Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Swinburne On The Conditions For Free Will And Moral Responsibility, David P. Hunt

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Hegel And The Failure Of Civil Society, Philip J. Kain

Philosophy

On what might be called a Marxist reading, Hegel’s analysis of civil society accurately recognizes a necessary tendency toward a polarization of classes and the pauperization of the proletariat, a problem for which Hegel, however, has no solution. Indeed, Marxists think there can be no solution short of eliminating civil society. It is not at all clear that this standard reading is correct. The present paper tries to show how it is plausible to understand Hegel as proposing a solution, one that is similar to that of social democrats, and one that could actually work.

Cinema In The Digital Age: A Rebuttal To Lev Manovich, Barbara Cail

Philosophy

In his book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich claims the index is an ontological condition of cinema. Manovich asserts digital cinema can never be indexical and therefore has fundamentally altered the very nature of cinema, reducing it to a form of animation. This paper offers a refutation of Manovich’s redefinition of cinema, showing that digital cinema can be indexical, but indexicality is not an ontological condition of cinema.

The Future Of Military Virtue: Autonomous Systems And The Moral Deskilling Of The Military, Shannon Vallor

Philosophy

Autonomous systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), anti-munitions systems, armed robots, cyber attack and cyber defense systems, are projected to become the centerpiece of 21st century military and counter-terrorism operations. This trend has challenged legal experts, policymakers and military ethicists to make sense of these developments within existing normative frameworks of international law and just war theory. This paper highlights a different yet equally profound ethical challenge: understanding how this trend may lead to a moral deskilling of the military profession, potentially destabilizing traditional norms of military virtue and their power to motivate ethical restraint in the conduct of war. …

Sheltering Xenophobia, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

What is xenophobia? Why is xenophobia immoral? How is xenophobia’s conceptual and moral meaning diminished? Investigations of these questions would invigorate xenophobia as a topic in public morality and discourage the public’s acquiesc- ing to xenophobia’s new prominence. This paper focuses on the third question, the diminishment of xenophobia. In the first sec- tion, I outline a general conception of xenophobia. In the second, I explain how theories of membership in liberal democratic soci- eties relegate xenophobia to a minor moral concern. And, in the third, that the conflation of xenophobia with racism disadvantages the former. How liberal Democratic nations …

Comment On Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative Of Integration, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Elizabeth Anderson draws the attention of moral, social, and political philosophy to the idea of integration, an idea that is most often associated with the struggles to desegregate schools and neighborhoods in the years before and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board. Her book, The Imperative of Integration, is a remarkable contribution because integration is not frequently mentioned outside of debates in the fields of urban affairs and education policy, and residential integration and segregation are rarely mentioned in academic philosophy. There are, however, some concerns with her defense of her defense of integration that …

God's Extended Mind, David P. Hunt

Philosophy

God the fully exercised power to know all truths. but why is God’s excellence with respect to knowing not treated on a par with his excellence with respect to doing, where the latter requires only that God have the (exercised or unexercised) power to do all things? The prima facie problem with divine ‘omni-knowledgeability’ – roughly, being able to know whatever one wants to know whenever one wants to know it – is that knowledge (whether occurrent or dispositional) requires an internal representation, whereas mere ‘knowledgeability’ does not. I argue to the contrary that knowledge does not require an internal …

Perils Of The Open Road, David P. Hunt

Philosophy

Open theists deny that God knows future contingents. Most open theists justify this denial by adopting the position that there are no future contingent truths to be known. In this paper we examine some of the arguments put forward for this position in two recent articles in this journal, one by Dale Tuggy and one by Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt. The arguments concern time, modality, and the semantics of ‘will’ statements. We explain why we find none of these arguments persuasive. This wide road leads only to destruction.

