5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 3: Mortality, Philosophy and Conceptions
of Death
Chair: Lloyd Steffen
King Death and the Death of a King: Monarchy and
Mortality in Late Medieval England
Ciara-Marie
Shevlin
Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland
This essay will consider the
social, cultural and political ramifications of the untimely or unexpected
death of a monarch. Recent history has shown that the death of a member
of royalty can cause significant social action. The death of Princess
Diana caused mass public grief; many people deemed ‘pilgrims’ by
the press flocked to the shrine at Althorp. Furthermore, a decade after
the incident numerous news reports and articles continue to discuss the
subject with no definitive narrative to the cause of the events having
been found satisfactory. This paper will focus primarily on the mysterious
death/murder of Richard II and how such an event had an equal, if not
greater, effect upon the royal subjects of the late medieval period.
The
essay is framed by three chapters. The first entitled ‘The King’s
Body’ provides an introduction to the philosophic position of the King’s
material and symbolic body as a basis for the further investigation of the political
potential of the King’s corpse. The second section of the essay, ‘The
Anxiety of Remembrance’, investigates the problems that arise when dealing
with historiographical accounts of royal deaths. Rather than attempting to present
a definitive narrative this essay is concerned with defending the value of variety
as a means of accessing the diversity of cultural articulations of grief. Finally ‘The
Unquiet Dead’ discusses the process where-by the dead monarch came to
haunt the reign of his usurper Henry IV. By analysing conspiratorial claims and
considering current critical theory about the birth of conspiracy this essay
will propose that the unexpected death of the king created complex, complicated
and moreover extremely sophisticated responses.
Owing the Dead
Jeremy
Wisnewski
Department
of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Hartwick College, New York, USA
No abstractis presently available
To Join the Army as a Volunteer During a War. Wittgenstein and the
Conception of Death
Rossella
Pisconti
Department of History and Social Science, Faculty of
Political Science, University of Bari, Italy
In this note some motivations
are discussed which cause people to join the army as volunteer during
a war. Such a choice would, indeed, deliberately expose oneself to an
extremely dangerous situation, since the probability of dying becomes
very high.
This issue has been investigated with reference to the Austrian
philosopher Ludwig Wittgentein’s personal experience, since he
willingly served the army during the World War I, and was used to write
down on a diary his thoughts about the atrocities he was surrounded by.
The well known conception of death in Wittgenstein’s philosophy
dates back to that troubled period of his life, and points out that,
even if science could answer to all its questions, issues of life and
death would remain untouched. The repercussions are further investigated
of those early reflections about the horrors of war on both his life
and philosophy, as it emerges from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
logico-philosophicus,
the only work which had been edited when the author was alive.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2007