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Vol 7 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

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Comparative Philosophy

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Comparative Philosophy

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Die Phantasie Gottes: An Analysis Of The Divine Ideas In Deity Theories And Brian Leftow, With A Proposed Synthesis, Nathaniel Dowell

Masters Theses

This thesis was on how God is related to the truth-values of propositions on possible worlds - specifically, those propositions that do not seem to be about Him and constitute His ideas for what to create. It opened with a survey of some historical positions with special emphasis on Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant. Next, some criticisms were given for these so-called deity theories (i.e., the belief that possibilities are dependent on God and God must, by nature, recognize the necessary truths He does) with the most space given to Brian Leftow’s critiques. The second chapter detailed Brian Leftow’s theological …

The C3 Conditional: A Variably Strict Ordinary-Language Conditional, Monique L. Whitaker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I provide a novel logic of the ordinary-language conditional. First, however, I endeavor to make clearer and more precise just what the objects of the study of the conditional are, as a lack of clarity as to what counts as an instance of a given category of conditional has resulted in deep and significant confusions in subsequent analysis. I motivate for a factual/counterfactual distinction, though not at the level of particular instances of the conditional. Instead, I argue that each individual instance of the conditional may be interpreted either factually or counterfactually, rather than these instances dividing …

It's Always Better With A Good Dm, David Colannino

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

It’s Always Better With A Good DM is about our relationship with objects and maps as a vector for fantasy. Beginning from the premise that humans understand the world via narrative, I am concerned with the loss of imagination in adulthood in lieu of ideology, which is no more real than stories of future and fantastic places.

Fundamental Awareness: A Framework For Integrating Science, Philosophy And Metaphysics, Neil D. Theise, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The ontologic framework of Fundamental Awareness proposed here assumes that non-dual Awareness is foundational to the universe, not arising from the interactions or structures of higher level phenomena. The framework allows comparison and integration of views from the three investigative domains concerned with understanding the nature of consciousness: science, philosophy, and metaphysics. In this framework, Awareness is the underlying reality, not reducible to anything else. Awareness and existence are the same. As such, the universe is non-material, self-organizing throughout, a holarchy of complementary, process driven, recursive interactions. The universe is both its own first observer and subject. Considering the world …

Theories Of Properties And Ontological Theory-Choice: An Essay In Metaontology, Christopher Gibilisco

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that we have no good reason to accept any one theory of properties as correct. To show this, I present three possible bases for theory-choice in the properties debate: coherence, explanatory adequacy, and explanatory value. Then I argue that none of these bases resolve the underdetermination of our choice between theories of properties.

First, I argue considerations about coherence cannot resolve the underdetermination, because no traditional theory of properties is obviously incoherent. Second, I argue considerations of explanatory adequacy cannot resolve the underdetermination, because every traditional theory of properties lacks the theoretical resources to adequately explain resemblance, …

Avatars Of Oneself, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Zoe is an American woman who has found that “drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch, and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one too.”[3] For two years, however, she played an online role-playing game using a male character where “as a man I was liberated from all that.” She made mistakes in her unfamiliar role, but learned from them. “I got better at being firm but not rigid,” she says; “I practiced, safe from criticism.” Case is an American man, who plays a similar game but always appears as a …

On The Relationship Of Alcibiades’ Speech To The Rest Of The Speeches In Plato’S Symposium[1], Andy Davis

Sophia and Philosophia

To get to the point immediately concerning how I think about the relationship between the first five speeches and Socrates’ speech: it seems to me the claim that Plato has only brought together inadequate perspectives on Eros in order to present Socrates’ speech over and against them as the only correct one is completely in error. Socrates himself does not deny these speeches their accolades, he comes back to many things in them as he assigns each single perspective its own due place. Much more, I believe that from the first speech to the last a decisive progress takes place, …

Jane Austen Meets The Gps: Place And Space, David Kolb

Sophia and Philosophia

When one reads Jane Austen’s novels, one finds that her heroines’ lives center around a beloved and comfortable home, in a local region including a small town, some neighboring estates, and local hills and valleys. It is a detailed and textured home area of nearby places reachable on foot or horse. One to three miles are walkable to a friend’s house or a favorite scenic hill. Beyond this region is no longer “home.” Fifteen or twenty-five miles can be distant.

