Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Peace Is Not Perpetual, Autonomous, Or Rational, Danielle Poe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

When I write about and teach Immanuel Kant, I am always impressed and seduced by the beauty and neatness of his work. After all, Kant makes morality a science; answers are clear and distinct, black and white. Individuals make ethical decisions by using reason according to universally accessible principles. People should do the right thing, not because it is easy, not because it makes them feel good, and not because they have been raised to do so. People should do the right thing because it is their duty, and they determine their duty by asking, "Can I universalize my action?" …

Leisure And Liberal Education: A Plea For Uselessness, John E. Jalbert

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

A liberal education informs a person in the proper use of leisure. Liberal education, as the word liberal suggests, is intimately connected with the idea of personal freedom.

The central role of the liberal or liberating arts is to free us, if only for short periods of time, from mundane affairs, from the need to subordinate our lives, wills, and intellects to external demands, from the need—whether real or merely felt—to place ourselves under the sway of the marketplace in order to make a living. After all, human excellence requires more than the material ends that are procured through labor, …

Exploring The Foundations Of Dworkin's Empire: The Discovery Of An Underground Positivist, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

This review essay examines the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin as presented in the anthology: Exploring Law's Empire: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, edited by Scott Hershovitz. Notwithstanding the influence Dworkin's jurisprudence has had on the reconsideration of moral reasoning within legal reasoning, the essay concludes that at its foundation Dworkin's jurisprudence is based upon Legal Positivist principles. The essay first summarizes the jurisprudence of Dworkin and then contrasts his jurisprudence with traditional Natural Law Legal Theory and finally exposes the Positivist foundations of Dworkin's Legal Empire.

Mixed-Race Looks, Ronald Sundstrom

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The multiracial population is growing larger and so is popular awareness about multiracial or mixed-race identity. Simmering beneath the growing public recognition of multiracial identity are questions about the legitimacy of mixed race, multiracial, or biracial as social categories, and further questions about the ethics and politics of those identities. Behind some of these questions are worries about how multiracial identity interacts with racialized aesthetic standards. This essay addresses these issues by investigating whether those affirmations are racist and betray monoracial groups. This essay concludes that such affirmations are not necessarily racist or traitorous. Instead, they are consistent with modern …

(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.

Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.

Epistemical And Ethical Troubles In Achieving Reconciliation, And Then Beyond, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

My optimism towards reconciliation in places like Bosnia and Kosovo has become increasingly guarded because of certain epistemical and ethical issues. Reconciliation presumes the making of moral judgments about a wrongdoing, judgments that are empirically informed. If the perceptual judgments that are used to do the informing are made suspect because of a lapse in the commonplace self-restraints (or controls) on reasoning or glitches in the regulative ideals or epistemic goods like understanding and intelligibility, then the moral judgments on which they are grounded become suspect as well. This happens to both fanatic and non-fanatic. In this article I explore …

Anger Et Cetera: Understanding The Emotions In Ethics, Damien Dupont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues in part that because the ethical theory of sentimentalism is based on the mistaken belief that emotions are non-cognitive, sentimentalism cannot account for the fact of the influence of cognition in morality and moral action. Therefore sentimentalism is of little use in ethics.

This work is done by going back to examine Western thinking on the emotions from its dawn in Homer's writing through to contemporary philosophy and neurophysiology on the emotions. Following the development of the way emotions were thought of and how they related to ethics allows the identification of an intellectual forked path brought …

Swarms, Schools, Flocks, And Colonies: Exploring The Ontology Of Collective Individuals, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Trusting In The 'Efficacy Of Beauty': A Kalocentric Approach To Moral Philosophy, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts to address the environmental challenges that we face will fall short unless and until we also set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What is needed, I argue, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize …

From Despot To Steward: The Greening Of Catholic Social Teaching, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Performance Hero, Craig Derksen, Darren Hudson Hick

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The Guitar Hero series of video games and their spin-offs have provided millions with a new way to interact with music. These games are not only culturally significant but also philosophically significant. Based on the way that these games allow people to interact with music we must decide that either playing a song in one of these games can be a legitimate performance of that song or that our current accounts of performance are inadequate.

Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I call 'relevantly similar' to one other. In the end, I endorse the second principle. There are no trumping features over and above …

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 …

Encountering The Other: Aesthetics, Race And Relationality, Mickaella Perina

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay examines the links between aesthetics and race through the lenses of accepted distinctions between Western and non-Western, colonial and postcolonial, national and transnational aesthetics, and questions the validity of the claim that there is an inherent and incommensurable difficulty in translating non-Western aesthetic thought into Western aesthetic thought. First, I argue that Manichean models are insufficient to understand the dynamics of the encounter between Western and non-Western aesthetics. Second, I illustrate the complexity of non-Western and Western aesthetics relations through the example of the encounter between Aimé Césaire’s Negritude and André Breton’s surrealism. I argue that this encounter …

The Divine Geometry Of Chocolate: Artist's Essay, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The artist discusses her series of paintings, The Divine Geometry of Chocolate, using a reappraised notion of the universal in the context of contemporary Latin American abstraction.

The Hijab And The Sari: The Strange And The Sexy Between Colonialism And Global Capitalism, Falguni A. Sheth

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

By exploring the “Western” reception of the sari in comparison to the hijab, I hope to illuminate the racial aesthetic that is at work in vilifying the latter while glorifying the former. The history of colonialism and the forced domestication of the sari help to facilitate its reception as an acceptably “sexy” garment. By contrast, the hijab has not been subjected to colonial modification. It has remained unmodified, and is still experienced as culturally, racially, and aesthetically strange by observers. In order to explore the role that political and cultural authority plays in shaping “acceptable” and “unacceptable” racial aesthetics as …

Integrative And Disintegrative Art, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article compares and analyzes two seemingly opposite approaches to visual arts that can be called integrative and disintegrative. They are usually seen to be contradictory, and the latter is often favored in contemporary art discourse. The article suggests, however, that the integrative approach can still be quite as favorable to art as the disintegrative one. Both views are useful for certain purposes and in the context of individual art works they are often actually intertwining. Especially from the perspective of art education, it is easy to understand the different implications of these views. This is because in that context …

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.

Is There A Value Problem?, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Evidentialism, Vice, And Virtue, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Xavier Zubiri: An Introduction, Brad E. Stone

Philosophy Faculty Works

In this essay, I seek to present Zubiri the man, the teacher, and the writer. Zubiri's influence as a philosopher is quite apparent given the large body of translations and secondary literature on him in many different languages and cultures.

Zubiri And The Very Problem Of The Problem Of Evil, Brad E. Stone

Philosophy Faculty Works

This essay continues the line of thought started in a previous article of mine, "The Very Problem of the Problem of God in Zubiri and Unamuno,"in The Xavier Zubiri Review 6 (2004), pp. 73-88. There I argued that true atheism is impossible if Xavier Zubiri and Miguel de Unamuno are correct about the re&son human beings talk about "God" at all.

Philosophy And Theology: Notes On Organ Donation After Cardiac Death, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Good Of The Intellect, Eric Perl

Philosophy Faculty Works

Recent continental philosophy often seeks to retrieve Neoplatonic transcendence, or the Good, while ignoring the place of intellect in classical and medieval Neoplatonism. Instead, it attempts to articulate an encounter with radical transcendence in the immediacy of temporality, individuality, and affectivity. On the assumption that there is no intellectual intuition (Kant), intellectual consciousness is reduced to ratiocination and is taken to be “poor in intuition” (Marion). In this context, the present paper expounds Plotinus’ phenomenology of intellectual experience to show how intellect, for Plotinus, is rather the richest mode of intuition, coinciding with the intelligible content of reality. This content, …

Units Of Selection, Timothy Shanahan

Philosophy Faculty Works

Understanding what kind of variation is possible and at what level selection occurs over those variations is what has driven the conversation about evolutionary biology at least since Darwin.

Tempoperformance Und Expressivität: Eine Studie Zwischen Musikpsychologie Und Musiktherapie, Jeffrey L. Wilson

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Moral Enquiry In A Pluralist Society: From Contention To Conversation, Philip Matthews

Theses

Over the last five hundred years, several conceptually incommensurable theories of ethics have been promulgated. For some moral philosophers, this incommensurability is a matter of deep concern because, in complex cases, there is no tradition-independent method for resolving moral conflict. More recently, a new discipline of applied or practical ethics has emerged. Practical ethics attempts to fill the void between rival moral theories by appealing, first, to the role of reason from an impartial observer perspective and, second, to decision making protocols based on moral principles. This ―first generation‖ attempt at codifying practical ethics failed to bridge the incommensurability gap …