Question
A Thracian maid who performed this act when Thales fell in a well is celebrated in Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this act performed by Medusa in the title of a Hélène Cixous essay. Chrysippus died from this act, which provides a nickname for the cheerful atomist Democritus.
ANSWER: laughter [or word forms or synonyms of laughing; accept “The Laugh of the Medusa” or Le Rire de la Méduse; reject “smiling” or synonyms]
[10h] This book notes the “entirely serious” way Plato describes the Thracian maid’s laughter. The author of this book used her Gifford Lectures for its parts on “Thinking” and “Willing” before dying with the first page of the third part on her typewriter in 1975.
ANSWER: The Life of the Mind (by Hannah Arendt)
[10m] Hans Blumenberg’s The Laughter of the Thracian Woman interprets the story as this concept “interrupting” theory. Edmund Husserl introduced this term for a shared realm of social experience.
ANSWER: lifeworld [or Lebenswelt; reject “world” or “Welt”]
<Philosophy>
Summary
| 2024 ACF Nationals | 2024-04-21 | Y | 24 | 13.75 | 96% | 38% | 4% |
Data
| Northwestern | Berkeley A | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Columbia A | Chicago B | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| Truman State | Chicago C | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Berkeley B | Chicago D | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Claremont Colleges | Duke | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Columbia B | Penn | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Stanford | Cornell A | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| Cornell B | Harvard | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Waterloo | Indiana | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| Iowa State | Georgia Tech | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Brown | Maryland | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| McGill | Minnesota B | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Illinois | NYU | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| Minnesota A | Purdue | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| WUSTL B | Rutgers | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Kentucky | South Carolina | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| North Carolina A | Texas | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| Michigan | Toronto A | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |
| North Carolina B | Vanderbilt | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Virginia | Toronto B | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Chicago A | WUSTL A | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |
| Johns Hopkins | Yale A | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Yale B | Ottawa | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Arizona State | Florida | 10 | 0 | 10 | 20 |