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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Reason And Necessity: The Descent Of The Philosopher Kings, Damian Caluori
Reason And Necessity: The Descent Of The Philosopher Kings, Damian Caluori
Philosophy Faculty Research
One of the reasons why one might find it worthwhile to study philosophers of late antiquity is the fact that they often have illuminating things to say about Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus, in particular, was a diligent and insightful reader of those great masters. Michael Frede was certainly of that view, and when he wrote that '[o]ne can learn much more from Plotinus about Aristotle than from most modern accounts of the Stagirite', he would not have objected, I presume, to the claim that Plotinus is also extremely helpful for the study of Plato. In this spirit I wish to …
The Absurdity Of Life, Steven Luper
The Absurdity Of Life, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
In "The Absurd"1 Nagel claims that self-conscious human beings are necessarily absurd, so that to escape absurdity while remaining human we would have to cease being self-conscious. fifteen years later, in The View From Nowhere,2 he defends the same thesis, supplementing some of his old arguments with a battery of new ones. I want to suggest that Nagel has misdiagnosed, and exaggerated the inescapability of, our absurdity. He does so partly because the grounds on which he bases his conclusion are spurious, and partly because he does not acknowledge the extent to which we can eliminate absurdity …
The Anatomy Of Aggression, Steven Luper
The Anatomy Of Aggression, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
Quite mundane pursuits as well as lofty attempts to achieve the extraordinary turn us against each other in tragic, insidious ways. These pursuits give rise to an "invisible hand" that, far from guiding people toward, steers them instead toward confrontation and aggression. People end up literally making war in order to secure a good life. My aim here is to lay bare mechanisms by which our undertakings make aggressors of us. I begin with an analysis of competition, aggression, and related phenomena.
The Causal Indicator Analysis Of Knowledge, Steven Luper
The Causal Indicator Analysis Of Knowledge, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
In this paper I want to describe and motivate an approach to knowledge that I call the Causal Indicator Analysis. My strategy will be to sketch (in Part I) the main features of an adequate account of knowledge, then use my sketch (in Part II) to reveal some of the faults of some of the main analyses defended today. I will be particularly interested in discussing the work of Fred Dretske, whose views have significantly influenced my own. With these tasks behind me, I will offer my own account in Part III, and argue that it has the features an …
Competing For The Good Life, Steven Luper
Competing For The Good Life, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
In this paper I will argue that Competitivism should be rejected. No more will be said about competitivist theories of justice, but if Competitivism as a theory of the good is rejected, so must Competitivism as a theory of right be, since the motivation for arranging society so as to maximize the extent to which people excel, or the like, is precisely the assumption that having competitive properties is valuable. My aim will be to show that the possession of such properties contributes nothing of any great importance to our lives: excelling and its kin should be neither intrinsically valuable …