Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Why We Still Do Not Know What A “Real” Argument Is, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his recent paper, “What a Real Argument is,” Ben Hamby attempts to provide an adequate theoretical account of “real” arguments. In this paper I present and evaluate both Hamby’s motivation for distinguishing “real” from non-“real” arguments and his articulation of the distinction. I argue that neither is adequate to ground a theoretically significant class of “real” arguments, for the articulation fails to pick out a stable proper subclass of all arguments that is simultaneously both theoretically relevant and a proper subclass of all arguments.

The End Of The World And Other Times In The Future, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In an interview with his biographer Sylvie Simmons, Leonard Cohen identifies the main interests in his work as "women, song, religion". These are not merely personal concerns for Cohen, they are dimensions of the world that he tries to understand as a poet, singer, and thinker.

Now it's something of a cliché to see the modern romantic or post-romantic singer or poet in terms of personal struggles, failures, triumphs, and reversals. Poets sometimes respond by adopting elusive, ironic, enigmatic, or parodic voices: think, in their different ways, of Bob Dylan and Anne Carson. Yet Cohen has always worn his heart …

Painting (And Photography), Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two of Foucault's signature essays on painting are especially well known: the analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and an essay on Rene Magritte that includes a striking account of how abstraction displaced representation in Western art. In addition, many of Foucault's texts are studded with acute descriptions of major painters from Breughel to Warhol; he gave lecture courses on quattrocento painting and Manet and published essays on several contemporary artists (Rebeyrolle, Fromanger, Michals). Since one of Foucault's major themes was the relation between visibility and discursivity, it is not surprising to find that painting is a favored site for …

States And Nomads: Hegel's World And Nietzsche Earth, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What is Nietzsche's concept of the earth? While "earth" is often taken in a general way to refer to embodied life, to this world rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the term and concept also have a significant political dimension-a geophilosophical dimension—which is closely related to the radical immanence so central to Nietzsche's thought. I shall argue that he often and pointedly replaces the very term "world" (Welt) with "earth" (Erde) because "world" is tied too closely to ideas of unity, eternity, and transcendence. "World" is a concept with theological …

Is There A Distinction Between A Priori And A Posteriori, Hiu Man Chan

Lingnan Theses

This thesis studies whether there is a tenable distinction between a priori justification and a posteriori justification.

My research considers three possible conceptions of a priori: (1) Justification Independent of Experience, (2) Mere Meaning Based Justification and (3) Justification by Rational Insight, and examines whether they can provide a sound and significant distinction between a priori and a posteriori.

This thesis contains five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the background knowledge of the a priori/a posteriori distinction. Chapter 2 analyzes the traditional conception of a priori, i.e. justification independent of experience, and considers whether the distinction based on it is tenable. …

A Thomistic Critique Of The Ethics Of Alasdair Macintyre, Marcus Otte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alasdair MacIntyre argues in favor of a historicist Thomism in ethics and political philosophy. In his theory, sociological categories take up much of the space traditionally occupied by metaphysics. This peculiar feature of MacIntyre's Thomism, and its merits and demerits, is already a subject that has been taken up by many critics. In this thesis, these criticisms are supplemented and unified by identifying what is perhaps the most fundamental difficulty with MacIntyre's ethics: his version of Thomism is problematic because it treats epistemology as first philosophy. This misstep compromises MacIntyre's ability to provide a defense of moral objectivity, while also …

The Pilgrim’S Intuitive Cognition In Pèlerinage De La Vie Humaine, David Strong

Quidditas

This article maintains that the Pilgrim in Guillaume de Deguileville’s allegorical dream vision, Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, acquires a previously unrecognized importance through his cognitive abilities. Each personified figure’s significance depends not upon a general introduction, but the Pilgrim’s ability to identify those traits unique to their person. This mode of intellection mirrors the late Scholastic epistemology of intuitive cognition as championed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. This theory allows the Pilgrim to grasp a particular object’s certitude without relying upon universals. Since this philosophy extols intellectual surety, it serves as a framework for interpreting the …

Visual Representations Of Prester John And His Kingdom, Michael E. Brooks

Quidditas

The mythical figure of the priest-king known to late medieval and early modern Europeans as Prester John fascinated literate Europeans for many centuries. Historians have weighed in on textual depictions of the legendary figure, but visual interpretations by European artists of the physical appearance of this eastern potentate have not been examined in any significant depth. These portrayals primarily took the form of map and book illustrations, and this essay examines the evolving visual representations that European artists developed of Prester John. In general, there was a gradual evolution over time in European artistic depictions of the legendary Prester John, …