Socratic Metaphysics, William J. Prior

Philosophy

Did Socrates have a metaphysics? The question is complex. We might begin by asking, what is a metaphysics? We might also ask, who we mean by Socrates? Let me deal with these questions in order. Metaphysics is concerned with what lies at the foundation of things, the principles underlying reality. ln this essay, that will mean primarily an ontology, a theory of 'what there is'. Now one point on which the authors discussed in this article agree, a 'point of departure' that anchors their various views about Socratic metaphysics, is that Plato had a metaphysics: as Gregory Vlastos puts it, …

Passive Dispositions: On The Relationship Between Πάθος And ῎Ἕξις In Aristotle, Marjolein Oele

Philosophy

In many studies of Aristotle it is taken for granted that there is a relationship between the affections (pathē) and the dispositions (hexeis) with which they are associated, but how the process of passively reacting to particular circumstances (i.e. the event of a mere pathos) can turn into and generate a particular moral disposition to be affected is not explained. This paper seeks to offer a systematic exploration of the constitutive relationship between pathos and passive moral dispositions.

Appealing to Categories 8, we argue that two forms of qualitative change underlie the alteration from pathos …

In The Shadow Of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought In America. By Robert Gooding- Williams. (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2009)., Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Robert Gooding-Williams’s In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro Modern Political Thought In America offers several contributions to political theory and African American philosophy and politics.1 His conception of “Afro-Modern Politics” sharpens our understanding of the history and tradition of African American political thought, and his analyses of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Blacks Folks and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom adds to and challenges various debates about their politics and legacies.2 Gooding-Williams applies the insights from his comparative analysis of Du Bois and Douglass to distinguish a conception of politics as rule from a conception of …

Heidegger’S Reading Of Aristotle’S Concept Of Pathos, Marjolein Oele

Philosophy

This paper takes as its point of departure the recent publication of Heidegger’s lecture course Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and focuses upon Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s concept of pathos. Through a comparative analysis of Aristotle’s concept of pathos and Heidegger’s inventive reading of this concept, I aim to show the strengths and weaknesses of Heidegger’s reading. It is my thesis that Heidegger’s account is extremely rich and innovative as he frees up pathos from the narrow confines of psychology and incidental change and places it squarely into the center of the fundamental changes affecting a living being’s existence; simultaneously, …

Attraction And Repulsion: Understanding Aristotle’S Poiein And Paschein, Marjolein Oele

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Sellars, Realism, And Kantian Thinking., Willem A. Devries

Philosophy

This essay is a response to Patrick Reider’s essay “Sellars on Perception, Science and Realism: A Critical Response.” Reider is correct that Sellars’s realism is in tension with his generally Kantian approach to issues of knowledge and mind, but I do not think Reider’s analysis correctly locates the sources of that tension or how Sellars himself hoped to be able to resolve it. Reider’s own account of idealism and the reasons supporting it are rooted in the epistemological tradition that informed the British empiricists, rather than in the metaphysical reasons that ruled within the German tradition from Leibniz through Hegel …

Developmentalism, William J. Prior

Philosophy

Developmentalism is a theory concerning the order of composition and the interpretation of Plato's dialogues. It is a modern phenomenon; ancient interpreters of Plato were ' unitarians' (Annas 1999:3-5; unitarians believe that there is a systematic unity of Platonic doctrine or belief among all the dialogues). There are several varieties of developmentalism; what is common to them all is the idea that the philosophical views contained in the dialogues, which are taken to reflect Plato's own views, changed significantly over time.

Intellectualism, William J. Prior

Philosophy

Intellectualism is a view attributed to Socrates in several of Plato's Socratic dialogues that treats certain mental states, in particular virtue and vice, as states of the intellect alone, and which, as a result, denies the existence of moral weakness (akrasia; q.v.). Intellectualism is especially prominent in the Laches, Gorgias, Euthydemus, Protagoras and Meno.

Socrates (Historical), William J. Prior

Philosophy

Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of the ancient Greek world and for several ancient schools an exemplar of what the philosophical life should be, was an Athenian citizen born in 469 BCE. He was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and Phaenarete, a midwife; and he was married to Xanthippe, with whom he had three children ( Phaedo 60a, 116a-b). His adult years coincided with the 'Golden Age' of Athens, and he was present during Athens' decline and fall during the Peloponnesian War (431-404). Socrates was a public figure during at least part of this period: the comic playwright …

Bell's Spaceships Problem And The Foundations Of Special Relativity, Francisco Fernflores

