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Richey, Ish Harden, 1905-1985 (Sc 1485), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1485. Book manuscript titled "Some Philosophical Aspects of Christianity, History, Literature and Education." The material was published by Richey in 1979.

Toward A Deweyan Theory Of Ethical And Aesthetic Performing Arts Practice, Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper formulates a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice that relies for its support on two main things:

1. The unity Dewey ascribed to all intelligent practices (including artistic practice) and
2. The observation that many aspects of the work of performing artists of Dewey’s time include features (“dramatic rehearsal,” action, interaction and habit development) that are part of Dewey’s characterization of the moral life.

This does not deny the deep import that Dewey ascribed to aesthetic experience (both in art and in life), but it does suggest that we might use his theory of ethical practice in conjunction with his …

(Im)Partiality, Compassion, And Cross-Cultural Change: Re-Envisioning Political Decision-Making And Free Expression, Emily Wade

Philosophy Honors Projects

Past justifications of free expression rely on the crucial role speech plays in deliberative democracies and respecting persons. Beneath each of these justifications lies the common goal of creating greater justice for individuals and groups. Yet 20th century political liberalism limits the kinds of arguments that ought to motivate political decisions. In this paper I explore how an inclusive political decision-making process can bring about a more just world. By relying on personal views and compassion rather than impartiality and reasonability, political actors can engage in a discourse that results in greater understanding among persons and lasting community change.

The Virtues Of Justice, John Thrasher, David Schmidtz

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"This essay considers (and endorses) three complementary conceptions of justice as virtue. To the two senses of justice just mentioned-justice as a virtue of the soul and of the polis-we add a third that bridges these two. Virtue can be a kind of outreach rather than a kind of internal harmony, because we are talking about essentially social beings. The harmony that is this virtue's object is harmony with a community. Thus, a person who is just in this sense is disposed to respect (play within the rules of) institutions that command respect by virtue of actually working-that is, actually …

A Schizocartography Of The University Of Leeds: Cognitively Mapping The Campus, Tina Richardson

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Since 2009 I have been walking and mapping the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) campus as part of the research for my thesis which I shall be submitting shortly. While not a cartographer, nor artist, I am a psychogeographer: someone who studies and critiques the urban environment using walking as part of the methodology.While this mapping aspect of my thesis sits within a larger project of critiquing the historical use and acquisition of campus space by the university, the cartographical part stands in its own right. Some of the examples provided in this essay are created as a response to …

Contesting Faith, Truth, And Religious Language At The Creation Museum: A Historical-Theological Reflection, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, attempts to demonstrate the flaws in contemporary science and to offer an alternative explanation of human origins and biological complexity rooted in a specific reading of the biblical narrative. This effort, however, is paradoxically rooted in the worldview of modern science and the Enlightenment. This article will examine the Creation Museum’s definitions of faith, truth, and religious language and will compare these definitions to those of mainline Protestant Christianity to uncover the historical and theological presuppositions of Creationist and mainline Protestant engagements with contemporary science.

The Truth About Honesty: An Interdisciplinary Analysis Of The Trait Of Honesty, Jared Talley, Lauren Stevens, Drew Lindgren, Sara Couture, Amanda Lynch, Kyle Brasil, Trevor Adams, Kim Hayes

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

In both the psychological and philosophical literature, there is little time devoted to a robust understanding of the character trait of honesty. The trait of honesty is often used as an example of a beneficial or good character trait, yet the gap in the literature raises a vexing question: what is honesty? This poster reports ongoing work aimed at identifying folk theories of honesty. We argue that an understanding of these theories can illuminate a principled understanding of this character trait in both psychology and philosophy.

Currently, we are using qualitative surveys to develop an operational definition of honesty. This …

Experimental Philosophy--An Emerging Discipline, Lauren Stevens, Kyle Brasil, Travis Bundy, Sara Couture, Kim Hayes, Drew Lindgren, Amanda Lynch, Jared Talley, Patrick Beach, Stephen Crowley, Kimberly Mcadams

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

This poster will explain the nature of a newly emerging field in philosophy called experimental philosophy (“X-phi”) and its presence on Boise State’s campus. BSU’s X-phi group operates via gathering data from “everyday” people, sorting and statistically analyzing the data, then reviewing trends identified people’s intuitions about certain concepts (e.g. know-how, intentional action, moral correctness, etc.). We are exploring the concept of Honesty—a concept that has, to date, not been adequately analyzed. To distinguish theories developed as a result of this research, X-phi employs the term “folk theory”, literally referring to the theory that the majority of people are found …

Situationism, Honesty, And The Folk, Drew Lindgren, Jared Talley, Travis Bundy, Lauren Stevens, Kim Hayes, Kyle Brasil, Sara Couture, Amanda Lynch

