Tolstoy

Richard Taylor, an ethicist said, “Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are truly just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning (Ethics, Faith, and Reason 7).” Does this effect that religion is the only way to explain morality? Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that morality itself wasn’t necessary. Merce Cardus said, “Envy is –…

Morality is “conformity to ideals of right human conduct” (Merrian-Webster.com, n.d.). Utilizing the word conformity to define morality seems to present an opposition to ethics, in that what is accepted as the norm is not always ethically right. As Leo Tolstoy stated, wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it. We often conform to the ideals and actions of the majority as part of a deep human need to be accepted by society. Ethics, differing from morality, allows for the…

Puritans and Their Legacy Leo Tolstoy once said “everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” The Puritans were a group of people from England who wanted to purify the Church of England from the influences of the Roman Catholic Church. To achieve their goal, the Puritans travelled to America and settled in the New England region and lived in a conservative manner in order to exemplify themselves as a “city upon a hill” (Tindall and Shi 71). The Puritans’…

the "Wise Old Woman" by Yoshiko Uchida, all of the elders are disrespected when the Lord creates a decree that all elders over the age of seventy-one must be banished into the woods to die. In "The Old Grandfather and his Little Grandson" by Leo Tolstoy, the grandpa is treated badly by his son and daughter-in-law. He is extremely old, deaf, blind, and has no teeth and when he drops his bowl his kids lash out at him. Both of these stories have the same universal theme which is to respect your…

Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply because his ideal was destroyed.” I think that if Othello were jealousy, he would begin hiding, spying, peeping and that is what he did not. The truly jealous man is not like that. Othello declares at the end of the play that he was not jealous, at least he was not of a jealous temperament. He would not have suspected Desdemona if he had not been deceived by the villain - Iago. Iago is pretending to be an honest man and Othello’s…

It is no secret that the idea of wilderness grips every American citizen. Some authors including, William Cronon, have gone to great lengths to explain American infatuation with the wild. Cronon in his article The Trouble with Wilderness, Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, presents the sublime nature of wilderness as one of the reasons Americans imagine nature. I believe both I, Krakauer and Chris McCandless disagree with William’s Cronon’s assessment of the American psyche. Rather than seeing…

“One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.” – Eleanor Roosevelt. Philosophy is an abstract study of knowledge, existence, and overall, life. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, philosophy is mainly expressed in a question of what the meaning of life and death is, due to one of main characters contemplating suicide. Though most of the light shined on those two aspects of philosophy, other…

“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible” (Tolstoy 22). He married a woman named Praskovya Fedorvna, had two children and was a member of the Court of Justice as a Public Prosecutor. Ivan lived a normal, healthy life till he fell off his step-ladder and hit his side against the window frame. Since then he started to experience discomfort in his left side and unusual taste in his mouth. His discomforts started to gradually increase over time and Ivan…

decide something based on what my heart tells me to do, and I also always use my heart as my guidance to decide the righteousness of an action. That is why I don’t believe that majority opinion is always the right decision. I agree with what Leo Tolstoy says in his autobiography, “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it”. I believe that righteousness of an action is not decided by the amount of people who support it. That is also one of the reason why I don’t really…

In Jon Krakauers investigation of American wilderness in Into the Wild he explores the appeal of high risk encounters and how they changes the lives of those who feel compelled to take part in these kinds of activities. This types of risks are often comes in the form of some kind of dangerous spiritual journey something with real risk of death or injury or can be simply just a drastic change of life style. Anything that requires the a great amount of courage brings clarity and happiness to one’s…