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As a domain of philosophical enquiry that examines what it means to be, existentialism is a moral project that is centered on the self. While a few have applied the precepts of existentialism to the philosophical implications of homicide offenders, one question that has been overlooked in previous literature is 'what is the offspring attempting to do by killing his/her parent(s)'? Using historical work on nineteenth century parricides in America, this paper examines parricide as an identity project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how providing the inferential basis to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretations features as a way of managing issues of accountability in talk about armed confrontation. We examine conversation produced in open-ended interviews with diplomatic representatives of the United States and Great Britain in discussion about those countries' involvement in the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–91. By providing the inferential basis upon which to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretative scenarios, speakers attend to the potential for any one account to be privileged over another. Further, in speculating upon the relationship between interpretative particulars and the inferential outcome to be drawn for some specific version of events in question, speakers work to establish the parameters of an admissible narrative trajectory with which to account for those events. In so doing, they manage the implications that excluded versions would otherwise make relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]