George Washington’s Attorneys: The Political Selection of United States Attorneys at the Founding

This Article examines the relationship between the Nation’s first President and the selection of United States Attorneys. It argues that politics played an important, if not primary, role in the President’s selections. George Washington sought those who would represent the government’s interests, adhere to the government’s policies, and advance Washington’s political goals. His selections also demonstrated Washington’s requirement of loyalty to America. In this respect, the politicization of United States Attorneys occurred at the outset. Part I of this Article defines politicization and identifies its four aspects. Part II describes the United States Attorney position as understood through the 1789 Judiciary Act and state experience. Part III examines how Washington’s selections and selection process included three of the four politicization categories. The concluding Section briefly explores the ramifications of politicization and its potential benefits in today’s prosecutorial environmen

Cooperative Intuitionism

According to pluralistic intuitionist theories, some of our moral beliefs are non-inferentially justified, and these beliefs come in both an a priori and an a posteriori variety. In this paper I present new support for this pluralistic form of intuitionism by examining the deeply social nature of moral inquiry. This is something that intuitionists have tended to neglect. It does play an important role in an intuitionist theory offered by Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (forth), but whilst they invoke the social nature of moral inquiry in order to argue that ordinary moral intuitions are trustworthy, my argument focuses on what I will call the ‘frontiers’ of moral inquiry. I will show that inclusive and cooperative dialogue is necessary at moral inquiry’s frontiers, and that intuitionists can expect such dialogue to result in both a priori and a posteriori moral beliefs

Thisnesses, Propositions, and Truth

Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, should accept a thisness ontology, since it can do considerable work in defence of presentism. In this paper, I propose a version of presentism that involves thisnesses of past and present entities and I argue this view solves important problems facing standard versions of presentism

The Moral Fixed Points: Reply to Cuneo and Shafer-Landau

No abstract

The graffiti artist : doing the work of the lyric through juxtaposition of disparate social discourse : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Master of Creative Writing, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

One way the lyric has developed over the last century is to accommodate non-poetic social discourses, e.g. languages of prose, genre, profession and cultural groups into the lyric tradition. This thesis investigates the use of discourse to perform the work of lyric. It does so in two parts: in a critical essay and through my own creative work, a manuscript of original poetry that is meant to account for 60 percent of my thesis. The critical component analyses four contemporary poems that do the work of the lyric through this accommodation of social discourse: “A History” by Glenn Colquhoun, “Mountains” by Sarah Jane Barnett, “Torch Song” by Laura Mullen and “Gesamtkunstwerk” by Lisa Samuels. It examines, in particular, these poets’ use of juxtaposition of disparate social discourse as an organising technique that illustrates the process of perception that is integral to lyric tradition. The intensity of the juxtaposition of social discourse increases with each of these poems, challenging some of the more traditional characteristics of what it means to be lyric, such as whether the lyric is “uttered by a single speaker” or “expresses subjective feeling”. But if these poems increasingly seem to fall outside the traditional lyric, this study argues that they in fact do the work of the lyric by treating the disparate discourse as both a representation and product of an increasingly globalised and fractured world. At the same time, the opportunities the poet provides to make links across the contrasting discourses allow the reader to construct an enunciative posture that provides a lens onto the “ache” of living in such a world, and thus recover the subjective experience associated with the lyric. This critical study investigates questions that are also of interest in the creative portion: how to use multiple strands of social discourse in poetry in an effective and relevant way, and iv how to organise a disparate set of poems into a collective whole. The essay, therefore, informed the creative component of this thesis, a collection of poetry entitled “The Graffiti Artist”. This collection offers juxtapositions of disparate discourses as well as narrative snapshots, each snapshot nevertheless intersecting with and connected to the life of the protagonist, a mother who turns during a time of crisis – personal crises with her children and social crisis in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes – to graffiti art. A narrative in fragments, the poems juxtapose strands of story and types of discourse she encounters in her different roles as graffiti artist, mother and wife. Such discourses include, for example, scientific discourse associated with her scientist son, the medical discourse of mental illness, the discourse of advertising, and the discourse of the earthquake-damaged city she inhabits. By using these techniques to extend defamiliarisation, I aimed to reveal a troubled world through the lens of a graffiti-artist speaker so a reader might see her experience from within, thus effecting a change in perception, and doing the work of the lyric