Today's Message
Posted: Friday, October 17, 2014Philosophy and Humanities Department Fall 2014 Colloquium: 'The Quarter on Thoreau's Gravestone' - October 20
Please join us for the first presentation in our annual Philosophy and Humanities Fall 2014 Faculty Colloquia, "The Quarter on Thoreau's Gravestone," presented by James Grunebaum, professor emeritus of philosophy, on Monday, October 20, at 2:00 p.m. in Bishop Hall 242. The commentator will be Jessica Simpson, '16, philosophy and French dual major.
Abstract
While visiting Concord, Massachusetts, we stopped at a cemetery with the graves of Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Visitors to the cemetery place remembrances such as pencils, pens, stones, ribbons, buttons, bits of paper, and pinecones on and around their tombstones. On Thoreau's stone, someone left a bright, shiny U.S. quarter. The question occurred to me whether it would be wrong to take it. My paper explores a variety of philosophical answers to this question.
Monday, October 20, 2014
