Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beyond Violence: Religious Sources Of Social Transformation In Judaism, Christianity, And Islam, James L. Heft, S.M.

Religion

In an age of terrorism and other forms of violence committed in the name of religion, how can religion become a vehicle for peace, justice, and reconciliation? And in a world of bitter conflicts-many rooted in religious difference-how can communities of faith understand one another?

The essays in this important book take bold steps forward to answering these questions. The fruit of a historic conference of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars and community leaders, the essays address a fundamental question: how the three monotheistic traditions can provide the resources needed in the work of justice and reconciliation.

Two distinguished scholars …

Responsibility And The Aims Of Theory: Strawson And Revisionism, Manuel R. Vargas

Philosophy

Strawsonian approaches to responsibility, including more recent accounts such as Dennett’s and Wallace’s, face a number of important objections. However, Strawsonian theories can be recast along revisionist lines so as to avoid many of these problems. In this paper, I explain the revisionist approach to moral responsibility, discuss the concessions it makes to incompatibilism (including the point that compatibilists may not fully capture what our commonsense understanding of responsibility), why it provides a fruitful recasting of Strawsonian approaches, and how it offers an alternative to the pattern of dialectical stalemates exhibited by standard approaches to free will and determinism.

The Price Of Insisting That Quantum Mechanics Is Complete, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The Bare Theory was offered by David Albert as a way of standing by the completeness of quantum mechanics in the face of the measurement problem. This paper surveys objections to the Bare Theory that recur in the literature: what will here be called the oddity objection, the coherence objection, and the context-of-the-universe objection. Critics usually take the Bare Theory to have unacceptably bizarre consequences, but to be free from internal contradiction. Bizarre consequences need not be decisive against the Bare Theory, but a further objection—dubbed here the calibration objection—has been underestimated. This paper argues that the Bare Theory is …

Environmental Education And Metaethics, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

Contrā Dale Jamieson, the study of the metaethical foundations of environmental ethics may well lead students to a more environmentally responsible way of life. For although metaethics is rarely decisive in decision making and action, there are two kinds of circumstances in which it can play a crucial role in our practical decisions. First, decisions that have unusual features do not summon habitual ethical reactions, and hence invite the application of ethical precepts that the study of metaethics and ethical theory isolate and clarify. Second, there are times in which the good of others (including organisms and systems in the …

The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’S Philosophy Of The Two, Alenka Zupancic (Book Review), Steven Michels

Political Science & Global Affairs Faculty Publications

Book review by Steven Michels.

Zupančič, A. (2003). The shortest shadow: Nietzsche’s philosophy of the two. MIT Press.

ISBN 9780262740265

Know-How, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In daily life we not only speak not only of knowing facts but also of know-how. We may not only judge that someone knows that the stock market is in decline, that an avalanche is imminent or that ice is not marble but also that someone knows how to make money on the stock exchange, knows how to survive an avalanche or knows how to carve a realistic life-sized human figure from a block of marble. Ryle (1949, 26-60) first drew attention to analysis of know-how and argued that know-how does not consist of propositional knowledge. He went on to …

Mining In Irian Jaya: How Citizens Should Think About Environmental Justice, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

"All around me are the facts of my life. But I can't see them, because the way I think gets in the way." I am making a case for environmental justice. We'll explore how questioning our lives and actions helps us grasp environmental justice. I believe environmental justice calls many of us to conceive of our lives in new ways so that we can become true ecological citizens. First, relations between humans and lands need to be articulated, and we need to think of our lives in spatially, temporally and ecologically extended ways. This paper is intended initially as an …

The Epistemic Availability Of Transcendental Self-Experience: Husserl And The Paradox Of The Pure Ego, Shiloh Whitley

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Foundationalism And The Search For Certainty In Mathematics, Natalia Baeza

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Cultural Contradictions Of The Anytime, Anywhere Economy: Reframing Communication Technology, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Detlev Zwick

College of Business Faculty Publications

Technology-aided ubiquity and instantaneity have emerged as major goals of most information technology providers and of certain classes of users such as “road warriors”. New mobile technologies promise genie-in-a-bottle type near-magical qualities with anytime, anywhere access to information and services. While the complex science, systems, and economics of such technologies receive considerable attention from industry executives and researchers, the social and cultural aspects of these technologies attract less attention. This paper explores the oft-contradictory promises and pitfalls of anytime, anywhere technologies from a cultural standpoint. It makes suggestions for reinterpreting these technologies for greater human good.

Playing Politics With Bioethics: Now That's Repugnant, Yvette E. Pearson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In a recent Washington Post editorial, Leon Kass claimed that neither he nor the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB) is "playing politics with science." At this point, it is clear that nobody really buys this claim. Nonetheless, even if they are not playing politics with science, someone certainly is playing politics with bioethics, which is just as unacceptable, if not worse.

Demonizing Science And Industry, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the perception that leaders in science and industry seeking power or setting down confining constraints to personal behavior as well as the converse of “…following where one’s heart and soul leads.” The author continues by positing that both sets of beliefs offer similar types of mental constraints.

Intelligence And Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the ramifications of the lack of epistemological underpinnings from which the rightness or wrongness regarding WMD in Iraq can be constructed and adjudicated.

