Philosophy Commons^™

A Reply To Vaidya, Michael Krausz

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

The Inclusive Dynamics Of Islamic Universalism: From The Vantage Point Of Sayyid Qutb's Critical Philosophy, Andrea Mura

Comparative Philosophy

This article pursues a topological reading of Milestones, one of the most influential books in the history of Islamism. Written by Muslim thinker Sayyid Qutb, the general interest in this crucial text has largely remained restricted to the fields of Islamic Studies and Security Studies. This article aims to make the case for assuming a philosophical standpoint, relocating its significance beyond the above-mentioned fields. A creative and topological reading of this text will allow the spatial complexity of Qutb’s eschatological vision to be fully exposed, while also unpacking the way in which antagonistic relations have variously been articulated by this …

Marx Wartofsky, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

Marx W. Wartofsky was born in Brooklyn and received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. He was a professor at Boston University (where he taught for twenty-six years) and then at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was long-time editor of the Philosophical Forum, which he founded in 1970. He also co-founded with Robert Cohen the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science in 1960. He wrote three books: Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968), Feuerbach (1977), and Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (1979), the last …

Pretty, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Temporality In The Literary Framework Of Nicholas Of Cusa’S De Pace Fidei, Jason Aleksander

Faculty Publications

This paper explores Nicholas of Cusa’s framing of the De pace fidei as a dialogue taking place incaelo rationis. On the one hand, this framing allows Nicholas of Cusa to argue that all religious rites presuppose the truth of a single, unified faith and so temporally manifest divine logos in a way accommodated to the historically unique conventions of different political communities. On the other hand, at the end of the De pace fidei, the interlocutors in the heavenly dialogue are enjoined to return to earth and lead their countrymen in a gradual conversion to the acceptance of rites which …

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 …

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 …

Vol 5 No 1 Information Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 5 No 1 Cover Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 5 No 1 Content Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

University Scholar Series: Carlos Sánchez, Carlos Sánchez

University Scholar Series

The History of Philosophy in Latin America

On October 29, 2013, Dr. Carlos Sánchez gave a talk titled “The History of Philosophy in Latin America” in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Ellen Junn at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Dr. Carlos Sánchez’s research focuses on the history of philosophy in Latin America. His latest work proposes that Latin American philosophy, particularly in the last century, manifests itself as a form of “decolonial critique,” or a critical confrontation with the lingering force of colonialism in Latin America. Sánchez has recently published a book about the phenomenology of …

Vol 4 No 2 Information Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Neoplatonism And Paramadvaita, Michal Just

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Palaeo-Philosophy: Archaic Ideas About Space And Time, Paul S. Macdonald

Comparative Philosophy

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts, instead of cognitive ‘complexes’. My paper draws on research by Jan Assmann, Jean-Jacques Glassner, Keimpe Algra, Alex Purves, Nicholas Wyatt, and others on the cultures of Ancient Greece, Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Etruria through comparative analyses of the semantic fields of spatial and temporal terms, and how these terms are shaped by their relation to the sphere of the sacred. It shows that there are three super-ordinate timeframes - the cyclical, the linear …

Vol 4 No 2 Cover Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 4 No 2 Content Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

German Idealism Meets Indian Vedanta And Kasmiri Saivism, Katherine Elise Barhydt, J. M. Fritzman

Comparative Philosophy

Regarding each philosophy as a variation of that of Spinoza, this article compares the German Idealism of Schelling and Hegel with the Indian Vedanta of Sa?kara and Ramanuja, as well as Abhinavagupta's Kasmiri Saivism. It argues that only Hegel's philosophy does not fail. For Śaṅkara, Ramanuja, Abhinavagupta, and Schelling, the experience of ultimate reality—Brahman for Śaṅkara and Ramanuja, Siva for Abhinavagupta, the Absolute for Schelling—is self-authenticating and so excludes the possibility of error. However, there is also no possibility of truth as no criterion distinguishes truth from error when individuals make contradictory claims. By contrast, Hegel's Geist is an extended …

Moral Realism And Anti-Realism Outside The West: A Meta-Ethical Turn In Buddhist Ethics, Gordon Fraser Davis

