Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nourishing Difference For The Erotic Couple, Danielle Poe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Erotic relationships have often been excluded from accounts of social transformation, but they can challenge us to work together and return to ourselves. In Irigaray’s work, “the two” create new paths to reach each other and return to themselves as individuals; in so doing, they create new possibilities for others.

Tradition-Based Rationality, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The term “tradition-based rationality” derives from the works of Alasdair MacIntyre. Human reasoning, argued MacIntyre, is both tradition-constitutive and tradition-constituted. By the first phrase, he means that all reasoning, especially moral reasoning (i.e., thinking about what “good” means), involves people sharing a conceptual language (rather than a natural language like English or Chinese).

For example, think of how widely three persons may differ on their use of the word “good” when applied to their jobs. The driver of a beer truck will claim his job is “good” because he is paid well; he is resoundingly welcomed wherever he goes; and …

Locating Royce's Reasoning On Race, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the fall 2009 issue of The Pluralist, Tommy Curry and Dwayne Tunstall challenged the current, dominant view of Royce as an antiracist. In "Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal," Curry presents Royce as a white supremacist, an admirer of British colonialism, and an advocate of black assimilation to Anglo-Saxon cultural practices (14-15). Tunstall, in "Josiah Royce's 'Enlightened' Antiblack Racism?," presents Royce as a non-essentialist regarding race, yet as a cultural antiblack racist, with a colonial attitude comparable to that held by John Stuart Mill (Tunstall 40). In the same issue of The Pluralist, Jacquelyn Kegley analyzes Royce's …

A Modus Vivendi? Sex, Marriage & The Church, William L. Portier, Nancy Dallavalle, Christopher C. Roberts, Tina Beattie, R. R. Reno, Patricia Hampl, Luke Timothy Johnson, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Paul Baumann

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

During the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of adult Americans were married. A recent analysis of U.S. census data reported that only 52 percent of adult Americans were married in 2009. That is the lowest percentage reported in the 100 years the Census Bureau has collected such information. The reasons for this dramatic cultural shift are well known: high rates of divorce; changing attitudes toward premarital sex; social acceptability of cohabitation; the weakening of the stigma surrounding out-of-wedlock births and single parenting; the postponement of marriage and children for academic or professional reasons.

Among those with only a high-school education or …

Conceptions Of Mechanisms And Insensitivity Of Causation, Viorel Pâslaru

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Conceptions of mechanisms due to Glennan (1996; 2002), Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000), Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2005) have developed in opposition to the nomological approach to explanation. It is less emphasized, however, that these conceptions have also developed as alternatives to the causal perspective on explanation. In this paper, I argue that despite their distancing from the topic of causation, the mechanistic conceptions need to incorporate in their definitions of mechanisms the notion of insensitivity of causal relations that was examined by Woodward (2006).

The Theological Origins Of Engineering, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Knowledge of our roots can sometimes help us figure out how we ought to proceed. Many claim that engineering began in ancient antiquity with the Egyptian pyramids, Archimedes' inventions, or the Roman aqueducts. Others give contemporary engineering a more recent history, tracing its origins to the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment. Yet what is often overlooked is the fact that contemporary engineering owes part of its identity to medieval monasticism.

The advantage of remembering this history is the bearing it has on the questions "What is engineering for?" and "How ought engineering be practiced?"

Michael Davis makes the claim that, …

A Systems View Of Time-Dependent Ethical Decisions, Hamid A. Rafizadeh, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Every ethical situation has a "system" characteristic with a group of human and nonhuman elements linked in a variety of interactions and interdependencies. The system allows the elements to act in part or as a whole towards achieving a spectrum of goals, objectives, or ends. The systems view asserts that any local and bipolar understanding of an ethical situation would be deficient as it would neglect certain interactions and interdependencies as well as overlook differing orientations of agents towards different goals and objectives. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for a systems-based view of ethics.

Rethinking Fideism Through The Lens Of Wittgenstein’S Engineering Outlook, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes a false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.” But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. …