This paper will examine Chekhov's attitudes toward love and marriage as revealed in his short stories. An attempt will be made to find certain themes which recur frequently and to discover the reasons for their recurrence.

Throughout his work, Kant regularly glosses ‘morality’ (and cognate expressions) as ‘worthiness to be happy’ (Würdigkeit glücklich zu sein). As a rule, Kant’s commentators do not find this remarkable. Correctly understood, however, Kant’s gloss on ‘morality’ is remarkable indeed. This thesis shows why. In it, I argue that whenever we encounter Kant’s gloss, we are faced with an implicit, durable cluster of unjustified commitments; that these commitments both antedate and survive his ‘critical period’; that they are fundamentally practical in nature (i.e., that they are unexamined commitments to particular practices); and that these commitments entail a number of problematic theological consequences. I argue, in particular, that Kant’s gloss is a habit that signals, obscurely and implicitly, his antecedent commitments to the practice of capital punishment, on the one hand, and to a particular set of practical attitudes towards the happiness and unhappiness of immoral agents, on the other. I show that this habit has key implications for Kant’s thinking about the agent that he calls ‘God.’ My point of departure is Kant’s claim, in his Religion, that the human being’s particular deeds are imputable to her ‘all the way down,’ only on condition that the underlying ‘disposition’ (Gesinnung) from which they arise (according to their kind, qua moral or immoral) is imputable to her as well—that is, only if her (im)moral character may be regarded as the upshot of, or in some sense identical to, an utterly unassisted, unmotivated, originary deed on her part. I argue that Kant evades the question whether we really are permitted, without further ado, to regard this disposition (and with it an agent’s deeds) as so imputable. He simply affirms his commitment to the practice of imputing particular deeds to particular agents and, with this affirmation, affirms that he takes the warrant that it requires (the imputability of ‘Gesinnung’) to be secure. I argue, then, that the theoretical significance of imputation, as expressed in this extraordinary, evasive leap, supervenes on the urgency of the commitments that are expressed in Kant’s habitual glossing of ‘morality’ as ‘worthiness to be happy.’ The practice for which we would lack a warrant if the human being’s character were not imputable to her is the imputation of her deeds under a description (of imputation) that has immediate reference to this same ‘one’s’ punishment—specifically and only, however, to the extent that Kant takes punishments to be justifiable in none but strictly retributivist terms. These stakes and the constraining role of Kant’s habitual gloss are clearest, I argue, in his thinking about the practice of putting murderers to death—a practice, I argue, that has both a political and an eschatological significance for him.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries women troubadours in southern France called trobairitz participated in dialogue or debate poems called tensons with male troubadours. Of the nine existing tensons that include a male and a female voice, we will only analyze five tensons with the known identities of both the trobairitz and the troubadour that debate the subject of love, and we will include the following trobairitz tensons in this paper: Alamanda, Isabella, Garsenda, Lombarda and Maria de Ventadorn. We will discuss the thematic elements these five tensons share. Scholars such as Pierre Bec, Peter Dronke and Katharina Wilson note trobairitz' themes vary from those of traditional male troubadours. Troubadours concentrate on the outward or social manifestations of the courtly love game and values, yet trobairitz focus on the intimate, private pleasures of love by deviating from generally accepted courtly love conventions and social behaviors. Since the subject of love is debated in these five tensons, the personal character in these tensons alludes to the trobairitz's life—circumstances and incidents. A trobairitz's personal character is also illustrated in the tenson by her willingness to show personal qualities about a love relationship and as Deborah Perkal-Balinsky calls it "a willingness to deviate from accepted social behavior or perhaps the rules of the game, in an effort to attain the intimate pleasures in a love relationship" (46). The tensons discussed provide valuable information about trobairitz and courtly love—the publicly displayed values of honor, valor and mercy. At times, trobairitz solicit love by revolting against the courtly love rules to win a man. In courtly love tensons, trobairitz use the literary style, courtly vocabulary and courtly values to express both their support and criticism for the system. Through the use of courtly vocabulary, trobairitz conform to the styles developed by troubadours, yet when trobairitz write as female lovers and poets, they also discard the conventions set forth by troubadours, since they are not male lovers and poets. In each tenson the literary mode is man-in-society, and the theme centers around love"”either the praise of it or the blame from lack thereof or both (Hagen 27). In each of the five tensons, there are three common threads in the trobairitz love relationships: (1) in each tenson we see the personal character of the trobairitz; (2) we see them deviate from the accepted social behavior or the rules of the game; and (3) we witness that the trobairitz are usually unhappy with their love relationships. We will examine each tenson individually regarding these three aspects.