Philosophy Commons^™

Kant's Change Of Heart: Radical Evil And Moral Transformation, Christina Drogalis

Dissertations

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), Kant makes the claim that all humans are radically evil, both by nature and through a free choice. This radical evil, which is the state of having a Gesinnung (disposition) that commits oneself to prioritizing incentives of inclination above incentives of duty, throws into question whether humans can ever become morally good. For this reason, many commentators have dismissed the Religion as not cohesive with Kant's corpus and do not consider it to play an important role in his ethical theory, in particular. Contrary to this traditionally-held interpretation, I show in …

Upbuilding Oppositions: Kierkegaard, Camus, And The Philosophy Of Love, Jesus Luzardo

HIM 1990-2015

Despite the fact that they are both known as leading figures of existentialism, the relationship between 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and 20th century French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus has largely gone unexplored in secondary scholarship. In the few times that their relationship is discussed, focus is heavily placed on the most obvious difference between the two thinkers: their religious orientations, which tends to prevent any further analysis or discussion. Furthermore, popular conceptions of each thinker-largely informed by their most popular works, arguably Fear and Trembling and The Myth of Sisyphus, respectively-tend to depict them as pessimistic and …

Community, Solitude, Patriarchy, And Proto-Feminism In The Old English Life Of St. Mary Of Egypt, Jeffrey Pawling Shipnes

Philosophy & Humanities Theses - Archive

This thesis examines the binaries of community/solitude and patriarchy/proto-feminism in the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt. For various reasons scholars such as Hugh Magennis believe that the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt, although included in a manuscript of Aelfric's Lives of Saints, was not by Aelfric. I argue that the character of Zosimus in this vita embodies the characteristics of community and patriarchy, which I call the Aelfrician model, and the character of Mary of Egypt embodies the characteristics of solitude and proto-feminism, which I call the non-Aelfrician model. I further argue that these …

American Jewish Identity Contruction: Capturing Youth Involvement, Joseph Lincecum

Philosophy & Humanities Theses - Archive

In 1986 the founder and President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), Daniel Elazar, in his address to the Jewish Theological Seminary titled, The Changing Realities of the North American Jewish Community, in consideration of the integration of American Jews, wrote that it "Means more assimilation, more secularization and the acquisition of habits previously considered un-Jewish. This in turn leads to increased intermarriage as a new generation which is culturally less Jewish is at the same time more American and more easily able to find common language with non-Jewish partners of otherwise similar backgrounds". Taken that this was …

Dividing And Conquering: The Dualistic Roots Of Environmentalism And Its Foes, Corwynn Beals

Quaker Religious Thought

No abstract provided.

Stalin’S Boots And The March Of History (Post-Communist Memories), Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I would like to propose here is precisely the invention of a relation to history and the public sphere of sociality that deconstructs the trauma/nostalgia opposition. The theoretical goal is to separate concrete narrative forms from actual political contents. It follows from the previous point that it might be possible to conceive of historical moments or concrete rhetorical situations in which we need to rely on nostalgic rather than traumatic narratives in order to imagine progressive political change. In these situations, the political task could be the development of a certain “critical nostalgia” that does not try to replace trauma …

Introduction To The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism And The Politics Of Popular Culture, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first half of The Naked Communist is devoted to the theoretical and historical foundations of my reading of anti-Communist fictions. After the theoretical introduction, I examine anti-Communist aesthetic ideology by first analyzing its political and then its aesthetic components.

In the second half, I examine the way the culture of anti-Communism defined the “world” as the ultimate horizon of political imagination. Included is a brief overview of some of the most popular texts of the given genre.

Finally, I conclude these chapters with a reading of particular authors.

Dreamscapes: Topography, Mind, And The Power Of Simulacra In Ancient And Traditional Societies, Paul Devereux

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Dream content can be influenced by external sounds, smells, touch, objects glimpsed with half-open eyes during REM sleep, and somatic signals. This paper suggests that this individual, neurologically-driven process parallels that experienced collectively by pre-industrial tribal and traditional peoples in which the land itself entered into the mental lives of whole societies, forming mythic geographies—dreamscapes. This dreamtime perception was particularly evident in the use of simulacra, in which the shapes of certain topographical features allowed them to be presented in anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or iconic guise to both the individual and the culturally-reinforced gaze of society members. This paper further indicates …

Shamanic Cosmology As An Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Michael Winkelman

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The biological foundation for a shamanic epistemology is indicated by the cross-cultural distribution of a shamanic cosmology derived from knowledge obtained during altered consciousness. These special forms of consciousness involve integrative brain conditions that access ancient ways of knowing, expressive systems which have evolutionary roots in the communicative and social processes involved in animal displays or rituals. These were augmented over the course of hominid evolution into expressive and mimetic activities that provided a basis for significant epistemological expansions of consciousness exemplified in shamanic out-of-body (OBE) experiences. These manifestations of consciousness involved new modes of self and processes of knowing, …

