Philosophy Commons^™

Teaching Philosophy Classes In Spanish Or Bilingually In The South Texas Borderlands, Alex Stehn, Cynthia Paccacerqua, Danny Marrero, Christopher Gomez, Dania López García, Katherine Christoffersen

11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language

Situated in the deep south Texas borderlands, over 90% of our students are Hispanic or Latino/a/x and the majority are bilingual. That is, most students enrolled across every course at our university are heritage speakers of Spanish. As professional philosophers, we believe that teaching these students should involve engaging them as the bilingual and bicultural students they are while helping them develop philosophical biliteracy. Our panelists are from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (native speaker, heritage speaker, L2 speaker) but all of us are bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate faculty who have been working together as a team to design and …

Genealogical Vs Phylogenetic Mutation Rates: Answering A Challenge, Robert Carter

Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism

There is a discrepancy between the mutation rate we can measure today and the rate at which evolution is supposed to have proceeded. The former is sometimes called the genealogical mutation rate, for it is obtained by comparing individuals whom we know to be related. The latter is sometimes called the phylogenetic mutation rate. It is calculated by counting the fixed differences between two species and dividing by the estimated time since their common ancestor. Genealogical mutation rates are generally several orders of magnitude faster than phylogenetic estimates. This causes problems for the evolutionary model. For example, using the genealogical …

Essentialism And The Human Kind, Or Experiments In Character Weighting, Todd Charles Wood

Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism

Human baraminology studies have been critiqued in the past for classifying disputed fossils as human and for ignoring character weight. Related to these concerns is an essentialist approach to hominin fossils, wherein a comparison of modern skeletons reveals a potentially small number of characteristics that distinguish human from ape and can be applied to the fossil record. This approach is essentialist because the characteristics that distinguish humans from apes now are assumed to be universally applicable for all time and taxa, and thus are unchanging. Thus, any approach to distinguishing human from ape in the fossil record must give greater …

Mrs. Dalloway As A Window For Understanding Life, Kristen Venegas

English (MA) Theses

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway may be dismissed as fiction, and fiction consequently is dismissed as fantasy. However, the novel enables readers to practice an intellectual exercise of meta-awareness that extends beyond the pages and onto real world phenomena. Under a cognitive neuroscience perspective, Mrs. Dalloway is a literary masterpiece due to its hyper- realistic execution of the intimacies of life. Through the narrative style of free-indirect discourse, Woolf illustrates what occurs in the minds of characters as they develop their own perceptions of reality and identity, exposes the fear and inadequacies of mankind’s distress in times of chaos and disorder …

Interviews In Global Catholic Studies: Dr. Judith Hahn, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Interview with Judith Chair of Canon Law at the University of Bonn.

The Theology Of The Liturgical Seasons In The Syro-Malabar Church, Ann Mary Madavanakadu Cmc

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper focuses on the theology of the liturgical seasons in the Syro-Malabar Church. The liturgical year with its liturgical cycles and seasons, is more than just a mere structural framework for the prayer life of the Church. It is a true locus of rich theology. The liturgical year is defined as the yearly plan of spiritual life by the Church, for her children, arranged in different seasons or periods to celebrate the mysteries of Christ in life together with feasts, fasts, and abstinence in order to make Christian life a successful pilgrimage to heaven for attaining salvation. This article …

Gaston-Paul Effa, Moine-Pèlerin Et Flambeur Au Risque De La Forêt Camerounaise, Sylvie Kande

The Goose

Book review of Gaston-Paul Effa's 2019 novel, La vertical du Cri. The narrator finds salvation in wandering between nations and throughout the African rainforest.

The Dialectical Virtue Of Ideological Reduction, Keehyuk Nahm

Doctoral Dissertations

Many would agree that there is something generally appealing and attractive about reduction. By this, I do not mean that reductive theories are accepted across the board, nor do I mean that they should be. All I mean is that there is something recognizably “good” about the reductive method that may be outweighed by other considerations. For instance, it is extremely rare for one to reject the reductionist position of a given domain while conceding that the proposed reductive procedure is successful. Typically, the opposition consists in denying that the subject matter can be reduced. This suggests an unspoken rule …

Becoming Harmonious: What Can Confucius Contribute To Our Theory Of Rights, Edgar J. Vasquez

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

In the West, the core value that informs how we create and think about rights is autonomy, especially for the individual. For the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius, the core value to be pursued is harmony or the well-being of society as a whole. In this paper I argue that the West should also make harmony our core value. To make my case, I take influence from Confucius to look at how his theory differs from typical Western political theory. I discuss Confucius’ emphasis on duties rather than rights, the idea of citizenship as a privilege rather than a right, and …

