Philosophy Commons^™

Grassroots Poverty And Grassroots Human Rights: Grounding Theory In Practice, Scott Collison

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Philosophical discourse on human rights is broad and contested, and not all of it agrees with human rights practice. None of the common philosophical problems, such as the reconciliation between theory and human rights law, the debate between civil-political and socio-economic rights, or even what sort of thing human rights are, has been answered definitively. What is uncontested, however, is the fact that human rights are far from fulfilled in the world today, as world poverty and inequality persist into the 21^st century.

A recent trend across the board—from philosophy to development studies to human rights practice—is to view …

Wyschogrod’S Hand: Saints, Animality, And The Labor Of Love, Virginia Burrus

Religion - All Scholarship

That the lives of saints constitute an unmediated appeal suggests both a call to imitate what cannot be imitated (thus can result in no mimesis of sameness) and a call to respond to the extremity of the saint's vulnerability; and I would suggest that the two calls turn out to be the same. Because the saint is radically open to the need of others, she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself (she will give everything, again and again); and because she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself, she is radically open to the need of others.

The Flower Of Human Perfection: Moses Mendelssohn's Defense Of Rationalist Aesthetics, Aaron M. Koller

Philosophy - Dissertations

This work is an analysis of Moses Mendelssohn's contributions to aesthetic rationalism, a tradition that arose in 18-century Germany. Rationalists held that aesthetic experience is primarily explained by the perfection of the object being considered, where perfection is a fundamental, rational (law-governed) property. As this work shows, Mendelssohn was among the first to acknowledge and effectively address several significant objections to the rationalist theory: its seeming inability to account for pleasure generally, tragedy and tragic pleasure more specifically, and the sublime; and its apparent blindness to the claims of genius and Rousseau's ethical critique of the arts. Many commentators have …

Exploring The Space Of Resistance: Art As A Site Of Re-Orientation, Lauren Emily Stansbury

Honors Capstone Projects - All

How are we oriented toward things outside our bodies? More specifically, how are our bodies tethered by the hooks of ideology, lurched forward in the inertia of consumer capitalism, or led tacitly by state and social apparatuses? This orienting of our bodies toward prescribed action relies on the conscious recognition these (abstract) objects exterior to our selves—we must face them, to complete the orienting process. But what happens when we turn away? And what kind of objects could so capture our attention, as to divert the normative gaze from the ushers of hegemonic power? Art that exists outside of commodity …

An Argument For Moral Nihilism, Tommy Fung

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project outlines what free will and moral responsibility would require in the truest sense, and will argue that we, as agents, do not truly exercise free will, and are thus not morally responsible for our choices. The project dismisses the Principle of Alternate Possibilities as the judge of moral responsibility, while establishing that being the source of one’s action is required for true moral responsibility. It discusses what causal determinism is, why its existence would threaten moral responsibility. The project then attacks the stance that holds that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible, even though they have a different …

Antigone's Nature, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

Antigone fascinates G.W.F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

Disarming Affirmative Action: Why The Concept As We Know It, Cannot Solve The Racial Issue, Daniel J. Cianchetta

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The following is a study on the use of affirmative action in higher education, particularly with respect to race. Because admission into institutions of higher education has traditionally been perceived as a reflection on one’s merit, the application of race-conscious affirmative action programs has undermined the meritorious prestige of a college education for graduates of all races alike. The use of an uncontrollable trait determined at birth as a factor in gaining admission to one of these institutions raised questions of fairness, legality, and purpose. The consequences of such a policy’s application raised further questions regarding fairness, its success, and …

Danto’S Embodied Meanings: Artworks As Morphemes, Alexander Douglas Coon

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Abstract not Included

Witnessing The Archive: In Mourning, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dreams And Expectations: The Paris Diary Of Albert Brisbane, American Fourierist, Abigail Mellen

The Courier

IN 1828 Albert Brisbane (1809-1890) persuaded his wealthy father to send him to Europe in order to find out "what is the work of man on this earth? What was he put here for and what has he to do?"1 In Europe Brisbane became interested in French utopianism, especially the ideas of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy (Comte de Saint-Simon, 1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837). Brisbane returned to the United States in 1834 and, until his death in 1890, devoted his wealth and energies to establishing an American Fourierist movement.

