Philosophy Commons^™

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2010)

Quidditas

Kristin M.S. Bezio

The Allen D. Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

“Hand Hand Shooke”: Compassionate Touch In George Chapman’S Hero And Leander, Patricia Davis Patrick

Quidditas

Chapman begins his continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander by announcing that he intends to “censure the delights” which the lovers have enjoyed without the sanction of ceremony. However, the narrator does not maintain this attitude of stern judgment. As readers of Chapman’s Hero and Leander have often noticed, the narrator continuously shifts his tone, sometimes censuring the lovers and sometimes sympathizing with them. Chapman’s poem is thus as deeply concerned with the problem of appropriate compassion as it is with the containment of Eros. The narrator’s vacillation between censure and compassion can be fruitfully considered by examining early modern …

Banishing Ganymede At Whitehall: Jove’S “Loathsome Staines” And Fictions Of Britain In Thomas Carew’S Coelum Britannicum, Jessica Tvordi

Quidditas

Thomas Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum, performed at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday of 1634, deploys an image of conjugal perfection in order to codify a fiction of national union. Not only are Charles I and Henrietta Maria models of moral and political comportment powerful enough to reform the profligate court of Jove, their harmonious marriage also provides the inspiration for reconciliation between England, Scotland, and Ireland. In order to assert this fiction of unification, the masque invokes images of sexual transgression, symbolically enacts their removal, and equates the strength of Britain with the absence of the deviant monarch, James I. …

“Talk Of Marriage” In Northwest England: Continuity And Change In Matrimonial Litigation, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

This article suggests that the matrimonial culture of northwest England from 1560 to 1640 was marked by a complex range of strategies, values, and processes that emphasized matrimony as a performative process. While present-tense language of consent created, in the words of sixteenth-century lawyer Henry Swinburne, the “Substance and indissoluble knot of Matrimony,” people in the northwest consistently identified other words, actions, and attitudes that also communicated matrimonial intent. Litigation from the diocese of Chester’s two consistory courts features considerable “talk of marriage” by litigants and deponents and reveals an enduring emphasis in the northwest on public performance of matrimonial …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Pan Gongkai: Reflections On Beginnings, Opposites, Changes Re: Contemporary Chinese Art, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Affectivity And The Nature Of The Sage: Gleanings From A Tang Daoist Master, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This essay explores the place of qing in conceptions of the nature and being of the sage, focusing on the Tang Daoist master Wu Yun. What it seeks to show is that assumptions about the attainability of “sagehood” and the “nature” (xing) of human beings inform the interpretation of qing. In this context, the idea that the sage is quintessentially wuqing, marked by the absence of desire and emotions, will be examined. I will close with a comparative note on a Confucian account of the same period—namely, the Fuxing shu by Li Ao.

Othering Obama : How Whiteness Is Used To Undermine Authority, David S. Owen

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority. Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color. Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: A Study Of The Hermeneutic Strategies Of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project, Darin Sean Mcginnis

Dissertations

In contemporary philosophy, there exists a vigorous debate between those thinkers who advocate the need for a truth that exists outside of historical forces and those who hold that all understanding must be historical in its basis. My research is focused on deciphering this problem by providing a description of how understanding and interpretation occur. More specifically, I have proposed a project that explores how the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche can give some insight into this problem of understanding truth. I argue that Nietzsche develops a method of interpretation - a hermeneutics - that focuses on the manner in …

On Constructive-Engagement Strategy Of Comparative Philosophy, Bo Mou

Faculty Publications

In this journal theme introduction, first, I explain how comparative philosophy as explored in the journal Comparative Philosophy is understood and how it is intrinsically related to the constructive engagement strategy. Second, to characterize more clearly and accurately some related methodological points of the constructive-engagement strategy, and also to explain how constructive engagement is possible, I introduce some needed conceptual and explanatory resources and a meta-methodological framework and endeavor to identify adequacy conditions for methodological guiding principles in comparative studies. Third, as a case analysis, I show how the constructive-engagement reflective practice bears on recent studies of Chinese and comparative …

Law And Its Order, Daniele Manni

Master's Theses

Daniele Manni

Loyola University Chicago

LAW AND ITS ORDER: THE PRIORITY OF ETHICS OVER LEGISLATION

IN PLATO'S LAWS.

