Emerson Sayde

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt” -- Immanuel Kant In this paper, I will defend that Kant’s theory of aesthetics illustrates a more advantageous baseline for defining political judgement in a democratic liberal society than Kant’s theory of morality. In his Third Critique, Kant's analysis of...

" The whole body of law is permeated by two recurring standards of decision: fault and intent." -- Lon Fuller In this paper, I will defend Lon Fuller’s account of the 1949 postwar Grudge Informer case   and the natural law conception of the vitality of moral consideration in the legal sphere. According to Lon Fuller, there is no neutral way to identify law without interpreting it. In every place that Fuller’s antithesis, H.L.A. Hart, argues for the separation of law and morality, Fuller...

“Oh, it is hard to give in! But it is worse to risk everything for stubborn pride.” In this paper, I will defend King Kreon’s decree in Sophocles’s Antigone  using principles derived from Aquinas’s natural law theory. According to Aquinas, law is an exercise of public personage by a sovereign who cares for all people of his state. As an instance of divergence from positive and divine law particular to a case of treachery, Kreon’s law was protective of natural law’s end towards eudaimonia in...