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Articles 31 - 60 of 97
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Permanent Wartime, Harry Van Der Linden
Permanent Wartime, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This article reviews War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences by Mary L. Dudziak, published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
Barack Obama As Just War Theorist: The Libyan Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
Barack Obama As Just War Theorist: The Libyan Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
President Barack Obama has clearly placed himself in the just war tradition, and so we may ask how successful has President Obama in fact been as just war theorist? His justification of the recent NATO intervention in Libya shows that the record is at best mixed. More broadly, Obama’s failure as just war theorist is at least partly a failure of the theory itself: as long as this theory does not address issues of “just military preparedness,” it will fail to place real constraints on American resort to military force.
On The Violence Of Systemic Violence: A Critique Of Slavoj Žižek, Harry Van Der Linden
On The Violence Of Systemic Violence: A Critique Of Slavoj Žižek, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense …
Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan
Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from the perspective of a mechanical theory of causation (Glennan 1996, 1997, 2010, forthcoming), and to explain what, from this perspective, causal generalizations mean, and what role they play within the mechanical theory.
Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves
Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.
Rich Man’S War, Poor Man’S Fight, Harry Van Der Linden
Rich Man’S War, Poor Man’S Fight, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This article reviews The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities by Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
Just Military Preparedness (Jus Ante Bellum): A New Category Of Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden
Just Military Preparedness (Jus Ante Bellum): A New Category Of Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This presentation discusses why just war theory is in need of just military preparedness (jus ante bellum) as a new category of just war thinking and it articulates six principles of just military preparedness. The paper concludes that the United States fails to satisfy any of these principles and addresses how this bears on the application of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum norms to possible future American military interventions.
Just Military Preparedness And Irregular Warfare, Harry Van Der Linden
Just Military Preparedness And Irregular Warfare, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This presentation explores the significance of just military preparedness (JMP), or jus ante bellum as a new category of just war theory, for just war thinking, especially with regard to irregular warfare. It articulates six just military preparedness (JMP) principles. It further discusses how America’s military preparation fails the JMP principles and how this negatively impacts its capability to justly initiate, execute, and conclude (irregular) war. This critical analysis takes as its point of departure (former) Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s view that the Pentagon needs to be “reprogrammed” toward a “balanced strategy” of preparing for both conventional and irregular warfare.
Just Military Preparedness, U.S. Military Hegemony, And Contingency Planning For Intervention In Sudan: A Reply To Lango And Patterson, Harry Van Der Linden
Just Military Preparedness, U.S. Military Hegemony, And Contingency Planning For Intervention In Sudan: A Reply To Lango And Patterson, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This paper rejects most aspects of John W. Lango and Eric Patterson’s proposal that the United States should plan for a possible intervention in Sudan on secessionist and humanitarian grounds and announce this planning as a deterrent to the central government of Sudan attacking the people of South Sudan if they would opt in a January 2011 referendum for independence. I argue that secession is not a just cause for armed intervention and that, rightfully, neither the American people nor many of its men and women in uniform would be prepared to engage in an intervention that might easily escalate. …
From Combat Boots To Civilian Shoes: Reflections On The Chickenhawk Syndrome, Harry Van Der Linden
From Combat Boots To Civilian Shoes: Reflections On The Chickenhawk Syndrome, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This essay is part of a symposium on Cheyney Ryan’s The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility (2009). Ryan’s reply to his critics can be found on pp. 181-89 in Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010.
The Desert Of The Real: Christianity, Buddhism & Baudrillard In The Matrix Films And Popular Culture, James F. Mcgrath
The Desert Of The Real: Christianity, Buddhism & Baudrillard In The Matrix Films And Popular Culture, James F. Mcgrath
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
The movie The Matrix and its sequels draw explicitly on imagery from a number of sources, including in particular Buddhism, Christianity, and the writings of Jean Baudrillard. A perspective is offered on the perennial philosophical question ‘What is real?’, using language and symbols drawn from three seemingly incompatible world views. In doing so, these movies provide us with an insight into the way popular culture makes eclectic use of various streams of thought to fashion a new reality that is not unrelated to, and yet is nonetheless distinct from, its religious and philosophical undercurrents and underpinnings.
