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Metaphysics

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2017

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in History of Philosophy

Socratic Metaethics Imagined, Steve Ross, Lisa Warenski Dec 2017

Socratic Metaethics Imagined, Steve Ross, Lisa Warenski

Sophia and Philosophia

A time machine mysteriously appeared one day in ancient Athens. Curious about the future of philosophical dialogue, Socrates entered the device and traveled to the 21st Century. He spent several months in the United Kingdom and United States discussing metaethics before returning to Athens, now a devoted and formidable quasi-realist moral expressivist.

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Platonism Of The Future, Patrick L. Miller Nov 2017

Platonism Of The Future, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester.[1] Perhaps the most dramatic since then has been at Reed College.[2] There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals.

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We Scholars, Mark Anderson Oct 2017

We Scholars, Mark Anderson

Sophia and Philosophia

As a graduate student in my late twenties, I began one winter to experience attacks of migraine fever while conducting research preliminary to the writing of my doctoral thesis. Long hours sitting alone in the basement rooms of university libraries, hunched over a creaking desk, chasing down references to obscure manuscripts, translating ancient languages from small-print editions of old books, copying extended extracts into my notes, formulating and recording my own insights and arguments—all this intellectual labor executed while hidden away from the sun drained me of the vigor I’d acquired as a child on walking tours with my father. …

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The Ontological-Ontic Character Of Mythology, Jeffrey M. Ray Aug 2017

The Ontological-Ontic Character Of Mythology, Jeffrey M. Ray

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates the concept of mythology within the opposing philosophical frameworks of the world as either an abstract totality from which ‘truth’ is derived, or as a chaotic background to which the subject brings a synthetic unity. Chapter One compares the culturally dominant, classical philosophical picture of the world as a necessary, knowable totality, with the more recent conception of the ‘world’ as a series of ideational repetitions (sense) grafted on to material flows emanating from a chaotic background (non-sense). Drawing on Plato, Kant, and Heidegger, I situate mythology as a conception of the false—that which fails to …

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Returning To Reality: Christian Platonism For Our Times, Paul Tyson, Derek A. Michaud Jul 2017

Returning To Reality: Christian Platonism For Our Times, Paul Tyson, Derek A. Michaud

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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Tolkien’S Sub-Creation And Secondary Worlds: Implications For A Robust Moral Psychology, Nathan S. Lefler Jun 2017

Tolkien’S Sub-Creation And Secondary Worlds: Implications For A Robust Moral Psychology, Nathan S. Lefler

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his work, “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien offers a detailed account of what he calls Sub-creation, along with the corresponding notions of Primary and Secondary Worlds. In this paper, I suggest that Tolkien’s concept of Sub-creation can be creatively appropriated in the realm of moral psychology and there applied to the fundamental relationship between self and other – or in Judeo-Christian terms, “I” and my neighbor. Through appeal to Tolkien’s thought and to the wider Christian theological tradition, and in constructive tension with the contemporary psychoanalytic attention to “intersubjectivity,” I attempt to elucidate the power and appropriate …

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Schelling's Ages Of The World: The Beginning Of The Beginning, Andrew Jussaume Jan 2017

Schelling's Ages Of The World: The Beginning Of The Beginning, Andrew Jussaume

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the development of Schelling's philosophy of time as it appears in the Ages of the World, a work which Schelling himself never completed but which he clearly intended as his magnum opus. My project focuses on Schelling's claim that time is the absolute, a claim which grew out of his Naturphilosophie and which later served as the basis for his fruitful interactions with Kierkegaard in Berlin. In the dissertation, I defend the thesis that Schelling's concept of "beginnings" paves the way for an "organic" understanding of time which articulates the latter as a living, breathing entity. In …

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Is Bodily Resurrection Compatible With Materialism?, Lucienne Altman-Newell Jan 2017

Is Bodily Resurrection Compatible With Materialism?, Lucienne Altman-Newell

Scripps Senior Theses

It is widely known that at least three of the major world religions—Christianity, Islam, and (more controversially) Judaism—embrace the theory of bodily resurrection, or an event in which a person or people are brought back to embodied life after death. But is this theory compatible with materialism, or the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications? In other words, if my “self” is identical with and nothing more than my body, could my unique and particular “self” come to exist again on Earth after my death? This thesis examines theories of compatibility from ancient times …

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