Digital Commons Network^™

Delay Of Principle B In Spontaneous Speech, Kelcie Burns Reid

Honors Scholar Theses

There is a debate over whether children exhibit a delay in the development of Principle B, one of three chief binding principles. The present study examines spontaneous speech data from nine children and identifies Principle B errors in third person pronouns. The study uses spectrographic analysis on a sample of utterances to determine the frequency of cliticized pronoun use. The results found that children do not make Principle B errors in spontaneous speech, and that they do not use shortened pronoun forms more often than fully pronounced pronouns.

Global-Mindedness And Intercultural Competence: A Quantitative Study Of Pre-Service Teachers, Qi Cui

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Shattering The Political Or The Question Of War In Heidegger’S "Letter On Humanism.”, Babette Babich

Working Papers

Jean Beaufret’s question concerning humanism was “politically” framed on several levels as initially presented to Heidegger.1 Accordingly, Heidegger’s own response was itself political: invoking both technology and the self-same question of science that we remain—and to this day—still “too pious” (in Nietzsche’s words) to be able to frame as a question: the very same question Heidegger develops in his later lectures delivered to the businessmen of Germany, including his Question Concerning Technology. The preoccupation with thinking technology and thinking science remains with Heidegger to the end of his life. Even more significant perhaps (particularly in proximity with Heidegger’s focus …

Just Because You're Offended Doesn't Mean You're In The Right: A Perspective On Language, Comedy, And Ethics, James H. Garrett

Student Publications

Some humor is offensive, but does this convey a moral constraint on what comedians can include in their jokes? Using stand up bits and reflections on comedy from George Carlin, Louis C.K., and Doug Stanhope, various philosophies of humor, and the linguistic philosophy of H.P. Grice, I explore the given question and attempt to settle the disputes about when it is prudent to be offended, in what ways comedians should be allowed to offend, and whether or not words can hurt just as much as sticks and stones.

Defining Maximalism: Understanding Minimalism, Patrick Templeton

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As little more than a buzz-word, maximalism has circulated around architectural discourses over the past decade. To illuminate the implications of the term and to explore its potential, this research explores minimalism in art and architecture to establish a foundation for a reciprocal definition for maximalism.

Digital Reading: A Question Of Prelectio?, Noel Fitzpatrick

Books/Book Chapters

Digital reading as superficial reading is examined by demonstrating that technologies act as placeholders for different types of memory, artificial memory and true memory. This chapter argues that the affordances of digital technologies enable certain types of reading activity, digital reading, but hinders others, such as deep reading. In particular, there is a tenuous relationship between digital reading and scanning for information in the printed text, a form of reading traditionally known as prelectio. This latter is a pre-reading of the text for salient information, not for deep understanding: it is, rather, a scanning or skimming of the text. …

Nonhuman Animals: Not Necessarily Saints Or Sinners, Cheryl E. Abbate

Between the Species

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated …

Shinto And Buddhist Metaphors In Departures, Yoshiko Okuyama

Journal of Religion & Film

Cinematic language is rich in examples of religious metaphors. One Japanese film that contains religious “tropes” (figurative language) is the 2008 human drama, Departures. This paper focuses on the analysis of religious metaphors encoded in select film shots, using semiotics as the theoretical framework for film analysis. The specific metaphors discussed in the paper are the Shinto view of death as defilement and Buddhist practices associated with the metaphor of the journey to the afterlife. The purpose of this paper is to augment the previous reviews of Departures by explicating these religious signs hidden in the film.

Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion And Film Studies In The Last Decade, Joseph Kickasola, John C. Lyden, S. Brent Plate, Antonio Sison, Sheila J. Nayar, Stefanie Knauss, Rachel Wagner, Jolyon Thomas

Journal of Religion & Film

On November 17, 2012, at the American Academy of Religion’s National Meeting, the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group sponsored a session entitled, “Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion and Film Studies in the Last Decade.” The session focused on four recent books in the field of Religion and Film: John Lyden’s Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (NYU, 2003); S. Brent Plate’s Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower Press, 2009); Antonio Sison’s World Cinema, Theology, and the Human: Humanity in Deep Focus (Routledge, 2012); and Sheila Nayar’s The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the …

When Praxis Breaks Down: What Heidegger's Phenomenology Contributes To Understanding Miscues And Learning In Reading, James Magrini

Philosophy Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Grammatical Paradigm, Alexia Polacheck