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

This project aims at finding a widespread folk theory of honesty in order to construct an accurate account of the philosophical nature of honesty as a character trait. Our research process involves gathering responses from the folk, then combining and interpreting the responses. Our broad goal is to discover a solid case for the existence of character traits that can be used against the recent situationist attacks being seen in psychology. Proponents of situationism reject the existence of broad character traits, arguing that behaviour is driven by situational factors and that humans posess no significant character traits at all (Harmon, …

The Problem Of Confirmation In The Everett Interpretation, Emily Adlam

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they …

Ordering Anarchy, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things that we might otherwise not do. The question for the contractarian is whether the costs of these social rules can be rationally justified. I argue that traditional contract theories have tended to underestimate the importance of evaluating the cost of enforcement and compliance in the contract procedure. In addition, the social contract has …

Perfection, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

The Earliest Mormon Understanding Of God, Benjamin Brown, Dr. David L. Paulsen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My research for this project was supportive of a larger project already underway by Dr. Paulsen and Ari Bruening. The project investigates claims by certain scholars concerning the teachings of the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter LDS Church) relative to the nature of God. The final product was a manuscript submitted to Koffard Books for subsequent publication. In addition to my research role, I also extensively edited the document, proposed and implemented major changes, and managed a research staff of a size varying from six to twelve people in their research, editing, fact checking, and writing …

Proper Names As Narrative Gaps: A Deconstructive Reading Of Rosario Ferré And García Márquez, Dora Suarez

Honors College Theses

This thesis argues that language in general, and proper names in particular, are surreptitious examples of narrative gaps. In this way, in the context of literature, the narrative gaps enclosed in proper names enable the audience to become an active participant in a type of writing that exceeds the limit of the specific literary text at hand. In deconstructing the way in which proper names and nicknames are used by Rosario Ferré and García Márquez, this exposition shows how names, as conveyors of different identities, systematically enable an exercise of différance: they distinguish subjects while postponing an actual description of …

It's About Time: Dynamics Of Inflationary Cosmology As The Source Of The Asymmetry Of Time, Emre Keskin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is about the asymmetry of time. The main source of discontent for physicists and philosophers alike is that even though in every physical theory we developed and/or discovered for explaining how the universe functions, the laws are time reversal invariant; there seems to be a very genuine asymmetry between the past and the future. The aim of this project is to examine several attempts to solve this friction between the laws of physics and the asymmetry and provide a new proposal that makes use of modern cosmology. In the recent history of physics and in contemporary philosophy of …

Leibniz's Theodicies, Joseph Michael Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Evil poses a particular problem to early modern thinkers. Late scholasticism, while itself variegated, provided a number of resources for dispelling concerns about the justice of God raised by the existence of evil. With much of the metaphysics of the scholastics rejected, the new philosophers needed either to find inventive ways to make the old solutions fit into their new systems, to come up with new resources for dispelling the difficulties, or to accept the difficulties as insurmountable, likely via fideism or atheism. Leibniz, I claim, provides a provocative mixture of the first two approaches.

Many readers think Leibniz's solution …

“Who Do You Think You Are?” On Nietzsche’S Schopenhauer, Illich’S Hugh Of St. Victor, And Kleist’S Kant, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

A Cardinal Sin: The Infinite In Spinoza's Philosophy, Samuel H. Eklund

Philosophy Honors Projects

One of the greatest developments in mathematics was Georg Cantor's theory of infinity. His work provided a new framework to think about age-old problems in both mathematics and philosophy. Given these developments, it is tempting to write off previous thinkers has having a primitive and undeveloped theory of infinity. However, this attitude undermines the complexity and importance of the theories which existed prior to Cantor. Benedict Spinoza is one philosopher who had a highly developed theory, despite lacking the mathematical tools developed by Cantor. He held that there were three different kinds of infinity, each with different properties and roles …

Journal For The Philosophical Study Of Education Vol 2 (2014), Allan Johnston, Guillemette Johnston, Samuel Rocha

Research Resources

Welcome to the second volume of the Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education (JPSE), a peer-reviewed journal put out by the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education (SPSE). JSPE aims to publish papers that approach the field of education from a philosophical perspective, in the broadest sense of the term. Some of the papers considered for publication may be selected from works presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education by members of that organization, after these papers undergo peer review and revision. However, this journal does not limit its content to …

A Reinterpretation Of The Dao De Jing, Tianyue Luo

Senior Theses

Next to the Bible, the Dao De Jing is the most translated work in world literature. Its popularity certainly shows the power of traditional Chinese thoughts. Late western modern philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre have been influenced by the thoughts of Dao De Jing. As a foundation of traditional Chinese spirit, the Dao De Jing certainly played a key role. In the new global temporality, it may also help people to eliminate the philosophical, ideological, and eventually the cultural gap as a cultural bridge between the east and west. Compared to the original source, most English references …