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In this essay, I chart a new origin story to counter popular understandings of the triumphalist, celebratory, northern- and abolitionist-centered origins of American animal welfare by providing underexplored historical context for the proslavery as well as antislavery origins of humane sentiment. I argue that humane carceral logics, or the rationale that surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration to protect animals through the legal system justified as well as pacified the means, ultimately produced coercive and discriminatory tools that naturalized white reformers’ heightened scrutiny of communities of color. I explore how white supremacy contributed to the formation of humane carceral logics by providing a historical study of carceral trends and the ways in which humane sentiment produced racial knowledge.
David Hume's moral system involves considerations that seem at odds with one another. He insists on the reality of moral distinctions, while showing that they are founded on the human constitution. He notes the importance to morality of the consequences of actions, while emphasizing that motives are the subjects of moral judgments. He appeals to facts about human psychology as the basis for an argument that morality is founded, not on reason, but on sentiment. Yet, he insists that no “ought” can follow from an “is.” He thinks that our motivation to justice must derive from our nature. Yet, he wonders how to explain why anyone would be motivated to follow rules when doing so does not further their personal interests. As an empiricist, his approach is descriptive, yet morality is prescriptive. This Element addresses these puzzles in Hume's moral theory, with reference to historical and contemporary discussions.
This essay analyzes Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's 2009 work Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray and its centering of Black women in US American history and contemporary choreographic practices. While the work's revisionist representation of national history could be understood as activist in terms of its desire to activate the spectator, this essay centers what performance might do for Black women performers and their personal practices of artistry and activism over what impulses toward social justice Black women's performances might galvanize in their audiences. Attributing FDWH's transformative potential to its aesthetic combination of postmodernism and sentimentalism and its erotic historiography, I theorize the work as a choreohistory, a mode of cultural production wherein the ordering of movement and the ordering of the past interanimate one another.
An overview of Steinbeck’s critical reputation that reasseses negative claims that Steinbeck is a middlebrow writer whose work is marked by unself-conscious nostalgia and sentimentalism. Turning to examples from The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Valley, the introduction argues that Steinbeck is a complex, varied, and experimental writer whose work is marked by metafiction and provocative contradiction that make it capable of unpacking and critically reexamining the very “faults” of which it is accused. Against claims that Steinbeck’s value lies in the past, I outline the many ways that his work is of urgent relevance today.
After an introductory discussion of Flaubert’s development as a writer and his direct experience (with Maxime Du Camp) of the February Revolution, this chapter focuses on his great novel, Sentimental Education. This novel is both the story of an unconsummated love affair and an account of the experience and imaginative life of the generation of young people who came to maturity around 1840 and whose lives were either broken or redirected by the revolution of 1848. Our analysis emphasizes the care taken by Flaubert to establish a counterpoint between the collapse of political ideals in 1848 and the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters. The novel is considered as a work of history and compared to the work of historians like Georges Duveau and Maurice Agulhon. A number of specific scenes and vignettes are discussed in an attempt to show how Flaubert brings the past to life. We conclude with a discussion of Bouvard and Pecuchet, which includes a chapter on the revolution of 1848 as it affected a village in Normandy. Though written in an overtly comic vein, this chapter reinforces the picture offered by Sentimental Education of history as ruled by elemental forces that overwhelm the plans of individuals.
After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.
Chapter 9 focuses on the two chapters that go missing near the end of the novel, where Uncle Toby is finally able to acknowledge his love for Widow Wadman but only, it seems, with a Bible open to the book of Joshua, the passage about the siege of Jericho. Why this passage? And why does Sterne purposefully misnumber and rearrange these chapters of his novel? The mock fortifications that Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim build together, those replicas of military sieges happening in Europe, work in the novel as metaphors for the ways that all books – whether philosophy, scripture, or fiction – can both distance us from difficult intimate relationships and make room to repair them.
Sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Scottish literature reflected the ideas of moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, who argued that our sense of morality has its origins in feelings aroused by impressions conveyed by the senses. The influence of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, an imaginary witness and judge of human interactions, is evident in novels by Henry Mackenzie and Tobias Smollett, whose characters’ emotional responses to scenes of suffering are described in great detail. In theatre, John Homes’ Douglas was deemed a success by the amount of tears shed by the audience, while Joanna Baillie’s plays dramatised moral sentiments by illustrating particular vices and virtues. Macpherson’s Ossianic poems became an international sensation through their nostalgic sentimentalism, which depicted the pure and noble virtues of a bygone era. Sentimentalism in the poetry of Robert Burns celebrates both individual subjectivity and common humanity through his treatment of universal themes like love and nature. Unlike the Romantic movement that would follow it, which tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability, sentimentalism in Scottish literature depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others.
Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind argues that a careful examination of the scientific literature reveals a foundational role for reasoning in moral thought and action. Grounding moral psychology in reason then paves the way for a defense of moral knowledge and virtue against a variety of empirical challenges, such as debunking arguments and situationist critiques. The book attempts to provide a corrective to current trends in moral psychology, which celebrate emotion over reason and generate pessimism about the psychological mechanisms underlying commonsense morality. Ultimately, there is rationality in ethics not just despite but in virtue of the neurobiological and evolutionary materials that shape moral cognition and motivation.
This essay presents a critical examination and development of an exchange between Adam Smith and David Hume on the nature of sympathy. I identify four objections to Smith's account in a letter from Hume and then argue that Smith's system has the resources to reply to all of them. As such, this essay shows that Smith's system provides a more robust foundation for a sentiment-based system of ethics than has been traditionally recognized.
This paper argues for a novel sentimentalist realist metaethical theory, according to which moral wrongness is analyzed in terms of the sentiments one has most reason to have. As opposed to standard sentimentalist views, the theory does not employ sentiments that are had in response to morally wrong action, but rather sentiments that antecedently dispose people to refrain from immoral behavior, specifically the sentiments of compassion and respect.
According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according to which the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content.
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