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[Introduction To] The Philosophy Of Taylor Swift, Lindsay Brainard, Ryan W. Davis, Jess Flanigan

Bookshelf

Edited by Lindsay Brainard, Ryan W. Davis, and Jessica Flanigan

• Offers the first book-length philosophical analysis focused exclusively on Taylor Swift's songwriting
• Demonstrates innovative methodologies for treating popular music as a site of rigorous philosophical inquiry
• Features essays by a diverse group of leading philosophers across multiple subfields
• Reveals new interpretive insights for both scholars and Swifties, deepening understanding of themes such as love, morality, and meaning

Winnie's Feminism: A Tribute To Mama Dr. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela As A Radical Feminist From 1986-2018, Anna Lefatshe Moagi

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Growing up in South Africa and having read several “tell-all” biographies by influential women have made this researcher aware of the struggles of women to be recognised and valued within their social environments. The many names that come to mind, when speaking of women’s voices that challenged their position in our society, belong to those of struggle veterans such as Adelaide Tambo, Ruth First, Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Thandi Modise, Baleka Mbethe, Leymah Gbowee, Ruth Mompati, Charlotte Maxeke, Joice Majuru, Thuli Madontsela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Their as women leaders roles remain undervalued (Shekhawat 2015). These phenomenal influential women and many …

Theology Of The People As Modernity’S Alternative: A Review Essay, William J. Collinge

The Journal of Social Encounters

In Modernity’s Alternative, Rocco Buttiglione presents the Argentinian theology of the people as an alternative to modernity as it has developed in Europe and North America. After an introduction, the first main part of this review essay discusses Buttiglione’s account of the development of the theology of the people and the major figures in it and how the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe marks the beginning of an alternative modernity. The second section considers Buttiglione’s parallel between Christian Platonists’ inculturation of Christian faith into Greek culture and Guadalupe’s inculturation of Christian faith into Mesoamerican culture. The third section …

Experiences Of Resilience During Divorce For Black Women Who Attend Church, Tracey Ann Grant

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Across the globe, divorce is a challenging situation that affects family relationships and disrupts social networks. Divorced women often experience a decline in their health and well-being immediately postdivorce. The problem addressed in this study is that divorcing women tend to experience more negative or undesirable impacts on their mental health (e.g., depression) postdivorce than men and often find involvement in church to be a source of support or added stress. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to investigate how recently divorced Black women describe how their involvement in church may have supported their mental health and resilience …

From Theory To Practice: Locating Moral Exemplars In Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Joseph A. Murray

McNair Summer Research Program

Abstract

This research examines mentorship within Aristotelian virtue ethics. Aristotle holds that moral excellence develops through habituation, guided practice that forms stable dispositions, rather than through knowledge or rules alone. Central to this process are virtuous mentors who model good character and cultivate practical wisdom (phronesis). Although Aristotle stresses the necessity of such examples, he offers little practical guidance on who they are or how they may be identified. This omission raises a practical challenge: if virtue depends on guidance from the genuinely virtuous, identifying those individuals is essential to the theory’s implementation.  My research investigates whether society provides accessible …

A Philosophy Of Communication Response To Bullying In Corporate America, Chris A. Phillips Dr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This philosophy of communication response to bullying in corporate America follows the structure of posing research questions, synthesizing relevant literature, and offering advice to practitioners. It invites the reader to have hope in continuing the conversation through a constructive hermeneutic approach to the problem. By building on literature in oppression, silencing, bullying, incivility, and communication ethics, this dissertation reveals how (rhetoric) and why (philosophy) the problem occurs in corporate America today. This dissertation offers a new angle to an old problem, or, a rhetoric and philosophy of bullying. It responds to the following questions:

