Philosophy Commons^™

The Intricacy Of Death And Destiny, Christopher Rogers

PTRS Undergraduate Publications

It is our eternal shadow and our ultimate judge. It is our shared destiny and greatest fear; death. The conceptualization of death has always been a fascination of man; we have forever explored it, pondered it, dissected it, but never conquered it. We know how to live, but yet very few of us know how to die.

Two of the most brilliant explorations of this dynamic are vastly different yet inherently important works. The genius of both George Orwell’s political satire 1984, and Albert Camus’ The Plague is their accessibility to the imagination regarding dying, the authors ability to …

Transhumanism And Society: The Social Debate Over Human Enhancement, Stephen J. Lilley

Sociology Faculty Publications

This book provides an introductory overview to the social debate over enhancement technologies with an overview of the transhumanists' call to bypass human nature and conservationists' argument in defense of it. The author present this controversy as it unfolds in the contest between transhumanists proponents and conservationists, who push back with an argument to conserve human nature and to ban enhancement technologies.

Readers are informed about the discussion over humanism, the tension between science and religion, and the interpretation of socio-technological revolutions; and are invited to make up their own mind about one of the most challenging topics concerning the …

Radical Reflection And Archaeology: Recasting The Subjectivity Dispute In Merleau-Ponty And Foucault, Kenneth D. Koffer

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This paper will analyze the alleged binary opposition within contemporary continental philosophy as it stands between phenomenological and archaeological discourses, and will inquire as to whether in fact we can entirely oppose the notion of reflection in Merleau-Ponty over and against the method of historical description that Foucault posited, despite the adamant criticisms Foucault maintained toward phenomenology.

Afterword: The Libertarian Middle Way, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libertarianism is sometimes portrayed as radical and even extreme. In this Afterword to a symposium on "Libertarianism and the Law" in the Chapman Law Review, I explain why, though it may be radical, libertarianism is far from extreme in comparison with its principal alternatives: the social justice of the Left or legal moralism of the Right. Social justice posits that everyone should get a certain amount of stuff; legal moralism posits that everyone should act in a certain way. But because there is no consensus about how much stuff each person should have or how exactly everyone should act, …

The Scorpion And The Frog: A False Narrative Of Human Nature, Karen Silverman, Jaret Kanarek

The Intellectual Standard

The Scorpion and the Frog is an age-old fable, having taken various forms over the past centuries.1 In the story, a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is hesitant to agree because the scorpion might sting him on the trip. The scorpion assures the frog that he would not do that because it would cause himself to drown. The frog agrees, yet midway through the trip, the scorpion stings the frog anyway. When the frog asks the scorpion why, he replies that it is in his nature.

How We Think Mādhyamikas Think: Reply To Tillemans, Yasuo Deguchi, Jay L. Garfield, Graham Priest

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In his paper in this Issue, ‘ “How do Mādhyamikas Think?” Revisited’, Tom Tillemans reflects on his paper “How do Mādhyamikas Think?” (2009), itself a reply to earlier work of ours (Deguchi, Garfield, and Priest 2008, Garfield and Priest 2003). There is much we agree with in these non-dogmatic and open-minded papers. Still, we have some disagreements. We begin with a response to Tillemans’ first thoughts, and then turn to his second thoughts.

Search, Seizure, And Immunity: Second-Order Normative Authority And Rights, Stephen E. Henderson, Kelly Sorensen

Faculty Articles

A paradigmatic aspect of a paradigmatic kind of right is that the rights holder is the only one who can alienate it. When individuals waive rights, the normative source of that waiving is normally taken to be the individual herself. This moral feature—immunity—is usually in the background of discussions about rights. We bring it into the foreground here, with specific attention to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kentucky v. King (2011), concerning search and seizure rights. An entailment of the Court’s decision is that, at least in some cases, a right can be removed by the intentional actions of …

Hegel's Symbolic Stage: An Old Perspective On Contemporary Art, Laura T. Disumma-Koop

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper proposes an evaluation of contemporary art works in light of some of the concepts embedded in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s symbolic stage. My belief is that an analysis of Hegel’s conditions for the affirmation of art opens the door to a discussion of contemporary artistic trends, a discussion that also takes distance from the (perhaps) abused question of what defines art. Art does more than question itself; art questions, and challenges, the nature of our perception.