Kirkos, Prabhu Venkatarama

Sophia and Philosophia

Yesterday morning I received a newspaper clipping that changed the course of my life. It arrived in a small grey envelope, my mother’s Cyrillic handwriting on the front instantly recognizable by its beautiful loops and arches. I was expecting it; my mother had told me it was in the mail. The clipping was of an obituary, that of Robert Mascas, a younger cousin of mine who’d lived in my former hometown of Kirkos. He had turned eighteen three months ago, precisely seven years to the day after I had. The obituary didn’t mention what my mother had on the phone, …

Xanthippe To Her Mother, Ginger Osborn

Sophia and Philosophia

The following is a translation of an ancient manuscript, presumably a late-Hellenistic school exercise, recovered from the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which was entombed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BCE. The library was well-stocked with philosophical works, mostly of an Epicurean bent, but with a variety of other traditions represented as well. The text below is the result of the editorial work and translation of the Italo-Brtitish philosophical eccentric Michael Tommasi, completed presumably in Cambridge in the 1940s, but never published; his literary executors discovered the manuscript among his posthumous papers. Several revisions to Tommasi's …

Nietzsche's Views On Plato Pre-Basel, Daniel Blue

Sophia and Philosophia

In an essay published in 2004[1] Thomas Brobjer surveyed Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Plato and argued that, far from entering into a dedicated agon with that philosopher, he had little personal engagement with Plato’s views at all. Certainly, he did not grapple so immediately and fruitfully with him as he did with Emerson, Schopenhauer, Lange, and even Socrates. Instead, he merely “set up a caricature of Plato as a representative of the metaphysical tradition … to which he opposed his own.”[2] This hardly reflects the view of Nietzsche scholarship in general, but Brobjer argued his case vigorously by ranging broadly over …

Empty Souls: Confession And Forgiveness In Hegel And Dostoevsky, Ryan Johnson

Sophia and Philosophia

“Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned and in the direction of Kameny Bridge in central St. Petersburg.”[1] Right then, this young man, a former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov, is caught in an agonizing conversation with himself over whether or not to commit the ultimate crime: to murder an innocent person. Exasperated, wondering what to do with such a weighty decision, he cried aloud, “that’s why I don’t act, because I am always talking. Or perhaps I talk so much just because …

Review Of Swimming Home, By Vincent Katz, Phillip Barron

Sophia and Philosophia

After a reading in San Francisco, I asked Katz about the significance of using the term “poetry” repeatedly throughout “Sidewalk Poem.” He answered, “poetry is about making, as much as any hand skill like carpentry or welding, but the craft of poetry is not respected.” For Charles Reznikoff and Federico Garcia Lorca, walking the streets of New York was integral to the act of writing poetry. The craft of poetry contains not only those moments when pen smears ink on paper or keyboard presses pixel on screen. Making poetry is more sensuous and active than the still, quiet moments that …

Nietzsche And Heraclitus: Notes On Stars Without An Atmosphere, Niketas Siniossoglou

Sophia and Philosophia

I awake estranged from everyone. Words have lost their meaning; they sound indifferent and homonymous. The word No appears to mean Yes, or rather: Yes and No are malleable, ephemeral, and transparent. A decades-old or perhaps centuries-old movement of miry clay has resulted in a miscarriage of words. Iinquire whether anyone still holds the resources needed for a direct, sincere affirmation of life—a Yes that is definitively and essentially affirmative—or a No that is definitively and essentially negative—words bursting forth splendour like a crystal. I am told that formulations of this sort are incomprehensible; they are too metaphorical and, …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

Book Reviews: Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’S Like To Be A Thing By Ian Bogost, Jet Plane: How It Works By David Macaulay, Andvibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things By Jane Bennett, Nathaniel A. Rivers

Criticism

In this review essay, I review Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) alongside David MacAuley’s Jet Plane: How It Works (2012), which is devoted to a child’s experience of airplanes. While composed for different audiences in traditionally discrete contexts, all three books do critical, speculative work in providing explicit articulations and implicit performances of alternative ontologies from which Critical Air Studies might benefit.

Explanatory Proofs And Beautiful Proofs, Marc Lange

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This paper concerns the relation between a proof’s beauty and its explanatory power – that is, its capacity to go beyond proving a given theorem to explaining why that theorem holds. Explanatory power and beauty are among the many virtues that mathematicians value and seek in various proofs, and it is important to come to a better understanding of the relations among these virtues. Mathematical practice has long recognized that certain proofs but not others have explanatory power, and this paper offers an account of what makes a proof explanatory. This account is motivated by a wide range of examples …