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Secularism, Religion, And Liberal Democracy In The United States, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is divided into three categories: some brief remarks about forms of secularism, an outline of American constitutional law as it relates to religion, and a discussion from the standpoint of political philosophy of the proper place of religion (and other similar perspectives) in making political decisions within liberal democracies. Because the audience for whom the oral comments from which the essay is derived was mainly non-American, the middle part of the essay sets out many propositions familiar to anyone acquainted with this branch of constitutional law. And because of the informal nature of the original presentation, I offer …

A Theory Of Cultural Glocality, Sarah Elizabeth Fernandez

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A Theory of Cultural Glocality shows how globalization can be salvaged from the negativity that often surrounds it. Globalization has been the target of criticism that claims globalization is pushed on cultures and in the process is destroying local cultures. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the limitations of globalization critics and show that it is not a negative force, that there is a healthy form of globalization. Therefore, globalization does not have to be considered disastrous for local cultures. Glocalizing provides cultures with a way to balance the local and the global in a healthy way where …

(2009) Caring For The “Self As One Among Others”, Laurance J. Splitter

Collected Papers of Laurance J. Splitter

n this paper, I explore some underpinnings of the community of inquiry (CoI), viewed as the primary mode of classroom organization in Philosophy for Children but also as a pedagogic, personal and inter-personal framework for teaching and learning in any subject area. I will argue that the CoI provides a model of both personal and intellectual development which exemplifies how classroom teaching and learning may be seen both as forms of care and of self-care.

On Hanging Laundry: The Place Of Beauty In Managing Everyday Life, Pauliina Rautio

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The data of my empirical research in the field of education discussed in this paper consist of letters produced through correspondence. I asked the participants to write about beauty in their everyday lives, giving substance to the concept as freely as they could. In this paper it is only the letters of one participant, Laura, which I limit my attention to. The aim is to find out what kind of place beauty, as defined and used by herself, holds in the managing of her everyday life. The concept of beauty is virtually missing from educational research or is misguidedly restricted …

Beyond Stewardship: Toward An Agapeic Environmental Ethic, Christopher J. Vena

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation is a work in theological anthropology and environmental philosophy. It seeks to provide a conceptual framework for a Christian environmental ethic rooted in love.

The heart of the crisis of ecological degradation is found in human attitudes and behaviors. In the late 1960's it was suggested that Christianity was a key source of the problem because it promoted the idea of human "dominion" over creation. This spurred a variety of responses designed to show that Christian faith was compatible with environmental care. A key theme emerging from this debate was the image of humans as Stewards of God's …

Identity, Oppression, And Group Rights, Andrew Jared Pierce

Dissertations

The dissertation argues for a conception of group rights based on Habermasian discourse theory, as an alternative to the dominant multicultural liberal approach to group rights, which treats group rights as instrumental to individual rights.

What Is A “Real” Argument?, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Numerous informal logicians and argumentation theorists restrict their theorizing to what they call “real” arguments. But is there a clear distinction to be made between “real” and “non-real” arguments? Here I explore four possible accounts of the alleged distinction and argue that none can serve the theoretical uses to which the distinction is most often put.

Explaining Depiction : Recent Debates In The Philosophy Of Pictorial Representation, Chi Kei, Solly Leung

Lingnan Theses

This thesis begins with a succinct survey of theories of depiction and then turns to two highly influential contemporary philosophical accounts, namely, the aspect-recognition theory proposed by Dominic McIver Lopes, and Robert Hopkins’s experienced resemblance theory. The latter two theories of pictorial representation are presented in detail before objections to both accounts are presented and assessed.

One of the central contentions of the thesis is that the aspect-recognition theory succumbs to a number of serious objections. First of all, this account rests upon a philosophically problematic notion of semantic information and consequently fails to account adequately for the possibility of …

Military Children And Holistic Education: A Narrative Reflection On Classroom Practice, Edith Allison

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation uses autobiographical narrative inquiry as a source of knowledge-generating reflection to examine how the educational needs of military children might be met through the use of holistic educational practices rather than a (well-intentioned) traditional, standardized curriculum. Data were gathered through observation; personal experience as a military child, military member, mother of military children and teacher of military children; journal entries and vicarious experiences shared by students, parents, educators and other invested in this population of learners. Experiences were compiled into fictional composites to protect the identity of all parties as well as national security. These composites were then …

Paratragedy In Plato's Gorgias, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Parody In Plato’S Menexenus, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Empire Sings Back: Aesthetics, Politics, And Postcolonial Whimsy, Namita Goswami

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay recovers the devalued aesthetic dimension of the Bollywood film/song from its political over-determination as national allegory. The qualities attributed to the film/song, such as effeminacy, irrationality, fantasy, and non-synchronicity, which I term its postcolonial whimsy, and its surplus value as the Bollywood film’s most transnational component, allow for the free play of the imagination. This admits the possibility of another performative public culture and imagined community not premised on exploitation, calculability, and passive spectatorship and consumption. The film/song enables affect without literal linguistic comprehension, especially among those unfamiliar with the indigenous languages and musical traditions. What is derided …

Friedrich Schelling, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of From Empedocles To Wittgenstein: Historical Essays In Philosophy By Anthony Kenny, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Davidson On Rorty's Postmetaphysical Critique Of Intentionalism, Kalle Puolakka

