Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Artisans, Athletes, Entrepreneurs, And Other Skilled Exemplars Of The Way, Alex Stewart, Felissa Lee, Gregory N.P. Konz, S.J.

Management Faculty Research and Publications

We introduce management and spirituality scholars to the “knack” passages from the c. 4th century B.C.E. text, the Zhuangzi. The knack passages are parables about low status figures, such as wheelwrights, furniture makers and cooks, whose actions offer insights into the spirituality of ordinary work and, we argue, of entrepreneurship. Such non-corporate settings are lesser-studied domains for spirituality. Ancient Chinese writings have been noticed by spirituality and management writers but we call for deeper scholarly textual attention. We seek also to model more attention to the renaissance in scholarship on classical China. More ambitiously, we hope to show that these …

Mad About The Boy, Debra Mayrhofer

Research outputs pre 2011

The media coverage of an out-of-control teenage party in the Melbourne suburb of Narre Warren on 12 January 2008, and its construction of the protagonist who threw the party, has highlighted once again the inequitable treatment of youth, particularly adolescent males, in the Australian media. This paper examines the coverage in terms of the discursive strategies used by the mainstream Australian media to legitimise and naturalise the denigration and humiliation of the boy involved. It will discuss the ongoing demonisation of young males in general, and the concomitant ‘panics’ about their degeneration into moral lassitude, as well as the particular …

Collateral Damage, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The phrase "collateral damage" refers to harm done to persons, animals, or things that agents are not morally permitted to target in the conduct of war, as a side effect of attacks on persons, animals, or things that agents are morally permitted to target in the conduct of war. Call the first category that is, those persons, animals, or things that agents are not morally permitted to target - illegitimate targets of war, and the second category legitimate targets of war. Collateral damage, then, refers to harm done to illegitimate targets of war as a side effect of attacks on …

Assassins And Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche describes his four Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen as Attentate, assassination attempts. The first of these, his self-described "duel" with David Friedrich Strauss, published in 1873, begins with the question of war and time. It is untimely or out of season insofar as it challenges the smugness of the cultural philistines who take Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian War to be a testament to the superiority of German culture. As those in the United States might have learned after the end of the Cold War and after the first Gulf War, "a great victory is a great danger," and we might …

The Ethical Lacunae In Friedman's Concept Of The Manager, Jonathan B. Wight, Martin Calkins

Economics Faculty Publications

This article challenges along two lines Milton Friedman's injunction that the sole role of the business manager is to maximize profits for shareholders using all legal and ethical means. First, it shows how Friedman overly narrows the manager's moral duties to consequentialist profit maximization and thereby fails to account for a wide range of values and virtues necessary for good management. Second, it illustrates how more oblique approaches to management as well as Adam Smith's virtue-based model better capture the moral imagination and relational aspects of leadership that are critical to good management today. In the end, this article suggests …

The Phenomenon Of Amoralism: An Investigation Of The Cognitive And Emotive Roots, Andrei G. Zavaliy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An amoralist is defined as a person who rejects the claims of moral reasons to special authority, and systematically acts without regard to the generally accepted moral standards. A psychopath can be seen as a paradigm case of an extreme amoralist, although the less severe cases of selective amoralists are considered. The research into the typical behavioral pattern, motivational structure, and the value system of psychopaths can shed light on at least three aspects related to the analysis of the moral agency. First, it can help elucidating the emotive and cognitive conditions necessary for moral performance. Secondly, it can provide …

Review Of "Goodness And Justice: A Consequentialist Moral Theory", Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

A review of Joseph Mendola's Goodness and Justice: A Consequentialist Moral Theory, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006.

Death And Truth: "Love Is My Religion", Joshua I. Bush

Whittier Scholars Program

There are many questions within the world that we as human beings have not yet found the answer to. These types of issues are often not discussed within mainstream society and have created tremendous debates that produce inconclusive evidence and ideas that cannot be used to create a distinct conclusion. Religious discussions and debates amongst various religious communities undoubtedly exhibit signs of being one of these inconclusive issues. With this in mind, in order to understand how religion was developed, we much first discover the responses of each religion to the unexplainable questions. Death is essentially the ultimate unknown as …

Forgetting The Subject, Christa Davis Acampora

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Dervishes Dance — The Sacred Ritual Of Love, Jale Erzen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the Sufi Way, the experience of the world and its perception is aesthetic in an ecstatic fashion. The awareness of the overpowering beauty of the world fills the heart with love and opens the mind to cosmic relations. The integration of reason, form-making, and imagining, along with yielding the body and mind to the powers of the earth, is a total aesthetic in Sufism.

