Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Climate Activism And The Working Class, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Under Review: Matthew T. Huber. Climate Change as Class War. Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2022. Paperback, pp. 312. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-78873-388-5

New Members, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

P/A Forum Symposia Animal Labour A New Frontier Of Interspecies Justice?, Jishnu Guha-Majumdar, Diego Rossello, Angie Pepper, Peter Niesen, Will Kymlicka, Charlotte E. Blattner

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

On April 15, 2021, a roundtable occurred at the annual conference of the Midwestern Political Science Association to discuss Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice?, edited by Charlotte Blattner, Kendra Coulter, and Will Kymlicka, and published by Oxford University Press in February 2020. The following symposium contains expanded versions of the papers presented at the MPSA conference. Jishnu Guha-Majumdar introduces the edited volume and the contributions of the respondents in the symposium. Diego Rossello then discusses the book’s framing as “interspecies justice” and its definition of labor. Angie Pepper reflects on whether it is possible for animals …

Litigating The Limits Of Religion: Minority And Majority Concerns About Institutional Religious Liberty In India, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Western religious liberty advocates tend to focus on restrictions placed on minority religious communities, particularly when advocating abroad, that is, outside of the country in which they reside. In all contemporary democracies, however, adherents of religious majorities also express concerns about religious liberty. For this reason, the article considers both minority and majority concerns about institutional religious freedom in India. This essay provides an overview of religious freedom issues, with a particular focus on institutions, though, as I acknowledge, it is not always simple to distinguish individual from institutional matters of religious freedom. After describing various minority and majority concerns …

Optimizing The Use Of Digitization Technologies In Museums, Emma Gunst

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Digital technologies are used mostly for artifact preservation, but they can also be used for educating people about those artifacts in a museum context. This paper investigates the way various age groups react differently to distinct kinds of digitization technology. By using different technologies with certain age groups, adolescents can learn more from the artifacts or objects they are interacting with. This project aims to explore which technologies work with what age group in order to optimize adolescent education and artifact accessibility in museums. Accessibility for this study is defined as a museum making their collections available to a variety …

Securing Equal Relations: An Addition To Elizabeth Anderson's Democratic Equality, James Richard Ewing

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Within social and political philosophy, egalitarianism entails some social theory of equality. In this paper, I will focus on a contemporary relational form of egalitarianism, a theory of Elizabeth Anderson which she calls "Democratic Equality." Through Democratic Equality, Anderson promotes a vision of egalitarianism which seeks to give individuals the capacity to stand in equal relations with one another in society. Although equal relations is a fine goal for egalitarianism (and perhaps the best goal for any egalitarianism), I will argue that Democratic Equality as Anderson describes it is not sufficient to achieve these relations. Ultimately, her theory is insufficient …

“I Want To Love Islam, I Really Do, But . . . ”: Islamophilic Classrooms In Islamophobic Times, Nermeen Mouftah

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the age of Aishah at the time of her marriage to the prophet Muhammed. I take students’ discomfort with the material and their expression of emotions—especially their desire to love Islam—as an opening to think about the opportunities and challenges of working with students’ emotions in the classroom. I begin by problematizing love (or the want of it) as an Islamophilic response to students’ awareness of the dangers of Islamophobia. I then go on to entertain the possibility of embracing love as a ‘productive’ emotion that …

Faith, Doubt, And Reason - Conclusion And Epilogue, Brent Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Courtesy of Wipf and Stock Publishers:

Faith, doubt, and reason are universal human faculties, yet they are frequently misunderstood, denigrated, and even abused. What does it mean to have faith, and what distinguishes faith from belief? Can someone have faith without religious commitments? What is doubt, and what is its relationship to faith and belief? How do we make sense of evil and suffering? What roles does reason play in our lives? What do we do when we have the sneaking suspicion that life is absurd? What do we love, and what do we fear? How do faith, doubt, and …

The Green New Deal: Promise And Limitations, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal (GND), written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting a just transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption …

Editors’ Introduction: Radical Philosophy And Politics Amid The Climate Crisis And The Coronavirus Pandemic, Harry Van Der Linden, Reed M. Kurtz

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Editors’ Introduction: Radical Philosophy and Politics Amid the Climate Crisis and the Coronavirus Pandemic for Radical Philosophy Review.

Paternalism And Autonomy In Transgender Healthcare, Charles Finley

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Transgender healthcare has made considerable advancements in the quality of patient care and gender confirmation surgical technique throughout the past several decades, which has led to a significant increase in patient satisfaction and overall physical and mental wellbeing. However, there are still several issues that remain to be addressed, many associated with excess paternalism by physicians and violations of patient autonomy. These problems can be mitigated by improving LGBTQ+ and transgender-related medical education for physicians, updating healthcare insurance coverage requirements to be more in line with current care standards, developing appropriate guidelines for lifelong primary care and geriatric care, and …

Exorcising Mythicism’S Sky-Demons: A Response To Raphael Lataster’S “Questioning Jesus’ Historicity.”, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Climate Change Mitigation And The U.N. Security Council: A Just War Analysis, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Should the U.N. Security Council (unsc) use its coercive powers to bring about effective climate change mitigation? This question remains relevant considering the inadequate mitigation goals set by the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord and the ramifications of U.S. withdrawal from the Accord. This paper argues that the option of the unsc coercing climate change mitigation through military action, or the threat thereof, is morally flawed and ultimately antithetical to effectively addressing climate change. This assessment is based significantly on the application of jus ad bellum principles of just war theory, incorporating some feminist critiques of this theory.

