Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Cosmological Significance Of Animal Generation, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

This paper explores the relation between Aristotle’s mature theory of animal generation and his broader cosmology.

"The Living Oracles": Legal Interpretation And Mormon Thought, Nathan B. Oman

Nathan B. Oman

No abstract provided.

The Real Legal Realism, Michael S. Green

Michael S. Green

No abstract provided.

Against The Conventionalist Turn In Legal Theory: Dickson On Hart On The Rule Of Recognition, Michael S. Green

Michael S. Green

No abstract provided.

"Being Mindful" And Becoming A "Harmony Worker" During Unsettling Times.Docx

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

Introduction. Viktor Shklovsky’S Heritage In Literature, Arts, And Philosophy, Slav N. Gratchev, Howard Mancing

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

This book aims to examine the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world – USA, Canada, Russia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Hong Kong – in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted this book to be more than just another collection of essays of literary criticism: we invited scholars from different disciplines – literature, cinematography, and philosophy – who have dealt with Shklovsky’s heritage and saw its practical application in their …

The 200,000 Cards Of Dimitri Yurasov: Further Reflections On Scholarship And Truth, Daniel A. Farber, Suzanna Sherry

Suzanna Sherry

No abstract provided.

Review Of Indian Thought And Western Theism: The Vedanta Of Ramanuja, Sucharita Adluri

Sucharita Adluri

No abstract provided.

Democracy And Scientific Expertise: Illusions Of Political And Epistemic Inclusion, J.D. Trout

J.D. Trout

Realizing the ideal of democracy requires political inclusion for citizens. A legitimate democracy must give citizens the opportunity to express their attitudes about the relative attractions of different policies, and access to political mechanisms through which they can be counted and heard. Actual governance often aims not at accurate belief, but at nonepistemic factors like achieving and maintaining institutional stability, creating the feeling of government legitimacy among citizens, or managing access to influence on policy decision-making. I examine the traditional relationship between inclusiveness and accuracy, and illustrate this connection by discussing empirical work on how group decision-making can improve accuracy. …

"Does Beethoven Have To Roll Over? Not If We Flip Him!” Paper For Session: “Who’S Afraid Of High Culture?”, David B. Dennis

David B. Dennis

No abstract provided.

Beethoven At Large: Reception In Literature, The Arts, Philosophy, And Politics, David B. Dennis

David B. Dennis

A detailed analysis of Beethoven's influence on global culture.

The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan

Stuart Glennan

The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of …

Willful Understanding: Avicenna’S Philosophy Of Action And Theory Of The Will, Jon Mcginnis, Anthony Ruffus

Jon McGinnis

In this study, we look at two interpretive puzzles associated with the thought of Avicenna that are still of intrinsic philosophical interest today. The first concerns to what extent, if at all, Avicenna’s deity can be said to act freely. The second concerns to what extent, if at all, humans within Avicenna’s philosophical system can be said to act freely. It is our contention that only through a careful analysis of Avicenna’s theory of action can one begin to assess his position concerning the status of the will and so provide a satisfactory response to these two interpretative issues. We …

A Small Discovery: Avicenna's Theory Of Minima Naturalia, Jon Mcginnis

Jon McGinnis

There has been a long-held misconception among historians of philosophy and science that apart from brief comments in Aristotle and Averroes, the theory of minima naturalia had to await Latin Schoolmen for its full articulation. Recently scholars have shown that far from sporadic comments on minima naturalia, Averroes in fact had a fully developed and well-integrated theory of them. In this study, I complement these scholars’ important work by considering Avicenna’s place in the history and development of the doctrine of the minima naturalia. There is no study to date that mentions Avicenna in connection with this doctrine despite the …

Scientific Methodologies In Medieval Islam, Jon Mcginnis

Jon McGinnis

The present study considers Ibn Sînâ's (Lat. Avicenna) account of induction (istiqra') and experimentation (tajriba). For Ibn Sînâ induction purportedly provided the absolute, necessary and certain first principles of a science. Ibn Sînâ criticized induction, arguing that it can neither guarantee the necessity nor provide the primitiveness required of first principles. In it place, Ibn Sînâ developed a theory of experimentation, which avoids the pitfalls of induction by not providing absolute, but conditional, necessary and certain first principles. The theory of experimentation that emerges though not modern, does have elements that are similar to a modern conception of scientific method.

Splitting Concepts, Gualtiero Piccinini, Sam Scott

Gualtiero Piccinini

A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a singular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; (b) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are …

The Resilience Of Computationalism, Gualtiero Piccinini

Gualtiero Piccinini

Computationalism—the view that cognition is computation—has always been controversial. It faces two types of objection. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, cognitive processes are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y, and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) computations. In this article, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a better account of computation.

