Philosophy Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Shakespeares: Staging Shakespeare At Conservative Christian Colleges, Christine Sustek Williams

Quidditas

American Theatre publishes an annual list of the top ten plays in production in regional theatres each year and simply removes all Shakespeares from consideration. Otherwise the top ten list would simply be the top ten Bard List. However, when it comes to attempting Shakespeare on the college stage, I argue that many theatre teachers in higher education think twice, or even thrice, before brushing off the old complete works. Most students are quite intimidated when they reach for Shakespeare, having been told for many years that his work is hard to read and harder to understand. Add to that …

Massive Modularity, Content Integration, And Language, Collin Rice

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

One of the obstacles facing massive modularity is how a pervasively modular mind might generate non-domain-specific thoughts by integrating the content produced by various domain-specific modules. Peter Carruthers has recently argued that the operations of the language faculty are constitutive of the process by which the human mind is able to integrate content from heterogeneous conceptual domains. In this article, I first argue that Carruthers’s data do not provide support for either of two possible interpretations of his thesis. In addition, I provide empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking content integration is performed external to the language faculty.

Peacocke’S A Priori Arguments Against Scepticism, Brent J C Madison

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

In The Realm of Reason (2004), Christopher Peacocke develops a “generalized rationalism” concerning, among other things, what it is for someone to be “entitled”, or justified, in forming a given belief. In the course of his discussion, Peacocke offers two arguments to the best explanation that aim to undermine scepticism and establish a justification for our belief in the reliability of sense perception, respectively. If sound, these ambitious arguments would answer some of the oldest and most vexing epistemological problems. In this paper I will evaluate these arguments, concluding that they are inconclusive at best. Despite offering some interestingly original …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Writing And Rewriting Early Modern History: Five Sixteenth-Century English Chroniclers, Barrett L. Beer, Andrea Manchester

Quidditas

In the field of early modern historical writing, sixteenth-century English chronicles have been regarded as an outdated medieval form, and they and their authors have suffered in comparison with later works influenced by Renaissance humanism. Yet in the Tudor period, chronicles, especially the smaller, abridged versions, enjoyed a substantial readership and were reprinted multiple times—very often with revisions. The nature of and motivation behind these revisions reveal much about the varying personal priorities and backgrounds of the chroniclers as well as the readership for which they were writing. This study focuses on five sixteenth-century chroniclers, Thomas Cooper, Robert Crowley, Richard …

Re-Envisioning Reproduction: Dividing Life From Death In Charles Etienne’S De La Dissection, Miranda Mollendorf

Quidditas

Charles Estienne’s De la Dissection des parties du corps humain (1546) presents the uterus not only as a site of generation and life, but also putrefaction and death. Estienne first writes about the uterus as a surgical site where life and death converge and must be separated, and then as an anatomical site where pain and pleasure are divided because of Galenic theories about the uterus that involve generation and corruption. In spite of frequent attempts to visually quarantine the uterus from the rest of the body with a printed inset, these surgical and anatomical separations between life and death …

Wyschogrod’S Hand: Saints, Animality, And The Labor Of Love, Virginia Burrus

Religion - All Scholarship

That the lives of saints constitute an unmediated appeal suggests both a call to imitate what cannot be imitated (thus can result in no mimesis of sameness) and a call to respond to the extremity of the saint's vulnerability; and I would suggest that the two calls turn out to be the same. Because the saint is radically open to the need of others, she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself (she will give everything, again and again); and because she is endlessly vulnerable to need herself, she is radically open to the need of others.

Book Review Panel: When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence In Western Thought, Terryl Givens, James L. Siebach, Dana M. Pike, Jesse D. Hurlbut, David B. Paxman

English Faculty Publications

On October 13, 2011, BYU Studies sponsored a program reviewing Terryl Givens’s important Oxford book on the idea of the premortal existence of souls in various lines of Western philosophy and religion. Because this first volume of its kind covers literature from so many different civilizations, the editors of BYU Studies saw no way to do this book justice without involving a panel of reviewers from several disciplines. After portions of Robert Fuller’s forthcoming review in Church History were read, the program proceeded with reviews, responses, and open discussion.

