Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Splitting Stars And Splitting Wood”: Address To New Members Of Phi Beta Kappa (Theta Of Minnesota), May 3, 2011, Erica Stonestreet

Headwaters

In recent years, there has been a widespread perception that liberal arts education in general, and humanities education in particular, are gradually being eroded away in the face of tightening budgets and an ever-growing emphasis on the practicality of education. If you’re going to college, after all, you’re supposed to end up with a so-called "good" job. And what better guarantee of a "good" job than a major in business or science, right?

Whether or not the perception about the decline of the liberal arts actually stands up to scrutiny, I tell my prospective philosophy majors when they come to …

“The Mysterious Stranger”: Address To New Members Of Phi Beta Kappa (Theta Of Minnesota), April 23, 2013, Scott Richardson

Headwaters

I used to know everything. Then I went to college. As I was about to enter college, I was pretty sure I had the world figured out. I didn’t need and certainly didn’t want my professors to do anything but reconfirm my beliefs, values, and vision of the world. I was in for a real surprise. There’s nothing innocent or comforting about a liberal arts education.

Preserving Moral Recognition In The Face Of Aggression: Aikido As A Practice Of Physical Intersubjectivity, Charles W. Wright

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Practitioners of Aikido advance the claim, peculiar to many, that martial training can support moral action. This essay examines the claim by exploring communicative structures implicit in the response to attack made possible by this art's techniques. This exploration reveals three dimensions of intersubjectivity embedded in the practice of Aikido, dimensions that explicate the ethical imperative of the art.

A Cognitive Approach To Teaching Strategies, Emily Esch

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Our knowledge of how the mind works is growing rapidly. One area of particular interest to philosophy teachers is research on reasoning and decision making processes. I explore one model of human cognition that offers new ways of thinking about how to teach philosophical skills. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to exposition of the model and the evidence that supports it; at the end of the paper, I suggest ways these findings might be incorporated into the classroom.

Self-Love And Self-Respect In The Meaningful Life, Erica Stonestreet

Forum Lectures

Most people have the sense that there's something wrong with living a meaningless life. Since most meaningless lives seem morally blameless, however, it's not obvious exactly what is wrong with it. Starting with a plausible conception of a meaningful life as a life engaged with values beyond oneself, I suggest that the problem is that someone living outside of this conception is not according herself a kind of recognition she deserves as a human being. Comparing self-respect and self-love as candidates for this recognition, I argue that lacking self-love is actually the more fitting explanation for what goes wrong in …

Natural Selection And Moral Sentiment: Evolutionary Biology's Challenge To Moral Philosophy, Charles W. Wright

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

25 Years Of Care Ethics: A Personal Retrospective, Jean Keller

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

The Purpose Of Personal Value, Erica Stonestreet

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It seems as if there are things that have what we might call personal value—special objects, artwork by our children, etc. This term is meant to mark a difference between things whose value seems tied to a particular person, as opposed to things (like the Mona Lisa) that are valuable, period. The concept of personal value hasn’t received much focused attention, but I believe that it is of not only theoretical, but practical importance. In this paper, I explore the practical angle, arguing that personal value is important to our ability to make sense of ourselves. I give …

A Moral Paradox Of Martial Training, Charles W. Wright

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Consolation, Anthony Cunningham

Headwaters

No abstract provided.

Donald Davidson's Semantics: Radical Interpretation, Triangulation, And The Ambiguity Problem, Karen Duffy

Philosophy Student Work

Donald Davidson was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century. His work is extensive, dense, and controversial. This paper seeks to look at one part of Davidson’s philosophy: his philosophy of language, and in particular, his ideas about meaning. My first aim in this project is to present Davidson’s proposals about meaning as a unified meaning theory – a theory that can specify the meaning of any expression in a language. This theory contains two major parts: the proposal that a properly constrained truth theory can serve as a meaning theory, and the process of radical interpretation, …

Why Do Fools Fall In Love? Spinoza's Commentary On Genesis 29, Eugene Garver

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Ruddick And The Ethnocentrism Critique Of Maternal Thinking, Jean Keller

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the early 1990s, Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking was criticized for harboring a latent ethnocentrism. Ruddick responded to these critiques in the 1995 edition of her book, but her response has not yet been addressed in the feminist philosophical literature. This essay addresses this lacuna in the scholarship on Ruddick. In the last installment of this critique, Alison Bailey and Patrice DiQuinzio suggested that the only way for Ruddick to avoid the ethnocentrism charge would require her near-universalistic claims about mothering to be rejected in favor of 'particularized, localized accounts of mothering.' In this essay I'll show that this claim …

The Empirical Basis Of Ethics, Timothy A. Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"The End Of Faith?" Science And Theology As Process, Noreen L. Herzfeld

Theology Faculty Publications

A spate of recent books would claim that science’s only role vis a vis theology is to discredit it. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, credits religious faith as the source of much of the violence in today’s world. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, views religion as, at best, a profound misunderstanding, and at worst a form of madness. Both find an antidote to such irrationality in science. To Harris and Dawkins religion is a body of accumulated knowledge. However, religion can also be thought of as a process, one based on experience, questions, and results. …

Compresence Of Opposites In Nehamas, Irwin, And Fine, Timothy A. Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Great Anger, Anthony Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Anger has had a major hand in a history of inhumanity. In this light, some schools of thought have suggested that we do best to jettison anger entirely. However, anger, like grief, is tied to caring deeply, and as such, both emotions can speak to what is best and most beautiful about human life and character.