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I shall address the standing of intentionalist theories of interpretation through Richard Rorty’s critique. Rorty’s criticism arises from the position literature holds in the post metaphysical, liberal culture Rorty sketches As a counterbalance to Rorty’s critique, I shall develop an intentionalist theory of interpretation drawing on Donald Davidson’s late philosophy of language and his view of literary interpretation that have sadly not been taken into proper consideration in the on-going debate in analytic aesthetics on the role of authorial intentions in interpretation. The prospects of Davidson’s intentionalism for meeting Rorty’s criticism are related to the position of …

Intentions And Interpretations: Philosophical Fiction As Conversation, Jukka Mikkonen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Appeals to the actual author's intention in order to legitimate an interpretation of a work of literary narrative fiction have generally been considered extraneous in Anglo-American philosophy of literature since Wimsatt and Beardsley's well-known manifesto from the 1940s. For over sixty years now so-called anti-intentionalists have argued that the author's intentions – plans, aims, and purposes considering her work – are highly irrelevant to interpretation. In this paper, I shall argue that the relevance of the actual author's intentions varies in different approaches to fiction, and suggest that fictions are legitimately interpreted intentionally as conversations in a certain kind of …

Introduction, Monique Roelofs

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Sensation As Civilization: Reading/Riding The Taxicab, Monique Roelofs

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Aesthetics, race, and nation are densely imbricated with one another. This essay examines their interactions in a newspaper column that describes an aesthetic confrontation between a presumably Arab taxi driver and his passenger, a white European-Dutch columnist. In this column, taste engenders acts of identification and abjection, transmits projections of fear, and underwrites a division of labor and virtue. It thereby serves as a racial border patrolling technology and institutes racial boundaries. To clarify the racial power of aesthetic constellations in the taxicab case, the paper turns to the dualities and integrations that theorists such as Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and …

Red, Gold, Black, And Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper tries to show that black nationalist movements have been pervasively influential on the music and visual culture of the world. In particular, it focuses on the Marcus Garvey movement and some of its religious expressions or extensions - Rastafarianism and the Nation of Gods and Earths - and on reggae and hip hop music. This is also an illustration of a wider conceptual point: that political ideologies are not only constellations of texts and doctrines but multi-media aesthetic environments. Race itself is articulated in aesthetic categories, not only in terms of body appearance and color, but in cultural …

Propositional Knowledge And Know-How, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411-444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first part is that know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist in propositional knowledge. The second part defends an analysis of know-how inspired by Katherine Hawley' (2003). …

The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded.

Contrastivism Rather Than Something Else? On The Limits Of Epistemic Contrastivism, Peter Baumann

Philosophy Faculty Works

One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form “S knows that p, rather than q”. In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too narrow concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge relation.

Reply To Joseph Ellin's Of All Professions, Prostitution Is The Oldest (Except Possibly For Teaching), Michael Davis

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

No abstract provided.

Animal Thoughts On Factory Farms: Michael Leahy, Language And Awareness Of Death, Rebekah Humphreys

Between the Species

The idea that language is necessary for thought and emotion is a dominant one in philosophy. Animals have taken the brunt of this idea, since it is widely held that language is exclusively human. Michael Leahy (1991) makes a case against the moral standing of factory-farmed animals based on such ideas. His approach is Wittgensteinian: understanding is a thought process that requires language, which animals do not possess. But he goes further than this and argues that certain factory farming methods do not cause certain sufferings to the animals used, since animals lack full awareness of their circumstances. In particular …

The Intentionality Of Plover Cognitive States, Chuck Stieg

Between the Species

This paper attempts to clarify and justify the attribution of mental states to animals by focusing on two different conceptions of intentionality: instrumentalist and realist. I use each of these general views to interpret and discuss the behavior and cognitive states of piping plovers in order to provide a substantive way to frame the question of animal minds. I argue that attributing mental states to plovers is warranted for instrumentalists insofar as it is warranted for similar human behavior. For realists about intentionality, the complexity, adaptability and flexibility of the plovers’ behavior, along with its ability to utilize the content …

Peter Singer’S Hegelianism: The Social Context Of Equality, David Rose

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Professions "Of All Professions, Begging Is The Best" A Paper By Michael Davis. Response By Joseph Ellin. Professor Davis' Reply, Center For The Study Of Ethics In Society

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Michael Davis' original paper was presented to the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University on October 4, 2007.

Of All Professions, Prostitution Is The Oldest (Except Possibly For Teaching), Joseph Ellin

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Response by Joseph Ellin to a paper by Michael Davis Professions "Of All Professions, Begging is the Best"

A Defense Of Moderate Invariantism, Leo W. Iacono

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is a defense of moderate invariantism, the traditional epistemological position combining the following three theses: invariantism, according to which the word ‘know’ expresses the same content in every context of use; intellectualism, according to which whether one knows a certain proposition does not depend on one’s practical interests; and antiskepticism, according to which we really do know much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know.

Moderate invariantism needs defending because of seemingly powerful arguments for contextualism, the view that, like ‘I’ and ‘now’, ‘know’ expresses different contents in different contexts. It has been argued that only contextualism …

Inter-Generational Youth Ministry And The Solution To Volunteers, Steve R. Vandegriff

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.