Philosophy Commons^™

Attempting To Answer The Question Of Animal Awareness, Alexandra Horowitz

Animal Sentience

It was as a graduate student that I first encountered the work of both Donald Griffin and Carolyn Ristau. Griffin's The Question of Animal Awareness (1976) and Animal Minds (2001) helped a budding animal-minds researcher appreciate both the possibilities of studying non-human animal consciousness and the struggle that such an undertaking would face. Now Ristau's (2024a,b) timely biography helps explain how Griffin became the figure in animal cognition that he is.

Mapping Gender And Territory: The Continent Allegories On European World Maps From The Late Middle Ages To The Renaissance Until The Early Enlightenment, Katharina Eva Oehmichen

Comparative Woman

The four-part set of female continent allegories, which originated in the early Renaissance, was born out of a European need for a new vehicle of thought that served the functions of representing imperial expansion and the superiority of Western science and civilization, while gratifying the curiosity of the readers about newly discovered lands at the same time. The shift from the Christian symbolic tradition of the representation of the continents on world maps mirrored the shift in Western perception and knowledge of the world and Europe’s position in it. Apart from geo-political and imperial agendas that might have favored a …

The Universal And The Unique, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper explores the abstract dyad of universality and uniqueness. It notes that the two might be complementary and even synergistic, or that they might be alternatives that oppose one another. It also explores how the unique might be an emergent from a primal universality, as well as how the universal might be an emergent from a primal uniqueness. Finally, it offers an interpretation of this dyad in which the universal and the unique are equivalent transforms of one another and thus two sides of the same coin.

Keywords: Universality, uniqueness, general and particular, similarity and difference, fundamental dyad, dualism

King Lear'S "Poor, Bare, Forked Animal" And The Cross, Paul J. Stapleton

Quidditas

In William Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear describes the “unaccommodated man” as a “poor, bare, forked animal.” Lear’s comments are ostensibly about Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, but critics have detected in the passage a more general expression about human nature. The term “forked” is regularly glossed as “two-legged,” but there are philological problems with this reading. This paper, therefore, takes into consideration an alternate meaning for “forked” based on sixteenth-century usages that relate the noun “fork” to instruments of torture. The paper discusses the depiction of the cross as a “fork” (Latin – furca) in the antiquarian Justus Lipsius’s …

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Quidditas

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Delno C. West Award Winner

Quidditas

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the West Award for 2024

Paul J. Stapleton

North Carolina Central University

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Review: The Poems Of Ben Jonson, Steven Hrdlicka

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Mobility In The Middle Ages - Literary Evidence As A Mental Map For Travel Imaginations: A Critical Reconsideration Of Modern Myths About The Past, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Literary fantasy has often served as a meaningful reflection of historical, material, or political developments, and events. This also applies to many works from the European Middle Ages. While popular opinion continues to assume that most medieval people were home-bound, the very opposite can almost be claimed, especially for the late Middle Ages. After the Crusades, the stream of pilgrims to the Holy Land grew tremendously, but many other people were on the roads as well, whether for economic, religious, or political reasons. Constructive contacts between West and East only developed in the course in time, but the basic foundations …

Donald Griffin, Sentience, And Animal Research Ethics, John Gluck

Animal Sentience

Recollection of early encounters with Donald Griffin’s pioneering work on animal awareness, provoking intense, often hostile academic responses, later forgotten.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Breck Award 2024

Jonathan Seyfried

Teaching Margaret Cavendish And Early Modern Women Writers: 1982 - 2013, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

I first came across Margaret Cavendish during the summer of 1982 in an innocuous trade collection of early modern women writers. Like many teachers of English, I made a habit of dropping into used book stores, and in such a place I found the collection. It contained a very few selections from Sociable Letters, in among the work of other women. Those few letters set me off on a new path of formal classroom teaching in person and online first at Northern Arizona University and later at the University of Sheffield. Those letters and other material from early modern …

Medieval Hypebeast: The Conspicuous Consumption Of Joan I Of Aragon, Jonathan Seyfried

