Philosophy Commons^™

Philosophy & World Religions Department Newsletter, V5, Fall 2012, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Philosophy And World Religions.

Philosophy & World Religions Department Newsletter

Inside this issue: -

The Scales of Justice: Liberty or Equality

Notes from the Head: Art on Campus

Faculty Spotlight: Francis Degnin, Professor of Philosophy

Faculty Spotlight: John Burnight, Professor of Religion

Harry Brod: Superman is Jewish?

Francis Degnin on Ethics in a Hospital Setting

Philosophy & World Religion Picnic

Student Interview: Jordan Bancroft-Smithe, Philosophy

Student Interview: Wynne Johnson, Study of Religion

Impact of Scholarships...making serious study possible

Explorers of Religion

Philosophy Club, Explorers of Religion Book Sale

Alumni Updates

Alumni Spotlight: John Fordyce, Philosophy

Grant Rozeboom: "If you are my End, then what are my Means?"

Alumni Response Form

The Tortoise And The Hare: A New Moral For An Old Fable, Jaret Kanarek

The Intellectual Standard

Aesop's The Tortoise and the Hare is a prominent moral fable in American cultural discourse. Having originated in ancient Greece, the fa­ble has varied over the years, but the basic elements remain the same. The story, as it is generally told, involves a tortoise and a hare as its two main protagonists. The hare is arrogant; he continually boasts about his speed and picks on the tortoise for being slow. The tortoise grows tired of the hare's boasting and questions the hare's claim of being the fastest creature. In retort, the hare decides to challenge the tortoise to a race …

The Issue Of Internet Polling, Nick A. Nichols

The Intellectual Standard

Surveys, polls, and focus groups are common phenomena in our daily lives. We live in a world where big data is big business. Large decisions hinge on the accuracy and predicative power of these numbers. Therefore, it should not be surprising that there is a market for the malicious manipu-1ation of data. Extreme care must be taken in the collection, checking, and processing of data to prevent decisions from being made on incorrect as­sumptions. In order to demonstrate the full potential and possible impact of these attacks, I shall provide the following example: John Doe is a member of the …

Faulty Phrases: "There Is No Such Thing As Perfection", Michael Christison

The Intellectual Standard

In regard to this saying, one of the most notable references can be found in the movie Tron: Legacy. Although not a direct quote, the charac­ter Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, communicates a very similar mes­sage to the public: "The thing about perfection is that it's unknowable. It's impossible, but it's also right in front of us all the time:' This stance from Flynn, or rather the scriptwriters, epitomizes the commonplace idea that I wish to critically examine.

Faulty Phrases: "There Are No Absolutes" & "The Truth Is Relative", Jaret Kanarek

The Intellectual Standard

"There are no absolutes:' "The truth is relative:' Each phrase im­plies and necessitates the truth of the other. An absolute is something that is universally true, that is, its truth is independent of all other factors or contexts (New Oxford American Dictionary). To say, "there are no absolutes:' is to say that there are no inde­pendent universal truths. All truths are therefore dependent. "The truth is relative" makes exactly this claim. Philosophically speaking, that which is relative "is dependent on something else" (New Oxford American Dictionary). But the concepts of relativity and dependence do not exist in a vacuum. For …

The Humanistic, Fideistic Philosophy Of Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Charles William Peterson

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines the way Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and Martin Luther's closest co-worker, sought to establish the relationship between faith and reason in the cradle of the Lutheran tradition, Wittenberg University. While Melanchthon is widely recognized to have played a crucial role in the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century as well as in the Renaissance in Northern Europe, he has in general received relatively little scholarly attention, few have attempted to explore his philosophy in depth, and those who have examined his philosophical work have come to contradictory or less than helpful conclusions …

Philosophy And Theology: Disability, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

The article focuses on various definitions of disability in human beings given by researcher. It mentions that disability is not universally accepted for normal function of a species. It informs that physical and psychological condition informs about the health of people. It further highlights that species norm defines disability in terms of disease.

Survival Of The Selfish:Natural Selection And The Myth Of Altruism, Kyle O'Shea

The Intellectual Standard

Altruism, in its purest sense, can be defined as an unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others. An altruistic act is one in which the person or animal benefiting from the act is the only one benefiting from it, and the person or animal performing the act gains nothing or is even harmed by the act. Truly altruistic acts are completely void of selfishness. One would like to believe that altruism could exist in its purest form; however, this devotion to the welfare of others cannot and does not exist in nature over time.

Civil Society, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

An introductory encyclopedia article covering all aspects of the topic of Civil Society.

