Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Of Gardens And Prosperity: Toward An Inspired Land Ethic, Paul Walker

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Several recent commentators argue that Thomas Hobbes’s account of the nature of science is conventionalist. Engaging in scientific practice on a conventionalist account is more a matter of making sure one connects one term to another properly rather than checking one’s claims, e.g., by experiment. In this paper, I argue that the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbesian science accords neither with Hobbes’s theoretical account in De corpore and Leviathan nor with Hobbes’s scientific practice in De homine and elsewhere. Closely tied to the conventionalist interpretation is the deductivist interpretation, on which it is claimed that Hobbes believed sciences such as optics …

On The Semantic Expression Of Mental Acts, William Grimes

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

In this unpublished manuscript, the author aims to provide "a concept of the language of the semantic expression of mental acts" based on the insights both of ordinary language philosophy and logical reconstruction.

No Grist For Mill On Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

According to the standard narrative, natural kind is a technical notion that was introduced by John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and the recent craze for natural kinds, launched by Putnam and Kripke, is a continuation of that tradition. I argue that the standard narrative is mistaken. The Millian tradition of kinds was not particularly influential in the 20th century, and the Putnam-Kripke revolution did not clearly engage with even the remnants that were left of it. The presently active tradition of natural kinds is less than half a century old. Recognizing this might help us better appreciate both Mill …

The Open Where Not To See, Emilie Bouvier

Master of Arts Theses

No abstract provided.

The Care Of The Reaper Man: Death, The Auditors, And The Importance Of Individuality, Erica L. Neely

Philosophy and Religion Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Natural Law And Spontaneous Order In The Work Of Gary Chartier, Aeon Skoble

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Universality Of Hermeneutics In Joseph Kockelmans’S Version Of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Dimitri Ginev

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

There is in Professor Kockelmans’s works from the 1950s a gradual transition from Nikolai Hartmann’s theory of the ontological modalities and categories (addressed in its capacity to serve as a prerequisite for reconstructing the ontological assumptions of basic scientifi c theories) to a kind of hermeneutic ontology. This transition is especially palpable in his reading of Hartmann’s “Philosophy of Nature.” In Hartmann’s categorial metaphysics of knowledge Dasein and Sosein (as ways of being) are subordinated to the modes and spheres of being. The transition was by no means accomplished via a direct borrowing of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein . It …

Consciousness, Quantum Physics, And Hermeneutical Phenomenology, Patrick A. Heelan Sj

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Two hundred years ago Friedrich Schleiermacher modified Kant’s notion of anthropology—‘hermeneutically,’ as he said — so as to make it inclusive of the tribes that Captain Cook found in the South Sea Islands. This paper honors the late Joseph J. Kockelmans for making a similar hermeneutic move to update Kant’s notion of natural science so as to make it inclusive of the phenomenological lifeworld (For ‘lifeworld,’ see Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 1954, 121–148, and the ‘lifeworld’ theme throughout the Crisis. ) syntheses of classical, relativity, and quantum physics. The new synthesis is in fact …

The Multidimensionality Of Hermeneutic Phenomenology: From Philology Through Science And Technology To Theology, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Double-Effect Reasoning Defended: A Response To Scanlon, Thomas A. Cavanaugh

Philosophy

Common morality endorses some form of an exceptionless prohibition against killing innocents. Natural lawyers employ double-effect reasoning (DER) to address hard cases involving deaths of the innocent. Current deontologists (Scanlon and Thomson) criticize DER-proponents as conflating act-with agent-evaluations. Scanlon develops this critique extensively. I respond to his criticism. He maintains that the DER-advocate tells a badly-motivated agent to refrain from an obligatory act. Thus, he asserts, the natural lawyer who employs DER errs. Instead, Scanlon proposes, one ought to assess the act as permissible while blaming the agent. I argue that DER does not succumb to this critique. Moreover, Scanlon’s …

Investigating The Lay And Scientific Norms For Using ‘Explanation’, Jonathan Waskan, Ian Harmon, Andrew Higgins, Joseph Spino

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In the mid-twentieth century, Hempel (1962, 1965) bucked posit ivist ort hodoxy and proposed that explanations have a legitimate role to play in science. Yet, when it came time to offer up a model of explanation, Hempel held fast to the positivist tendency of abstracting both from facts about human psychology and from the specific contents of claims (i.e., in favor of bare logical form). At the broadest level, he proposed that explanations are sets of true statements arranged into formally acceptable arguments. That such arguments count as explanations has, Hempel thought, nothing to do with what anyone thinks or …

Advances In Documentation, Digital Curation, Virtual Exhibition, And A Test Of 3d Geometric Morhpometrics: A Case Study Of The Vanderpool Vessels From The Ancestral Caddo Territory, Robert Z. Selden Jr., Timothy K. Perttula, Michael J. O'Brien

CRHR: Archaeology

Three-dimensional (3D) digital scanning of archaeological materials is typically used as a tool for artifact documentation. With the permission of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, 3D documentation of Caddo funerary vessels from the Vanderpool site (41SM77) was conducted with the initial goal of ensuring that these data would be publicly available for future research long after the vessels were repatriated. A digital infrastructure was created to archive and disseminate the resultant 3D datasets, ensuring that they would be accessible by both researchers and the general public (CRHR 2014a). However, 3D imagery can be used for much more than documentation. To …

Under The Veil, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Moral And Professional Accountability For Clinical Ethics Consultants, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Mcmullin, Irene. Time And The Shared World: Heidegger On Social Relations, Robert J. Dostal

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

According to McMullin, injustice is, for Heidegger, the insistence on "my time ... my now." Because the "social" and "justice" are themes of the book, a reader might expect some discussion of the political dimension of human life; but there is no reference to the political, no discussion of the significance of the hero, and no reference to the distinction of the social and the communal (at the cost of the "social") that Heidegger makes toward the end of Being and Time.

