Philosophy Commons^™

Identity And Memory, Ryley Hinton

Philosophy Summer Fellows

For my Summer Fellows project, I researched personal identity in a philosophical way. The goal was to disambiguate the concept of self-identity, understand what the main notions of identity are, and look at how they apply in different circumstances. My philosophical approach is to treat films as philosophical thought experiments, imaginative situations that reveal the meaning and limits of concepts. Films are great for exploring the topic of identity because they present characters struggling with their self-identity as situations change around them. A major focus of my research is the role of memory in the formation of one’s identity and …

An Alternative To “Rules” In Practice Approaches To Distinguishing Art Kinds, Larry Shiner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Numerous contemporary philosophers have invoked the idea that art is best understood as a social practice in order to distinguish among art kinds or to distinguish Art from closely related practices such as Design. Many general accounts of social practices and of art practices in particular claim that sets of shared assumptions or norms are a key constituent of practices. But some standard accounts of social practices interpret these shared norms with the concept of “rules” or “agreements.” I argue that the idea of rules or agreements is theoretically inadequate and should be replaced by what the philosopher of science, …

Review Of The Oxford Handbook Of Food Ethics, Josh Milburn

Between the Species

The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, contains 35 chapters over 8 sections. Many of these chapters are directly relevant to animal ethicists. Even many of those that do not initially appear to be, however, should be of interest. I thoroughly recommend The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics to all animal ethicists interested in addressing food-related questions in their research or teaching.

Dialectical Methods And The Stoicheia Paradigm In Plato’S Trilogy And Philebus, Colin C. Smith

Philosophy Graduate Research

Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman exhibit several related dialectical methods relevant to Platonic education: maieutic in Theaetetus, bifurcatory division in Sophist and Statesman, and non-bifurcatory division in Statesman, related to the ‘god-given’ method in Philebus. I consider the nature of each method through the letter or element (στοιχεῖον) paradigm, used to reflect on each method. At issue are the element’s appearances in given contexts, its fitness for communing with other elements like it in kind, and its own nature defined through its relations to others. These represent stages of inquiry for the Platonic student inquiring into the sources of knowledge.

Agency And Neuroscience: A Conversation Between Philosophy And Psychology, Kevin Timpe, James Van Slyke

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Diminished Agency: Psychological Science And The Role Of Choice In Goals And Actions, James Van Slyke, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Abelard's Affective Intentionalism, Lillian M. King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work contained within this dissertation is a textual exegesis of Abelard’s ethics. The goal is to elucidate Abelard’s sort of intentionalism given his use of “intention” within his wider corpus, the grammatical and syntactical patterns in his prose, and Abelard’s own interests, biography, and situation as a twelfth-century monastic figure. As a result, this project should be understood as a history of philosophy dissertation. I am not attempting to build upon Abelard’s ideas but to clarify them. This is not to say that building upon Abelard’s ideas is not a worthwhile project. It is merely to say that doing …

Thelonious Monk's Prototypical Style: Close And Distant Readings Of Jazz Stylings, Connor Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thelonious Monk’s style has been considered non-conformist, modernist, technically stilted, intentionally unconventional, even incompetent. His performing is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, by what metric is his performing idiosyncratic, or, framed another way, in what ways do Thelonious Monk’s performances deviate from the prototypical performance? Situated within family resemblance theories of prototypicality, I utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to categorize jazz solos based on their melodic usage of standard jazz language (novel corpus of 530 jazz solo improvisations). Using these distant readings to determine which solos are prototypical, I perform a close reading of these prototypical solos …

Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon, Jeffrey Sundberg

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Falling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise Of Reich’S Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, And Crisis In Reich’S Bio-Energetic Spiritual Psychology, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and even transform a globalizing materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. The later Reich developed a highly original version of a “vitalistic” transpersonal psychology, as his “religion for the children of the future,” which needs …

Thinking With Adorno [Table Of Contents], Gerhard Richter

Philosophy & Theory

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it, and what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. Richter’s book teaches us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations, from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.

Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, …

The Reproduction Of Life Death [Table Of Contents], Dawne Mccance

Philosophy & Theory

Based on archival translations of a soon-to-be-published seminar by Jacques Derrida, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular biology and genetics. McCance shows how Derrida ties biological accounts of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching, challenging an auto-reproductive notion of pedagogy, while also reinterpreting the work of psychoanalysis.