In the Islamic world, humans' movement, the way they understand the process of time and space, depends on nature and parallels the cosmic order and the basic underlying forms that are found in nature. They …

The Aesthetics Of Trademarks, Peter H. Karlen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Trademarks are not just property, they are aesthetic creations that pervade everyday experience. One estimate is that the average person encounters more than 1,000 trademarks per day, many of which influence purchases and product use.

As pervasive aesthetic creations having literary, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and musical content, trademarks deserve aesthetic analysis. The article discusses the origins, strength, appeal, and effectiveness of trademarks within the context of aesthetic considerations such as meaning, intention, authorship, and mode of creation. Also reviewed are morphemic and phonemic analysis of trademarks, semantic positioning, the dichotomy between creation and discovery of trademarks, and the differences between …

Questioning "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction": A Stroll Around The Louvre After Reading Benjamin0, Jonathan Davis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I claim that Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" merits renewed critical attention. Just as Dada had confronted art with anti-art, so Benjamin hoped his essay would confront aesthetics with an anti-aesthetic. I examine Benjamin's capsule history of the aura and show it to be misleading, criticize the essay's underdeveloped ontology of painting and sketch an alternative, and draw attention to the surprising proximity of Benjamin's notion of value to that of neoliberal thought. I conclude with a critique of Benjamin's cultural politics.

Definition Of Videogames, Grant Tavinor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Can videogames be defined? The new field of games studies has generated three somewhat competing models of videogaming that characterize games as new forms of gaming, narratives, and interactive fictions. When treated as necessary and sufficient condition definitions, however, each of the three approaches fails to pick out all and only videogames. In this paper I argue that looking more closely at the formal qualities of definition helps to set out the range of definitional options open to the games theorist. A disjunctive definition of videogaming seems the most appropriate of these definitional options. The disjunctive definition I offer here …

Danto And Art Criticism, Cynthia Freeland

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I examine the relationship between Arthur Danto's philosophy of art and his practice of art criticism. Danto has said that he included many actual examples of discussions of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace because of the feeling that, previously, philosophers had theorized about art in a vacuum. And since the time of publishing that book, he has written on a wide variety of both historical and contemporary artists and art practices. Danto's philosophy of art commits him to an account of the practice of art criticism as interpretation. However, I question whether the Danto-esque interpretive …

The Riddle Of A Riddle, Ivan Gaskell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper examines the distinction made by Arthur C. Danto between artworks and what he terms "mere real things." It presents an eighteenth-century tool for sifting grain (a riddle) as a case study in the contexts of first, the house of its first known owner, General Artemas Ward (1727-1800); second, an exhibition 2006-7 drawn from the contents of that house pointedly held in an art museum; and, third, the likely maker of the object, a member of Hassanimisco Band of Nipmuc Indians. It examines the equivocal position of objects such as this in Danto's estimation, things that he considers to …

Four Varieties Of Character-Based Virtue Epistemology, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

The terrain of character-based or “responsibilist” virtue epistemology has evolved dramatically over the last decade — so much so that it is far from clear what, if anything, unifies the various views put forth in this area. In an attempt to bring some clarity to the overall thrust and structure of this movement, I develop a fourfold classification of character-based virtue epistemologies. I also offer a qualified assessment of each approach, defending a certain account of the probable future of this burgeoning subfield.

Philosophy And Theology: Notes On Infanticide, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Morality Of Palestinian Terrorism, Timothy Shanahan

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Origin Of Intentionality, Darryl J. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The modern origins of intentionality reside in the early work of Franz Brentano—specifically, his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1876) and the notion of the “intentional inexistence” of the object of consciousness presented therein. “Intentional inexistence”, says Brentano, is the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the objects that occupy our desires, aversions, thoughts, and all of our conscious activities in general. According to Brentano, “Aristotle himself spoke of this mental inexistence. In his book on the soul he says that the sensed object, as such, is in the sensing subject; that the sense contains the sensed object without its matter; that …

How Not To Be An Atheist: A Neoclassical Response To The New Atheism, Donald W. Viney

Faculty Submissions

The New Atheists (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Stenger) claim that a commitment to science, reason, and morality is inconsistent with theism. Using as my point of departure neoclassical theism as expounded in the works of A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I argue that the New Atheism is intellectually anemic, interesting though it is as political activism. The New Atheists criticize a caricature of faith, offer inferior versions of old arguments, commit the mistake of construing theism as a scientific hypothesis, and ignore sophisticated forms of belief in God.

