Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Origin Of Human Consciousness, Milan Meszaros

Milan Meszaros physicist

There are certain conditions regarding the expansion of man’s existence on Earth, but these are not identical to those conditions regarding man’s existence itself. Thus in the violating the symmetry of the fundamental processes of consciousness, man’s intellectual development can become multi-dimensional.

Our conscious functioning with its non-Earth lifebase gives rise to the following questions: how and why did our consciousness come to be on Earth? Where did we originate from?

The search of solution is recommendable to all those who are interested in a scientific, high level, responsible approach to the experiments and solutions concerning the problems: Where do …

Never Mind Grendel! Can Beowulf Conquer The 21st-Century Guilt Trip?, Stephen Asma

Stephen T Asma

The writer casts doubt on whether the emasculated Beowulf put forward by J. R. R. Tolkien and in the recent movie version of the story transcends and nullifies the heroic original. He suggests that both Beowulfs may be necessary.

Privacy In Database Designs: A Role Based Approach, Gary A. Poe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Privacy concerns have always been present in every society. The introduction of information technology information has enabled a reduction in the cost of gathering information, management of that information and the permitted that same information to become increasingly portable. Coupled with these reductions of cost has been an increase in the demand for information as well as the concern that privacy expectations be respected and enforced through security systems that safeguard access to private-type data. Security systems enforce privacy expectations. Unfortunately there is no consensus on a definition of privacy making the specification of security often over broad and resulting …

Kerr, William Bugg, 1894-1993 (Sc 1317), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1317. William Bugg Kerr, a Bowling Green, Kentucky educator, businessman and farmer, records his philosophy and his reminiscences, for his family, in his paper titled "The High Road."

Looking Up From The Gutter: Pop-Culture And Philosophy, Stephen Asma

Stephen T Asma

No abstract provided.

Computing Mechanisms, Gualtiero Piccinini

Philosophy Faculty Works

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 …

The Apostle Table - Part Ii - Competent (Pressures: Response) Intransitivity, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

The Apostle Table illustrates a New Testament encryption scheme revealed in the Book of Matthew. Specifically, the list of the twelve apostles in Matthew, 10:1-4, points to the Matthew, Chapters 8 and 9, disciple characterizations. The disciples metaphorically characterize the social choice theory aspect of the scripture writers' (ordered relations theory: social choice theory: welfare model) regression. The paper is written in two parts: I. The Exogenous Pressures; and, II. The Endogenous Response. Interestingly, the paper explains why the crucified Jesus could not get off the cross.

The Apostle Table - Part Iii - Incompetent Endogenous Response Intransitivity, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

The Apostle Table illustrates a New Testament encryption scheme revealed in the Book of Matthew. Specifically, the list of the twelve apostles in Matthew, 10:1-4, points to the Matthew, Chapters 8 and 9, disciple characterizations. The disciples metaphorically characterize the social choice theory aspect of the scripture writers' (ordered relations theory: social choice theory: welfare model) regression. The paper is written in two parts: I. The Exogenous Pressures; and, II. The Endogenous Response. Interestingly, the paper explains why the crucified Jesus could not get off the cross.

Auf Der Suche Nach Einer Authentischen Architektur; Ein Gespräch Mit Glenn Murcutt Und Juhani Pallasmaa, Noel Brady

Articles

The article is a record of a conversation on architectural ethics between the author and Glenn Murcutt and Juhani Pallasmaa.

Will As Commitment And Resolve: An Existential Account Of Creativity, Love, Virtue, And Happiness, John Davenport

Philosophy & Theory

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve, Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires.

The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from …

Entropy, Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

A brief take on order and disorder in modern times.

Living With Dying: Grief And Consolation In The Middle English Pearl, Karen A. Sylvia

Honors Projects

Analyzes the themes of grief and consolation in the Middle English poem, Pearl, and compares this work to Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess. Applies the five psychological stages of grieving identified by Kubler-Ross to the poem's Dreamer and concludes that, at the poem's end, the Dreamer has failed to finish the grieving process.

The 9-Day Multiplier And Cumulative Effects, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

The Star of David's nine levels is implicated by the 9-Day Multiplier and Cumulative Effects quantitative analysis.

For The Glory Of God: Why Cain Had To Kill Abel, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

The first four Genesis chapters involve the (ordered relations theory: social choice theory: welfare model operations) regression; principally focusing on social choice theory.

Algorithms For Converting Water Into Wine -- The Gospel Of John, Chapter Two, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

Learn why scripture uses the number 37 as a numerical reference for water, the number 515 as a numerical reference for wine and the procedure for converting water into wine.

The Art Of Existentialism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer And The American Existential Tradition, J'Aimã© L. Sanders

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of my research is to examine the philosophic influences on three literary works: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and Norman Mailer's An American Dream. Through an investigation of biographical, historical, cultural, and textual evidence, I will argue for the influence of several European philosophers---Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger---on these authors and on the structures and messages of their works. I will discuss how the specific works I have selected not only reveal each author's apt understanding of the existential-philosophical crises facing the individual in the twentieth century, but also …

Nietzsche’S Doctrine Of Eternal Return, David R. Gadon

Senior Honors Projects

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche challenges the reader to imagine that every moment of his or her life, every joy and every sorrow, every smile and every tear, will be repeated in exactly the same way from beginning to end. He asks us to envision these things recurring, not one more time, but for all infinity into the past and future alike. Amongst the many revolutionary and profound concepts put forward by the witty and vitriolic Nietzsche, there is none as inscrutable and seemingly inapproachable as this doctrine of eternal return of the same. In just three of his …