The Blackwell Guide To Ethical Theory, 2nd Ed., Hugh Lafollette, Ingmar Persson

Faculty Books

Building on the strengths of the highly successful first edition, the extensively updated Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory presents a complete state-of-the-art survey, written by an international team of leading moral philosophers. A new edition of this successful and highly regarded Guide, now reorganized and updated with the addition of significant new material Includes 21 essays written by an international team of leading philosophers Extensive, substantive essays develop the main arguments of all the leading viewpoints in ethical theory Essays new to this edition cover evolution and ethics, capability ethics, virtues and consequences, and the implausibility of virtue ethics

The Young Shils, Stephen Turner

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Edward Shils began as a sociologist under the close mentorship of Louis Wirth, with whom he collaborated on the translation of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. After 1940, however, Shils’ career, which had been focused on topics in sociology, notably the class and occupational structure of cities and on German Sociological Theory, took an apparent turn, which in 1946 led him into a relationship with Michael Polanyi, a half-time appointment at the London School of Economics, and a new intellectual direction. Part of the biographical background to this was personal: his relationship with Wirth ended, and with it his expectation …

Can A Pluralistic Commonwealth Endure?, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

This article considers whether the American pluralist system can satisfy Cicero's definition of a commonwealth as a multitude united in a definition of law and justice. The analysis is based upon a review of Thaddeus Kozinski's book, The Problem or Religious Pluralism and Why Philosophers Can't Solve It. This book critiques the philosophy of John Rawls, Jacques Maritain and Alisdaire MacIntyre. The critique is based upon Cicero's definition of a commonwealth and the article concludes that a society which maintains a deep pluralism over the first principles of law and justice cannot survive as a commonwealth.

Human Rights And Literature (Fall 2013), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

In this class, we will be reading literary and cultural documents to contemplate the concept of "human rights". What rights do all humans have, simply by virtue of being human? Who counts as human? Do current understandings of human rights exclude some people? Do humans have more rights than other species? How do questions of gender and sexuality fit into the discussion of human rights?

As we seek to answer these questions, we will trace the development of human rights discourses from the Enlightenment to the present, looking at literature from a variety of cultures and human rights documents from …

Delno C. West Award (2013)

Quidditas

Ginger L. Smoak

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper presented by a senior scholar at the annual Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association conference.

“Nothing But Sit, And Sit, And Eat, And Eat”: The Cantankerous Teacher In The Taming Of The Shrew, Eric L. De Barros

Quidditas

By definition, all comedies must end by praising and/or celebrating the elimination of a serious threat to the patriarchy order, and Shakespeare sets up the final scene of The Taming of the Shrew, one of his earliest comedies, to do just that. In short, by the time we reach Lucentio and Bianca’s wedding banquet, Petruccio has effectively tamed Katherine of her shrewishness. However, despite this scene of and cause for celebration, Petruccio remains oddly dissatisfied, as he responds to Lucentio’s encouragement of the sitting, chatting, and eating appropriate to such a festive occasion with these mood-killing words: “Nothing but …

Aethelflaed: History And Legend, Kim Klimek

Quidditas

This paper examines the place of Aethelflaed, Queen of the Mercians, in the written historical record. Looking at works like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Irish Annals, we find a woman whose rule acted as both a complement to and a corruption against the consolidations of Alfred the Great and Edward’s rule in Anglo-Saxon England. The alternative histories written by the Mercians and the Celtic areas of Ireland and Wales show us an alternative view to the colonization and solidification of West-Saxon rule.

What's Love Got To Do With It? An Exploration Of The Symposium And Plato's Love, Remy P. Pinson

CMC Senior Theses

To many people love is special, sacred even. Love plays a countless number of roles for a countless number of people. Contemporary ideas about love, however, are more in alignment with the philosophies of Aristotle, and not of Plato. Aristotle held that love could exist as many people see it today – wishing well for others purely for their own sake. But Plato disagreed. Plato claimed that love was a way by which one could better themselves and become wiser. In this thesis, I explain Plato’s theory of love put forth in the Symposium. I also explore the textual …

A New Foundation For The Propensity Interpretation Of Fitness, Charles H. Pence, Grant Ramsey

Faculty Publications

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that avoids these (and other) counterexamples. By producing a counterexample-free model of the PIF, we call into question one of …

Identifying Pathway Proteins In Networks Using Convergence, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

One of the key goals of systems biology concerns the analysis of experimental biological data available to the scientific public. New technologies are rapidly developed to observe and report whole-scale biological phenomena; however, few methods exist with the ability to produce specific, testable hypotheses from this noisy ‘big’ data. In this work, we propose an approach that combines the power of data-driven network theory along with knowledge-based ontology to tackle this problem. Network models are especially powerful due to their ability to display elements of interest and their relationships as internetwork structures. Additionally, ontological data actually supplements the confidence of …

Conventional Wisdom About Yugoslavia And Rwanda: Methodological Perils And Moral Implications, Aleksandar Jokić

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

While ostensibly a response to a critique, the main goal of this Article is to demonstrate how easily conventional wisdom, usually shaped by the media and politics, can corrupt scholarship when it is simply presupposed by those engaged in what should be an academic polemic, yet often also includes ‘activism in scholarship’. The examples of approved narratives in the West on Yugoslavia and Rwanda are used for the sake of this demonstration.