RQ 1: As a destructive communication …

The Person As Foundation Of Responsibility: The Insufficiency Of Rights-Based Human Development Approaches, Jaclyn Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building on the plethora of research that demonstrates the way rights language has been more useful for those with wealth and power to further expand capitalist markets, this text extends that criticism to human development programs and institutions. While they claim to be directed towards addressing global issues of poverty and hunger as well as climate crises, they continue to treat the symptoms without accurately diagnosing the disease. Approaches to development that rely on rights without questioning the way rights have been influenced by neoliberal capitalists or without questioning the capitalist global economic system will never be able to achieve …

Why Do We Need To Prove That Pigs Feel?, Aranza Vera-Espinoza, Nancy Harlet Esquivel-Marín

Animal Sentience

Birch's framework manages uncertainty but overlooks the likelihood that citizen panels have speciesist biases that reduce precaution to mere harm-management even in species that undoubtedly feel.

Engaging Intercultural Philosophy In The Classroom: A Methodological Proposal, Gloria Luque Moya

Comparative Philosophy

The exclusion of non-Western philosophies from university curricula has been a persistent feature of academic philosophy, both in the United States and Europe. This marginalization reflects an enduring assumption that philosophy is a uniquely Western enterprise, originating in ancient Greece and developed exclusively within European traditions. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that the teaching of intercultural philosophy is not merely a pedagogical issue, but an urgent necessity in the context of globalization and cross-cultural exchange. Focusing on the limited presence of non-Western philosophical traditions in Spanish university programs, the article first analyzes the structural asymmetry in the historiography …

Teaching China Beyond Eurocentrism: Intercultural Pedagogy And The Case Of The República Del Reino De La China By Jerónimo Román Zamora, Miriam Diaz Belizon

Comparative Philosophy

Interdisciplinary approaches to teaching China in Western academic contexts often reproduce Eurocentric frameworks that reduce Chinese philosophical and cultural traditions to subordinate objects of analysis. This article proposes an alternative model grounded in intercultural philosophy and the Filosofías del Sur, arguing that China should be approached not as a distant object of representation, but as an epistemic interlocutor capable of transforming philosophical education. The article develops this argument through the recovery of the República del Reino de la China, included in the 1595 edition of Repúblicas del Mundo, as a key example of early intercultural mediation from the European South. …

Intercultural Questioning: Teaching Report On A Question-Oriented Pedagogy In Teaching Chinese Philosophy, Sai Hang Kwok

Comparative Philosophy

Language and cultural barriers pose major obstacles to teaching Chinese philosophy to Western philosophy students. Without a cultural and linguistic background, students often struggle to read the original Chinese philosophical texts. Translation also involves issues of interpretation that are difficult to be settled in undergraduate-level courses. To address this situation, this paper introduces a question-oriented pedagogy called “intercultural questioning”. Instead of aiming at a comprehensive understanding of the entire Chinese philosophical tradition, the question-oriented pedagogy reveals the implicit assumptions in one’s conceptual frameworks and unexamined questions in Western philosophy through the East-West dialogue. Students can obtain philosophical insights from Chinese …

Why Minds Need Bodies: Organismic Unity And Limits Of Artificial Consciousness, Renée Snow

Comparative Philosophy

This paper argues that functional organization alone is not sufficient for phenomenal consciousness or the existence of a unified subject of experience. While many contemporary accounts of artificial consciousness assume that replicating the causal or computational structure of the brain would be sufficient for subjective experience, this paper identifies a deeper constraint: consciousness depends on organismic unity. The argument proceeds through a triangulation of conceptual, empirical, and metaphysical considerations. First, Zuboff’s thought experiment shows that functional organization can be preserved while the unity of the subject dissolves, suggesting that causal pattern replication alone cannot secure subjectivity. Second, findings from neuroscience …

Fang Zhu’S Shen-Mie-Lun And Contemporary Physicism: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue, Soo Lam Wong