(Dis)Solving The Chronological Paradox In Customary International Law: A Hartian Approach, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As traditionally conceived, the creation of a new rule of customary international law requires that states believe the law to already require the conduct specified in the rule. Distinguishing the process whereby a customary rule comes to exist from the process whereby that customary rule becomes law dissolves this chronological paradox. Creation of a customary rule requires only that states come to believe that there exists a normative standard to which they ought to adhere, not that this standard is law. What makes the customary rule law is adherence by officials in the international legal system to a rule of …

On The Foundation Of Rights To Political Self-Determination: Secession, Non-Intervention, And Democratic Governance, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

From a justificatory standpoint, perhaps the most basic question with respect to secession is what, if anything, provides the moral foundation for a group’s right to secede. My aim here is to make a start to answering this question. I do so, however, by considering a different, albeit closely related, question, namely what is the nature of the wrong done to members of a qualified group denied secession by the state that currently rules them? A compelling answer to this latter question, I suggest, will contribute significantly to a satisfactory answer of the former one.

Adam Smith And His Sources: The Evil Of Independence, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This paper explores the foundations of Adam Smith’s view that the philosopher is the same as the street porter. Despite their innate similarity, Smith recognized that the role of the philosopher, someone who provides useful instruction to fellow humans, is not that of the street porter (Pear and Levy 2005; Schliesser 2005, 2006). He also saw that this potentially useful employment may entail a biased perspective on human conduct. Motivated by matters too distant for ordinary people to notice, the philosopher may come to believe that he is better than those he studies and to regard himself as independent form …

Ethics In Experimentation, Donelson R. Forsyth

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Experimentation in the social sciences, by its very nature, requires researchers to manipulate and control key aspects of the social setting so as to determine what effect, if any, these manipulations have on the people in that setting. Such studies, although unmatched in terms of their scientific yield, nonetheless raise questions of ethics: Do researchers have the moral right to conduct experiments on their fellow human beings? What practices are unacceptable and what procedures are allowable? Can standards be established to safeguard the rights of participants?

Reconstructing Xunzi's Moral Knowledge, Hok Nam Chan

Lingnan Theses

Reconstructing the content of Xunzi’s (荀子) moral knowledge is the main goal of this thesis. A first main task of this reconstruction is to provide a clarification of the content and functions of li. A second primary goal of the reconstruction is to discuss the roles and functions of the moral sage or morally superior person, junzi (君子), in Xunzi’s account of moral practice. The figure of the sage is important in explaining the rationale of li and exemplifying how to behave in accordance with the rules of proper conduct in different situations. As truth is essential to knowledge, it …

Peter Severinus: From Humours To Chemistry In The Sixteenth Century, Michael T. Walton, Robert M. Fineman

Quidditas

The re-discovery of the works of Mendel and others has added greatly to our understanding of genetics. Such is now the case of Peter Severinus, with the recent recovery (or re-discovery) of his seminal work, Idea Medicinae Philosophicae (1571). Severinus concurred with Paracelsus’s (1493-1541) concept of seeds (little chemical factories) that worked on matter to form living things; but he was also aware of transplantation (grafting and cross-pollination) that changed phenotypes and genotypes in plants. Severinus applied this understanding to hereditary diseases in humans and extended Paracelsian theory. He believed that certain diseases in one’s offspring were caused by a …

Tracing Shakespeare’S Sea-Change: From The Tempest To The New York Times, Joshua L. Comer

Quidditas

An historical approach to the changing use of a Shakespearean phase, like “sea- change,” offers a case study in the long-standing power and evolving meaning of Shakespeare’s language. While all sea-changes today are not so major as those of which Ariel sang in The Tempest, the rich language of Ariel’s song has acquired a significant place in the history of American journalism.

Jagannath's Saligram: On Bruno Latour And Literary Critique After Postcoloniality, Amit Ray, Evan Selinger

Articles

Bruno Latour has turned to Indian vernacular fiction to illustrate the limits of ideology critique. In examining the method of literary analysis that underlies his appropriation of postcolonial history and culture, we appeal to Edward Said's notion of "traveling theory" in order to discuss critically the aesthetic as well as political stakes of using the technology of the modern novel for the allegorical purposes that Latour has in mind. We argue that Latourian analysis fails to uphold its own rigorous aspirations when it reduces complex literary and cultural representation to universal allegory.

On Human Migration And The Moral Obligations Of Business, Linda H. Harris

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work addresses to what extent businesses in the United States and the European Union have a moral obligation to participate in social integration processes in areas where they operate with the use of migrant laborers. It begins with the presupposition that a common framework as to what constitutes ethical behavior in business is needed and beneficial. It argues that the very industry that creates a need for migrant labor ought to also be involved in merging this labor successfully into the existing community and specifies that a discourse on business ethics and migration is gravely needed. This must be …