casuistry

'A rhetorician would have had much to say upon that point.' It may be observed however that Plato never intended to answer the question of casuistry, but only to exhibit the ideal of patient virtue which refuses to do the least evil in order to avoid the greatest, and to show his master maintaining in death the opinions which he had professed in his life.

Was it simply that Elizabeth was one of that rare few who can touch pitch and not be defiled?--or was it, I have sometimes wondered, an unconscious and after all a sound casuistry that had saved Elizabeth's soul, an instinctive philosophy that taught her, so to say, to lay a Sigurd's sword between her soul and body, and to argue that nothing can defile the body without the consent of the soul.

Containing the great address of the landlady, the great learning of a surgeon, and the solid skill in casuistry of the worthy lieutenant.

And the paradoxes in which Raffles revelled, and the frivolous casuistry which was nevertheless half sincere, and which his mere personality rendered wholly plausible at the moment of utterance, appealed very little to me when recalled in cold blood.

Meanwhile it would seem, as regards the moral question, that his analysis was complete; his casuistry had become keen as a razor, and he could not find rational objections in himself.

Her casuistry was interrupted by some one softly whistling a theme from the overture to Masaniello, popular at the college in the form of an arrangement for six pianofortes and twelve hands.

Brown demonstrates that Donne employed an explicitly Protestant form of casuistry wherein the individual was responsible for making moral choices, based on conscience, reasons, and scripture.

Though his narrator has a style more characteristic of the casuistry of an Orwellian bureaucrat than what we might expect of the photographer he is supposed to be, it succeeds well in linking these repressive regimes, which, despite their great differences, still all too often differed more merely in the principles on which they committed their atrocities than in many of their actual practices.

Brown suggests that in his prose and poetry Donne defends his exceptional propositions by adopting the relativity of casuistry's methods, though without its theo-centric assurance.

In this way, other issues can also be touched on, such as study, casuistry, charity, and confraternities.

His most recent book is Measure for Measure: Casuistry and Artistry.

A similar casuistry drives the character of the Bad Lieutenant, whose absolute degradation runs a parallel course with salvation.