CS Musings

Amia Srinivasan opens her piece, “Does anyone have the right to sex?” with a discussion of ‘Incel’ culture – involuntarily celibate men enraged at women for depriving them of sex. Srinivasan affirms that such men are obviously in the wrong; their anger at women has no basis and their advocation for rape is horrendous. However, there…

In his piece, “Intoxicated Consent to Sexual Relations,” Alan Wertheimer addresses the question of whether (unambiguous) consent to sex should be regarded as valid when only given while intoxicated. In his case, it is a woman “B” giving consent to a man, “A.” As Wertheimer points out, there are major institutional and moral ramifications to…

Throughout Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the central question plaguing its characters is one of why. The novel’s protagonist Frederic Henry and his compatriots do not ask how the war will be won (at least, not as time goes on), but why it began in the first place. What’s the point? Henry struggles with. Yes, there…

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is fundamentally one about God and Christianity, but for Ivan – the middle Karamazov brother – God’s existence is not a pressing problem. Ivan does not struggle with accepting a God, he tells his younger brother Alexey, but he does struggle with embracing the world that God has created; if…

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his lecture-turned-essay The Humanism of Existentialism, writes that existentialism is “nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position” (62). Indeed, throughout his lecture Sartre writes from a perspective firmly rooted in atheism. The absence of God, Sartre says, is what gives way to the principal…