Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Patrick Heelan, Space-Perception And The Philosophy Of Science, Cliff Hooker

Research Resources

Heelan has taken a rich philosophical framework and within its categories woven a marvellously detailed and wondrously wide tapestry. That tapestry includes an exciting illumination of Western art and pictorial understanding generally; the sweep of history, scientific and cultural; the enterprise of science and the nature and roles of technology in both science and culture. Heelan's book then has interest at several different levels; in ascending order: there are the specific theses about vision and about science; there is the connecting of philosophy of visual art and philosophy of science; there is Heelan's attempt to set both of these latter …

A Precautionary Tale: Separating The Infant From The Fetus, Lawrence Torcello

Articles

This article confronts growing conservative opposition to abortion based on the slippery slope claim that abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. By examining the relationship between moral skepticism and precautionary ethics the article promotes completely the permissive position on abortion from conception to birth while consistently rejecting the possibility that such a position entails permissive implications for infanticide. The article introduces and traces the implicit relationship between moral skepticism, the precautionary principle and political liberalism.

Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, And Design, Patrick Lin, George Bekey, Keith Abney

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

To Thine Own Self Be Untrue: A Diagnosis Of The Cable Guy Paradox, D. P. Rowbottom, Peter Baumann

Philosophy Faculty Works

Hajek has recently presented the following paradox. You are certain that a cable guy will visit you tomorrow between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. but you have no further information about when. And you agree to a bet on whether he will come in the morning interval (8, 12] or in the afternoon interval (12, 4). At first, you have no reason to prefer one possibility rather than the other. But you soon realise that there will definitely be a future time at which you will (rationally) assign higher probability to an afternoon arrival than a morning one, due to …

Untangling The Debate: The Ethics Of Human Enhancement, Patrick Lin, Fritz Allhoff

Philosophy

Human enhancement, in which nanotechnology is expected to play a major role, continues to be a highly contentious ethical debate, with experts on both sides calling it the single most important issue facing science and society in this brave, new century. This paper is a broad introduction to the symposium herein that explores a range of perspectives related to that debate. We will discuss what human enhancement is and its apparent contrast to therapy; and we will begin to tease apart the myriad intertwined issues that arise in the debate: (1) freedom & autonomy, (2) health & safety, (3) fairness …

Book Review Essays, Richard A. Stevick

Psychology Educator Scholarship

Book review essay of: John L. Ruth, Forgiveness: A Legacy of the Amish School; Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt, and David Weaver-Zercher, Amish Grace; Harvey Yoder, The Happening: Nickle Mines Tragedy, reviewed by Richard A. Stevick

The Moral Justification For Journalism, Sandra L. Borden

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Papers presented for the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University

Themistius As A Commentator On Aristotle: Understanding And Appreciating His Conception Of 'Nous Pathetikos' And 'Phantasia', Myrna Gabbe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Themistius is not only a commentator on Aristotle; he is also one of our main sources of Theophrastus on the intellect. Hence, it is important to understand how he approaches and reads texts. It is my view that care and rigor are reflected in his treatment of nous pathêtikos. In this paper, I argue that Themistius postulates a third intellect whose job is to discern enmattered forms-i.e., sensible particulars-on the reasonable assumption that the productive and potential intellects are responsible solely for our contemplation of un-enmattered forms. As such, the passive intellect is responsible for what Aristotle calls incidental …

The Role Of Causal Processes In The Neutral And Nearly Neutral Theories, Michael R. Dietrich, Roberta L. Millstein

Dartmouth Scholarship

The neutral and nearly neutral theories of molecular evolution are sometimes characterized as theories about drift alone, where drift is described solely as an outcome, rather than a process. We argue, however, that both selection and drift, as causal processes, are integral parts of both theories. However, the nearly neutral theory explicitly recognizes alleles and/or molecular substitutions that, while engaging in weakly selected causal processes, exhibit outcomes thought to be characteristic of random drift. A narrow focus on outcomes obscures the significant role of weakly selected causal processes in the nearly neutral theory.

Sagp Newsletter 2008/9.1 East Philol, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Announcement of SAGP programs with the American Philological Association and with the American Philosophical Association 2008/2009 academic year.