Philosophy

Recent ‘dynamical’ approaches to relativity by Harvey Brown and his colleagues have used John Bell’s own solution to a problem in relativity which has in the past sometimes been called ‘Bell’s spaceships paradox’, in a central way. This paper examines solutions to this problem in greater detail and from a broader philosophical perspective than Brown et al. offer. It also analyses the well-known analogy between special relativity and classical thermodynamics. This analysis leads to the sceptical conclusion that Bell’s solution yields neither new philosophical insights concerning the foundations of relativity nor differential support for a specific view concerning the existence …

Arthur Pap’S Functional Theory Of The A Priori, David J. Stump

Philosophy

Arthur Pap was not quite a Logical Empiricist. He wrote his dissertation in philosophy of science under Ernest Nagel, and he published a textbook in the philosophy of science at the end of his tragically short career, but most of his work would be classified as analytic philosophy. More important, he took some stands that went against Logical Empiricist orthodoxy and was a persistent if friendly critic of the movement. Pap diverged most strongly from Logical Empiricism in his theory of a “functional a priori” in which fundamental principles of science are hardened into definitions and act as criteria for …

Arguments By Analogy, Matt Donner

Philosophy

This paper is an inquiry into the largely unexamined analysis of arguments by analogy (ABA). By exposing the degree of philosophical complexity, which ultimately renders evaluation of ABA subjective, we shall see that the most appropriate doxastic attitude to adopt, with respect to the conclusions drawn from these arguments, is often suspension of judgment. A critical examination of Copi’s criteria for evaluating ABA shows that while these criteria work well for simple arguments, they fail when considering more philosophically profound ABA. This paper supports these claims by using Cleanthes’ teleological argument for the existence of God from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning …

Physician-Assisted Suicide Within A Kantian Framework, Daksha Bhatia

Philosophy

The highly polarized debate over the practice of physician-assisted suicide is relatively new to the realm of ethical issues. Physician-assisted suicide was first explicitly legalized in the United States in 1994, when Oregon passed its Death with Dignity Act. Although the Act stipulates that a doctor “may prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill people under certain conditions,” the term physician-assisted suicide also encompasses giving a patient information on how to commit suicide, or giving them the means to do so in a form other than a prescription. Physician-assisted suicide is different from euthanasia in that the patient, …

Elements Of A Self-Deconstructive Ethic, Cameron R. Waldman

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Robot Ethics: Mapping The Issues For A Mechanized World, Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, George Bekey

Philosophy

As with other emerging technologies, advanced robotics brings with it new ethical and policy challenges. This paper will describe the flourishing role of robots in society—from security to sex—and survey the numerous ethical and social issues, which we locate in three broad categories: safety & errors, law & ethics, and social impact. We discuss many of these issues in greater detail in our forthcoming edited volume on robot ethics from MIT Press.

Review Of Michael Heidelburger And Gregor Schiemann, Eds. The Significance Of The Hypothetical In The Natural Sciences, David J. Stump

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Review Of Rethinking The History Of Skepticism: The Missing Medieval Background, Sharon M. Kaye

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

What ‘Biological Racial Realism’ Should Mean, Quayshawn Spencer

Philosophy

A curious ambiguity has arisen in the race debate in recent years. That ambiguity is what is actually meant by ‘biological racial realism’. Some philosophers mean that ‘race is a natural kind in biology’, while others mean that ‘race is a real biological kind’. However, there is no agreement about what a natural kind or a real biological kind should be in the race debate. In this article, I will argue that the best interpretation of ‘biological racial realism’ is one that interprets ‘biological racial realism’ as ‘race is a genuine kind in biology’, where a genuine kind is a …

Evolutionary Psychology In The Service Of Moral Psychology: A Possible Future For Ethics, William S. Lewis

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

The Scientist As Impartial Judge: Moral Values In Duhem’S Philosophy Of Science, David J. Stump

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Review "Anthropocentrism And The Continental Tradition: Calarco's Zoographies", Gerard Kuperus

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Fevered Desires And Interracial Intimacies In Jungle Fever, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever centers on a sexual affair between a black man, Flipper, and a white, Italian American woman, Angela. This pairing centers on the type of interracial relationship and pairing (black man plus white woman) typically obsessed about in discussions of interracial romances. It is also the pairing offered by Left radicals, such as Frantz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks (1952), as the prototype of racial revolution. The title of Julius Lester’s black nationalist classic Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama! (1969), dramatically illustrates this view. Lee’s Jungle Fever upsets this radical stance by …