Philosophy Commons^™

An Existential Ethical Imperative, Kent A. Lambert

Episteme

The author’s purpose in this article is to show that Sartre’s ontological structure has room in it for an existential imperative that makes moral activity possible. The author dramatically reveals that “we cannot will freedom without grasping, on an interhuman level, the ambiguous existence of each other.” This reality results from an understanding of Sartre’s notions of consciousness, temporality, bad faith, authenticity, freedom, responsibility, and especially the Other. By the end of his exegesis, the author has shown that Sartre’s phenomenology requires each of us to be authentic as being-for-itself and as being-for-others. The author uses this conclusion to negate …

Wittgenstein, Lewis Carroll And The Philosophical Puzzlement Of Language, Amy L. Kind

Episteme

The author’s method in this paper is to draw connections between Wittgenstein’s thoughts and Lewis Carroll’s play on words in the Alice tales. Even though Carroll obviously wishes to delight the reader, his puzzles map closely with the philosophical puzzlement at the heart of Wittgenstein’s language-game and meaning as use concepts. The author highlights Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as use in connection to the nature of time, the concept of “nobody,” and language on holiday, all of which are ideas played upon in the Alice tales. The author also invokes Hegel’s philosophy about Now in order to help clarify what …

Darwin And Dennett: The Operationalist Debate And The Teleological Response, John W. Roorda

Episteme

The author of this paper makes an analogy between the 20th century debate in artificial intelligence and the 18th and 19th century debate concerning the design of the natural world. In the more recent disagreement, Turing and Searle represent the two poles in the AI discussion of computers and intentionality. In the earlier debate, the author identifies theologian William Paley and Hume as opposites, displaying arguments quite similar to those raised in the contemporary hot topic of AI. The author ends his overview of both debates by introducing the argument that moves the topic into a direction that makes use …

Illocutionary Speech Acts, John W. Tucker

Episteme

This article looks critically at Austinian speech act philosophy and applies Derrida’s critique to Searle’s account of promising. First, the author provides an overview of speech act philosophy, especially in connection to the notion of illocution. The author notes that for the Austinian, the gap between the intention and the expression is deemed unimportant. But isn’t Austinian speech act theory invested in a problematic idealization? Derrida holds that the Austinian account is misleading and ignores real difficulties. Searle’s notion of felicity neither approaches the reality that context itself is always partially open for (mis)interpretation, nor recognizes that speech acts often …

An Analysis Of The Dilemma Of Protagoras And Euathlus And The Librarian's Paradox, Kelly G. Smith

Episteme

This paper emphasizes the complex thinking demanded by dilemmas and paradoxes. To make her case, she provides detailed analyses of the Protagoras and Euathlus dilemma as well as the librarian’s paradox. In an imagined dialogue between a supporter of Protagoras and a cross-examiner, the author unravels the increasingly detailed specifications (dependent on subjective reasoning and supposedly “required” implications) needed to clarify support for Protagoras’ case in court. Ultimately, the dilemma is best solved by noting only the language of the contract and judging against there being grounds to sue. The author next illuminates the many facets of the veridical librarian’s …

A Phenomenological Approach To Clinical Empathy: Rethinking Empathy Within Its Intersubjective And Affective Contexts, Carter Hardy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the philosophy of empathy and biomedical ethics by drawing on phenomenological approaches to empathy, intersubjectivity, and affectivity in order to contest the primacy of the intersubjective aspect of empathy at the cost of its affective aspect. Both aspects need to be explained in order for empathy to be accurately understood in philosophical works, as well as practically useful for patient care in biomedical ethics.

In the first chapter, I examine the current state of clinical empathy in medicine including professional opinions about empathy, the dominant definition being employed, and the problems that arise from this definition. …

Catharine Mackinnon, Feminism, And Continental Philosophy: Comments On Toward A Feminist Theory Of The State—Twenty-Five Years Later, Natalie Nenadic

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist work on sexual abuse and violence has had a major impact on law and on policy in the United States and internationally. However, her complex theoretical writings, which are a foundation of that work, have yet to be adequately appreciated by philosophy, especially continental philosophy, that tradition with which she identifies her project. I explain her project in continental terms, especially Heidegger’s thought, so that we may better grasp the philosophical nature and significance of her work. In doing so, I also open paths by which those within the continental tradition may make it more relevant to …

Reflections On Tom Regan And The Animal Rights Movement That Once Was, Gary L. Francione

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Liberal-Democratic States Should Privilege Parental Efforts To Instill Identities And Values, Andrew M. Robinson

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberal-democratic states’ commitments to equality and personal autonomy have always proven problematic with respect to state regulation of relations between parents and children. In the parental authority literature positions have varied from invoking children’s interests to argue for limitations on parental efforts to instill identities and values to invoking parental rights to justify state privileging of such efforts.

