The comparison of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae with the architecture of a cathedral is not new. We find it in 1850 in Karl Werner’s System der christlichen Ethik (1850, 47), and in 1860 the German architect Gottfried Semper writes in the preface to his two-volume manual Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts: art... appears isolated and relegated to a field especially marked out for it. The opposite was true in antiquity, where philosophy held sway over this field as well. (...) Philosophy was seen as an artist herself and a guide to the other arts. But in growing old, she turned to analysis and devised dead categories instead of living analogies. In just the same way, Gothic architecture was the.. (shrink)

While feminist philosophy has had much to say on the topic of reason, little has been done to develop a specifically feminist account of the concept. I argue for a virtue account of mind grounded in contemporary approaches to rationality. The evolutionary stance adopted within most contemporary theories of mind implicitly entails a rejection of central elements of Cartesianism. As a result, many accounts of rationality are anti-modern is precisely the sorts of ways that feminists demand. I maintain that a (...) virtue account of rationality can provide a satisfactory answer to Benhabib’s question in Situating of the Self: what concept of reason are we willing to defend? (shrink)

This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project, a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe. Drawing on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and principles of bibliotherapy employed since the Middle Ages, we argue that The Decameron Project offers (...) strategies to simultaneously confront and contain the anxious mind. Storytelling, according to both Boccaccio and to the editors of The Decameron Project, is not merely a source of distraction but a means of survival. (shrink)