Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype (body fossils) and the remains of an organism’s life activities (trace fossils). The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations …

De-Extinction And The Conception Of Species, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” …

The Value Of Public Philosophy To Philosophers, Massimo Pigliucci, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

Philosophy has been a public endeavor since its origins in ancient Greece, India, and China. However, recent years have seen the development of a new type of public philosophy conducted by both academics and nonprofessionals. The new public philosophy manifests itself in a range of modalities, from the publication of magazines and books for the general public to a variety of initiatives that exploit the power and flexibility of social networks and new media. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of public philosophy in its several facets, and investigate whether and in what sense it is itself a mix …

Pragmatism And Meaning: Assessing The Message Of Star Trek: The Original Series, Anne Collins Smith, Owen M. Smith

Faculty Publications

The original Star Trek television series purported to depict a future in which such evils as sexism and racism do not exist, and intelligent beings from numerous planets live in a condition of peace and mutual benefit. As many scholars have observed, from a standpoint of contemporary theoretical analysis, Star Trek: The Original Series contains many elements that are inimical to the utopia it claims to depict and thus undermine its supposed message. A different perspective may be gained by drawing on the American pragmatist movement, in which the value of an idea is judged by its effectiveness, how it …

Book Review: Nanoethics: The Ethical And Social Implications Of Nanotechnology, Kevin Elliott

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Can Virtue Be Taught?, Glenn Rawson

Faculty Publications

One of Plato's liveliest Socratic dialogues, the Protagoras, stages a debate between the greatest philosopher and the greatest sophist of their time, with other leading sophists in the audience. The debate concerns Protagoras' own specialty: the teaching of 'virtue ' or arete, a crucial term in ancient Greece that involves both moral goodness and human greatness. Protagoras and Socrates end up with oddly overlapping intellectual positions: Socrates contends that virtue is not something that's taught, though h e believes that all of virtue is essentially a kind of knowledge. Protagoras denies that all virtues are forms of knowledge, though he …

Platonic Recollection And Mental Pregnancy, Glenn Rawson

Faculty Publications

This article proffers reinterpretation of Platonic recollection and examines Plato and his models for philosophical inquiry. One underappreciated puzzle about Platonic recollection is why this notorious legacy to epistemology and theory of education, this pioneering notion of innate ideas, should so often be ignored by its author ... Plato finds ways to remind us constantly of his favorite teachings, and recollection would be particularly relevant at important moments in Symposium and Republic, which offer different models of innate ideas instead: in place of the non-dispositional model of recollection, which implies the innate possession of the content of the knowledge …

The Ethical Importance Of Being Human: God And Humanism In Levinas's Philosophy, Pat J. Gehrke

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S Place In Nineteenth Century German Philosophy, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

La Psicología Moral De Sócrates, Daniel Graham

Faculty Publications

Os estimo y os amo, hombres de Atenas, pero obedeceré al dios en vez de [obedeceros] a vosotros, y mientras respire y tenga vida, no dejaré de filosofar, exhortando y desafiando a cualquiera de vosotros con quien me encuentre, diciéndole de la manera que acostumbro: “Hombre excelente, tú que eres ciudadano de Atenas, la ciudad más grande y la más famosa por su sabiduría y su poder, ¿no te avergüenzas de dedicarte a amontonar dinero, gloria y poder, sin prestarle ninguna atención a la sabiduría, a la verdad y al mejoramiento de tu alma?” Y si alguien protesta y dice …

Smith On Hanley, 'The Metaphysics Of Star Trek, Anne Collins Smith

Faculty Publications

Review by Anne Collins Smith on the H-PCAACA mailing list, June 1998.

The Metaphysics of Star Trek by Richard Hanley. New York: Basic Books, 1997. xviii + 253 pp. $18.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-09124-9.

Richard Hanley's The Metaphysics of Star Trek is an engaging examination of certain philosophical issues raised within the Star Trek universe. Its title, however, is overly broad; it would be more correctly titled, The Twentieth-Century Applied Metaphysics of Star Trek. The earliest reference in the bibliography is an article written in 1950; the next earliest, 1960. The vast majority of sources are from the 1980's and …