Philosophy Commons^™

The Airport And The City: Toward A Philosophy Of The Aerotropolis, Shane Ray Epting

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

As a city centered on its airport's vast influence, the aerotropolis's existence has an inherent tension: It is a stable city for people to stay put and dwell, with the notion of leaving at the foreground of urban life. As a conception, the aerotropolis requires investigation to reveal its significance for humankind and its place in an ontology of cities. When the aerotropolis is situated in such a manner, we see how it differs significantly from other kinds of cities throughout history that depend on travel, such as river and port cities. After unpacking these points, a view emerges illustrating …

Arithmetic And Necessity: A Quasi-Concrete Modal Structuralist Account, Benjamin Faltesek

Mathematics, Philosophy and Physics (D.Sc.) Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the necessity of arithmetic by distinguishing two tasks that are often run together: the derivation task, which seeks to prove that mathematical truths are necessary, and the characterization task, which asks what kind of necessity arithmetic has and what grounds it. Setting the former aside for now, I focus on the latter, arguing that an adequate explanation of arithmetical necessity requires two sources: logical necessity and the necessary possibility that the right kind of structure exists. The second source makes mathematical modality distinctively mathematical, and the dissertation’s positive contribution emerges chiefly in that area. I survey and …

From Linguistic Domination To Counter-Power: The Weaponisation And Reappropriation Of Language In Shakespeare's Drama, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

Studies of language and power in Shakespeare usually treat colonial, psychological, political, and familial domination as separate problems belonging to separate plays. This article asks what happens when the target of linguistic domination takes up, repeats, or withholds the discourse through which domination is exercised. It proposes linguistic counter-power as a comparative analytical concept: a change in who can define, command, or be believed within the dramatic world that outlasts and exceeds the speaker’s own act of resistance. The concept is distinguished from discursive resistance, linguistic agency, counter-discourse, and resignification, and is operationalised through three tests: uptake, durability, and structural …

The American Ethic: Happy 250th Anniversary!, Matt Walker

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

The American Ethic: Two hundred fifty years ago, In 1776, the American colonies faced a pivotal decision: whether to remain under British rule or to assert their independence. The Founding Fathers chose to separate from Great Britain and proceeded to clearly articulate both their justification for independence and the fundamental principles of liberty and justice upon which the new nation would be built. The Declaration of Independence, drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, was far more than a proclamation of political separation, it also presented the framework for a novel rights-based ethical system which made the extraordinary claim of universal individual …

The Many Lives Of Benjamin Franklin: A Historiographical Examination Of America’S First Self-Made Man, Michael W. Cunningham

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

This paper explores how Benjamin Franklin's historiography has changed over time. It argues that Franklin has been reinterpreted throughout American history and that these reinterpretations say just as much about America as they do about Franklin. Instead of taking a chronological approach to Franklin's life, this study explores how historians have thought about Franklin over time, starting with eighteenth-century writers and ending with historians writing in the twenty-first century. The life of Franklin has been used to exemplify upward mobility, middle-class virtues, and republican success stories, but has more recently been the subject of revisionist scholarship focused on slavery and …

Multiple Insights Into Affective Sentience, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg

Animal Sentience

We discuss some of the many valuable insights into affective sentience from Birch’s The Edge of Sentience, such as its eight criteria for determining which entities have sentience (e.g., emotions) and its insights into the difficulty of testing whether an Artificial Intelligence system has attained sentience. We add our own perspectives on why the eight criteria are valid, on the difficulty of using behavioral trade-offs to determine whether an animal has sentience, and why evolutionary theory says consciousness is not an epiphenomenon.

A Narrative-Driven, Socratic Instructional Framework For Teaching Adversarial Cognition In Cybersecurity, Joshua K. Goossen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The Socratic method has demonstrated, in studies across law, medicine, and nursing, that dialectic structured questioning improves expert reasoning. Cybersecurity currently teaches tools and techniques but lacks Socratic dialogic leaving graduates underprepared for novel scenarios requiring cross-domain reasoning. Because law, medicine and nursing cultivate similar reasoning as security there is principled reason to expect reasoning benefits could transfer to security students. This paper argues that the correspondence warrants investigation. Investigation requires a named, teachable reasoning target analogous to clinical reasoning and we specify that target as adversarial cognition, a framework integrating adversary features, system architecture, implementation logic, governance structure, human …

Stepping Toward The Edge, Rony Hirschhorn, Niccolò Negro, Liad Mudrik

Animal Sentience

The Edge of Sentience asks us to shift from asking whether an entity is sentient to whether it is a sentience candidate. Candidacy then motivates a debate about proportionate precautions, which Birch argues should be settled by citizens’ panels. This raises the question of what citizens bring to such a debate: what they attribute to entities, how they treat those entities, and how these vary depending on both the attributor and the entity in question. We report survey findings bearing on each question and ask what follows for the composition of the panels entrusted with these judgments.

Science And Religion In The Imagination Of C.S. Lewis: The Quest For The Best Mental Model Of The Universe By Alister E. Mcgrath, Martina Juričková

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This is a book review of Science and Religion in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis: The Quest for the Best Mental Model of the Universe by Alister E. McGrath

Morality And Me: An Investigation Of A Moral Framework For College Students, Jillian Lee Meyer '23, Ted Bitner

Student Research

How do college students explain their choices when everyday situations raise moral questions? This study examined the reasoning of 136 U.S. undergraduates across ten dilemmas involving friendships, coursework, employment, and social life. Participants chose a course of action and briefly explained why. Their written explanations were coded using six moral dimensions developed by the Prindle Institute for Ethics: consequences, intentions and motivations, principles and rights, care and relationships, virtues, and fairness. Across dilemmas, students most often emphasized consequences, followed by intentions and motivations. Other dimensions became more prominent in particular contexts: legal questions drew attention to principles and rights, while …

Could 'Real Existing Ai' Be Sentient?, Tim Crane

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch is rightly sceptical about the idea that today’s AI machines (e.g. LLMs) are candidates for sentience. Nonetheless, he gives three reasons for taking the future possibility of AI sentience seriously. I dispute them all. Birch fails to distinguish the very idea of an artificial mind from computational AI (what I call ‘Real Existing AI’); he does not adequately distinguish a simulation from a replica or copy; and he fails to acknowledge that the appeal to computational functionalism in this context is straightforwardly question-begging.