Structured as an itinerary of “three rings,” each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida’s seminar ties Jacob’s logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the …

Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest For Deliverance In Medieval China, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This is a work of considerable erudition, reflecting decades of research into the Daoist tradition. Imperiled Destinies offers a close reading of “the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption, and procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny” (p. 324), from the second century CE to the tenth century. More specifically, it focuses on three main phases of development in Daoist redemptive rituals. Divided into three parts, of four chapters each, it discusses in turn the “petition” (zhang) rituals in Heavenly Master Daoism (Tianshi dao), the “retreat” (zhai) rituals in Lingbao (Sacred Jewel) Daoism that gained currency during the …

Racial Disparities In The United States Criminal Justice System: “With Liberty And Justice For All?”, Remi Alapo, David Rockefeller

Publications and Research

Racial discrimination remains a prevalent issue in the contemporary U.S. despite efforts to promote equality. Many young African American and Hispanic males are easy target for law enforcement agents. Minorities experience a higher and more unfair form of racial discrimination, racial profiling, police brutality, unfair sentencing, and mass incarceration for offences which are the same or less than those committed by White males. The rate of incarceration in the United States is five to eight times higher than most developed countries, and Black males constitute the largest percentage of inmates in the U.S. prison system. Once arrested, Black Americans are …

Lostness, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, I argue that lostness is the life of wonder and that it carries the weight of human striving as understood in the neo-Aristotelian tradition exemplified by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Michael Thompson. Being lost in wonder is an especially important part of human dynamism without which our excellence, or virtue, cannot be grasped. I explore the first part of this argument in some detail and situate it within the wider question I am pursuing about a politics of wonder in conditions of dissensus. Overall, I seek a revised understanding of democracy as collective capacity grounded …

Henry Of Ghent On ‘Persona’: Summa, Article 53, Question 1, Jennifer M. Gray

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that Question 1, Article 53 of his Summa represents an unexpected epistemic sensitivity in the teachings of Henry of Ghent. By this, I mean that his discussion of the persons in the Trinity hints at an awareness of certain epistemic consequences or assumptions at play in the metaphysical use of terms like person, substance, universal, and so on. This acknowledgement is unique and original among his contemporaries.

My argument establishes Henry’s position in context with the traditions he inherited by demonstrating the ways in which it is related to the problem of …

Aristotle On The Good Of Reproduction, Myrna Gabbe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper discusses Aristotle’s theory of reproduction: specifically, the good that he thinks organisms attain by reproducing. The aim of this paper is to refute the widespread theory that Aristotle believes plants and animals reproduce for the sake of attenuated immortality. This interpretive claim plays an important role in supporting one leading interpretation of Aristotle’s teleology: the theory that Aristotelian nature is teleologically oriented with a view solely to what benefits individual organisms, and what benefits the organism is its survival and well–being. This paper challenges the theories that Aristotle takes plants and animals to reproduce for the sake of …

The Province Of Conceptual Reason: Hegel's Post-Kantian Rationalism, William Clark Wolf

Dissertations (1934 -)

In this dissertation, I seek to explain G.W.F. Hegel’s view that human accessible conceptual content can provide knowledge about the nature or essence of things. I call this view “Conceptual Transparency.” It finds its historical antecedent in the views of eighteenth century German rationalists, which were strongly criticized by Immanuel Kant. I argue that Hegel explains Conceptual Transparency in such a way that preserves many implications of German rationalism, but in a form that is largely compatible with Kant’s criticisms of the original rationalist version. After providing background on Hegel’s relationship to the traditional rationalist theory of concepts and Kant’s …

On The Criticism Of Hegelian Necessity, Rosa Turrisi Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

According to Hegel, there are no intrinsic limitations on the extent of human knowledge and reason, and one of the prerequisites of overcoming their relative limits is a logic that is capable of grasping the intrinsic contradictions in things. Hegel claims that his Logic shows that these contradictions are immanently necessary. By means of a close reexamination of Hegel’s own texts, I defend this claim against two of his most prominent nineteenth century critics, Schelling and Trendelenburg, who hope to undermine Hegelian rationalism and defend the more modest Kantian outlook. I also show that a school of interpretation that I …