Quidditas

Limited releases, celebrity culture, and insane profit margins: these features define the hypebeast phenomenon of the early twenty-first century. The rise and fall of this cycle of conspicuous consumption bears remarkable resemblance to the craze for French culture in the Crown of Aragon in the late fourteenth century. King Joan I, starting from the time of his youth as the Duke of Girona, funded several projects to import French culture. In 1380, Joan married Violante de Bar, niece of the French King Charles V and the Duc de Berry. Once Joan and Violante ascended to the throne, they co-created a …

Review: White Before Whiteness In The Late Middle Ages, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

Quidditas

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Teaching Boccaccio's Decameron And The Black Death Post Covid-19, Vanessa Dimaggio

Quidditas

Giovanni Boccaccio’s introduction to the Decameron depicts one of the most gruesome and vivid portraits of the effects of the Black Death in Florence to come out of medieval Italy. Until 2020, students’ understanding of the plague in medieval Florence was, at best, one of lurid interest in the gory details of a disease that killed nearly 1/3 of the population of Europe, an interest far removed from their reality. However, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, students began to understand the difficulties medieval Florentines faced in a way that was all too familiar. This shift in students’ perspective …

The Epistemic Role Of Ai Decision Support Systems: Neither Superiors, Nor Inferiors, Nor Peers, Rand Hirmiz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Despite the importance of discussions over the epistemic role that artificially intelligent decision support systems ought to play, there is currently a lack of these discussions in both the AI literature and the epistemology literature. My goal in this paper is to rectify this by proposing an account of the epistemic role of AI decision support systems in medicine and discussing what this epistemic role means with regard to how these systems ought to be utilized. In particular, I argue that AI decision support systems are not epistemic superiors, inferiors, or peers. Instead, I recommend that they be classified in …

Can We Use Judgement Bias To Assess The Welfare Of Fish In Aquariums And Zoos?, Culum Brown

Animal Sentience

This commentary examines the potential of tests of judgment bias to assess fish welfare in aquariums and zoos. Judgment bias offers a non-invasive approach to interpreting affective states in animals, using cognitive responses to ambiguous stimuli as indicators of mental wellbeing. Despite the constraints of captive environments—such as limited handling and species diversity in exhibits—recent adaptations of judgment-bias protocols make them suitable across taxa, including fishes. Collaborations with progressive zoos and aquariums could facilitate this research, based on the shared goal of enhancing animal welfare and promoting public education.

Modernisasi Budaya Minum Kopi Gahwa Di Uni Emirat Arab, Nurmalitasari Rahadian, Ade Solihat

Multikultura

Penelitian ini membahas tentang budaya gahwa, yaitu tradisi minum kopi di Uni Emirat Arab. Tradisi ini telah menjadi sarana interaksi sosial masyarakat Emirati sejak abad ke-15 Masehi dan masih bertahan hingga era modern ini. Bukan sekadar bertahan, tradisi gahwa di Uni Emirat Arab sejalan dengan modernisasi yang tengah berlangsung. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan bagaimana budaya gahwa dipertahankan oleh masyarakat Emirati dan dapat selaras dengan modernisasi. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif deskriptif. Pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan mengambil informasi dari buku, artikel jurnal elektronik, video yang termuat di Youtube dan artikel di situs web. Teori yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah …

Menuju Kebijakan Sosial Berorientasi Kapabilitas: Telaah Pemikiran Amartya Sen Dan Martha Nussbaum, Iswahyudi Iswahyudi, Naupal Asnawi

Multikultura

Artikel ini menyajikan kerangka evolusi kebijakan sosial, dengan fokus khusus pada upaya mewujudkan kebijakan sosial yang berorientasi pada kapabilitas (capability-oriented approach). Penelitian ini disusun berdasarkan karya Sen dan Nussbaum yang memberikan pendekatan kapabilitas sebagai kerangka kerja yang berharga untuk mengembangkan kebijakan sosial guna mendorong pembangunan dan kesejahteraan manusia. Penelitian ini mengeksplorasi keterbatasan dan kegagalan kebijakan sosial tradisional, dengan menekankan ketergantungannya pada pertumbuhan ekonomi yang berdampak pada pengorbanan kebebasan dan bakat individu. Penelitian ini juga menyoroti potensi kebijakan sosial yang berorientasi pada kapabilitas untuk meningkatkan kapasitas manusia dan mendorong keadilan sosial. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode analisis konseptual …