Rhetoric And Platonism In Fifth-Century Athens, Damian Caluori

Philosophy Faculty Research

There are reasons to believe that relations between Platonism and rhetoric in Athens during the fifth century CE were rather close. Both were major pillars of pagan culture, or paideia, and thus essential elements in the defense of paganism against increasingly powerful and repressive Christian opponents. It is easy to imagine that, under these circumstances, paganism was closing ranks and that philosophers and orators united in their efforts to save traditional ways and values. Although there is no doubt some truth to this view, a closer look reveals that the relations between philosophy and rhetoric were rather more complicated. …

The Nature And Possibility Of Public Philosophy, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

The article argues that there is a central problem with the concept of public philosophy, in that philosophy is partly defined by questioning reflection on its own sense, while public or popular culture characteristically relies unreflectively on its ultimate givens, and these are mutually exclusive modes of thought. The article proposes, however, that because of philosophy’s reflection on and potential questioning of its own sense it has a paradoxical structure of foundational and comprehensive conflict with itself and its own procedure, and that this self-divergence allows a genuinely philosophical role for public philosophy. In the public context, acknowledged failure to …

The Literature Of Political Things And Places: Reading And Writing Design, Susan Yelavich

Articles

No abstract provided.

Thoreau As Liberation Thinker, Robert M. Ruehl

Philosophy and Classical Studies Faculty/Staff Publications

In lieu of an abstract, here is the article's first paragraph:

Henry David Thoreau’s claim to be “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher” took an unexpected turn for me. Spending much time with A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (my dissertation addresses the idea of religion found between its covers), I encountered a “liberation thinker” resisting the limitations of American culture while honoring the natural world and indigenous peoples. Thoreau’s epigraph reveals how he wants the muse of his dead brother to inspire him, but the book also discloses how he wants the muse of indigenous …

Psychological Continuity: A Discussion Of Marc Slors' Account, Traumatic Experience, And The Significance Of Our Relations To Others, Pieranna Garavaso

Philosophy Publications

This paper addresses a question concerning psychological continuity, i.e., which features preserve the same psychological subject over time; this is not the same question as the one concerning the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity. Marc Slors (1998, 2001, 2001a) defends an account of psychological continuity that adds two features to Derek Parfit’s Relation R, namely narrativity and embodiment. Slors’ account is a significant improvement on Parfit’s, but still lacks an explicit acknowledgment of a third feature that I call relationality. Because they are usually regarded as cases of radical discontinuity, I start my discussion from the experiences of …

Believing On Authority, Matthew A. Benton

SPU Works

Linda T. Zagzebski's "Epistemic Authority" (Oxford University Press, 2012) brings together issues in social epistemology with topics in moral and political philosophy as well as philosophy of religion. In this paper I criticize her discussion of self-trust and rationality, which sets up the main argument of the book; I consider how her view of authority relates to some issues of epistemic authority in testimony; and I raise some concerns about her treatment of religious epistemology and religious authority in particular.

Iffy Predictions And Proper Expectations, Matthew A. Benton, John Turri

SPU Works

What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we advocate some constraints that we think a good theory of prediction should respect.

The Awakening: Reevaluating The Anthropocentric Framework Of Western Ethics, Sophie Zander '14

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

No abstract provided.

A Defense Of Stand Your Ground Legislation, Jarrett Field '14

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

No abstract provided.

Dreams As A Meta-Conceptual Or Existential Experience, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

The paper argues that dreams (or the recollected experience of dreams) consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how …

Swinburne On The Conditions For Free Will And Moral Responsibility, David P. Hunt

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Compensation Ethics And Organizational Commitment, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If an employee is committed to his firm – if he is “attached” or “bound” to it – then his firm may be able to obtain a discount on his labor. This paper asks: Is it wrong for firms to do so? If we understand just or fair pay solely in terms of voluntary agreements between employers and employees, the answer seems to be ‘no’. Against this, I argue that, in some cases, it is ‘yes’. In particular, it is wrong for firms to try to obtain discounts on their committed employees’ labor when their employees reasonably expect that they …

Understanding How Student Nurses Experience Morally Distressing Situations: Caring For Patients With Different Values And Beliefs In The Clinical Environment, Nancy J. Matchett, Mary Jo C. Stanley

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Introduction/Background: Moral distress and related concepts surrounding morality and ethical decision-making have been given much attention in nursing. Despite the general consensus that moral distress is an affective response to being unable to act morally, the literature attests to the need for increased clarity regarding theoretical and conceptual constructs used to describe precisely what the experience of moral distress involves. The purpose of this study is to understand how student nurses experience morally distressing situations when caring for patients with different values and beliefs than their own in the clinical environment Methods: This study is based on secondary analysis of …

A Thoreauvian Account Of Prudential Value, Christopher Morgan-Knapp

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This article develops and defends an account of prudential value and disvalue that is constructed out of ideas found in Thoreau’s Walden. The core claim is that prudential value consists in responding appropriately to those things that make the world better, and that prudential disvalue consists in encountering those things that make it worse. The core argument is that responding appropriately to objective value and avoiding objective disvalue are our aims in so far as we are evaluative creatures, and that our evaluative nature is fundamental in the context of inquiring into our own good. I conclude by discussing respects …