Diss.--Faculty of linguistics and literary studies--Wuppertal--Bergische Universität, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. [321]-[331].

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 358-363). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 358-363). Also available on the Internet.

This is a work of moral psychology in the course of which is presented a theory on the nature of guilt. The point of departure is a psychological phenomenon that I call “scrupulousness.” Scrupulousness is present when someone is in doubt about the morality of a minor past action. He or she is obsessively driven to determine whether his act was right or wrong. The result for the individual is vexing preoccupation in a cycle of internal casuistry. I explain this unhappy phenomenon as the result of anxiety over guilt understood as moral staining. A moral stain is a persistent residue adhering to the self created by a past wrongful action. To better explain moral stains, I borrow Christine Korsgaard’s theory of personal identity as constituted by one’s choices. With the aid of Korsgaard’s theory, I then consider how a belief in guilt as moral staining accounts for the worry of the scrupulous person. The Postscript of the Report first considers whether scrupulousness is justified by the explanation I have furnished. I answer this question in the negative. I also consider how anticipation of scrupulous worry could drive a person away from morally ambiguous situations, sometimes preventing him from taking the correct course of action in a form of “moral cowardice.” The Postscript secondly explains the significance of investigating scrupulousness and moral staining for philosophers. I argue that moral staining captures important aspects of the phenomenology of guilt and that it correctly accounts for the reality of guilt as more than a mere psychological state or feeling. To exhibit these strengths of the moral staining view, I compare and criticize Herbert Morris’ prominent model of guilt as consisting in the severance of valued relationships. / text

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In the postscript to The Concept of Law, H.L. A. Hart describes the on-going debate inspired by his book, focusing on the criticisms of Ronald Dworkin. In this essay, I will discuss Dworkin’s criticisms of Hart, as well as Hart’s responses, showing that while Hart responds adequately to some criticisms, he fails to respond adequately to others. I will also reconstruct and evaluate the arguments given for and against the separation thesis by Dworkin and Hart. Finally, I will argue that the debate about the separation thesis – the thesis that morality and law are separable – is misguided, conflating as it does two distinct questions. These are the questions of what the positive law is, that is, the law that is posited in a specific time and place, and of what the natural law is, that is, the law that (if it exists) is universal and timeless. Once we distinguish these questions, we will see that the answer to the question of whether law is separable from morality depends on which sense of ‘law’ is relevant, and that there are two different answers corresponding to the two senses of positive law and natural law. Positive law is separable from morality while natural law is not. / text

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Critics have observed that in early Stuart England, the broad, socially significant concept of melancholy was recoded as a specifically medical phenomenon—a disease rather than a fashion. This recoding made melancholy seem less a social attitude than a private ailment. However, I argue that at the Stuart universities, this recoded melancholy became a covert expression of the disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration produced by pressures there—the overcrowding and competition which left many men “disappointed” in preferment, alongside James I’s unprecedented royal involvement in the universities. My argument has implications for Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere, which he claims did not occur until the eighteenth-century. I argue that although the university was increasingly subordinated to the crown’s authority, a lingering sense of autonomy persisted there, a residue of the medieval university’s relative autonomy from the crown; politicized by the encroaching Stuart presence, an alienated community at the university formed a kind of public in private from authority within that authority’s midst. The audience for the printed book, a sphere apart from court or university, represented a forum in which the publicity at the universities could be consolidated, especially in seemingly “private” literary forms such as the treatise on melancholy. I argue that Robert Burton’s exaggerated performance of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, which gains him license to say almost anything, resembles the performed melancholy that the student-prince Hamlet uses to frustrate his uncle’s attempts to surveil him. After tracing melancholy’s evolving literary function through Hamlet, I go on to discuss James’s interventions into the universities. I conclude by considering two printed (and widely circulated) books by university men: the aforementioned The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, an Oxford cleric, and The Temple by George Herbert, who left a career as Cambridge’s public orator to become a country parson. I examine how each of these books uses the affective pattern of courtly-scholarly disappointment—transumed by Burton as melancholy, and by Herbert as holy affliction—to develop an empathic form of publicity among its readership which is in tacit opposition to the Stuart court. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 15:30:01.702