Comparative Philosophy

In recent years, discussions of Buddhist ethics have increasingly drawn upon the concepts and tools of modern ethical theory, not only to compare Buddhist perspectives with Western moral theories, but also to assess the meta-ethical implications of Buddhist texts and their philosophical context. Philosophers aiming to defend the Madhyamaka framework in particular - its ethics and soteriology along with its logic and epistemology - have recently attempted to explain its combination of moral commitment and philosophical scepticism by appealing to various forms of meta-ethical anti-realism. This paper argues that those attempts do not succeed, even in their own terms. Their …

Recent Studies Of Comparative Philosophy In The Balkans: Interview With Jana S. RoŠKer, Nevad Kahteran

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 3 No 1 Cover Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 3 No 1 Contents Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Editor's Words, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Dharmakirti, Davidson, And Knowing Reality, Lajos Brons

Comparative Philosophy

If we distinguish phenomenal effects from their noumenal causes, the former being our conceptual(ized) experiences, the latter their grounds or causes in reality "as it is" independent of our experience, then two contradictory positions with regards to the relationship between these two can be distinguished: either phenomena are identical with their noumenal causes, or they are not. Davidson is among the most influential modern defenders of the former position, metaphysical non-dualism. Dharmakirti' strict distinction between ultimate and conventional reality, on the other hand, may be one of the most rigorously elaborated theories of the opposite position, metaphysical dualism. Despite this …

How To Avoid Solipsism While Remaining An Idealist: Lessons From Berkeley And Dharmakirti, Jeremy E. Henkel

Comparative Philosophy

This essay examines the strategies that Berkeley and Dharmakirti utilize to deny that idealism entails solipsism. Beginning from similar arguments for the non-existence of matter, the two philosophers employ markedly different strategies for establishing the existence of other minds. This difference stems from their responses to the problem of intersubjective agreement. While Berkeley's reliance on his Cartesian inheritance does allow him to account for intersubjective agreement without descending into solipsism, it nevertheless prevents him from establishing the existence of other finite minds. I argue that Dharmakirti, in accounting for intersubjective agreement causally, is able to avoid Berkeley's shortcoming. I conclude …

Benevolent Government Now, Howard J. Curzer

Comparative Philosophy

Mencian benevolent government intervenes dramatically in many ways in the marketplace in order to secure the material well-being of the population, especially the poor and disadvantaged. Mencius considers this sort of intervention to be appropriate not just occasionally when dealing with natural disasters, but regularly. Furthermore, Mencius recommends shifting from regressive to progressive taxes. He favors reduction of inequality so as to reduce corruption of government by the wealthy, and opposes punishment for people driven to crime by destitution. Mencius thinks government should try to improve the character of the population by preventing or relieving poverty, by setting a good …

Whole Set Of Volume 3 No 1 (2012), Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 3 No 1 Information Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

How Is This Paper Philosophy?, Kristie Dotson

Comparative Philosophy

This paper answers a call made by Anita Allen to genuinely assess whether the field of philosophy has the capacity to sustain the work of diverse peoples. By identifying a pervasive culture of justification within professional philosophy, I gesture to the ways professional philosophy is not an attractive working environment for many diverse practitioners. As a result of the downsides of the culture of justification that pervades professional philosophy, I advocate that the discipline of professional philosophy be cast according to a culture of praxis. Finally, I provide a comparative exercise using Graham Priest’s definition of philosophy and Audre Lorde’s …

Vol 4 No 1 Cover Page, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Confucian And Islamic Approaches To Democracy And Human Rights, Stephen Angle

Comparative Philosophy

Both Confucian and Islamic traditions stand in fraught and internally contested relationships with democracy and human rights. It can easily appear that the two traditions are in analogous positions with respect to the values associated with modernity, but a central contention of this essay is that Islam and Confucianism are not analogous in this way. Positions taken by advocates of the traditions are often similar, but the reasoning used to justify these positions differs in crucial ways. Whether one approaches these questions from an intra-traditional, cross-traditional, or multi-traditional perspective, the essay shows that there is great value in getting clear …