Mechanisms (Oxford), Stuart Glennan
Mechanisms (Oxford), Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Mechanism is undoubtedly a causal concept, in the sense that ordinary definitions and philosophical analyses explicate the concept in terms of other causal concepts such as production and interaction. Given this fact, many philosophers have supposed that analyses of the concept of mechanism, while they might appeal to philosophical theories about the nature of causation, could do little to inform such theories. On the other hand, methods of causal inference and explanation appeal to mechanisms. Discovering a mechanism is the gold standard for establishing and explaining causal connections. This fact suggests that it might be possible to provide an analysis …
Aristotle On Pure And Simple Stuff, Tiberiu Popa
Aristotle On Pure And Simple Stuff, Tiberiu Popa
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
A view that has been entertained traditionally by Aristotelian scholars is that the four simple bodies in the sublunary world (earth, water, air, and fire) cannot exist independently; a consequence of this view is the general belief that all homoeomers or uniform bodies have to be compounds. i would like to suggest that, while Aristotle consistently maintains that the four basic opposites (hot, cold, moist, dry) cannot exist independently, this is not always the case with the four simple bodies. My central claim is that Meteorology IV – Aristotle’s ‘chemical treatise’ – provides evidence that, contrary to the traditional interpretation …
Mechanisms, Causes, And The Layered Model Of The World, Stuart Glennan
Mechanisms, Causes, And The Layered Model Of The World, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Most philosophical accounts of causation take causal relations to obtain between individuals and events in virtue of nomological relations between properties of these individuals and events. Such views fail to take into account the consequences of the fact that in general the properties of individuals and events will depend upon mechanisms that realize those properties. In this paper I attempt to rectify this failure, and in so doing to provide an account of the causal relevance of higher-level properties. I do this by critiquing one prominent model of higher-level properties – Kim’s functional model of reduction – and contrasting it …
Ephemeral Mechanisms And Historical Explanation, Stuart Glennan
Ephemeral Mechanisms And Historical Explanation, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses – actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and capricious. In this paper I shall argue that, notwithstanding their ephemeral nature, these processes deserve to be …
Questioning The Resort To U.S. Hegemonic Military Force, Harry Van Der Linden
Questioning The Resort To U.S. Hegemonic Military Force, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This paper seeks to defend the thesis that this American project of military hegemony has a variety of global security costs of such combined magnitude that there is a strong prima facie case against the resort to armed force by the United States, so that its wars might be wrong even when there is a just cause. My thesis is based on the jus ad bellum principle of proportionality.
From Hiroshima To Baghdad: Military Hegemony Versus Just Military Preparedness, Harry Van Der Linden
From Hiroshima To Baghdad: Military Hegemony Versus Just Military Preparedness, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
In this paper I question the morality of U.S. military supremacy or hegemony in terms of what constitute the legitimate use of military force and the proper preparation for using such force. I first discuss in a somewhat synoptic fashion how American hegemonic military force (from its very beginning with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) has been justified in dishonest ways and wrongly executed. Next, I show that Just War Theory (JWT) needs to be revised in order to come to a convincing assessment of U.S. military hegemony and its use of military force. This leads me …
Barack Obama, Resort To Force, And U.S. Military Hegemony, Harry Van Der Linden
Barack Obama, Resort To Force, And U.S. Military Hegemony, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Just War Theorists have neglected that a lack of “just military preparedness” on the side of a country seriously undermines its capability to resort justly to military force. In this paper, I put forth five principles of “just military preparedness” and show that since the new Obama administration will seek to maintain the United States’ dominant military position in the world, it will violate each of the principles. I conclude on this basis that we should anticipate that the Obama administration will add another page to the United States’ history of unjust military interventions.