This article argues that liberal-democratic states should privilege parental efforts to raise their children to share their identities and values. Its approach is distinctive in two ways: i) it engages in interdisciplinary reflection upon selected findings in psychological literature on immigrant youth, …

Openness And Protection: A Philosophical Analysis Of The Placenta's Mediatory Role In Co-­‐Constituting Emergent Intertwined Identities, Marjolein Oele

Philosophy

This paper analyzes the placenta's biological and ontological underpinnings in human affectivity as it is generated. The placenta as medial boundary constitutes a place for the encounter and becoming of mother and child, not only as sapient beings, but also in their very nature. Before and beyond the difference between self and other, the placenta offers a model of affective symbiogenesis where selves come into existence in and through the very materiality of one another, contradicting the presumed "immunitary logic of selfpreservation."

The section on placental (re)presentation crafts a placentology that accounts for the possibility of ontogenetic becoming in the …

Demystifying Animal Rights, Mylan Engel Jr.

Between the Species

According to the mysteriousness objection, moral rights are wholly mysterious, metaphysically suspect entities. Given their unexplained character and dubious metaphysical status, the objection goes, we should be ontologically parsimonious and deny that such entities exist. I defend Tom Regan's rights view from the mysteriousness objection. In particular, I argue that what makes moral rights seem metaphysically mysterious is the mistaken tendency to reify such rights. Once we understand what moral rights are and what they are not, we will see that rights talk is neither mysterious nor nonsensical. I then consider a second aspect of Regan’s rights view that …

Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics And Citation In Philosophy, Asphodel And Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour And The ‘Science Wars, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The attached file is a proof copy.

Please see the printed version. Das interpretative Universum

Shakespeare The Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy And His Plays. Anthony Raspa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. X + 196 Pp. $95., Andrew Cutrofello

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A review of Anthony Raspa's book, Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy and His Plays.

Chasing Secretariat's Consent: The Impossibility Of Permissible Animal Sports, James Rocha

Between the Species

Tom Regan argued that animal sports cannot be morally permissible because they are cruel and the animals do not voluntarily participate. While Regan is correct about actual animal sports, we should ask whether substantially revised animal sports could be permissible. We can imagine significant changes to certain animal sports, such as horse racing, that would avoid cruelty and even allow the animals to make their own choices. Where alternative options are freely available, we can consider the horses to have preference autonomy in that they make their own decisions, and we could thereby claim that we have their hypothetical consent. …

Book Reviews: Feldman, Fred. Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve From Our Country., Joseph Mendola

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Fred Feldman is known for the view that consequentialists should admit a fundamental role for desert in moral evaluation. But this book sketches a different desertism. It is a theory of what Feldman calls “political-economic distributive justice,” according to which such justice is a matter of getting what one deserves.

The view, briefly stated in Feldman’s theoretical vocabulary, is this: First, there is perfect political-economic distributive justice in a country if and only if, and in virtue of the fact that, in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political-economic desert, he or she receives that …

Artificial Intelligence And Public Trust, Shannon Vallor

Philosophy

The future is here. With the exploding commercial market for high-powered, cloud-computing AI services provided by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the reach of artificial intelligence technologies is virtually unlimited. What does this mean for humans? How will we adapt to a world in which we increasingly find ourselves in economic, creative, and cognitive competition with machines? Will we embrace these new technologies with the same fervor as we embraced televisions and smartphones? Will we trust them? Should we trust them?

Values And Evidence: How Models Make A Difference, Wendy S. Parker, Wendy S. Parker

Philosophy Faculty Publications

We call attention to an underappreciated way in which non-epistemic values influence evidence evaluation in science. Our argument draws upon some well-known features of scientific modeling. We show that, when scientific models stand in for background knowledge in Bayesian and other probabilistic methods for evidence evaluation, conclusions can be influenced by the non-epistemic values that shaped the setting of priorities in model development. Moreover, it is often infeasible to correct for this influence. We further suggest that, while this value influence is not particularly prone to the problem of wishful thinking, it could have problematic non-epistemic consequences in some cases.

Imagining Disability Futurities, Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Jen Rinaldi, Nadine Changfoot, Kirsty Liddiard, Roxanne Mykitiuk, Ingrid Mundel

Articles & Book Chapters

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in the service of able‐bodiedness and able‐mindedness (Kafer 2013), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, And The Racialization Of Nature, Or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today, Carol W. White

Faculty Journal Articles

Embedded in persistent representations of people of African descent as inferior beings or subpar humans are problematic notions of animality, race, and nature in the U.S., or a lethal combination of intimately conjoined white supremacy and species supremacy. Confronting these processes is a model of African American religious naturalism, which presupposes human animals’ deep, inextricable homology with each other and with other natural processes. Building on the ideas of Anna J. Cooper, W. E. B. du Bois, and James Baldwin, this model of religious naturalism emphasizes humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep …