Philosophy Commons^™

Love And Marriage On The Medieval English Stage: Using The English Cycle Plays As Sources For Social History, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Much scholarship concerning the concept of “companionate” marriage traces its origins to the early modern period as clergymen, especially Protestant ones, began to publish “guides” to the relationships and respective duties of husbands and wives in the 1500s and 1600s. Studies of marriage in the Middle ages concentrate on marriage among the nobility, since there is more documentary evidence about the medieval elites. Examinations of sermons reveal that the Church, especially after the twelfth century, stressed the sanctity of marriage as an institution created by God and blessed by Christ at the marriage at Cana, but sermons say little about …

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 …

On The Incompatibility Of Political Virtue And Judicial Review: A Neo-Aristotelean Perspective, Ralph F. Gaebler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Part I of this essay outlines a neo-Aristotelean theory of political virtue, an instance of virtue generally, that serves as the basis of excellent citizenship in the polis. As such, political virtue contributes its share to the achievement of eudaimonia, or the fulfillment of an individual’s natural, human function. In fact, political virtue is especially important because people are political beings, i.e. they seek the good most comprehensively in the context of association with others. Therefore, Aristotle describes politics as the master science of the supreme good, because politics orders the community of the polis and thereby establishes the norms …

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.

Truth Commissions And Human Rights, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Humane Dignity, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

The ethics of care has developed as a movement of allied thinkers, in different continents, who have a shared concern and who reflect on similar topics. This shared concern is that care can only be revalued and take its societal place if existing asymmetrical power relations are unveiled, and if the dignity of care givers and care receivers is better guaranteed, socially, politically and personally.

In this first volume of a new series leading care ethicists from Europe and the United States focus on the moral significance of two concepts in the debate that ask for further reflection. In discussion …

The Political Body In Chinese Art, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Avant Garde In Chinese Art, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

The question that I propose to examine here is to what extent or in what sense there has been an avant-garde presence in Chinese art. And in what sense is the avant-garde present in contemporary Chinese art connected to avant-garde in the west. Before examining the relevance of the avant-garde to developments in Chinese art, it is necessary to provide a brief account of avant-garde in western art.