Stoics On The Differentiation Of Character, Margarete Graver

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

I will show that Stoic writers were perfectly capable of distinguishing among character-types also according to secondary differentia that can be exhibited independently of one another and in greater or lesser degree. Just as one may observe variations in the sea floor without disregarding the fact that all of it is equally underwater, so Stoic theory defines traits of character which differentiate one individual from another even where all concerned have the same overall moral standing. Such secondary characteristics are identified even among the virtuous; more numerous, however, and also more philosophically interesting, are the character traits of the nonvirtuous— …

Egoism And Eudaimonia - Maximization In The Nicomachean Ethics, Erik J. Wielenberg

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

I argue that Aristotle holds the following principle:

(AE) An ethically virtuous person always chooses a course of action that he believes promotes his own eudaimonia at least as much as any other course of action he could have chosen.

The claim that Aristotle holds such a principle conflicts with Richard Kraut’s interpretation of Aristotle’s view presented in Kraut’s important book Aristotle on the Human Good. I am inclined to count (AE) as a brand of egoism, primarily on the grounds that it implies that sacrificing one’s own eudaimonia for the sake of the eudaimonia of others is incompatible with …

Tangible Consequences Of An Intangible Time, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

Philisophical Study Of Responsibility, William Doug Bolden

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Sagp Newsletter 2004.3 (April), Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

SAGP at the Central Division, April 2004

Review Of Feminists Doing Ethics Edited By Peggy Desautels And Joanne Waugh, Theresa W. Tobin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Error As Means To Discovery, Kevin C. Elliott

Faculty Publications

This paper argues, first, that recent studies of experimentation, most notably by Deborah Mayo, provide the conceptual resources to describe scientific discovery’s early stages as error-probing processes. Second, it shows that this description yields greater understanding of those early stages, including the challenges that they pose, the research strategies associated with them, and their influence on the rest of the discovery process. Throughout, the paper examines the phenomenon of ‘‘chemical hormesis’’ (i.e., anomalous low-dose effects from toxic chemicals) as a case study that is important not only for the biological sciences but also for contemporary public policy. The resulting analysis …

On Agamben's The Open, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

With no mention of his prior work on the issues of sovereignty or the production of humanity, Agamben makes a foray into complicating such matters by examining the theorization of the animal and its relation to the human in the work of Kojève (and Hegel) and Heidegger; what Agamben attempts to do is to collapse the figures of the animal and man (and, despite the sexist overtones of man, I'll abide by his usage) into one another, implying that the state of animality is a performative, just as humanity is, and that there is strength to be drawn …

Review Of La Philosophie Désormais, By Jean Pierre Faye, Hervé Regnauld

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

Concerned Philosophers For Peace, Vol. 24, No. 1, Concerned Philosophers For Peace

Concerned Philosophers for Peace

No abstract provided.

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …

Creative Redemption And Complete Affirmation In Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Matthew Homan

Honors Theses

Creative Redemption and Complete Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra Any reader engaged with Nietzsche's thought, as we are (or about to be), must consider his or her life in relation to one thought, Nietzsche's most abysmal thought, the greatest weight:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all …

Using The Economic Concept Of A 'Merit Good' To Justify The Teaching Of Ethics Across The University Curriculum, Mark Nowacki, Wilfried Ver Eecke

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Philosophers often lament the limited role that philosophy plays in the intellectual formation of the average university student. Once central to university life—there was a time when the study of philosophy defined what it meant to be a student of the liberal arts—philosophy as a subject of study has become marginalized. It is a painful reality that in many universities philosophy has been reduced to the status of a fluffy elective, a course of study to be conscientiously avoided by the more "practical" and "hard nosed" students bent upon success in the pragmatic worlds of business and politics. Only classical …

Theory And Practice In Plato's Theaetetus: The Question Of Knowledge And The Primacy Of Dialectic, Tushar Irani

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Most studies of the Theaetetus concentrate on Plato’s examination of Protagoras’s ‘Man is the Measure’ doctrine— and rightly so. The bulk of the dialogue is after all devoted to an exhaustive critique of this doctrine and its consequences, and in order to understand Plato’s views it is surely crucial to determine what position he sets up in contrast to his own. Commentators differ, however, when it comes to the finer points of Protagoras’s position— particularly concerning the validity of Plato’s infamous self-refutation argument against the Measure Doctrine at 171A6-C7—and its relation to Heraclitean flux. After some preliminaries on the overall …

A Quarrel Between The Ancients And The Moderns: Aristotle's Realism And Modern Skepticism, Michael Bowler

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

For Aristotle, the object as perceived and the subject as perceiving can only be understood with respect to the activity of perception itself and the unity it brings about between the perceived object and perceiving subject. This is a complex unity that requires further analysis and refinement. This unity is the ground of Aristotle’s “realism” with regard to perception. However, if this unity is dissolved into an external, synthetic connection between two dissimilar things only one of which we have access to, then it is at best problematic and perhaps impossible for us to discover anything about the other. This …

Politics Book Iii On 'He Ariste Politeia', Denis Vlahovic

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The thesis of this paper is that, contrary to the common reading of Book III of the Politics, the constitution identified by Aristotle as best in this book is the ideal constitution of Book VII. I present my argument for this thesis in the first part of the paper, where I examine Aristotle’s statements about the best polis, the most important of which is Aristotle’s final word on the matter, at the end of Book III. In the second part of the paper, I examine and criticize the most comprehensive argument for the common reading of Book III, presented in …