Comparative Philosophy

Fan Zhen’s 范缜 “Shen-Mie-Lun 神灭论” can be read as a debate between a physicalist and a dualist in the philosophy of mind. Many of Fan’s arguments found in the “Shen-Mie-Lun” correspond to contemporary physicalism in Western analytic philosophy. My aim in this essay is to bring Fan's “Shen-Mie-Lun” into conversation with contemporary physicalism in the following way: (1) offer an outline of Fan’s physicalism as presented in the “Shen-Mie-Lun” (2) map his view onto the key positions and concepts of contemporary physicalism, (3) show how his view is (a) incompatible with eliminative …

Can Skepticism Be Politically Progressive? An Approach From Zhuang Zi, Tammo Lossau

Comparative Philosophy

Ancient skeptics, both in the West and East, suggest their philosophy as a form of life. One reservation about living as a skeptic is that it turns us into political conformists—this is also Jonathan Ichikawa’s (2024) objection to philosophical skepticism. Skeptics take their own perspective on the world to be limited, and in this sense they will be hesitant to fully embrace a conservative ideology. But the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus recommends that in their actions, skeptics will follow existing laws and common moral beliefs. In this paper, I want to develop a different conception of skepticism based on the …

Jing (敬) And Respect, Wenyang Gao

Comparative Philosophy

Jing (敬) is often translated as “respect”. Some scholars argue for a “perception of worth” reading, conceiving jing as a deontic normative attitude akin to “respect” in the Western tradition. Others propose a “directing attention” reading, holding that jing is a virtue. This article clarifies the meaning and normative structure of jing, arguing that it has three dimensions:  (1) a state of mind characterized by seriousness, (2) an intentional, respectful feeling, and (3) respectful conduct aligned with ritual propriety (Li禮). While the “directing attention” reading correctly identifies jing as a virtue, insisting that jing does …

A Constructive Engagement With Confucian Gender Ethics: Reinterpreting The Three Obediences And Four Virtues In Contemporary Vietnam, Vo Van Dung

Comparative Philosophy

This paper examines the influence of the doctrines of the Three Obediences and Four Virtues on the moral thought of Vietnamese women in contemporary society. The study addresses the central question of whether and how these doctrines remain relevant within current social and cultural contexts. It traces the historical introduction and transformation of these doctrines in Vietnam. It analyses their dual impact on women’s moral values, highlighting both their enduring ethical contributions and their role in sustaining gendered constraints. The findings suggest that while certain elements of the Four Virtues have been reinterpreted and selectively integrated into modern ethical frameworks, …

A Poetic Call For And A Reflection And Commentary On Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, And Compassion, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Finding a published poem I had written as a teenager, titled “The Heavens Weep.” this article uses that poem as the basis for a commentary that reflects on the state of the world today (2026),  As a commentary, the article uses the poetic and metaphoric words in the poem as a relevant "reality check" for what is still going on today.  In essence, the commentary is about a call for Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, and Compassion, or what I call Archetypal Energies, Higher Vibrational Energies that operate deep within our individual and collective psyches to creatively urge us to "see" …

The Ambivalent Wisdom Of Moral Disgust, Brandon Yip

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper has two aims. First, to provide a positive account of moral disgust. I suggest that moral disgust is a response to acts that are socially corrosive, namely, acts that undermine the normative structure to which an agent is attuned. I support this analysis with two lines of evidence: (1) moral disgust serves the important function of guarding normative structures from socially corrosive actions and (2) the analysis provides an illuminating explanation of moral disgust in a wide variety of cases. The secondary aim of this paper is to probe the normative implications of my positive account. I suggest …

Witchcraft Dialogues : Anthropological And Philosophical Exchanges, George Clement Bond, Diane M. Ciekawy

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the occult. It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of witchcraft and sorcery and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences.