The Tragedy Of Death In The Pursuit Of Spiritual Immortality, And The Physician’S Response, Rachel Furman

Senior Honors Projects

Life is a tragedy in the sense that it amounts to one single contradiction: man will die, and knows this, yet he still does not want to die. He thus spends his entire life fighting the battle to survive, though he knows that victory is impossible. That is, victory in the sense of corporeal immortality is impossible – but what happens to the soul? That human soul, which we have come to distinguish from the body by placing it above the temporal world, and equating it with eternity. Belief in immortality, in this case, spiritual immortality, is, according to Miguel …

Holding Onto Belief, Benny Nyikos

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

It seems that every major book of philosophy is composed of the author's personal views on the world. The philosopher presents his or her views not only to convince readers to take up his or her views but also to send the ideas in the book out for review and debate in order to test the reaction they receive. With this in mind, this paper will present ideas I have encountered in philosophy classes, read in books, and observed in the world at large. The focus will be on the claim that God is dead and what this means to …

Distributed Cognition And The Task Of Science, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This paper gives a characterization of distributed cognition (d-cog) and explores ways that the framework might be applied in studies of science. I argue that a system can only be given a d-cog description if it is thought of as performing a task. Turning our attention to science, we can try to give a global d-cog account of science or local d-cog accounts of particular scientific projects. Several accounts of science can be seen as global d-cog accounts: Robert Merton's sociology of scientific norms, Philip Kitcher's 20th-century account of cognitive labor, and Kitcher's 21st-century notion of well-ordered science. Problems that …

The Role Of Moral Philosophers In The Competition Between Deontological And Empirical Desert, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Desert appears to be in ascendence as a distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment but there is confusion as to whether it is a deontological or an empirical conception of desert that is or should be promoted. Each offers a distinct advantage over the other. Deontological desert can transcend community, situation, and time to give a conception of justice that can be relied upon to reveal errors in popular notions of justice. On the other hand, empirical desert can be more easily operationalized than can deontological desert because, contrary to common wisdom, there is a good deal of agreement …

On The Rates Of Differentiation: Derrida On Political Timing, Antonio Calcagno

Antonio Calcagno

No abstract provided.

The Philosophical Approach To God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

Philosophy & Theory

This book is a revised and expanded edition of three lectures delivered by the author at Wake Forest University in 1979. Long out of print, in its new edition it should be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of the philosophy of religion.

The first two lectures, after a critique of the incompleteness of St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous Five Ways of arguing for the existence of God, explore lesser-known resources of Aquinas’s philosophical ascent of the mind to God: the unrestricted dynamism of the human spirit as it reaches toward the fullness of being, and the strictly metaphysical ascent …

The Nexus Paper, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

All of scripture is focused on one particular social state definition; why the persistent focus? This paper shows the alignment of the philosophy of the human condition with the ethics endowed physical universe underscores the focus.

Eternal Recurrence And The Categorical Imperative, Philip J. Kain

Philosophy

The question has been raised whether Nietzsche intends eternal recurrence to be like a categorical imperative. The obvious objection to understanding eternal recurrence as like a categorical imperative is that for a categorical imperative to make any sense, for moral obligation to make any sense, it must be possible for individuals to change themselves. And Nietzsche denies that individuals can change themselves. Magnus thinks the determinism “implicit in the doctine of the eternal recurrence of the same renders any imperative impotent…. How can one will what must happen in any case?” At the other end of the spectrum, those who …

The Rebirth Of Consciousness, Urszula Blaszak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human beings encounter cascades of a plethora of experiences, one after another, every single microsecond of our lives. There are many things happening around. The world is full of events and occurrences. As they happen, the mind reacts to every individual input. This is a very exhausting and difficult. Thus, people have developed a process of self-defense against this horrible mishmash of information. Their minds have this amazing capacity of sorting them out and making sense out of them. Humankind's survival depends on that. If one does not sort all this information out, one might not be able to make …

Would The United States Doctrine Of Preventative War Be Justified As A United Nations Doctrine?, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

On the same day, 23 September 2003, that President George W. Bush defended his Iraq policy to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan also spoke to the Assembly. Annan reiterated his opposition to the view that states may independently be justified in using military force “preemptively” to avoid the dangers posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) among states and terrorists, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

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

Philosophy

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, …

Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

How could thought ever benefit from being formed in poetic language rather than philosophical prose? This essay attempts to clarify a single, relatively narrow respect in which poetry can perform philosophical work that prose, as such, cannot: the evasion of philosophical dogmatism through Stevensian qualification. What Helen Vendler in an early essay calls Stevens’ “qualified assertions,” and what Marjorie Perloff calls Stevens’ “ironic modes," are the basic techniques of Wallace Stevens' anti-dogmatic art.

Social State Definition And The Economic Control Systems Product, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

Professor Arrow formulated his social state definition in terms of each individual's consumption versus factors of production. Ancient philosophers understood impossibility-resolved social choice theory derived welfare models involve reflexive economic form hierarchical structures where the individual is implicit. The scripture writers also concluded theory construction and empirical research are not reflexive such that empirical research undertaken in the absence of an essential theoretical nexus is illusionary. Therefore, empirical aggregation surrogates are unable to competently effect Arrovian impossibility end-runs. The scripture writers' reference ethics based aggregation mechanics articulate impossibility-resolved (social welfare function formulation: social state definition) transitivity.