A New Formalization Of Anselm's Ontological Argument, Timothy A. Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Why We Should All Be Platonists, Timothy A. Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Language Speaks: Heidegger's Understanding Of Language, Jason Barrett

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

The central task of my thesis, entitled "Language Speaks: Heidegger on Language," is to bring to light an understanding of language found in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (18898-1976). This understanding was rendered by a textual exegesis of three difficult texts from Heidegger's corpus: Being and Time (1929), "On the Essence of Truth" (1930), and "Hoelderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1936). The reading of Being and Time (up to section 34) provided the grounding for the discussions on truth and language by situating Heidegger with regard to the problem of Being an language, articulating Heidegger's foundational thought, and identifying …

A Look At Kabbalah, Scott M. Wellman

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

No abstract provided.

Elie Wiesel: Moral Action In An Immoral World, Christopher R. Johnson

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

The essay, "Elie Wiesel: Moral Action in an Immoral World," is an investigation into the three ways Elie Wiesel's characters in his novel The Town Beyond the Wall deal with their own often painful and confusing views of the absurd world about them. Because The Town Beyond the Wall is a very autobiographical work for Wiesel, the backdrop of chaos found in the novel--the concentration camps, the death of the main character's father, mother and sister, the cold indifference with which the rest of the world watched as the Jews were 'liquidated'--are found in Wiesel's world too. Reading Wiesel's works, …

Romantic Perception: A Kierkegaardian Re-Formation Of The Appearances Via Existential Arrest Towards Conscious Imaginative Relation, Christoph Franz Dobrowolski

School of Theology and Seminary Graduate Papers/Theses

The focus of this paper is to attempt to analyze how, in Kierkegaard's paradigm of what constitutes "a self", the representations of the phenomena change in the eyes of the perceiver from a state of "no self" - lacking this consciousness and active engagement of spirit-, to the moment of existential arrest, to a state of being "a self" - new and ever-growing consciousness as a result of this arrest. The primary source for this endeavour is Kierkegaard's text, The Concept of Anxiety. Methodology for this endeavour will involve explication of the text itself with nuances from other post-enlightenment literature …

Ethics And The Awareness Of Complex Individuals: Reflections On Adolf Eichmann And Oskar Schindler, Glen Tautges

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Like many philosophers who favor Aristotelian virtue ethics over more legalistic and impersonal theories like those of Kant and Mill, I claim that ethics is more a matter of cultivating the right character than of living by a set of rules based on abstract principles. True to this stance, I present a certain attitude toward others as crucial to living well. This attitude involves cultivating a powerful awareness of the intricate complexity of other people and a deep appreciation of the value of such complex beings. Also with this attitude comes a sense of relation and community inspired by our …

Moral Addicts, Anthony Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Moral exemplars are often depicted as those who go to extraordinary lengths in preventing suffering and eradicating injustice. Thus, figure like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King are apt to be identified as moral saints in the sense of being the morally best people. However, any adequate conception of moral excellence must be broader and more complex.

Nietzsche And Daly: Sparks Of Friendship A Study Of Nietzschean Thought In Daly's Early Works, Pete Costello

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

This thesis studied the possible Nietzschean influences upon or parallels within the early works of Mary Daly, radical feminist philosopher. To this end, the thesis first tried encapsulate Nietzschean thought in the discussion of the eternal recurrence, the will-to-power and self-overcoming. Then it proceeded to discuss Mary Daly's self-described project of moving beyond the patriarchal structures of the Catholic church and society as a whole. And finally, while it avoided questions of Nietzsche's alleged misogyny, this study outlined possible points of light between a particular feminist project and the ""lasting"" value of Nietzschean philosophy. The end result was not an …

Edmund Husserl's Crisis : A Critique Of Modernity And A Phenomenology Of History, John Cords

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

This thesis is an explication and analysis of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology as he presents it is his last work, The Crisis. I do a page-by-page reading of this work and explain such topics as what the crisis itself actually is, how it came about, and what Husserl sees as a way out of this crisis. This involves, for Husserl, an analysis of modernity as arising from the thought of Descartes and the physical science of Galileo. Within this, the rapid development of technology and the theoretical science is explained and interpreted. Husserl sees these great advancements as giving rise to …

Plato's Divided Line And A Mythical Mode Of Knowledge, Dorothy Hageman

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

My thesis is a discussion of Plato's divided line with a special concentration on the fourth level of knowledge. First, the discussion centers on gaining an understanding of the divided line and what Plato says about the method of attaining fourth level knowledge. Second, I show the four levels of the line in two of Plato's dialogues, the Republic and the Phaedrus. The first three levels match the description of them that Plato gives in the divided line, but instead of finding what Plato describes for the fourth level we find a myth. Finally, I discuss how the myth takes …

Heidegger And The Wander Of Poetry, John T. Pollard

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

No abstract provided.

David Hume: A Philosopher Discovered, Steven Viner

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

No abstract provided.