Rich Man’S War, Poor Man’S Fight, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article reviews The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities by Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

Visual Rhetoric And The Promotion Of Scientific Ideas: The Strange Case Of The Prion, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the field that investigates infectious brain diseases such as mad cow disease, the verbal and visual packaging of scientific visuals associated with identifying the agent, prion, its processes, and structure served the community ritual of establishing belief in a highly unorthodox phenomenon. Visual promotion fed into cultural expectations of single agents and simple processes, even though the actual agency and disease process have proven highly complex and perhaps unknowable.

Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from the perspective of a mechanical theory of causation (Glennan 1996, 1997, 2010, forthcoming), and to explain what, from this perspective, causal generalizations mean, and what role they play within the mechanical theory.

Friends, Foes, And Nel Noddings On Liberal Education, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The author analyzes the debate over liberal education, focusing on critic Nel Noddings, who advocates alternative education. The author cites Noddings' article "Conversation as Moral Education," where Noddings identifies traditional education as studying the canon of Great Books, and another article in which Noddings discusses the theory of curricula.

Narrative Rehearsal, Expression, And Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied Ii", Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

"Shrinking Historicism": Review Of Dale Townshend, The Orders Of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, And The Subject Of Gothic Writing 1764-1820, Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constructing And Disciplining The Working Body: Organisational Discourses, Globalisation And The Mobile Worker, Marian Crowley-Henry, Paul Donnelly

Books/Book Chapters

We consider the ethical treatment of people working in organizations along the relativism/absolutism continuum. Work is a dominant activity in people’s lives and a core part of people’s identities. In it is the managerial realm of Human Resource Management where the focus on the working body primarily resides. The construction and disciplining of the working body is theoretically and empirically explored in this chapter. Do organizations construct and discipline their workforce as a means to their organizational ends (as resources), or do they treat them as means in themselves (as humans)? We trace organizational discourses that emphasize resources rather than …

Contemplation And The Human Animal In The Philosophy Of St. Thomas Aquinas, Edyta M. Imai

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how, according to Thomas Aquinas, the operations of the sensitive soul are necessary for ordinary (i.e., not mystical) human contemplation, and for the acquisition of knowledge which precedes contemplation.

The sensitive soul is the soul possessed by all sentient beings, that is, animals, and thus, in examining the role of the sensitive soul in human contemplation we learn about the way the animal side of our nature participates in contemplation.

According to Aquinas, we possess natural inclinations, which direct us to our proper ends, our proper good. Knowledge of truth is also a good to which we …

Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: A Modified Poggean Argument For How We Harm The World's Poorest, Mark Chakoian

Dissertations

This work presents an analysis of Thomas Pogge's approach to the problem of world poverty as presented in World Poverty and Human Rights. It begins by situating the project of Pogge relative to the work of his predecessor John Rawls. It then moves on to compare Pogge's negative-duty approach to more common positive-duty approaches by discussing the relative merits and weaknesses of the approach of Peter Singer to the problem of poverty. The remaining chapters give an in-depth analysis of Pogge's argument itself. Although there are significant holes and inconsistencies in Pogge's approach, a reformulated argument that preserves his original …

Thinking Through The Phenomenon Of Trust: A Philosophical Investigation, Jeffrey M. Courtright

Dissertations

Jeffrey M. Courtright

THINKING THROUGH THE PHENOMENON OF TRUST: A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION

The phenomenon of trust is historically underrepresented as a topic of serious investigation in Western philosophy. This dissertation investigates the integral role that trust plays in enabling and sustaining meaning and significance in human existence. This thesis is substantiated in the following ways.

First, I explicate various senses and ways of thinking about trust in the work of two historically important philosophers, Plato and Nietzsche. I show that Socrates, in Plato's dialogue Phaedo, articulates the feeling of being entrusted with life, a feeling that one experiences as a …

Rethinking Prayer And Health Research: An Exploratory Inquiry On Prayer’S Psychological Dimension, Adrian Andreescu

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions

on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”,

“intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s

psychological dimension as a way to unite such elements opens new fertile perspectives on

the academic study of prayer and health. In this context, it is suggested that a consistent

interdisciplinary research agenda is required in order to understand those biopsychosocial

factors interconnected within the process and outcome of prayer before attempting to

decipher the big answers laying dormant probably within the transpersonal …

Reassessing Whitman's Hegelian Affinities, Brian Glaser

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article explores Walt Whitman's Hegelian beliefs.