Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Orange Is The New Golgotha, Kerry S. Walters

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Roman soldiers jeered at Jesus, called him "towelhead" and "sand monkey," ripped off his garments and clad him in an orange jumpsuit. Then they pulled a black sack over his head and led him to an interrogation cell, where CIA operatives awaited him. They shackled Jesus's wrists and strung him up so that he dangled from the ceiling. One of them questioned him, and when his responses weren't to their liking, the other beat him. [excerpt]

Reviewed Work: Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide To Political Disagreement, By Scott Aikin And Robert Talisse, Emily Esch

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rachel Weeping: A Christian Pacifist Reluctantly Endorses Military Strikes Against Isis, Kerry S. Walters

Philosophy Faculty Publications

I'm haunted these days by a scene from Matthew's Gospel. Herod, learning that an infant has been born in Bethlehem who will become "King of the Jews," orders the slaughter of the town's male children two years old and under. Matthew captures the deed's mind-numbing horror by imagining that Rachel, one of the traditional Hebrew matriarchs, "weeps and laments and refuses to be comforted, because her children are no more."

How, I ask myself, would Jesus's followers have acted could they've been in Bethlehem on that frenzied day? Would they have remained silent? Would they have shielded the infants with …

Response To Comments On 'Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans', Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The author thanks Denise James and Charlene Haddock Seigfried for their thoughtful comments on her paper. Although they respond in different ways, they both picked up on questions and uncertainties that arose as she wrote the paper.

For some years, she has been trying to write about essays Addams addressed to African American audiences. For this paper, she decided to deal only with Addams’s writings between 1900 and 1910 in order to compare her essays for African American audiences with what she wrote at the same time for wider audiences. This approach enabled her to sort out when Addams’s writing …

Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper, I will restrict the discussion to Addams’s writings during the twentieth century’s first decade, when she developed most of her thinking on cultural pluralism. By 1910, Dewey had not yet moved to cultural pluralism, Boas’s cultural relativism had not yet penetrated the intellectual world, and Mendelian genetics had not yet replaced Lamarckian assumptions regarding heredity.The Great War was yet to shatter illusions about Western civilization’s strength and rightness.

Love As A Regulative Ideal In Surrogate Decision Making, Erica Stonestreet

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This discussion aims to give a normative theoretical basis for a “best judgment” model of surrogate decision making rooted in a regulative ideal of love. Currently, there are two basic models of surrogate decision making for incompetent patients: the “substituted judgment” model and the “best interests” model. The former draws on the value of autonomy and responds with respect; the latter draws on the value of welfare and responds with beneficence. It can be difficult to determine which of these two models is more appropriate for a given patient, and both approaches may seem inadequate for a surrogate who loves …

Philosophy Of Mathematics In The Twentieth Century: Selected Essays, Stewart Shapiro, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward A Deweyan Theory Of Ethical And Aesthetic Performing Arts Practice, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper formulates a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice that relies for its support on two main things:

1. The unity Dewey ascribed to all intelligent practices (including artistic practice) and
2. The observation that many aspects of the work of performing artists of Dewey’s time include features (“dramatic rehearsal,” action, interaction and habit development) that are part of Dewey’s characterization of the moral life.

This does not deny the deep import that Dewey ascribed to aesthetic experience (both in art and in life), but it does suggest that we might use his theory of ethical practice in conjunction with his …

Review Of John Mccumber, Understanding Hegel's Mature Critique Of Kant, Stanford University Press, 2014, Sebastian Rand

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Improvisational Artistry In Live Dance Performance As Embodied And Extended Agency, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark’s theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world.

I claim here that while a dance performer’s improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system, this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how …

Review: 'The Triumph Of Mercy: Philosophy And Scripture In Mullā Ṣadrā', Sayeh Meisami

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Due to the fact that for Muslims the Qur ̓ān provides not only practical guidelines for a righteous life, but the framework of a theoretical worldview, Islamic philosophers have made direct and indirect scriptural allusions that go far beyond rhetorical ornamentation and theological persuasion. For the most part, they have resorted to the Qur ̓ān in order to reinforce their philosophical position. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of Qur ̓ānic exegesis ranging from technical linguistic analysis to rational and esoteric hermeneutics (ta ̓wῑl). With regard to the relationship between the Qur ̓ān and philosophy, the Persian …

