Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Dispositional Account Of Gender, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This paper argues that one’s gender is partially constituted by extrinsic factors. In Sect. 2, I very briefly explain my understanding of sex, gender, and transgender. In Sect. 3, a survey recent accounts of gender as a socially constructed or conferred property, ending with Judith Butler’s idea that gender is a pattern of behavior in a social context. In Sect. 4, I suggest a modification of Butler’s idea, according to which gender is a behavioral disposition. In Sect. 5, I develop my dispositional account by responding to a worry that it is too essentialist. In Sect. 6, I defend my …

Book Review: Schroeder, Mark. Explaining The Reasons We Share: Explanation And Expression In Ethics, Vol. 1., John Brunero

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This volume is a collection of eleven essays by Mark Schroeder, including one previously unpublished paper, divided into four parts. Schroeder’s substantive introduction to the volume explains the unifying argumentative thread running through these essays and will be useful even to those who have read the essays separately. The essays themselves are superb. Schroeder’s work is unmatched in its clarity, incisiveness, originality, creativity, and depth. And this volume will leave the reader with a new appreciation for various ways in which assumptions about the structure of normative explanations—particularly about what Schroeder calls the Standard Model Theory—are important to central debates …

Book Reviews: Broome, John. Rationality Through Reasoning., Andrew Cullison, Aaron Bronfman

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Andrew Cullison

There is one final worry about bringing emotions into a theory of moral perception that might be best drawn out with an analogy to nonmoral perception. Suppose we were beings with a slightly different nonmoral perceptual apparatus. Suppose phenomenal qualia that we typically experience when we observe objects also showed up in our cognitive life when we weren’t experiencing the presence of an object. Basically, we would periodically have apparent perceptions of objects when there were no objects. Furthermore, suppose we could know that this was sometimes the case. I suspect we would feel rational pressure to be …

A Deflationary Interpretation Of Locke's Theory Of Ideas, Danielle N. Hampton

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is a defense of a deflationary interpretation of Lockean ideas. The orthodox view is that Locke uses the term ‘idea’ to designate a collection of things that share some philosophically significant characteristic in common. While there is much debate over what this unifying characteristic might be, it is largely agreed upon that there is one, and only one, such characteristic. This is the assumption that I deny. I argue that Locke uses ‘idea’ as an umbrella term to cover several different types of mental items.

In Chapter 1, I look at six non-deflationary interpretations of Locke’s theory of …

Blame Within Reason, Adam R. Thompson

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

My dissertation develops a novel response to global skepticism about responsibility—the view that no one is fit to be held responsible for anything. Though P.F. Strawson offered a highly influential account of holding and being responsible, his argument is widely considered to fail as a response to global skepticism. The primary worry is that he only describes our practice of holding responsible but does not justify it. I propose an unorthodox Strawson-style account of holding and being responsible and employ that account to offer an argument against global skepticism which not only describes but also justifies our practice of holding …

Re(Public)An Reasons: A Republican Theory Of Legitimacy And Justification, Christopher Mccammon

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification.

My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity to interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, …

Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation To Pragmatics, Critique, And Trends, Linda R. Waugh, Theresa Catalano, Khaled Al Masaeed, Tom Hong Do, Paul G. Renigar

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This chapter introduces the transdisciplinary research movement of critical discourse analysis (CDA) beginning with its definition and recent examples of CDA work. In addition, approaches to CDA such as the dialectical relational (Fairclough), sociocognitive (van Dijk), discourse historical (Wodak), social actors (van Leeuwen), and the Foucauldian dispositive analysis (Jager and Maier) are outlined, as well as the complex relation of CDA to pragmatics. Next, the chapter provides a brief mention of the extensive critique of CDA, the creation of critical discourse studies (CDS), and new trends in CDA, including positive discourse analysis (PDA), CDA with multimodality, CDA and cognitive linguistics, …

Ethics In The U. S. Navy, Walter E. Carter Jr.

U.S. Navy Research

First paragraph:

The U. S. military is among the most trusted of American institutions. The trust accorded to the U. S. Navy by the American people derives from our status as members of the military profession. Only to the degree that the Navy is, and is perceived to be, trustworthy can we maintain our status as the naval profession in American society.

Last paragraph:

Our official Navy ethos charges that:

We are patriots, forged by the Navy's core values of Honor, Courage and Commitment. In times of war and peace, our actions reflect our proud heritage and tradition.

Our goal, …