Computing Mechanisms, Gualtiero Piccinini

Gualtiero Piccinini

This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of computing, namely, doing justice to the practices of computer scientists and computability theorists. It is also an application of recent literature on …

Is There Less Bullshit In For Marx Than In Reading Capital?, William S. Lewis

William Lewis

This paper explores G. A. Cohen’s claim that Althusser’s Marxist philosophy is bullshit. This exploration is important because, if we are persuaded by Cohen’s assertion that there are only three types of Marxism: analytic, pre-analytic, and bullshit and, further, that only analytic Marxism is concerned with truth and therefore “uniquely legitimate” then, as political philosophers interested in Marxism’s potential philosophical resources, we may wish to privilege its analytic form. However, if Cohen’s attribution is misplaced, then we may wish to explore why Cohen was so insistent in this ascription and what this insistence reveals about his own political philosophy. The …

Editorial Introduction To Louis Althusser's 'Letter To The Central Committee Of The Pcf, 18 March 1966', William S. Lewis

William Lewis

As an accompaniment to the translation into English of Louis Althusser's 'Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, March 18th, 1966', this note provides the historical and theoretical context necessary to understand Althusser's 'anti-humanist' interventions into French Communist Party policy decisions during the mid-1960s. Because nowhere else in Althusser's published writings do we see as clearly the political stakes involved in his philosophical project, nor the way in which this project evolved from a 'theoreticist' pursuit into a more practical one, the note also argues that the letter is of importance to Althusser scholars, to historians of Marxist thought, …

A Christian Aesthetic For The Arts, Daniel Reynaud

Daniel Reynaud

No abstract provided.

Vaclav Havel, Jan Patocka: The Powerless And The Shaken, Daniel Brennan

Daniel Brennan

This article makes a case for considering Vaclav Havel's political theory of the nature of dissent as more politically grounded than that of his mentor fan Patoka. Against the criticism of Havel, which describes him as a less rigorous repeater of Patocka's ideas, this paper demonstrates how Havel appropriated Patocka's idea that the dissident is, similarly to a World War I trench soldier, fighting in a contemporary front in a demobilized war. However I argue that in Havel's thought, the understanding of dissent takes on a more practical and useful complexion than that of Patocka. This paper will explain and …

On Thinking (And Measurement), Raymond A. Younis

Raymond Younis

We do indeed “live and work in a time when the issues facing education, many of which have been with us for a considerable period, are being approached primarilythrough measurement – classroom assessment, research methods, standardized testing, international comparisons”. It is also true that “we do not often stop to consider what counts – and alternatively, what doesn’t count – in a climate where measuring up to a standard is the name of the game. At a deeper level, we rarely raise questions about measurement itself.” Heidegger argued that what is “most thought provoking [in this ‘thought provoking age’] is …

Free Will And Agency: A Scoping Review And Map, Paul Fehrmann

Paul Fehrmann

Systematic reviews (SR) are important in the health and social sciences, and could have value for theoretical and philosophical psychology (TPP). Three objectives are addressed in this paper: 1. To identify a SR framework for topics in TPP. 2. To assess current SR methods use in the TPP literature. 3. Scoping is a type of SR, and a third objective is to explore using scoping SR on this broad topic: how is the topic of “free will and agency” addressed in the TPP literature? Corresponding to the three objectives, these methods were used: 1. Major systematic review guidelines and recent …

A Conquering Race: The Birth Of Social Darwinism In Pre-War Germany, Andrew T. Murphree

Andrew T Murphree

Popular opinion suggests that certain political and military leaders throughout history are the primary agents for change in civilization; however, such a conclusion represents a serious oversight regarding the powerful potential of emerging worldviews to dictate epochal moments throughout mankind. Certainly, dynamic figures rise to prominence to lead movements of conservatism, progression, and moderation, but the conduit of ideas serves as the essential catalytic force that ignites and sustains these patterns. The Great War of the twentieth century was a complex global conflict of immense proportions, unlike anything the world had ever known. Historians perhaps express the greatest perplexity in …

Animal Cognition, Kristin Andrews, Ljiljana Radenovic

Kristin Andrews, PhD

Debates in applied ethics about the proper treatment of animals often refer to empirical data about animal cognition, emotion, and behavior. In addition, there is increasing interest in the question of whether any nonhuman animal could be something like a moral agent.

Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer

Michael Fischer

The Romantics are not widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught. Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its self-indulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to abide by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some of these objections have dogged the Romantics from …

From Aristotle’S Teleology To Darwin’S Genealogy: The Stamp Of Inutility, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (Pdf: Introduction)., Marco Solinas

Marco Solinas

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

Rare Books And Social Science, Donald J. Polzella

Donald J. Polzella

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.