The Formal Structure Of Metaphysics And The Importance Of Being Earnest, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

This article considers how the formal structure of metaphysical thought is displayed in Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. One frequent aim of metaphysics is to understand the world as a whole. We cannot gain such a global vantage point without separating ourselves from all the particular meanings things have for us within the world. But we start within the world, and so can only proceed on the basis of those particular meanings. Consequently we can only separate ourselves from them if they work to cancel themselves in favor of the global understanding. When the separate range of meanings is …

On The Concept Of A Morally Relevant Harm, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper I explicate and defend the concept of a morally relevant harm. This concept figures prominently in common-sense and contractualist moral reasoning concerning cases where an agent can prevent harm to members of a large group or a small one, but not both. When the two harms to which members of these groups are exposed are morally relevant to one another, an agent is permitted (or perhaps required) to take into account the number of people he can save. When the harms are irrelevant, an agent should not even consider preventing the lesser harm, regardless of how many …

"An Almost Single Inference": Kant's Deduction Of The Categories Reconsidered, Konstantin Pollok

Faculty Publications

By taking into account some texts published between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deduction of the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the 'almost single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general,' which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to 'make up for the deficiency' of the A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifold of an intuition …

Niebuhr’S Immoral Society And Bellah’S Good Society: A Conversation About Moral Man, Harlan Stelmach

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The title of my paper is an indication of where I began my thinking about this project. I was convinced from the start that Niebuhr’s and Bellah’s most significant disagreement would be how they viewed the role of collective life. Second, I assumed that they would have their most significant area of agreement on the moral capacity and responsibility of individuals. If you focus on Niebuhr’s early work, especially in Moral Man and Immoral Society and Bellah’s mature work today, these assumptions are generally true. Further, I still expected some broad lines of continuity in the work of these two …

A Time For The Humanities: Futurity And The Limits Of Autonomy, James J. Bono, Tim Dean, Ewa P. Ziarek

Education

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?

The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, …

Referral In The Wake Of Conscientious Objection To Abortion, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

Currently, the preferred accommodation for conscientious objection to abortion in medicine is to allow the objector to refuse to accede to the patient's request so long as the objector refers the patient to a physician who performs abortions. The referral part of this arrangement is controversial, however. Pro-life advocates claim that referrals make objectors complicit in the performance of acts that they, the objectors, find morally offensive. McLeod argues that the referral requirement is justifiable, although not in the way that people usually assume.

Propositional Knowledge And Know-How, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411-444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first part is that know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist in propositional knowledge. The second part defends an analysis of know-how inspired by Katherine Hawley' (2003). …

Exacerbating Injustice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay responds to Josh Bowers' argument that criminal procedure should openly allow innocent defendants to plead guilty as a legal fiction. Though most scholars emphasize the few but salient serious felony cases, Bowers is right to refocus attention on misdemeanors and violations, which are far more numerous. And though the phrase wrongful convictions conjures up images of punishing upstanding citizens, Bowers is also right to emphasize that recidivists are far more likely to suffer wrongful suspicion and conviction. Bowers' mistake is to treat the criminal justice system as simply a means of satisfying defendants' preferences and choices. This …

Productivity, Relevance And Natural Selection, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship that can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I …

Compassion And Sympathy As Moral Motivation, Steven Sverdlik

Occasional Papers

No abstract provided.

Draft For Harmless Use: Gleaning From Fields Of Copyrighted Works - 2008, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

My inquiry is into whether harmless uses of property should give the property owner a right to sue. Under current law, harmless trespasses to land and to copyrights and patents do indeed give rise to liability. Should they? Neither moral philosophy, political science nor economics deals well with the harmless free-rider. The possibility I'm exploring-- just exploring at this stage-- is the following: that where inexhaustible products like information become a primary source of value, our institutions might serve us better if instead of mandating payment for harmless use via legal compulsion, payment for harmless use be left to the …

Review: Talking About God: Exploring The Meaning Of Religious Life With Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich And Heschel (By Daniel F. Polish), Michael S. Jones

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Demonstrative Induction And The Skeleton Of Inference, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

It has been common wisdom for centuries that scientific inference cannot be deductive; if it is inference at all, it must be a distinctive kind of inductive inference. According to demonstrative theories of induction, however, important scientific inferences are not inductive in the sense of requiring ampliative inference rules at all. Rather, they are deductive inferences with sufficiently strong premises. General considerations about inferences suffice to show that there is no difference in justification between an inference construed demonstratively or ampliatively. The inductive risk may be shouldered by premises or rules, but it cannot be shirked. Demonstrative theories of induction …

The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded.

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Program, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Abstract Collection, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Traditional Culture And Global Commodification, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

We can think of technology and Christianity as competing forms of life. Technology promises a life of ever greater liberty and prosperity where liberty is the liberation from the limits and burdens of the human condition and prosperity is the variety and refinement of pleasures. Christianity bears the good news of salvation, the assurance that the coming of Christ has enabled us to live a life of grace and love that is affirmed by eternal life in the presence of God.

Philosophy And Theology: Notes On Sex Selection, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Review Of Cesar Chavez And The Common Sense Of Nonviolence, Grant J. Silva

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Hobbies, Alienation, & Identity Revision, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.