Shaped by Hegel, philosophy’s approach to Antigone has always been firmly rooted in all the assumptions of realism, with proper, true-to-life, consistent, and plausible characters. These characterological mimetic interpretations often feed off each other within context what’s perceived as “realist” drama, its focus on characters their insoluble, hence tragic, conflict. Starting twentieth-centur...

We offer a new answer to the paradox of tragedy. We explain part of the appeal of tragic art in terms of its acknowledgement of sad aspects of life and offer a tentative explanation of why acknowledgement is a source of pleasure.

Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain crosscountry differences in public policies, political stability, and other economic indicators. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa,...

Two generations before Aristotle wrote his celebrated treatise on what the nature of tragic mimesis (or imitation) is, the comic poet Aristophanes had written two plays about the subject, Thesmophoriazusae and the more celebrated Frogs. The first play has the poet Euripides as its hero, and the second the god Dionysus. This god is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, and at a festival in his hon...

OBJECTIVE Within days of each other, 2 catastrophic fires occurred in Kenya. On January 28, 2009, a busy supermarket was destroyed in downtown Nairobi. Shortly thereafter on February 2, an overturned petrol tanker exploded near the village of Molo, 200 km from the capital. These 2 disasters, in an urban and a rural setting, respectively, illustrate the lack of disaster readiness on a local and ...

The natural and social sciences have recognized for some time that when rational agents use a shared resource (a \commons") near its capacity, the resource is doomed. This is the tragedy of the commons. The same problem will also arise when agents in a distributed AI system share a resource. In this paper, we examine the tragedy of the commons as it applies to DAI and discuss several potential ...

We are praised and blamed for things of which we are causes, not things for which necessity, nature,chance or other human beings are causes. In his ethical writings Aristotle restricts moral responsibility to those actions an agent performs voluntarily. Only voluntary actions are candidates for praise and blame, reward and punishment. Voluntary actions meet two conditions: they have their causa...