Dynamic Change Of Awareness During Meditation Techniques: Neural And Physiological Correlates, David Dillard-Wright

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Special Issue, Vol. 15, Issue 1, Jane Johnson

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

What The Wild Things Are: A Critique On Clare Palmer’S “What (If Anything) Do We Owe Wild Animals?”, Joel P. Macclellan

Between the Species

In this critique of “Clare Palmer’s “What (if anything) do we owe wild animals?”, I develop three points. First, I consider the case study which opens her essay and argue that that there are good empirical reasons to think that we should assist domesticated horses and not wild deer. Then, I critique Palmer’s claim that “wildness is not a capacity”, arguing that wildness connotes certain capacities which wild animals generally have and which domesticated animals generally lack. Lastly, I develop what I call the “supererogation problem” against Palmer’s preferred contextualist view, claiming that while the contextualist view doesn’t obligate us …

Review - "Motive And Rightness" By Steven Sverdlik, Nancy J. Matchett

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Review - "Motive and Rightness" by Steven Sverdlik

Self-Love And Self-Respect In The Meaningful Life, Erica Stonestreet

Forum, 2012 Fall

Most people have the sense that there's something wrong with living a meaningless life. Since most meaningless lives seem morally blameless, however, it's not obvious exactly what is wrong with it. Starting with a plausible conception of a meaningful life as a life engaged with values beyond oneself, I suggest that the problem is that someone living outside of this conception is not according herself a kind of recognition she deserves as a human being. Comparing self-respect and self-love as candidates for this recognition, I argue that lacking self-love is actually the more fitting explanation for what goes wrong in …

Causal Modeling, Reversibility, And Logics Of Counterfactuals, Wai Yin Lam

Lingnan Theses

This thesis studies Judea Pearl’s logic of counterfactuals derived from the causal modeling framework, in comparison to the influential Stanlnaker-Lewis counterfactual logics.

My study focuses on a characteristic principle in Pearl’s logic, named reversibility. The principle, as Pearl pointed out, goes beyond Lewis’s logic. Indeed, it also goes beyond the stronger logic of Stanlnaker, which is more analogous to Pearl’s logic. The first result of this thesis is an extension of Stanlnaker’s logic incorporating reversibility. It will be observed that the translation of reversibility from Pearl’s language to the standard language for conditional logic deserves some attention. In particular, a …

Self-Love And Self-Respect In The Meaningful Life, Erica Stonestreet

Forum Lectures

Most people have the sense that there's something wrong with living a meaningless life. Since most meaningless lives seem morally blameless, however, it's not obvious exactly what is wrong with it. Starting with a plausible conception of a meaningful life as a life engaged with values beyond oneself, I suggest that the problem is that someone living outside of this conception is not according herself a kind of recognition she deserves as a human being. Comparing self-respect and self-love as candidates for this recognition, I argue that lacking self-love is actually the more fitting explanation for what goes wrong in …

On The Respectful Use Of Animals, Jon Garthoff

Between the Species

In his essay “The Integration of the Ethic of the Respectful Use of Animals into the Law”, David Favre begins to articulate a new framework for understanding the legal status of nonhuman animals. The present essay supports the broad contours of Favre’s framework, but raises challenges for some of the framework’s elements. The first half questions Favre’s claim that possession of DNA and the capacity for life underlie the need for a more robust conception of animal legal standing. The second half questions Favre’s prior proposal that animals be deemed persons under law and questions his pragmatic suggestion that judges …

False Negatives, Steven Luper

Philosophy Faculty Research

In Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick suggested that knowing that some proposition, p, is true is a matter of being “sensitive” to p’s truth-value. It requires that one’s belief state concerning p vary appropriately with the truth-value of p as the latter shifts in relevant possible worlds. Nozick fleshed out this sketchy view with a specific analysis of what sensitivity entails. Famously, he drew upon this analysis in order to explain how common-sense knowledge claims, such as my claim to know I have hands, are true, even though we do not know that skeptical hypotheses are false. His …

Generalization And Induction: Misconceptions, Clarifications And A Classification Of Induction, Eric W. K. Tsang, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In “Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research,” Lee and Baskerville (2003) try to clarify generalization and classify it into four types. Unfortunately, their account is problematic. We propose repairs. Central among these is our balance-of-evidence argument that we should adopt the view that Hume’s problem of induction has a solution, even if we do not know what it is. We build upon this by proposing an alternative classification of induction. There are five types of generalization: (1) theoretical, (2) within-population, (3) cross-population, (4) contextual, and (5) temporal, with theoretical generalization being across the empirical and theoretical levels and the rest …

A Comparative Study: Traditional Evangelical Friends Pastors With Contemporar Evangelical Pastors For Twenty-First Century Application, Thomas Crawford

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This is a study of the dominant views of traditional evangelical Friends pastors and contemporary evangelical pastors. A comparative study of lifestyle, methods of ministry, and primary doctrinal beliefs is used to discover areas of agreement, differences, and points critical to successful leadership for Evangelical Friends pastors. Being a pastor and denominational leader in the Evangelical Friends Church-Eastern Region for the past 32 years gives the author a critical interest in this study. Every church and denomination wants to effectively reach people for Christ. The author and Evangelical Friends are no different. Academic research is combined with interviews of evangelical …