"Still Dreaming Of Paradise": Rodgers And Hammerstein ' S Oklahoma!, South Pacific , And Postwar America, Randall Bond

Dissertations - Open Access

Oklahoma! and South Pacific were Rodgers and Hammerstein's most successful and popular musicals of the 1940's. This study demonstrates their function as modern morality plays for their audiences. Specifically, the two musicals provided Americans with a prescription for a postwar Paradise. This was a Paradise based upon the American Dream of rebirth and renewal acted out in a landscape of second chances. The components of this Paradise are examined in topical essays that consider such issues as Americanism, consumerism, tourism, racism, and optimism. Each of these elements links what would otherwise appear to be disparate narratives: the American West at …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Five), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fifth in a series on the history and ambitions of punctuation, describes the first vigorous manifestation of logical pointing. In an enlightened atmosphere of book reading and language consciousness, it was discerned that the shapes of sentences and their working parts were better delineated when punctuated syntactically.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Four), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fourth in a series of essays on the history of punctuation, deals with Renaissance and Jacobean England, a period of intense experiment both in language and in the bookmaking arts. Printing, now fully in action, governed the public perception of what looked best on the page and how text should be pointed and spelled. Special attention is given to authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

A Question Of Journalism Ethics, Lucinda D. Davenport

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

No abstract provided.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Three), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This is the third in a series of articles on the past and future of punctuation. The years under focus here are crucial ones, for they include the invention of the printing press and the shift it caused in the human response to the written word.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Two), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Part One of this serialized survey (Courier 23.2, Fall 1988) dealt with the emergence of a late-Classical and early-Christian interest in eliciting, with 'euphuistic' punctating techniques, the voice patterns inherent in text. Part Two, herewith, gives attention to the Middle Ages. In this haphazard era, logical punctuation, which concentrates on syntactical structures and is therefore more appealing to eye than ear, begins its faltering growth.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion, Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

"The Punctator's World: A Discursion" is a study, in several parts, of the origins of punctuation and its development to the present day. Part One, herewith, follows the subject from its murky beginnings into the broad daylight of classical usage.

Pherecydes' Fable, Michael J. Katz

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

No abstract provided.

Genius And Monologue, Ken Frieden

Books

"Genius is the intellectual obsession of our time," Ken Frieden writes, "and monologue is one symptom of the disorder." From ancient, spiritual conceptions of genius to modern notions of the extraordinary mind, Frieden traces associated philosophic and literary expressions of inspiration and individuality.

Frieden juxtaposes the evolving forms of genius with traditions of monologue in pre-Shakespearean and Shakespearean drama, Romantic poetry, and nineteenthand twentieth-century fiction. He delineates the linguistic mechanisms that have shaped the dominant ideology of genius, showing that while literary monologues typically break the conventions of dialogue, aethetics ultimately identifies originality with deviance and madness. The successive guises …

Pseudoscience, C.L. Hardin

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

C. L. Hardin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his Ph.D. from Princeton. The author of articles on diverse philosophical topics, many of them related to the philosophy of science, he is currently at work on a monograph on philosophical problems
of color.

Glimpses Of Spinoza, Jonathan Bennett

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

Jonathan Bennett was born in New Zealand in 1930. His career as a teacher of philosophy has been spent mainly at the University of Cambridge (1956-68), the University of British Columbia (1970-79), and, since 1979, Syracuse University. He has written three books on early modern philosophy and two on the philosophy of mind and language. His Spinoza's Ethics will appear in December 1983.

Estrangement: Marx's Conception Of Human Nature And The Division Of Labor, Isidor Wallimann

Books

Estrangement: Marx's conception of human nature and the division of labor, examines the idea of estrangement in philosophy and the social sciences through an analysis of Marx's works. This book elucidates a functional meaning for the term estrangement and explores Marx's views on the division of labor and human nature.

Nietzsche And His Friends: Richard Wagner And Jakob Burckhardt, Meredith A. Butler

The Courier

From November 1 to 10, 1972, Syracuse University's Bird Library was host to a unique exhibition of books, manuscript materials, photographs, and original graphics by and about Friedrich Nietzsche.

The section of the exhibition subtitled "Nietzsche and Friends" is given emphasis in this paper, which was based on materials from Syracuse University Special Collections. They detail Nietzsche's friendship with Richard Wagner and Jakob Burckhardt. As Walter Kaufmann wrote: "It was Wagner's presence that convinced Nietzsche that greatness and genuine creation were still possible, and it was Wagner who inspired him with the persistent longing first to equal and then to …

Philosophy In Literature, Julian L. Ross

Syracuse University Press

The most important questions of our time are philosophical. All about us we see the clash of ideas and ideologies. Yet the formal study of philosophy has been losing rather than gaining ground. There is increasing interest in the issues, but up to the present there has been no corresponding increase in their systematic study. In many American colleges the work in philosophy attracts fewer and fewer students. Because philosophy is in the doldrums, I have wondered for some time what should be done to breathe into it fresh life. One idea that appeals strongly to me is to invite …

Philosophy In Literature, Julian L. Ross

Books

The most important questions of our time are philosophical. All about us we see the clash of ideas and ideologies. Yet the formal study of philosophy has been losing rather than gaining ground. There is increasing interest in the issues, but up to the present there has been no corresponding increase in their systematic study. In many American colleges the work in philosophy attracts fewer and fewer students. Because philosophy is in the doldrums, I have wondered for some time what should be done to breathe into it fresh life. One idea that appeals strongly to me is to invite …