Artificial Sentience: From Computational Functionalism To Behaviourism?, Wanja Wiese

Animal Sentience

I critically examine Jonathan Birch’s account of how brain emulations might create artificial sentience candidates, arguing that his account risks collapsing into a behaviourist account, unless the specific computational processes realised by such emulations are carefully considered. Drawing on examples from computational neuroscience, I show that similar behaviours can arise from vastly different computational processes, thereby undermining the suggestion to focus on behaviourial profiles to determine whether a brain emulation of a sentience candidate is itself a sentience candidate.

What Film Is Good For: On The Values Of Spectatorship, Pablo Alzola

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw, eds., What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023).

Eternity, Leah R. Sisk

Journal of Religion & Film

This film review of Eternity was developed from an essay on how the film demonstrates the nature of choice, including William James's notion of a leap of faith.  The original essay was submitted for an undergraduate Philosophy and Religion class on American Pragmatism at Western Carolina University.

Making Meaning: Free Will And The Meaning Of Life In Barbie, Bertha A. Manninen Ph.D.

Journal of Religion & Film

Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie highlights both the empowerment and drawbacks of one of Mattel’s most famous toys. Although Barbie’s feminist messages have taken center stage, the film also has several theological dimensions and touches upon what it means to live a meaningful life. I will argue that Barbie can be interpreted as a defense of the free will theodicy in response to both the logical and evidential versions of the problem of evil. One common challenge to the theodicy is that even granting that free will is a great good, it is not so good as to be worth …

Moving On: Purgatorial Seriality And Unanswered Prayer In Lost’S “Ab Aeterno”, Christian Wilken

Journal of Religion & Film

“Ab Aeterno” (Lost, 6.09) distills the series’ religious logic with unusual explicitness by staging theodicy not as doctrine but as narrative procedure. This article argues that the episode converts Catholic sacramental form (confession, absolution, and penitential address) into a serial ethics of endurance in which closure is structurally deferred. Richard Alpert’s confession establishes a subject who seeks an authorized word that would stabilize suffering, yet the priest’s refusal (“I can’t”) installs a theology of unanswered prayer that becomes the template for Richard’s long durée of waiting. Jacob’s “cork” parable then supplies a katechontic justification of restraint: evil is not abolished …

A Metaphorical Passage To God: Simone Weil And Robert Bresson, V. G. Voigt Hogg Phd

Journal of Religion & Film

VOIGT HOGG_Abstract (REVISED)_Journal of Religion & Film_30 April 2026

This article contrasts the metaphysical and religious philosopher Simone Weil’s concepts of attachment and detachment with auteur director Robert Bresson’s method of subtraction. It argues for a commonality in their philosophy and cinema, that guides the reader or viewer respectively, to perceive a metaphorical passage to God through the lived experience of suffering. The article considers by what means does Weil and Bresson share a mutual commitment to understanding the state of the soul in affliction, while also acknowledging an opposition in the interpretation of detachment in relation to suicide. The …

Sacred Loss And Moral Authority: Religious Leadership And Identity Reconstruction In Post-Conflict Societies, Kimberly C. Kennedy

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

This paper examines how religious leaders shape narratives of identity formation and reconciliation in post-civil conflict societies where violence, defeat, or political transition produces moral injury and crises of meaning. By drawing on themes of justice, forgiveness, and accountability, religious leadership can wield moral authority to influence public perception, guide healing processes, and support transitions from active conflict to more stable forms of peace. The paper explores how religious leaders reframe narratives of defeat, particularly in cases where a community’s cause was endowed with sacred meaning, creating a crisis of faith. It argues that this work is best understood as …

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 43. Alfred Russel Wallace’S Social Environment And Moral Progress., David Stack, Charles H. Smith Editor

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Alfred Russel Wallace’s Social Environment and Moral Progress (1913) was the last book he wrote and one of the most powerful statements of his thought and beliefs. As with his Revolt of Democracy (1913), written before but published after Social Environment and Moral Progress, the work finds Wallace passionate in his advocacy of social and economic reform. Despite his advanced age (Wallace turned 90 in January 1913), the book is deeply engaged with contemporary controversies, including the rise of labor, arguments against eugenics, and debates around the social and political status of women. What distinguishes Wallace’s text is that he …

The Algorithmic Narcissus: Ai Validation And The Atrophy Of The 'Athletic' Social Self, Ilham Phalosa Reswara, Anggi Mayangsari

Jurnal Psikologi Sosial

Artificial intelligence systems designed around continuous affirmation and minimal friction are becoming increasingly prominent as social and relational partners in everyday life. This article examines how sustained interaction with such frictionless AI systems may reshape the developmental conditions under which social selfhood forms and is maintained. Drawing on Cooley's (1902) looking glass self, Kohut's (1971) concept of optimal frustration, and the developmental literature on social competence, the article argues that frictionless AI may distort the social mirror through which identity forms, remove the manageable frustration that appears necessary for psychological growth, weaken empathic capacity, and erode the social stakes that …