Abstract
C.H. Grandgent claimed that Dante’s portrait of Francesca was marked by “compassion, tenderness, sympathetic curiosity, [and] anguish.”1 The idea that Dante pitied Francesca still seemed so obvious to Lionel Trilling that he used it as a figure of speech, saying of a minor work: “like carnal passion in the Inferno, it evokes not blame but tender sorrow.”2
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Notes
Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America” (1940) in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 6.
Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1983), pp. 167–168.
Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 175.
Cf. Mark Norris Lance and Maggie Little, “From Particularism to Defeasibility in Ethics,” in Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč, and Vojko Strahovnik, eds., Challenging Moral Particularism (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 54.
Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p, 56.
I am quoting an argument that Mike W. Martin introduces, only to reject: see his Martin, “Love’s Constancy,” Philosophy, vol, 68, no, 263 (January 1993), p. 64.
Gianfranco Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta sella Commedia,” in Un’idea de Dante (Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1976), p. 46
Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well-Being,” in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds,, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Moral philosophy, John Rawls says, cannot be “simply a list of the judgments on institutions and actions that we are prepared to render.…” A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999, sec, 9, p, 41).
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, section 11 (pp, 53–4), Cf. Ronald Dworkin, “Rights as Trumps,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1 (1981), pp. 177–212.
See, for example, Roger Crisp, “Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue,” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 167 (April 1992), with a clear statement at p. 160.
H.W.B. Joseph, Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 92
David McNaughton, “An Unconnected Heap of Duties?” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 185 (October 1996), p. 434.
W.D. Ross, The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 190.
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, revised and augmented version translated by Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 85.
De Kougemont is wrong about the troubadours as a group, because only about three percent of their songs seriously extol adultery, and many criticize it. See William D. Paden, “The Troubadour’s Lady: Her Marital Status and Social Rank,” Studies in Philology, vol. 72 (1975), pp. 28–50.
Marcia W. Baron is typical of modern Kantian moral philosophers in that she emphasizes these two duties rather than the Categorical Imperative as the useful heart of Kant’s ethics. See Marcia W. Baron, “Kantian Ethics,” in Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, eds., Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), especially pp. 19
See Eva Cantarella, “Homicides of Honor: The Development of Italian Adultery Lav/over Two Millennia,” in David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Sailer, eds., The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 229–244.
For example, in the Italian version of the Arthurian romance, La Tavola ritonda, Mark punishes his wife Iseult and her lover Tristan for adultery, but Arthur then shames and punishes Mark for his actions. See Aldo D. Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1963), p. 21.
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© 2009 Peter Levine
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Levine, P. (2009). Dante Philosophizes About Francesca’s Case. In: Reforming the Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104693_3
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