Speaking A Word For Nature: Thoreau's Philosophical Saunter, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Thoreau's extraordinary essay "Walking" is obviously an encomium on what the author calls "the art of Walking" and an exhortation to readers to understand and practice that art. Yes, but we must realize that he speaks of the art of walking in no "pedestrian" sense (if this expression may be excused). Thoreau not only wants us to think the unthought in ordinary walking but to participate in the essay's performance of an allegory or analogue of the practice that he calls sauntering to the Holy Land; it becomes an itinerary through the fields of language that reveals unsuspected sights and …

Phenomenological Insights Into Oppression: Passive Synthesis And Personal Responsibility, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Drawing on phenomenology’s account of “passive synthesis,” this paper seeks to provide a phenomenological vocabulary that could be useful in explaining institutional oppression to those who find it difficult to understand that we can be responsible for acts and meanings that we do not intend. Though the main goal of the paper is to justify the use of the terminology of passive synthesis in the discourse on oppression, the paper ends by suggesting how employing passive synthesis in this manner suggests ways of combating oppression.

Bokrecension, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Like so many who have survived American post-graduate education in philosophy, I entered the academy having neither formal training in teaching nor writing. (Oh, as I see it, taking a few college courses on composition and literature does not count as a means to avoiding dull prose.) I became a teacher by imitating my professors and through trial and error; I developed as a scholar, and only secondarily as a writer, through countless comments given to me during seminars and office visits, as well as in the margins of my papers. Yes, marginalia, the holy grail of insight!

Deflationism About Truth And Meaning, Onyoung Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of my thesis is to defend a deflationary view of truth and meaning. I characterize the view as a doctrine holding that truth is a purely logical notion, and truth-theoretic notions don't play a serious explanatory role in an account of meaning and content. We use truth-terms (e.g. `true') everywhere, from the discourse of ordinary conversation to those of the hard science and morality. The ubiquity of truth-terms gives rise to the impression that truth is a profound notion playing substantive explanatory roles. This impression, say deflationists, is unduly inflated--the ubiquity of truth-terms is not a sign of …

Metaphysical Dependence And Set Theory, John Wigglesworth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a counterfactual analysis of metaphysical dependence. It is natural to think that one thing x depends on another thing y if had y not existed, then x wouldn't have existed either. But counterfactual analyses of metaphysical dependence are often rejected in the current literature. They are rejected because straightforward counterfactual analyses fail to accurately capture dependence relations between objects that exist necessarily, like mathematical objects. For example, it is taken as given that sets metaphysically depend on their members, while members do not metaphysically depend on the sets they belong to. The set …

From Up In The Air To The Roots Of Pandora’S Tree Of Souls: Hossein Nasr’S Islamic Traditionalism And The Hope For Western Futures Grounded In The Sacredness Of The Earth, Daniel O'Dea Bradley

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Termites And Men: On The Ontology Of Collective Individuals, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Living With Differences: From Everyday Fundamentalisms To Invitational Communication, Lisa M. Watrous

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This project examines fundamentalism understood as an everyday way of living poorly with difference. It demonstrates that the fundamentalist is not reducible to stereotypes of the terrorist, extremist, irrational madman, or religious zealot. All of these characterizations--common in mainstream media--depict the fundamentalist as them, and rarely, if ever, as us. Rather, this project understands fundamentalism in terms of fundamental interpretive constructs that constrain our ways of being-with others, skew our interpretive and responsive possibilities, distort our perceptions of difference, and affirm our poor treatment of others. Following Martin Heidegger's conception of the hermeneutic structure of existence, this dissertation calls attention …

Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, And Freedom, Christa Davis Acampora

Publications and Research

That Ecce Homo, with its subtitle "How One Becomes What One is;' is Nietzsche's self-presentation of sorts seems rather easy to conclude. But why does Nietzsche do this? What is evident? What do we really learn from the work? Is it primarily a behind-the-scenes peek at Nietzsche's thought, the ideas that truly or actually motivated him? How complete is it as an autobiography, given that it seems devoted largely to his writings? To what extent can we put much stock in the account at all given that Nietzsche would slip into madness not long after the first draft was …

Laughing Matters, Matthew Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis defends a weak version of the superiority theory of humor: the superiority theory explains some instances of humor better than the incongruity theory. This thesis features an overview of the philosophy of humor in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy; this section contains criticisms of the incongruity theory. Connections between the superiority theory and humor about death are explored. Parallels are then drawn between this type of humor and Aristotle's great-souled man. A new type of laughter, jubilant laughter, is subsequently identified as being similar to laughter classified under the superiority theory since both exhibit a triumphant quality. But …

Panpsychism And Mind-Dust, John Heath Hamilton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is only recently that panpsychism has emerged as a viable position in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. As such, the exploration and defense of it is not yet on par with some competing views. The current project is a step towards a remedy to this unfortunate state of affairs. It concerns one of the most important objections to the view, which I label the 'mind-dust' objection in homage to William James. It is essentially the conceptual difficulty of how proto-experiential being at the micro-level is supposed to 'sum' in a way that forms the consciousness with which we are …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.