Resentment, Will, And Moral Identity, Nicole Reid

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

Our everyday personal interactions with others are nothing if not complex. Accidents happen, mistakes are made, and the seamless understanding of the attitudes and actions of others doesn’t always occur. At some point an apology will need to be offered. In this essay I intend to examine the work done by an apology after an accidental transgression in mitigating unfavorable reactive attitudes like anger and resentment. This important work, I’ll argue, is more than just a societal norm. The work of an apology not only helps others to hold us in our identity as morally responsible agents, but has the …

Hope, Contentment, And Shame: The Formulation Of Agency In Children, Niamh Quinnan

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

In this paper, I examine how agency develops in children and I evaluate where parents and guardians are responsible for facilitating this development. I explain how parental scaffolding allows children to be supported by their parents to learn to hope, both as it is relevant to their growth and development, and as they begin to acquire particular skills relevant to their agency. Through what I call collaborative agency, I express the importance of parental facilitation and nurturing of the moral agency of their child so that they may better develop complete agency by adulthood. I explain the roles that hope, …

"The Algorithm Decides": Unintentional Agency Laundering & Explanation, Carson Johnston

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

In this paper I explore a situation under-explored by AI researchers where those who deploy decision-making algorithms unintentionally launder their moral agency to algorithms through anthropomorphic ascriptions of their underlying architecture. Often, this kind of agency laundering occurs rather innocently, by attempting to render an otherwise opaque system transparent through simplified and analogous explanations intended to enhance the decision subject’s understanding. Consequently, when unintentional agency laundering happens, the decision subject’s agency to seek recourse for adverse outcomes is undermined in the process of laundering the data controller’s moral agency to a non-agent. This paper explores this situation as it pertains …

On Radical Moral Encroachment: Distancing Epistemology From Truth, Roshan Dahale

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

Rima Basu has described radical moral encroachment as a theory that detaches wronging from action and attaches it to the belief instead. Furthermore, the stakes are associated with the wrongness of the belief rather than the risk of being false. Basu believes that this form of encroachment accurately captures our modern intuition on how racism functions. However, this paper lays out objections to this form of thinking. The rebuttal includes making the distinction between assumptions, probabilities, and outright beliefs. Probabilities and assumptions cannot be equated with an outright belief. Next, there is the issue of making the wronging of another …

Letter From The Editors, Edgar J. Vasquez, John Milkovich

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

No abstract provided.

What Do We Owe The Other Animals In Health-Related Research?, Jessica A. Du Toit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I provide an account of the protections to which most captive non-human animals are morally entitled when they participate in health-related research. At least in the animal ethics literature, it is uncontroversial that the protections currently afforded to captive research animals are inadequate. This has much to do with the fact that most animals who serve as research participants are 1) sentient and, thus, have important morally considerable interests; 2) unable to provide informed consent to their research participation; and 3) seriously harmed as a result of their participation.

Unsurprisingly, then, a number of authors have proposed …

On Virtue Ethics Theory And Elementary Music Education, Joshua Burgos

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses virtue ethics theory, teacher research method, and self-study to examine how I perceive myself as contributing to cultivating virtuous persons. Virtue ethics theory, teacher research method, and self-study are empirical, using concrete methods of data generation and analysis, and conceptual, relating to studying philosophical research, ideas, and interpretations (Annas, 2007; Check & Schutt, 2012; Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988). The study aimed to discover how virtue is cultivated through music education and improve teaching practice using virtue ethics theory and empirical research to offer insight into how virtue is cultivated. The study was conducted in an elementary school …

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” This paper supports Harman’s assertion from a systems theoretic perspective and illustrates it with some examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. But dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components not only imply one another but are related, and where this spatial dyad is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or an additional orthogonal dyad.

Self-Inflicted Frankfurt-Style Cases And Flickers Of Freedom, Michael Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a …

Is There Really Anything Wrong With That? An Aristotelian Analysis Of Duty, Luke J. Mcgrath

Honors College Theses

In the iconic Seinfeld series finale, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer find themselves in a peculiar legal predicament when they mock a crime rather than intervene to help the victim. The show’s commitment to portraying reality, even in its finale, vividly demonstrates the potential consequences of a society lacking the legal obligation to aid others. This comical incident raises a thought-provoking question about the legitimacy of duty-to-act laws in the United States. This thesis examines the application of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to the concept of duty-to-act laws and argues for the necessity and benefits of such laws in promoting a …

Are We Living In A Simulation?, Michell-Lee Graham

Student Research

If we are living inside of a simulation, what’s wrong with that? Nick Bostrom, a swedish philosopher has proposed the question of whether we are living in a simulation. Philosophers in the past have grappled with this concept, from Plato to George Berkeley. In this thesis, I intend to argue or prove that we may be living inside of a simulation or to my best ability find some approximation to the truth of the matter.