Philosophy Department Faculty Speeches and Presentations Copyright (c) 2013 Connecticut College All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp Recent documents in Philosophy Department Faculty Speeches and Presentations en-us Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:41:03 PDT 3600 Eichmann in Athens: Hannah Arendt and the New Problem of Evil http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/4 http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/4 Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:03:17 PDT After witnessing the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat at Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt identifies a “new problem of evil that rears its head in the twentieth century.” She calls this problem “the banality of evil: the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, that could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness.”

Struck by the disproportion between the aim of the Final Solution and the petty motives of many of its executioners, Arendt wonders: If “the greatest evil” comes from “not-thinking” (or banality), is it possible that the activity of thinking for oneself has the power to keep us from participating in such evil – even in a perverse social context where “every legal act is immoral and every moral act a crime”? Arendt turns to Socrates to support her conclusion that thinking is an antidote to evil. We shall ask whether Arendt proves her case and manages to save the Western philosophical tradition from the brink of shipwreck.

]]> Lawrence A. Vogel The Ethics of Role-Playing Video Games http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/3 http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/3 Thu, 06 May 2010 13:23:09 PDT In this project, I explore the ethics of interactive role-playing video games. After explicating a wide range of issues contained in these games, I argue that they belong in the realm of fiction. Using the theory of Response Moralism, I argue that the emotions we feel in response to fictions, which includes role-playing games, are real and morally assessable. I then present an attack on escapism, which I challenge by arguing that evincing virtues and vices is possible within a video game or virtual reality. I end my project with a discussion of the ways in which race and gender are represented in video games, alongside an applied case of response moralism. I make the conclusion that role-playing video games are morally significant works, which are worthy of philosophical attention.

]]> Riordan Frost Thoughts on Mel Woody's Retirement http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/2 http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/2 Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:32:14 PDT Lawrence A. Vogel Arts that Liberate http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/1 http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacsp/1 Tue, 06 Sep 2005 07:51:00 PDT J. Melvin Woody