Philosophy Commons^™

Collective Memory And Creative Subjectivity: A Living Conversation, Alexandra Katherine Goodall, Alba Torres Robinat

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article is the record of a dialogue between two artists and Expressive Arts therapists, Alba Torres Robinat and Alexandra Katherine Goodall. They chose to undertake this conversation in the form of letters that were written back-and-forth over a period of time in a shared document, which places their correspondence in the tradition of epistolary writing. This decision to write the article as letters lends the conversation an immediacy, a warmth, a sense of time, distance and familiarity, and a feeling of intimacy.

The authors invite readers to witness the deepening of a relationship and the development of their conversational …

Deconstruction Of A Dialogue: Creative Interpretation In Comparative Philosophy, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

It is common knowledge that Martin Heidegger’s attempts at engaging non-Western philosophy are very much a construct of his own making. This article in no way seeks to disagree with those observations, but argues two things: first, that Heidegger’s “dialogue” with his two main other sources of inspiration, the ancient Greek thinkers and the German poets, is not different in kind or in principle from his engagement with East Asia. One can of course quite easily argue that Heidegger’s main interest was the ancient Greek thinkers, and then the poets, and only lastly Asia. But this hierarchy in preference does …

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

What And Whose Confucianism? Sinophone Communities And Dialogical Geopolitics, Quan Gao, Justin K. H. Tse, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This commentary responds to An et al.’s (2020) article, ‘Towards a Confucian geopolitics’ by re-examining ‘the political’ of Confucianism and its contribution to fostering a cosmopolitan form of Confucian geopolitics. By taking note of the differences within and between Sinophone communities, we discuss the variegated forms of Confucianism, and their various geopolitical implications. In doing so, we call for re-theorising Confucian geopolitics as dialogical geopolitics that challenges the cultural and ideological basis of statist and Sino-centric geopolitics.

Coding Empathy, Fabrizio Macagno, Chrysi Rapanta

OSSA Conference Archive

In rhetoric, empathy – the ability to put oneself inside the interlocutor’s position in an argument – has been considered as the bridge between the orator and the interlocutors. Despite its crucial importance, no studies have addressed the challenge of operationalizing this concept, translating it into proxies that can be used for determining how empathic a dialogue is. This paper intends to propose a coding scheme for capturing two dimensions of empathy in dialogue – otherness and relevance.

Does Taste Counts As Evidence In Argumentation?, Daniel Mejía

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper is intended to answer the question of whether taste represents some kind of evidence in argumentation. To do this, the text is divided into four parts: first, the relationship between the technique of reconstruction and the definitions of argumentation is exposed. Second, different borderline cases that limit the use of this technique are discussed. Third, a dialogue where the argument appeals to taste is presented as another borderline case. Fourth, the role of taste as evidence (ground) for the analyzed argument is explored.

What Makes A Fallacy Serious?, Michel Dufour

OSSA Conference Archive

Among the defining criteria of a fallacy, Douglas Walton requires that its flaw must be serious. This allows his distinction between “serious” fallacies, minor ones, or mere blunders. But what makes a fallacy serious? Isn’t being fallacious serious enough? Walton leaves these questions unanswered but often calls to his distinction between sophism and paralogism. Several ways to apply the adjective “serious” to fallacies are discussed. Some depend on the type, others on structural aspects, and others on a dialectical background.

Confidence In Arguments In Dialogues For Practical Reasoning, Waleed Mebane

OSSA Conference Archive

For the context of practical reasoning, this paper suggests a method of assessing the level of confidence we should rationally have in arguments. It draws from dialectic which induces the elaboration of reasons for a position and on auditors’ prior knowledge. Accurate assessment depends on evidential standards, on selecting dialogue moves according to their practical and epistemic importance, and on selecting auditors according to their competence and diversity of relevant knowledge.

Deliberation And Collective Identity Formation, Hubert Marraud

OSSA Conference Archive

Deliberation is an argumentative practice in which several parties reason in order to decide the best available course of action. I argue that deliberation, unlike negotiation, requires a collective agency, defined by shared commitments, and not merely a plural agency defined by aggregation of individual commitments. Since the “we” presupposed by this argumentative genre is built up in the course of the deliberation exchange itself, shaping collective identity is a basic function of public deliberation.

The Contradiction Of Representation In Levinas's Command Of The Other And The Possibility Of Responding Through The Dialogicality Of The Self, Robert Claflin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Emmanuel Levinas views the phenomenological tradition as being predicated on an asymmetrical relationship between the self and the other in which the self possesses the power to dominate and represent the other. This leads to the reduction of the other to the same. Instead, he wants to flip this relationship in favor of the other by showing how the very qualities of alterity and infinity enable the other to resist the self’s attempts at representation. Furthermore, he conceives of an ethics in which the self is compelled to listen to the other’s command and respond accordingly. The inherent issue in …

Why Study Language? Discussing Language And Its Influence On Gender Discrimination, Katelyn Eisenmann

Honors Projects

An applied research project, with the culminating piece being a panel discussion that focused on the ways in which language use and structure contribute to attitudes and perceptions of gender within our society, and the politics that surround concepts of gender.

