Chapter 第五章： --- 身體資本 --- p.122 / Chapter (一) --- 柔馴的身體？ / Chapter (二) --- 難馴的身體？ / 爲保育身體資本而反抗 / 以身體爲主體的反抗 / 以美容顧問爲主體的反抗 / Chapter (三) --- 工作的身體？閒暇的身體？ / Chapter (四) --- 身體資本的內在緊張 / 自然衰老 / 過度使用 / Chapter (五) --- 精明理智的投資者 / Chapter (六) --- 身體資本的回報 / Chapter 第六章： --- 結語及建議 --- p.143 / Chapter (一) --- 獨特的專業 / 姿色=知識 / 從情緒勞工到身體勞工 / Chapter (二) --- 分析架構的局限 / Chapter (三) --- 跟進硏究建議 / 附錄 --- p.160 / Chapter (一) --- 深入訪談被訪者基本資料 / Chapter (二) --- 訪談大綱 / Chapter (三) --- 輔助資料 / 參考書目 --- p.170 / 後記 --- p.175

Uncontrollable Beauty examines the role beauty and taste play in commoditization and monetization of art within contemporary Western culture. This body of work is predicated on the notion of ‘good taste’ and explores this complex issue through the history and medium of painting and the concept of ‘decorativeness’ as they relate to modernist criticism and commercial industry.

Time back to French Revolution (1789), on the other side of the English Channel, a British philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) vigorously appealed French was under a dangerous revolution. As he criticized, the protesters were eradicating the long tradition of France, blindly sublimed the abstract ideas of rights, such as liberty or equal. The dangerous of pursuing abstract ideas, would caused unrecoverable damages in political practices and were also against the human nature. The core and vital of tradition, for Burke, is it brings the intellectual knowledge abreast of modern developments, actively improve and modify those inappropriate contexts. This is why abstract ideas of rights are not persuasive, and tradition is worth been relied. This thesis will focus on Burke¡¦s aesthetic. First, regard the core cause of his social construction is related to his aesthetic. Then, explain how his noble and aesthetic ideas in politics combine with tradition. Last, point out his critics to Rationalism also comes from his ideas of human nature. It is proved that to comprehend his politics through his aesthetic won¡¦t cause conflicts between Ancient Constitutionalism, but can replenish those vogue parts in his political writings.

With such an indicative adjective as ¡§fortunate¡¨ in its title, Daniel Defoe¡¦s Roxana interests readers in how fortunate the heroine is and in what sense she is called fortunate. Finishing reading the story of Roxana, readers are also concerned about why the fortunate mistress ends up in calamity. Therefore, this thesis sets out to explore how Roxana fortunately becomes powerful and to explain why she ironically ends up a tragedy. In terms of the financial prosperity she achieves, it is apparent that Roxana can never make it without the fortunate blessing of her remarkable beauty. Being a beautiful woman, she attracts one powerful man after another, and this attraction is the source of her large fortune. In other words, this thesis focuses on the influence and power of personal beauty, and more importantly, on how Roxana uses her beauty to manipulate those powerful men to benefit herself greatly. Her power comes from the exertion of the power of her beauty. Although Roxana is fortunately beautiful, her fortune, however, is decided by her character too. Roxana¡¦s tragedy results from an ambitious mind, that cannot, however, reconcile itself to her chosen style of life. As a result, although she is living a seemingly comfortable life, her unbalanced and disturbed state of mind leads to nothing but a tragic ending. In sum, this thesis, adopting textual analysis, aims at tracing Roxana¡¦s power and tragedy in association with the most formative element of the story, her beauty. Recent research has shown that being beautiful translates into being privileged and favored in many respects, and Roxana¡¦s story bears out these findings in the eighteenth century. In addition, although Roxana¡¦s final tragic ending renders her a failed social climber, she is, however, truly a fortunate mistress, who, riding on the Wheel of Fortune, can always fortunately rise whenever she is unfortunately reduced. In other words, Roxana¡¦s beauty, power and tragedy are all her fortune and how they interrelate is the principal concern of this thesis.

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