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Reconciling Modernity And Tradition In A Liberal Society, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many modern liberals have been eager to tout the virtues of diversity, but many have equally found it difficult to tolerate customs or traditions that do not conform to liberalism’s deepest commitments to equality and individual liberty. The distinction between traditional and modern is not a very useful one for understanding the problems confronting liberal society, or for working out how to address them because the contrast does not pick out a tension or conflict about which we can usefully generalise. Chandran Kukatahs suggests that as the tension in question is not one that is capable of resolution, the best …

Northrop Frye On Twentieth-Century Literature, Glen Robert Gill

Department of Classics and General Humanities Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book, T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to a twentieth-century literature anthology. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate definitively that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods.

Glen Robert Gill's …

"Of All Professions Begging Is The Best" - Some Problems In The Study Of Professions, Michael Davis

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Michael Davis' original paper was presented to the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University on October 4, 2007.

Professions "Of All Professions, Begging Is The Best" A Paper By Michael Davis. Response By Joseph Ellin. Professor Davis' Reply, Center For The Study Of Ethics In Society

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Michael Davis' original paper was presented to the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University on October 4, 2007.

Death As Metaphor, Lawrence Kimmel

Philosophy Faculty Research

What remains to be said about the question and problem of death that has not been repeated a thousand times in the history of human thought and culture? Philosophers in the Western tradition have seemingly argued every nuance of the name, nature, causes, and consequences of death since Plato first took up the death of Socrates as the funding occasion of his philosophical life and thinking. Epicurean and Stoic philosophers subsequently framed the basic arguments that are still with us, directed to three basic questions concerning death: What is it? Is it good or bad? Should we fear it?

The Case For Open Immigration, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

People favor or are opposed to immigration for a variety of reasons. It is therefore difficult to tie views about immigration to ideological positions. While it seems obviousthat political conservatives are the most unlikely to defend freedom of movement,and that socialists and liberals (classical and modern) are very likely to favor more openborders, in reality wariness (if not outright hostility) to immigration can be foundamong all groups. Even libertarian anarchists have advanced reasons to restrict themovement of peoples.

Political Correctness Today, Joseph Ellin

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Paper presented to the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University, November 14th, 2003.

Afterword: The Hermeneutics Of Natural Science, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

A Husserlean intentionality analysis of the early Bohr-Heisenberg view of the quantum theory; of quantum logic as a context logic of differently embodied inquirers; of the problems of causality and localization in quantum mechanics.

Heideggerian analysis of the ontological status of measurement and laboratory data. The Husserlean group transformation structure of perceptual objects in general, and of theoretically denominated laboratory entities construed as perceptual objects.

A critique of David Marr’s program for machine perception.

A study of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, Bedroom at Arles (1888), of the art and aesthetics of the (negatively curved) local Riemannian pictorial space achieved by …

Equality And Affiliation As Bases Of Ethical Responsibility, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Logic And Coercion In Bentham's Theory Of Law, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Unlike conventional moral standards and other social rules, laws can be deliberately laid down and changed by specified procedures. It therefore seems reasonable to think of laws as issuing from or adopted by lawmakers who are ordinary human beings. Since laws tell us what must or must not be done, and since there is some temptation to understand all laws on the same pattern, it is natural to think of them as either commands or prohibitions. This is indeed a traditional view.

George Berkeley And The Jacobite Heresy: Some Comments On Irish Augustan Politics, Graham P. Conroy

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay is an attempt to explain Berkeley's connections with the Augustan Circle and to mitigate the criticisms brought against him by those opposed to the views of some of that group.