The Illusion Of An Abundant End- A Phenomenological Approach To Sustainability: The Progress Trap And The Transformative Potential Of Dialogue, Shantanu Rojatkar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Abundance is a concept according to which a thing is deemed to be in plenty. The feeling of satisfaction and assurance, arising from something that is concretely abundant, serves as a material reason for motivation of a desired action. Just like the stock of food lying in our fridge, ensuring more than just the needs of the moment, the abundance cooks the taste of freedom, freedom from worrying about tomorrow. However, over consumption out of greed as a potential outcome of abundance, could result in the increased capacity of a person in order to reach the initial level of satisfaction. …

Crowdsourcing Consciousness: You Think, Therefore I Am, Justin M. Campbell

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The challenge to understand consciousness is a centuries-old interdisciplinary research program. The search entails fundamental questions about our nature - the desire to understand who we are has been around for nearly as long as experience itself. It is also one of the most important questions we can ask; meaning itself is predicated on having some sort of conscious experiencer for whom something can matter. Given the magnitude and intractability of explaining the paradox of how consciousness can be at once the most obvious thing in the universe, and also the most inaccessible, the endeavor is a tremendous undertaking. Until …

Two Concepts Of Education, Vikramaditya H. Joshi

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The foundation of the current discourse on education is grounded in the funding and distribution of a ‘good’ called education. The Common Core State Standards, as a set of shared goals stipulated by the federal government, considers education to be a “stepping stone” towards joining the workforce in a competitive global marketplace. The lexicon of economic commodities instrumentalizes education due to its tacit assumption that education is a means to an occupational end. It treats education as an individual possession deposited by a school, via its teachers, into …

From Object To Other: Models Of Sociality After Idealism In Gadamer, Levinas, Rosenzweig, And Bonhoeffer, Christopher J. King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an account of the different ways in which putatively idealist and transcendental models of sociality, which grounded the subject’s relation to other human beings in the subject’s own cognition, were rejected and replaced. Scrapping this account led to a variety of models of sociality which departed from the subject as the ground of sociality, positing grounds outside of the subject. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer represent alternative positions along a spectrum of models of sociality which reject the idealist concept of sociality.

The central argument of this dissertation claims that the responses to …

Emotional Arguments: What Would Neuroscientists And Psychologists Say?, Linda Carozza

OSSA Conference Archive

Why is there resistance in acknowledging emotional arguments? I explore the ambiguity entrenched in the emotional mode of argument, which may contribute to the lack of widespread agreement about its existence. In particular, belief systems and personality styles are addressed, as they are integral to the emotional mode of argumentation. This multidisciplinary approach neither advocates or dismisses the emotional mode; it adds another layer of understanding to the literature that is important to consider.

In The Mood For A Little Dialogue?, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A Dialogue About Whether or Not to Dialogue

Dialogue Types: A Scale Development Study, Ioana A. Cionea, Dale Hample, Edward L. Fink

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper presents the results of a quantitative study in which self-report scales were developed to measure four of the six dialogue types proposed by Walton (1998): persuasion, negotiation, information-seeking, and eristic dialogues. The paper details the research design, presents the measurement instruments developed, and describes the analyses conducted to assess the dimensionality and reliability of the proposed scales.

Arguing Or Reasoning? Argumentation In Rhetorical Context, Manfred Kraus

OSSA Conference Archive

If dialogue is a necessary condition for argument, argumentation in oratory becomes questionable, since rhetoric is not a dialogically structured activity. If special norms apply to the ‘solo’ performances of rhetoric, the orator’s activity may be more appropriately described as reasoning than as arguing. By analyzing in what respect rhetorical texts can be interpreted as dialogue-based and subject to criteria of Informal Logic, the virtues of rhetorical argumentation in contrast to logic and dialectic emerge.

Distinctive Features Of Persuasion And Deliberation Dialogues, Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon, Douglas Walton

CRRAR Publications

The distinction between action persuasion dialogues and deliberation dialogues is not always obvious at first sight. In this paper, we provide a characterisation of both types of dialogues that draws out the distinctive features of each. It is important to recognise the distinctions since participants in both types of dialogues will have different aims, which in turn affects whether a successful outcome can be reached. Such dialogues are typically conducted by exchanging arguments for and against certain options. The moves of the dialogue are designed to facilitate such exchanges. In particular, we show how the pre- and post-conditions for the …

Fallacy Identification In A Dialectical Approach To Teaching Critical Thinking, Mark Battersby, Sharon Bailin, Jan Albert Van Laar

OSSA Conference Archive

The dialectical approach to teaching critical thinking is centred on a comparative evaluation of contending arguments, so that generally the strength of an argument for a position can only be assessed in the context of this dialectic. The identification of fallacies, though important, plays only a preliminary role in the evaluation to individual arguments. Our approach to fallacy identification and analysis sees fal-lacies as argument patterns whose persuasive power is disproportionate to their probative value.