Public Shaming: Milton And The English People, Courtney O. Carlisle

Quidditas

“Public Shaming: Milton and the English People” discusses the role of shame and its performance in John Milton’s First and Second Defence of the People of England. As Milton attempts to shame Salmasius and More, he focuses on bodies and their relationship to shame. For Milton, shame should be morally productive—it is meant to produce a sense of self-consciousness and an appropriate moral awareness. Milton argues that Salmasius and More are shameless and therefore not self-conscious or morally aware. Involved with shame and self-consciousness is a profound awareness of one’s body and its relationship to others and to the environment. …

The End Of An Era: John E. Wills Jr’S 1688: A Global History As A Capstone, Nikolas O. Hoel

Quidditas

When designing a course, an appropriate question is how to end it. What great primary or secondary source will send students off into the larger academic world, outside the immediate class at hand with a better understanding of the period they had just been studying? The quandary is important in every medieval or early modern course; for example, does one end the medieval survey with Dante or Petrarch, or even Erasmus? The necessity for a capstone is no less great in classes that are entitled “England to 1688,” which populate many university course catalogues today. Many monographs and articles have …

Resolving Exeter Book Riddles 74 And 33: Stormy Allomorphs Of Water, Thomas Klein, William F. Klein, David Delehanty

Quidditas

The following article argues that the idea of the allomorph is a productive way to view two “transformation” riddles from the Old English collection of riddles in the Exeter Book. In the view of the authors, Riddles 74 and 33 should both be solved generally as “water,” and specifically as “in the form of a thunderstorm.” Both riddles dramatize the multiple forms that water may take, and meditate on the divinely-ordained grandeur of the storm and the particular paradox of a thing being both immensely violent and necessary for life on earth. Understanding how these riddles play out these truths …

Was Frederick Barbarossa The First Holy Roman Emperor?, Thomas Renna

Quidditas

Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) was the first German emperor—later to be called the Holy Roman Emperor—who gave considerable attention to the three terms of the imperial title. His own registers and contemporary chronicles reveal frequent references to the three components of both his title and the Holy Roman Empire. I argue that Barbarossa was the first to attempt to integrate them into the German traditions of the empire, in particular the method of electing the king of the Romans, the historical ties with Charlemagne, and the concept of the empire as an amalgam of smaller principalities. He was the first to …

John Bale’S Kynge Johan As English Nationalist Propaganda, G. D. George

Quidditas

John Bale is generally associated with the English Reformation rather than the Tudor government. It may be that Bale’s well-know protestant polemics tend to overshadow his place in Thomas Cromwell’s propaganda machine, and that Bale’s Kynge Johan is more a propaganda piece for the Tudor monarchy than it is just another of his Protestant dramas..

Delno C. West Award Winner (2014)

Quidditas

David Strong

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Zagzebski On Rationality, Shane Ryan, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper examines Linda Zagzebski’s (2012) account of rationality, as set out in her rich, wide-ranging, and important book, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. We briefly describe the account that she offers and then consider its plausibility. In particular, in the first section we argue that a number of Zagzebski’s claims with regard to rationality require more support than she offers for them. Moreover, in the second section, we contend that far from offering Zagzebski a quick way of dealing with radical scepticism, her account of rationality actually seems to be particularly vulnerable to …

Evaluating Inquiry-Based Learning As A Means To Advance Individual Student Achievement, Cherilyn Gwen Ziemer

Theses and Dissertations

Although inquiry-based learning has been debated throughout the greater educational community and demonstrated with some effect in modern classrooms, little quantitative analysis has been performed to empirically validate sustained benefits. This quantitative study focused on whether inquiry-based pedagogy actually brought about sustained and measurable improved learning and higher levels of student engagement, satisfaction, and understanding. The present study employed classic stratified random sampling to form two sample groups. Sixth-grade student subjects in two middle school science classes completed a four step process: all students completed a 40-question objective pretest, students completed a unit of study in either an inquiry-based learning …

(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper investigates the relationship between architecture and theories of the avant-garde in the critical projects of the 1970s, with a focus on the theories of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. Both Tafuri and Bürger were writing from within the context of a radicalized Marxism and were fueled by an intellectual pessimism towards the totalizing systems of cultural production that questioned the role of resistance in aesthetics and the inability of the historical avant-gardes to engage within the political and economic fields of contemporary society. While there is a common ancestry to these two approaches, and mutual acceptance of the …

Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Jacques Rancière defined the “distribution of the sensible” as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision-making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between “art” and “non-art,” between “dominant, residual, and emergent,” and between “mainstream” and “periphery.” This essay examines certain “boundary effects” that develop as a result of the act of the partitioning itself and closely examines what arguably are two new categories in contemporary art: “crossover” and “interventionist.” Both categories have a certain relationship to a …

Through The Eyes Of The Dead Others, Isaac Aaron Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

I use Edith Wyschogrod's figure of the heterological historian to argue that we have a responsibility to learn from the "dead others" of the past in order to better apply in practical ways the lessons we learn from history. I draw on an interpretation of Nietzsche's view on historiography, to examine the claims of Hegel's dialectic, namely, that the Ideal Absolute for which Spirit pines, is actually achievable, particularly through the advent of the Internet. Beginning with a relatively well-known interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history, Fukuyama's, I show how Hegel's dialectic takes shape in Fukuyama's interpretation as a negative …

On Moral Supervenience, Ramon Alvarado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conventional accounts of moral supervenience are not fit for the moral realist to use against skeptic objections. In particular, they do not provide a sufficiently robust account of dependence or determination needed to counter the argument from queerness.This is shown in their inadequacy to deal with cases of minimal discernibility and cases of moral gradation. A similarity-base account of supervenient seems to be the one that the moral realist ought to incorporate instead.

The Problem Of Using Evil Against The Possible Existence Of God, Juan Rafael Torres

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis has two modules, which entail two different approaches about the problem of evil. In module one, which consists of chapters one and two, I consider the difficulties of defining `evil' and the case against the `logical problem of evil' respectively. Module two is a phenomenological and skeptical approach to the problem of evil. Specifically, it is a response to those that do not agree with Plantinga's arguments and it is a critique of the traditional paradigms about God, evil and ethics. For instance, I reject the so called category of "natural evils" and I categorize `evil' as a …

Mindful Mending: The Repair Of Thought And Action Amidst Technologies, Bryan Kibbe

Dissertations

My thesis is that the concept and practice of repair, properly understood and circumscribed, can serve to: (1) specify a responsibility to care for individuals who are cognitively dependent on particular configurations of technologies and suffer cognitively significant harms following damage to various technologies, and (2) to act as a standard by which to regulate the design, implementation, and selection of technologies available for human use and appropriation. I begin (Chapters One and Two) by providing a critical investigation of the concept and practice of repair. In Chapters Three and Four, I set forth a proposal to consider what I …

Moral Philosophy And The Art Of Silence, Kristina Grob

Dissertations

In this dissertation I begin with the claim that silence is part of moral life. Moral philosophy must make every attempt to bring within it all that is part of moral life. The dissertation produces a methodology for learning how to see some of the silences that I claim for moral life and it shows the importance of silence to continuing moral self-formation.

Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, And Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution To Social Epistemology, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from structures beyond their control (but perhaps amenable to government remediation)? If both of these explanations are true (as I …

Everyday Aesthetics And Photography, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

Everyday aesthetics as a new subdiscipline within aesthetics benefits by constantly going back to and borrowing from earlier theorists, even those who were primarily concerned with the aesthetics of art. To that end, I will begin my discussion of everyday aesthetics and photography with a look at that classic formalist aesthetician from the beginning of the 20th century, Clive Bell (1958). Bell was notoriously very negative about photography. He basically saw photographs as mechanical imitations of reality. He also famously criticized illustrative or descriptive painting for doing what photography can do better. One of the problems he had with people …

Valuing The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: A Defense Of Countercultural Environmentalism, Mae Manupipatpong

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Anti-Essentialism, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s one of the main foci of aesthetic inquiry was the attempt to develop definitions of art and such related concepts as visual art, music, tragedy, beauty, and metaphor. Clive Bell (1958) famously stated that either all works of visual art have some common quality or when we speak of “work of art” we speak nonsense. DeWitt H. Parker (1939) argued more generally that the assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence of some common nature present in all the arts. This search for a common quality or nature …

Intuition And Its Proper Uses, Chris Boss

Honors Theses

What is intuition? Is it nothing but a nagging conviction in certain beliefs? Is it the same thing as common sense? When, if ever, is intuition a legitimate epistemological tool? Is the use of intuition in philosophical inquiry not just legitimate, but also inevitable? The aim of the present research project is to answer these and related questions. This research project will prove important due to the regularity with which intuitions are evoked in philosophical discourse, and the judgment errors that can result from a misunderstanding of the proper scope of these intuitions.

In section (1), I define and explain …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.