While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of witchcraft as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that witchcraft encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and …

Towards Confucian Economic Democracy: A Relational Alternative To Possessive Individualism, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article offers a Confucian conception of ownership and a different approach to equality based on a concept of relational person that could provide an alternative philosophical framework for economic democracy. The Confucian concept of nonexclusive and nonabsolute co-ownership, conditional on owners fulfilling their social responsibilities and sustained in networks of relationships mitigates the drive to appropriation and resistance to redistribution even without formalizing legal rights of equal ownership. Confucian texts’ condemnation of wide disparities between rich and poor corresponds with distributive ideas that balance equal satisfaction of needs with merit-based incentives for productivity constrained by social harmony. Without advocating …

The Problems Of Philosophy: Student Edition, Bertrand Russell, Landon D.C. Elkind Ed.

Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications

This is a very lightly edited open educational resource version of The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. It is lightly edited to approach (without yet meeting) the “truer” text of The Problems of Philosophy indicated by Kenneth Blackwell in the journal Russell.1 Student notes from the editor are included to make the text more suitable for college (or high school) students.

The basis for this edition is this 2004 version available in HTML through Project Gutenberg, produced by Gordon Keener and David Widger. After using Pandoc to convert this HTML file into TeX, I made some aesthetic edits (like …

Representasi Kehidupan Sosial Remaja Queer Di Belanda Dalam Film Out (2024), Ajie Kelana, Barbara Elisabeth Lucia Pesulima

Multikultura

Belanda dikenal relatif terbuka terhadap homoseksualitas, kondisi yang tercermin dalam film Out (2024) karya Dennis Alink tentang dua remaja queer, Ajani dan Tom, yang menjalani kehidupan baru di Amsterdam. Penelitian ini mengkaji representasi kehidupan sosial remaja queer dalam film tersebut dan relevansinya dengan realitas sosial remaja queer di Belanda, menggunakan teori representasi Stuart Hall dengan pendekatan konstruksionis serta konsep congruence Carl Rogers, melalui metode deskriptif kualitatif. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa film merepresentasikan kehidupan sosial remaja queer sebagai proses adaptasi yang dipengaruhi ruang sosial: keluarga sebagai ruang penerimaan tanpa syarat namun idealis dibanding realitas Belanda, desa sebagai ruang yang membatasi …

Reproduksi Pola Keibuan Tokoh Zhenya Dalam Film Нелюбовь (Nelyubov) ‘Tanpa Cinta’ (2017) Karya Andrey Zvyagintsev, Ratu Diva Majirelle, Thera Widyastuti

Multikultura

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Нелюбовь (Nelyubov) or Loveless (2017) portrays the absence of affection in a family through divorce, child neglect, and emotional disconnection. This study analyzes the reproduction of Zhenya’s mothering pattern through Nancy Chodorow’s feminist psychoanalysis. Zhenya is read in three positions: a daughter lacking maternal affection, a wife in a fractured marriage, and a mother emotionally distant from Alyosha. Using qualitative content analysis, this study examines scenes, dialogues, expressions, gestures, character relations, and visual elements. The findings show that Zhenya’s mothering pattern is reproduced through childhood affective deprivation, an unsupportive marriage, social expectations of motherhood, and maternal …

Voters’ Perception Of Nigeria’S Electoral Process: An X-Ray Of The 2023 Presidential Election, Omamurhieme Julia Akpodovhan, Chukwuma Anyanwu Dr

International Review of Humanities Studies

In its six decades of post-independence, Nigeria has experienced the best and worst in military and democratic governance fluctuating from one to the other. It has purportedly settled into a democracy but with highly flawed electoral processes. This paper interrogates the February 25, 2023 Presidential election with a view to assessing the perception of voters in the exercise to determine whether there has been an improvement or otherwise in the status quo of how previous elections were conducted. Drawing from historical antecedents, participant observation and opinion poll research techniques, the authors relied on information from five of ten polling booths …

A Comparative Critique Of Masculine Domination In Madame Bovary (1856) And Gemma Bovery (1999), Aqeela Hamarthya Czecheska Humayra, Diah Kartini Lasman