Legal Conceptions Of Parenthood: Adoptive Parents As Stewards, Ashlyn Edwards

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this paper, I outline common conceptions of parenthood and assess the strengths and weaknesses of these models, including the proprietarian, consent, causal, and stewardship models. In what follows, each type of parenthood is evaluated for 1) its description of how a parent comes to be or 2) its normative claims about how a parent should act in regard to their child throughout the child’s life. After weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each conception, I conclude that the stewardship view is the most successful conception of parenthood not only because of its description of what makes a parent a …

Questioning Combatant’S Privilege In Unjust Wars, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Following international humanitarian law, soldiers who are authorized by their states to fight wars of aggression have a legal right to kill enemy soldiers, and (indirectly) even enemy civilians, as long as they respect such jus in bello norms as discrimination and proportionality. I criticize a variety of arguments in support of this “combatant’s privilege” of aggressor soldiers that maintain that these soldiers have a moral right to kill or are not culpable for their wrongful killing. I also contest some arguments in support of the view that even though soldiers executing wars of aggression may be morally liable for …

Climate Change And Our Political Future, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Harry van der Linden's review of Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018, ISBN 978178663429-0.

The Institution Of Gender-Based Asylum And Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit, Ezgi Sertler

Philosophy, Religion, and Classics

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded …

Writing A Moral Code: Algorithms For Ethical Reasoning By Humans And Machines, James F. Mcgrath, Ankur Gupta

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The moral and ethical challenges of living in community pertain not only to the intersection of human beings one with another, but also our interactions with our machine creations. This article explores the philosophical and theological framework for reasoning and decision-making through the lens of science fiction, religion, and artificial intelligence (both real and imagined). In comparing the programming of autonomous machines with human ethical deliberation, we discover that both depend on a concrete ordering of priorities derived from a clearly defined value system.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’S Shock Politics And Winning The World We Need, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Review of Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

A Blend Of Absurdism And Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’S Place In The Secondary Setting, Krisandra R. Johnson

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation.

Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically …

Drone Warfare And Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This book chapter addresses two questions. First, can targeted killing by drones in non-battlefield zones be justified on basis of just war theory? Second, will the proliferation and expansion of combat drones in warfare, including the introduction of autonomous drones, be an obstacle to initiating or executing wars in a just manner in the future? The first question is answered by applying traditional jus ad bellum (justice in the resort to war) and jus in bello (justice in the execution of war) principles to the American targeted killing campaign in Pakistan; the second question is answered on basis of principles …

Faith Development Beyond Religion: The Ngo As Site Of Islamic Reform, Nermmen Mouftah

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II …

The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan

Philosophy, Religion, and Classics

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of …

Trump, Populism, Fascism, And The Road Ahead, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This review essay offers a discussion of some recent studies that help to explain the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA. The studies examine Trump as “media spectacle,” analyze his support among Tea Partiers, and discuss his backing by the white working class left behind by neoliberalism and global capitalism. Special attention is given to two questions: Is Trump a rightwing populist or closer to a fascist? Relatedly, is Trump a threat to liberal democracy? The essay concludes with some suggestions of how to move beyond Trump.

Arguments Against Drone Warfare With A Focus On The Immorality Of Remote Control Killing And “Deadly Surveillance”, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Drone warfare, particularly in the form of targeted killing, has serious legal, moral, and political costs so that a case can be made for an international treaty prohibiting this type of warfare. However, the case would be stronger if it could be shown that killing by drones is inherently immoral. From this angle I explore the moral significance of two features of this technology of killing: the killing is done by remote control with the operators geographically far away from the target zone and the killing is typically the outcome of a long process of surveillance. I argue that remote …

The New American Revolution: Economic Inequality And Economic Democracy, Alec Stubbs

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This work explores the disastrous effects of the modern capitalist system and how it creates, as well as perpetuates, the negative impacts of a vastly unequal system. Beginning with how inequality manifests itself and why we should care, this work analyzes the damages, dangers, and destruction of economic inequality. These insights help to reveal two key aspects of the failing capitalist system: the lie of real political democracy and the lack of economic democracy. At the root cause of these issues is an unstable capitalism that cannot simply be quelled by taxation, regulation, and reconfiguration. Instead, I contend that what …

When Is It Mental?, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Most philosophical debate over mental causation has been concerned with reconciling commonsense intuitions that there are causal interactions between the mental and the physical with philosophical theories of the nature of the mental that seem to suggest otherwise. My concern is with a different and more practical problem. We often confront some cognitive, affective, or bodily phenomenon, and wonder about its source – its etiology or its underlying causal basis. For instance, you might wonder whether your queasiness due to something you ate, or whether it is just nervousness, or whether your aunt’s memory loss is a neurological problem or …

Review: Killing By Remote Control: The Ethics Of An Unmanned Military, Edited By Bradley Jay Strawser, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Dr. Harry van der Linden's review of: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley Jay Strawser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (264 pages, cloth).

Whose Truth?, Seth J. Hale

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Is objective reality verifiable or is all fact merely subjective experience? If the history of humanity has shown anything, it has shown that we are a species intent on explaining our environment and place within it. Most every philosophical pursuit is aimed at some version of this end. Mathematics and the physical sciences attempt to explain the universe by finding consistent order in the workings of nature. The social sciences attempt to explain the human race by finding consistent order in the behaviors of humans and human organizations. Literary and media studies attempt to explain the meanings that humans attach …

Monotheism, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

James McGrath's contribution to the forthcoming edition, Vocabulary for the Study of Religion.