Browsing by Author "Castrillon, Gloria Ledger"

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    Invention or reflection? - tradition and orality in the works of Bessie Head
    (1993) Castrillon, Gloria Ledger
    This dissertation examines the work of Bessie Head with a view to sophisticating prevailing understandings of her texts which tend to concentrate on Head's place in a tradition of African women writers. Current critical works emphasise selected aspects, of Head's biography and assume her presentation of the 'tradition' and 'orality' of Serowe to be accurate. We argue in this dissertation that Head has constructed and manipulated concepts of 'tradition' and 'orality' in her texts to suit both her intellectual concerns and her fictional intentions. Broadly these are to present her works as the recorded history of an 'oral African' society. Head's six novels as well as aspects of her letters and interviews are examined in order to demonstrate this assertion.
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    Is suicide ever morally permissible?
    (2015-08-19) Castrillon, Gloria Ledger
    The moral permissibility of suicide continues to be as controversial as ever. Recent, rapid advances in medicine and science, and in particular in those technologies that extend human life, have resulted in a resurgence of interest in the question. In this paper, I examine two views on suicide so as to arrive at an answer to the question of whether suicide is ever morally permissible. I look in some detail at a sanctity-of-life approach, in which it is argued that suicide is against ‘natural’ law and that it perverts our rational desire for the good that is life. By way of contrast, I examine a broadly utilitarian approach to the question. I conclude that it is through the application of the utilitarian approach that we are able to come to the answer that sometimes, depending on the circumstances, suicide may in fact be morally permissible, not only for reasons of suffering or ill health such as we expect to find in the context of euthanasia.