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how social construction influences the representation of female autonomy through the transition of medium and temporal context. Its primary focus is to compare the mechanisms of masculine domination in Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary (1856) with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel adaptation Gemma Bovery (1999). Utilizing Hutcheon’s adaptation theory (2013) and de Beauvoir’s existential feminism (1949), complemented by Freytag’s dramatic structure analysis (1900) as the main framework, this research proceeds from the premise that the transposition from text to visual medium has significant implications for changes in narrative strategies and plot. This study highlights the differing manifestations …

The Indonesian Conjunction Dan ‘And’ And Its Chinese Correspondences: A Corpus-Based Approach To Syntactic And Register Variation, Hatmi Idris

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how the Indonesian conjunction dan ‘and’ is rendered in Chinese across syntactic units using a corpus-based contrastive approach. Focusing on children’s books, classic novels, and online news, it analyzes coordination at word, phrase, and clause level from a syntactic and register perspective. Findings show that dan ‘and’ does not correspond to a single Chinese form. At the word and phrase level, nominal coordination employs hé (和) ‘and’, yǔ (与) ‘and’, and yǐjí (以及) ‘as well as’ , with formal news discourse favoring yǔ (与) ‘and’ and yǐjí (以及) ‘as well as’. In verbal coordination, bìng (并) ‘furthermore’ …

Persuasive Strategies In Umrah Marketing On Social Media: A Comparative Study Of Arabic And Indonesian, Stevania C. Asahri

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines persuasive strategies in Arabic- and Indonesian-language Umrah marketing flyers circulated on social media. As public interest in Umrah continues to grow, travel agencies increasingly rely on digital platforms not only to promote travel packages but also to construct spiritual appeal, religious credibility, and consumer trust. This study therefore aims to analyze how spiritual imagery is constructed, how rhetorical and pragmatic persuasive strategies are used, and how persuasive patterns differ between Arabic- and Indonesian-language Umrah marketing flyers. The study adopts a qualitative-dominant convergent parallel mixed-methods design. The qualitative analysis is based on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), integrated …

Radical Responsibility: Sartre And The Ecocentric Erosion Of Human Agency, Khodadad Azizi, Naupal Asnawi, Abby Gina Boang Manalu

International Review of Humanities Studies

Contemporary ecological crisis persists despite decades of environmental ethics discourse and rising public awareness, a discrepancy researchers have named the awareness-action gap. One influential corrective, running from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic through Arne Naess’s deep ecology, addresses anthropocentric domination by folding the human being back into the biotic community as one member among others. This article argues that such levelling, whatever its merits against domination, carries an underexamined cost: it erodes the very ground on which anyone can be held responsible for ecological destruction, since only a being capable of choice, not soil, water, or rock, can be asked to …

Hairdressing Service Request In Japanese, Kirana Insyafira Rafa, Filia Filia Dr.

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study aims to explain the request for hairdressing services in Japanese beauty salon, focusing on the use of verbal and nonverbal markers. This study use descriptive qualitative design. The data source consists of video conversations between clients and hairstylist on the NARIKYO channel on YouTube. The results of analysis revealed 128 request data through two strategies, such as 77 verbal and 51 nonverbal. Verbally, desiderative forms (such as -tai and -hoshii) with 33 data, followed by declarative forms (such as -ga ii, omakase de, unfinished tense) with 17 data and embedded forms (such as -you na, -mitai na, -hou …

Ƒ(Enlightenment): A Complex Adaptive Systems Model Of Recursive Causality And Human Meaning-Making, Daniel Lambert

Dissertations and Theses

Conflict Resolution has developed as a richly interdisciplinary field; however, its theoretical architecture remains fragmented across distinct bodies of scholarship. Existing approaches offer valuable but often isolated explanations of conflict behavior, limiting their ability to account for its complexity. This thesis addresses this limitation by advancing systems science as an organizing framework for integrating these perspectives. It introduces the Human-Complex Adaptive Systems (H-CAS) framework, which conceptualizes human behavior as a recursive adaptive process operating across interconnected regulatory domains. Within this model, conflict is not treated as a discrete event or purely deliberative process, but as an emergent property arising from …