Rhett Butler

The Importance of Sentiment in Morality In this paper, I will argue that David Hume’s argument on morality is more persuasive than Thomas Hobbes’ argument due to the nature of sentiment that everyone carries. One of the key problems of Hobbes’ argument is that it assumes that everyone is unitary. Hobbes explained the State of Nature and the way people would react to it in a way where all the actors involved would make the obvious--rational--choice, however, this is not the case. Not all…

The Scopes Trial  John Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, TN, beginning around 1924. He is best known for the controversy that he caused over teaching one very touchy subject to his students, Evolution. In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act which made it illegal for any teacher in a public school "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” John Scopes was not a…

Growing up in a world where there is so much pressure to be successful, numerous people are frightened of being ostracized for being themselves. As a young child, completely care free, opinions of others or how they might look at me never crossed my mind. But the older we get, conforming to the rules became the norm, a drastic change occurred as a yearning for acceptance grew. In the articles by Bordo, Appiah and Foucault, readers can see a range of views presented as they elaborate further into…

Critical review of the article Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler Gender is a difficult term to define. Some people might think it is the external characteristics of a person what marks it, others believe it is what it is what you feel inside, and another may hold that is what society imposes them. This critical review examines an article that argues that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social…

When I took the AP Language and Composition course my junior year of high school, I scored a three on the exam. As a student who always enjoyed English and did well in the subject, this was a low point, but . However, I still loved literature and knewI still wanted to become an English major at college. That is how I ended up in Dr. Clermont-Ferrand’s “Introduction to English Studies” class. Looking back at my work throughout this course, I noticed that I have a slight preference in applying…

But, Butler warns, philosophy’s transcendentalism, the false suggestive of universals, won’t deliver us there. Indeed, it is the very opposite – an “ungroundedness” – that informs our “contemporary “agency” (131) (touching upon the theme of a vulnerable universal from her first essay). Responding directly to Benhabib’s criticism, Butler notes her misreading of the “doer beyond the deed” (as opposed to the “doer behind…

The Scopes Trial took place in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. A group of teachers decided to test a law called the Butler Law. The Butler law made it illegal to teach the theory of evolution and instead mandated the biblical interpretation of creationism. The teachers felt that academic freedom and integrity as well as separation of church and state was at stake. Twenty four year old science teacher and football coach John T. Scopes would teach the class. Knowing he would be arrested Scopes taught…

opportunity for all would settle many disputes. Dayton, Tennessee, 1925 the “Scopes Monkey Trial” begins. John Thomas Scopes was allegedly accused of teaching evolution to his students in violation of a Tennessee State Law. The law, known as the Butler Act, prohibited public school teachers from teaching the Evolution Theory. Scopes was tried for teaching specifically Darwinism, the theory by which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. The…

actions associated with femininity have been repeated to form a concrete idea of what a true woman is. Butler supports this idea with the statement that the “expectation produces the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (Butler xv), meaning that the constant pressure for women of all ages to be feminine, demure, and motherly creates the idea that there shouldn’t be deviations from these standards. Butler defines performativity as, “Not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which…

Gender inequality is an issue that has been happening for thousands of years, affecting cultures from all around the world. Women have endured since ancient times the title as the inferior being, the “other” gender besides the man, the weaker and less valuable specimen. This gender inequality created a huge difference between men and women, placing women’s rights under men’s jurisdiction, which dictated what women were and were not allowed to do. This issue was analyzed by the French and…