Reflections On Reading Plato And Aristotle At Lancaster, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

While serving as a Visiting Fellow at Lancaster University, I was asked to lead an informal seminar on Classical Philosophy. It was to be a reading group of postgraduate students and staff, focusing on two foundational texts of Western civilization: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I happily accepted. The resulting two-hour, weekly sessions over Michaelmas Term were lively times of philosophical effervescence, full of probative questions, interesting interpretations, diverse evaluations, vigorous debates, and shared insights. Postmodernists engaged in the holy act of Interpreting the Text, we nonetheless strained to grasp the “true meaning” of the texts, to extend our …

Becoming-Other: Foucault, Deleuze, And The Political Nature Of Thought, Vernon W. Cisney

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper I employ the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze’s notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze’s thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘dogmatic image …

An Ernie Banks Season, Steven Gimbel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The dawn of the baseball season is an existential moment. For big market teams with owners willing to pay for marquee players, and general managers who build playoff-bound teams, it is a time of great anticipation.

It's also a time of hope, albeit dim, for those die-hard fans of teams who are off the playoff pace by double digits year in and year out. Their cautious optimism is one that illuminates the human condition. [excerpt]

The Illusion Confusion, Clare E. Batty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In Batty (2010b), I argue that there are no olfactory illusions. Central to the traditional notions of illusion and hallucination is a notion of object-failure—the failure of an experience to represent particular objects. Because there are no presented objects in the case of olfactory experience, I argue that the traditional ways of categorizing non-veridical experience do not apply to the olfactory case. In their place, I propose a novel notion of non-veridical experience for the olfactory case. In his (2011), Stevenson responds to my claim that there are no olfactory illusions. Although he agrees that it is natural—or at least …

The Mechanistic Approach Of 'The Theory Of Island Biogeography' And Its Current Relevance, Viorel Pâslaru

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Philosophers of science have examined The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson (1967) mainly due to its important contribution to modeling in ecology, but they have not examined it as a representative case of ecological explanation. In this paper, I scrutinize the type of explanation used in this paradigmatic work of ecology. I describe the philosophy of science of MacArthur and Wilson and show that it is mechanistic. Based on this account and in light of contributions to the mechanistic conception of explanation due to Craver (2007), and Bechtel and Richardson (1993), I argue that …

Liberal Education (An Overview), Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Education is a field sometimes beset by theories-of-the-day and with easy panaceas that overpromise the degree to which they can alleviate pressing educational problems. The two-volume Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy introduces readers to theories that have stood the test of time and those that have provided the historical foundation for the best of contemporary educational theory and practice. Drawing together a team of international scholars, this invaluable reference examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them and presents them in the context needed to understand their strengths and weaknesses. In …

Natural Law And Spontaneous Order In The Work Of Gary Chartier, Aeon Skoble

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The End Of The World And Other Times In The Future, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In an interview with his biographer Sylvie Simmons, Leonard Cohen identifies the main interests in his work as "women, song, religion". These are not merely personal concerns for Cohen, they are dimensions of the world that he tries to understand as a poet, singer, and thinker.

Now it's something of a cliché to see the modern romantic or post-romantic singer or poet in terms of personal struggles, failures, triumphs, and reversals. Poets sometimes respond by adopting elusive, ironic, enigmatic, or parodic voices: think, in their different ways, of Bob Dylan and Anne Carson. Yet Cohen has always worn his heart …

Painting (And Photography), Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two of Foucault's signature essays on painting are especially well known: the analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and an essay on Rene Magritte that includes a striking account of how abstraction displaced representation in Western art. In addition, many of Foucault's texts are studded with acute descriptions of major painters from Breughel to Warhol; he gave lecture courses on quattrocento painting and Manet and published essays on several contemporary artists (Rebeyrolle, Fromanger, Michals). Since one of Foucault's major themes was the relation between visibility and discursivity, it is not surprising to find that painting is a favored site for …

States And Nomads: Hegel's World And Nietzsche Earth, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What is Nietzsche's concept of the earth? While "earth" is often taken in a general way to refer to embodied life, to this world rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the term and concept also have a significant political dimension-a geophilosophical dimension—which is closely related to the radical immanence so central to Nietzsche's thought. I shall argue that he often and pointedly replaces the very term "world" (Welt) with "earth" (Erde) because "world" is tied too closely to ideas of unity, eternity, and transcendence. "World" is a concept with theological …

Books And Our Human Stories, Paul H. Benson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

An essay on the impact of the works in the Imprints and Impressions: Milestones in Human Progress, an exhibition of rare books from the collection of Stuart Rose. Exhibition was held Sept. 29-Nov. 9, 2014, at the University of Dayton.