Spring 2013, Kuhn's Philosophy of Science

Avram Noam Chomsky is known for his work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his political pursuits, and most importantly, for his theories in the discipline of linguistics. Chomsky linguistic pursuits aimed to answer the following linguistic studies: how a person learns and develops a language, how a person structures and understands a sentence, and what the purpose of linguistics is as a whole. His theories dramatically changed the linguistic paradigm. Due to this change, this paper also attempts to illustrate the correlation between scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s belief in ‘paradigm shifts’ and the subsequent change in linguistic thought spurred …

The Ever Changing Shape Of The Universe: A Kuhnian Analysis Of Edwin Hubble's Discoveries, John Bugnacki

Spring 2013, Kuhn's Philosophy of Science

Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sought to explain how science changes, functions, and advances. According to Kuhn, science periodically undergoes a paradigm-shift during which time the prevailing methodologies, theories, and commitments of normal-science are all thrown into question until a new dominant paradigm takes hold. However, as his career progressed and his critics railed against his new conception of scientific progress, Kuhn would emphasize the role of linguistic incommensurability in paradigm shifts over normal-science. In 1923, astronomer Edwin Hubble took the first steps toward the discovery of galaxies. In doing so, Hubble simultaneously drew upon …

Heisenberg’S Uncertainty Principle, Matthew Santos

Spring 2013, Kuhn's Philosophy of Science

In 1926 Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle set the field of quantum mechanics on a trajectory riddled with indeterminacy, a trajectory which stood in stark contrast with the classical Newtonian world causality and origin. In doing so, Heisenberg effectively created a new standard by which physicists conducted their science, broadened the scope of that science, and altered the very worldview of those physicists. Such paradigmatic upheaval fits the philosophical model of scientific progress posited by Thomas Kuhn. However, in the ever-changing and still-evolving world of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s revolutionary work uniquely strays from Kuhn’s model in its further implications.

Mobile Knowledge, Karma Points, And Digital Peers: The Tacit Epistemology And Linguistic Representation Of Moocs, Lisa Portmess

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Media representations of massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as those offered by Coursera, edX and Udacity reflect tension and ambiguity in their bold promise of democratized education and global knowledge sharing. An approach to MOOCs that emphasizes the tacit epistemology of such representations suggests a richer account of the ambiguities of MOOCs, the unsettled linguistic and visual representations that reflect the strange lifeworld of global online courses and the pressing need for promising innovation that seeks to serve the restless global desire for knowledge. This perspective piece critically appraises the linguistic laboratory of thought such representation reveals and its …

Ethical Ambivalence In Local Television Weathercasting: A Rossian Analysis, Vernon Keith Thompson

Masters Theses

Today’s television weathercasters are being called upon increasingly to go beyond benign weather prognostications to become the “newsroom experts” for science topics. The expectation to act as both scientists and journalists can cause ethical ambivalence (EA), a sociological condition in which, faced with conflicting norms, the subject feels that he/she is being pulled psychologically in two different directions (Jansen & Von Glinow, 1985). This thesis presents a Rossian analysis of climate change in weathercasting, a topic that captures the most important ethical tensions arising from conflicting duties within the weathercaster role, specifically: a) how might the duties of the television …

Bringing Back Color, Bringing Back Emotion: Exploring Phenomenological Empathy In The Reclamation Of The Female Nude In Painting, Sophia R. Forman

Scripps Senior Theses

At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before …

Sheltering Xenophobia, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

What is xenophobia? Why is xenophobia immoral? How is xenophobia’s conceptual and moral meaning diminished? Investigations of these questions would invigorate xenophobia as a topic in public morality and discourage the public’s acquiesc- ing to xenophobia’s new prominence. This paper focuses on the third question, the diminishment of xenophobia. In the first sec- tion, I outline a general conception of xenophobia. In the second, I explain how theories of membership in liberal democratic soci- eties relegate xenophobia to a minor moral concern. And, in the third, that the conflation of xenophobia with racism disadvantages the former. How liberal Democratic nations …

Philosophy Colloquium, Mallika Kavadi

News and Events (Discontinued Series)

No abstract provided.

David Foster Wallace To The Rescue, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Stability Of Art Preference In Frontotemporal Dementia, Andrea R. Halpern, Margaret G. O'Connor

Faculty Journal Articles

We examined aesthetic preference for reproductions of paintings among frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients, in two sessions separated by 2 weeks. The artworks were in three different styles: representational, quasirepresentational, and abstract. Stability of preference for the paintings was equivalent to that shown by a matched group of Alzheimer's disease patients and a group of healthy controls drawn from an earlier study. We expected that preference for representational art would be affected by disruptions in language processes in the FTD group. However, this was not the case and the FTD patients, despite severe language processing deficits, performed similarly across all three …

Wandering About: Analogy, Ambiguity And Humanistic Mathematics, William M. Priestley

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article concerns the relationship between mathematics and language, emphasizing the role of analogy both as an expression of a mathematical property and as a source of productive ambiguity in mathematics. An historical discussion is given of the interplay between the notions of logos, litotes, and limit that has implications for our understanding and teaching of Dedekind cuts and, more generally, for a humanistic notion of the role of mathematics within liberal education.