Despite the fact that the Laws are almost twenty four hundred years old, their reserve of philosophically and politically interesting points is still copious and relevant for the contemporary reader. The present work is an initial attempt to analyze the nature of law as treated in the Laws and to highlight especially the reliance of the legislative sphere on the ethical sphere.

In spite of the many, and often painfully detailed, laws posited by the Athenian in the course of books VIII-XII, …

Reorientation Through Interruption: On The Relation Of Immanuel Kant's Modes Of Egoism To His Critical Philosophy, Giancarlo Tarantino

Master's Theses

The relationship between Immanuel Kant's anthropology, and his Critical philosophy has proven to be a notoriously difficult problem, both for specifically Kantian scholarship as well as for philosophy in general. This thesis attempts to investigate this relationship by showing the importance of Kant's modes of egoism at work in his three Critiques. In doing so this thesis will highlight the phenomena of interruption, and orientation as playing crucial interpretive roles for parsing out the aforementioned relationship. I will try to show that anthropology and Critique mutually interrupt, and re-orient one another's specific contributions to the major themes of Kant's thinking.

The Logic Of Objects, David B. Eichelberger

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The human mind assimilates information and experiences quickly and constantly, and is aided by mental systems that we rely on to function. We classify the input of our lives with extreme efficiency. Our notions about the things we encounter in the world are learned from past experiences, and these expectations help us file the data of our lives. My work is composed to create pause. I am interested in slowing down the processes of assimilation by manipulating our expectations, and extending events measured in microseconds into saturated and engaging experiences. Functional qualities, visual rhythms, and exaggerated proportions are some of …

Human Rights Without Foundations, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a good time for human rights. Not that they are respected more than in the past. The flagrant resort to kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, and torture by the United States of America (USA), and the unprecedented restriction of individual freedom in the USA, and in Great Britain (GB), cast doubt about that. It is a good time for human rights in that claims about such rights are used more widely in the conduct of world affairs than before. There are declarations of and treaties about human rights, international courts and tribunals with jurisdiction over various human right violations. They …

Self-Knowledge And Rationality, Stephen Blackwood

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Several basic asymmetries are normally thought to exist between first- and third-person present-tense ascriptions of mental states. First of all, when a speaker ascribes, for instance, a belief that p to another, she must do so on the evidence provided by the utterances and actions of the other. However, it at least appears that typically she need not do so when ascribing a belief to herself. In other words, there is an immediacy to a self-ascription of a belief (that is, an utterance of the form ‘I believe that p’) that thirdperson ascriptions (‘He believes that p’) lack. …

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Third Tear In Everyday Aesthetics, Katya Mandoki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Although totally overlooked by mainstream aesthetic theory, various paths were nevertheless left open for addressing everyday aesthetics, a natural yet surprisingly controversial topic. Why they were never taken until recently, when the theme of everyday aesthetics is now becoming fashionable, can be explained not only by the obvious fact of philosophical aesthetics’ restrictive focal point on art but, among other reasons, by a kind of fetishism that demands an object of recognized value for legitimating an aesthetic inquiry. This new popularity entails, however, certain theoretical risks such as clinging to traditional art-centric and beauty-centric categories to explain the everyday and …

Water And Stone: Contemporary Chinese Art And The Spirit Resonance Of The World, Mary Bittner Wiseman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

My claim that the new art in China operates at the level of matter and gesture, below that of discourse, is twofold. First, much of the art that is being made exemplifies principles articulated by Hsieh Ho (fifth century) and Shih Tao (seventeenth century) and refracted through the changes wrought by Mao in 1949 and Deng in 1979. Through their art, experimental Chinese artists ask what can art be in a world turned upside down, and what can it be to be artist in such a world and, in particular, to be a Chinese artist.

Second, in the course of …

Interpretation, Sincerity & "Theory", John Gibson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Allowing The Accidental; The Interplay Between Intentionality And Realism In Photographic Art, Katrina Mitcheson

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

We experience photographs both as intentional and as prone to the accidental. The photograph is both capable of being an artwork with its own, constructed world and of drawing our attention to the reality of the objects used in creating it. In this article I employ the insights contained in the concepts of Barthes’ studium and punctum in order to explore how the artist’s intentions and the realism of photography interact aesthetically. I advance the idea that a unique aesthetics of photography can be rooted in the tension between the intentional, culturally coded message of a photograph and the emanation …