Joseph Margolis, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Margolis’s methodology is best located in the pragmatic tradition, broadly construed. His pragmatism lies in his commitment to understanding the world as part of collective and consensual human practice and situated interaction; his embracing of the changing nature of history and science; and his approach to human knowledge as constructed.

In particular this pragmatic bent is evidenced by his affinity for Charles Sanders Peirce’s semeiotics, by which thought shows us the real world through the interpretation of signs and symbols, the existence of mind legitimated as “objective” and “real.” Margolis also uses Peirce’s theory of predicative generals (as constructed but …

Morris Weitz, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Morris Weitz’s initial theory of art was provided in his book Philosophy of the Arts (1950). Here Weitz calls his theory of art “empirical” and “organic,” and he defined “art” as “an organic complex or integration of expressive elements embodied in a sensuous medium." By “empirical” he means that his theory answers to the evidence provided by actual works of art. “Organic,” for Weitz, means that each element is to be considered in relation to the others in a living and not merely mechanical way. Weitz also has a broad understanding of “expressive,” which refers to an artistic property that …

Censorship As Catalyst For Artistic Innovation, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theater in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions of women, this paper demonstrates that human identity-related arts censorship can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than …

Review Of “Sally Sedgwick, Hegel’S Critique Of Kant: From Dichotomy To Identity,” Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012., Sebastian Rand

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Rational Entitlement And Responsibility: A Socratic Exercise, David Godden

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The paper reports on a Socratic exercise that introduces participants to the norm of rational entitlement, as distinct from political entitlement, and the attendant norm of rational responsibility. The exercise demonstrates that, because participants are not willing to exchange their own opinion at random for another differing opinion to which the owner is, by the participants' own admission, entitled, they treat their entitlement to their own opinion differently, giving it a special status. This gives rise to rational obligations such as the obligation to provide reasons, and a willingness to risk those opinions to the force of the better reason.

Understanding How Student Nurses Experience Morally Distressing Situations: Caring For Patients With Different Values And Beliefs In The Clinical Environment, Nancy J. Matchett, Mary Jo C. Stanley

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Introduction/Background: Moral distress and related concepts surrounding morality and ethical decision-making have been given much attention in nursing. Despite the general consensus that moral distress is an affective response to being unable to act morally, the literature attests to the need for increased clarity regarding theoretical and conceptual constructs used to describe precisely what the experience of moral distress involves. The purpose of this study is to understand how student nurses experience morally distressing situations when caring for patients with different values and beliefs than their own in the clinical environment Methods: This study is based on secondary analysis of …

Philosophy, Medicine And Health Care - Where We Have Come From And Where We Are Going, Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Jonathan Fuller, Stephen Burtow, Rose E. G. Upshur, Kirstin Borgerson, Maya J. Goldenberg, Elselijn Kingma

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The role of philosophy in discussions of clinical practice was once regarded by many as restricted to a very limited version of ‘medical ethics’, one that has been extensively criticized in the pages of this journal and elsewhere for being at once philosophically untenable and practically unhelpful [1–4]. While this uninspiring view of the nature and scope of applied philosophy has by no means been eradicated, over a number of years there has been a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of medicine and health care as an intellectually serious and practically significant enterprise. Controversies about evidence, value, clinical knowledge, …

Why We Still Do Not Know What A “Real” Argument Is, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his recent paper, “What a Real Argument is,” Ben Hamby attempts to provide an adequate theoretical account of “real” arguments. In this paper I present and evaluate both Hamby’s motivation for distinguishing “real” from non-“real” arguments and his articulation of the distinction. I argue that neither is adequate to ground a theoretically significant class of “real” arguments, for the articulation fails to pick out a stable proper subclass of all arguments that is simultaneously both theoretically relevant and a proper subclass of all arguments.