Productivity, Relevance And Natural Selection, Stuart Glennan
Productivity, Relevance And Natural Selection, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship that can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I …
Combatant’S Privilege Reconsidered, Harry Van Der Linden
Combatant’S Privilege Reconsidered, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
International law grants to legitimate combatants the right to kill enemy soldiers both in wars of aggression and defensive wars. A main argument in support of this “combatant’s privilege” is Michael Walzer’s doctrine of the “moral equality of soldiers.” The doctrine argues that soldiers fighting in wars of aggression and defensive wars have the same moral status because they both typically believe that justice is on their side, and their moral choices are equally severely restricted by the overwhelming coercive powers of the state, including propaganda, conscription, and harsh penalties for the refusal to fight. Recently, this doctrine has been …
Whose Science And Whose Religion? Reflections On The Relations Between Scientific And Religious Worldviews, Stuart Glennan
Whose Science And Whose Religion? Reflections On The Relations Between Scientific And Religious Worldviews, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Arguments about the relationship between science and religion often proceed by identifying a set of essential characteristics of scientific and religious worldviews and arguing on the basis of these characteristics for claims about a relationship of conflict or compatibility between them. Such a strategy is doomed to failure because science, to some extent, and religion, to a much larger extent, are cultural phenomena that are too diverse in their expressions to be characterized in terms of a unified worldview. In this paper I follow a different strategy. Having offered a loose characterization of the nature of science, I pose five …
Is Global Poverty A Moral Problem For Citizens Of Affluent Societies?, Harry Van Der Linden
Is Global Poverty A Moral Problem For Citizens Of Affluent Societies?, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
The gap between the affluent and the global poor has increased during the past few decades, whether it is measured in terms of private consumption, income, or wealth. One would expect that severe poverty in a world of abundance would constitute a moral challenge to the affluent, but in fact it hardly seems a serious ethical concern. Affluent citizens seem so little morally concerned with global poverty. However, the most promising approach seems to be to explore and divulge factually and conceptually the numerous ways in which the affluent are implicated in a wholly unjust world of growing inequality. Changing …
Would The United States Doctrine Of Preventative War Be Justified As A United Nations Doctrine?, Harry Van Der Linden
Would The United States Doctrine Of Preventative War Be Justified As A United Nations Doctrine?, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
On the same day, 23 September 2003, that President George W. Bush defended his Iraq policy to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan also spoke to the Assembly. Annan reiterated his opposition to the view that states may independently be justified in using military force “preemptively” to avoid the dangers posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) among states and terrorists, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
The Left And Humanitarian Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
The Left And Humanitarian Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Although the author concedes that much criticism from the left alleging ulterior imperialist motives of missions for “humanitarian intervention” is valid; nevertheless, the author argues that it would be wrong to rule out the concept of humanitarian intervention, even when conducted by imperialist powers for imperialist motives. The concept of “rescue” remains a valid humanitarian concept, and a logical foundation for solidarity with populations who find themselves under assault and defenseless. The author considers various regulative principles that may guide more careful thinking about humanitarian intervention.
Questioning Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden
Questioning Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Review of: "Michael Walzer, Arguing About War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 208. Cloth, $25.00. ISBN: 0-300-10365-4."
"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves
"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.
Economic Migration And Justice, Harry Van Der Linden
Economic Migration And Justice, Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Our main thesis is that the U.S. has a duty of justice to adopt an open border policy with regard to economic migrants because it is significantly responsible for the unjust social and economic conditions that bring such migrants to its borders. From this perspective, President Bush’s recent “guest worker” proposal is morally objectionable because it is designed more to serve U.S. business interests than the interests of the migrants. We address three objections to opening borders: it will worsen the economic condition especially of low-skilled native workers; it will harm developing countries by increasing the so-called “brain drain”; and …
Modeling Mechanisms, Stuart Glennan
Modeling Mechanisms, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Philosophers of science increasingly believe that much of science is concerned with understanding the mechanisms responsible for the production of natural phenomena. An adequate understanding of scientific research requires an account of how scientists develop and test models of mechanisms. This paper offers a general account of the nature of mechanical models, discussing the representational relationship that holds between mechanisms and their models as well as the techniques that can be used to test and refine such models. The analysis is supported by study of two competing models of a mechanism of speech perception.
Immigration (Reference Entry), Harry Van Der Linden
Immigration (Reference Entry), Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
"Immigration," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 715-17, reprinted (or reproduced) by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press.
Kantian Ethics (Reference Entry), Harry Van Der Linden
Kantian Ethics (Reference Entry), Harry Van Der Linden
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
"Kantian Ethics," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 806-08, reprinted (or reproduced) by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press.