Aristotle On The Truth Of Things, John Thorp

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle on the truth of things

Abstract

Most of Aristotle's texts dealing with truth are unexceptionable: truth belongs only to sentences or beliefs, and it does so in virtue of a correspondence between those sentences or beliefs and the things in the world that they are about. Single words cannot be true, and the things in the world, whether single or compound, cannot be true either. There is however one text, Chapter 10 of Book Theta of the Metaphysics, that breaks with these familiar and comfortable views; it allows that single words or thoughts can be true, and also …

Nominalism In Mathematics - Modality And Naturalism, James S.J. Schwartz

Wayne State University Dissertations

I defend modal nominalism in philosophy of mathematics - under which quantification over mathematical ontology is replaced with various modal assertions - against two sources of resistance: that modal nominalists face difficulties justifying the modal assertions that figure in their theories, and that modal nominalism is incompatible with mathematical naturalism.

Shapiro argues that modal nominalists invoke primitive modal concepts and that they are thereby unable to justify the various modal assertions that figure in their theories. The platonist, meanwhile, can appeal to the set-theoretic reduction of modality, and so can justify assertions about what is logically possible through an appeal …

Platonism Vs. Nominalism In Contemporary Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

Ontological theories of musical works fall into two broad classes, according to whether or not they take musical works to be abstract objects of some sort. I shall use the terms 'Platonism' and 'nominalism' to refer to these two kinds of theory. In this chapter I first outline contemporary Platonism about musical works—the theory that musical works are abstract objects. I then consider reasons to be suspicious of such a view, motivating a consideration of nominalist theories of musical works. I argue for two conclusions: first, that there are no compelling reasons to be a nominalist about musical works in …

Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality And Phenomenology In Constructive Body Theologies, Heike Peckruhn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience …

The Content Of Thought Experiments And Philosophical Context, Kevin G. Gilfether

Honors Papers

Thought experiments are one common method of trying to make a philosophical point. However, there is the question of how useful thought experiments are in telling us about the world: what does thinking about killing a king tell us about actually killing a king? Timothy Williamson offers an account of thought experiments based upon a general cognitive capacity to consider counterfactuals. Anna-Sara Malmgren is critical of such a capacity. This work assess both accounts in the context of common philosophical thought experiments and finds Williamson's could be sharpened by considerations from philosophical context and facts from cognitive science.

Speaking The Language Of Destiny: Heidegger’S Conversation(S) With Hölderlin, James Magrini

Philosophy Scholarship

This essay offers the reader a unique interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of authentic destiny as it develops in the Hölderlin lectures and essays written in the 1930s through the 1950s. Ultimately, for Heidegger, the destiny of Germany, and perhaps beyond, that of humanity, is contingent on the receptivity of a people to the founding and grounding words of the “poet of poets” Hölderlin, who calls Dasein to participate in the awakening to a future that is as of yet indeterminate and historical in the highest degree, wherein, attuned by Hölderlin’s poetry, participants resolutely anticipate the potential “historical” arrival of Being …

Science, Sentience, And Animal Welfare, Robert C. Jones

Ethics and Animal Welfare Collection

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on …

The Aesthetic Unconscious, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Within the context of recent European history, examines the phrase "aesthetic ideology" and attendant conceptual considerations. Discusses Jacques Rancière’s work and his unequivocal rejection of what he calls “this great anti-aesthetic consensus,” and the central category of the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). Rancière calls some level of political engagement “primary aesthetics” and opposes it to actual “aesthetic practices.”

Further, considers Alain Badiou’s critique of Rancière’s Disagreement. Badiou summarizes Rancière’s argument by calling it “a democratic anti-philosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective that sublates the …

The Self: A Transpersonal Neuroanthropological Account, Charles D. Laughlin

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The anthropology of the self has gained momentum recently and has produced a significant body of research relevant to interdisciplinary transpersonal studies. The notion of self has broadened from the narrow focus on cultural and linguistic labels for self-related terms, such as person, ego, identity, soul, and so forth, to a realization that the self is a vast system that mediates all the aspects of personality. This shift in emphasis has brought anthropological notions of the self into closer accord with what is known about how the brain mediates self-as-psyche. Numerous examples from the ethnography of the self are given, …