Philosophy Commons^™

Book Review: The Quest For Legitimacy And The Withering Away Of Utopia, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Many who live in the West have a myopic view of the world and of recent history. They understand the transition from the end of the twentieth century to the start of the new millennium as the replacement of one “evil” with another. The Cold War and the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union have been replaced with the War on Terrorism and the battles being waged against Al-Qaeda, Hizballah, and the many other terrorist organizations worldwide, as well as nation states like Iraq and Iran that are said to sponsor terrorist groups. Indeed, the expression “rogue …

Unified Pluralism: Fostering Reconiliation And The Demise Of Ethnic - Objedinjeni Pluralizam: Gajenje Pomirenja I Okončanje Etničkog Nacionalizma, Rory Conces, Jasminka Babić-Avdispahić

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Od parafiranja Daytonskog mirovnog sporazuma 21. novembra 1995. Bosna i Hercegovina je "zamašan eksperiment” u demokratizaciji, opsežan skup aktivnosti na izgradnji mira koje se protežu od onih upravljenih odozgo prema dole kroz međunarodno reguliranje izbora, ekonomski menadžment i razvoj institucija do onih upravljenih odozdo prema gore kroz razvoj političke kulture izgradnjom civilnog društva. Štaviše, o ovom širokom međunarodnom uplitanju u bosanske državne poslove se nije moglo pregovarati. Počev od kraja 1997., međunarodni mandat je proširen. Na primjer, Visokom predstavniku je data ovlast u poduzimanju akcija protiv obstrukcionizma izabranih zvaničnika na državnom i entitetskom nivou.

Is Information Systems A Science? An Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Information Systems Discipline, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The Information Systems (IS) discipline is apparently undergoing an identity crisis. Academicians question the need for IS departments in colleges stating the absence of a core for the field and its integration within other business functions as a basis for its elimination. At the same time, many practitioners, as reflected in the US government's recent IT labor shortage report, continue to ignore IS as a distinct field of study. This article briefly outlines these and other challenges and argues that notwithstanding underlying philosophical differences, it can be concluded that IS is an emerging scientific discipline. This conclusion is reached through …

Book Review: Ethics For The New Millennium, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Ethics for the New Millennium is a book written by the Dalai Lama that came to my attention at the request of a few of my students who wanted to start a reading group. Although the book remained in my office, I took the Dalai Lama's ideas about ethics with me when I visited China, a country that bears Buddhism's mark. Whether you agree with bis views or not, you cannot help but admire him; nor do you have to be a Buddhist to enjoy this readable and interesting book, a quick and easy read intended for the general reader.

Book Review: The Man Who Tried To Save The World: The Dangerous Life And Mysterious Disappearance Of Fred Cuny By Scott Anderson, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Occasionally a biography is written about an individual who is "cut" from a different piece of cloth than the of the rest of us. The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny is such a biography. Scott Anderson. a war correspondent who has covered numerous connects around the world, tells the story of this most extraordinary humanitarian relief expert. Fred Cuny considered the interests of strangers to be more important than those of his own and eventually gave his life in the pursuit of rendering assistance to those who most needed …

Book Review: To End A War, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If asked to name career diplomats who have tackled some very difficult international crises, many foreign policy makers would put Richard Holbrooke near the top of the list. Not many negotiators have wielded moral principle, power, and reason as well as Holbrooke. His book on the Bosnia negotiations leading up to the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement is timely, given the ethnic cleansing that is being carried out in Kosovo, a southern province of Yugoslavia's Serb Republic. Once again we are faced with unrest in the Balkans. We have seen the daily newspaper headlines change from "24 Albanian Men Killed in …

Book Review: Chechnya: Tombstone Of Russian Power, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

From December 1994 to August 1996, Russia was engaged in the Chechen War, a Vietnam-style quagmire that exemplified, on the one hand, the end of Russia as a great military and imperial power, and, on the other hand, "one of the greatest epics of colonial resistance in the past century.'' No analysis can hope to understand the totality of forces that lend to the stability (or instability) of nations with large minority populations unless it first examines the conditions that led to the Russian defeat in Chechnya. At the center of that problem lies an interesting issue. What aspects of …

Contract, Trust, And Resistance In The `Second Treatise', Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If there is a single problem that has dominated political thought for the past four hundred years, it is the tension within the body politic between the will of the collective, as it is expressed by those vested with authority and power, and the will of the individual. Among political theorists who have examined this problem, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke viewed this potentially ruinous tension in radically different ways. In his Leviathan, Hobbes presents the problem of how we are to conduct ourselves as a society, an apparent dilemma whose horns are anarchy and servile absolutism. Either we …

Book Review: The Decolonization Of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge And Power, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power includes fourteen essays, some of which are revised papers presented at a cultural studies conference in Amsterdam in 1991, that contribute to the rapidly growing library of literature on postcolonial theory by exploring the dimensions of decolonization.

Ethics And Sovereignty, William L. Blizek, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the political arena, every nation is considered to be sovereign. That is, what happens within the legitimate borders of a nation, what docs not affect other nations, is to be decided by the people of that nation or the government of' that nation and no one else. If a nation wants to centralize economic decisions, that is its business. If a nation wants a free market economy, no other nation can interfere. If a nation wants to be represented by a new form of government, it has the right to change governments. And so on.

Outside or the political …

The Semblance Of Ideologies And Scientific Theories And The Constitution Of Facts, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Responding to those who want to consign ideologies to the dustbin of history, I make what is perhaps an unexpected connection between ideologies and scientific theories to ward off what may amount to be an assault on the former's cognitive value. Although there are significant differences between ideologies and scientific theories, particularly in terms of objectivity and openness to innovation, I find that they are similar insofar as each is a cognitive fund which allows us to make sense of the world that we live in. Part of the sense-making quality of scientific theories is that they allow us to …

Book Review: The Price Of A Dream: The Story Of The Grameen Bank And The Idea That Is Helping The Poor To Change Their Lives, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

A simple logo, a red and green arrow, is commonly found on buildings in villages and cities scattered across the South Asian country of Bangladesh. The logo, as unpretentious as its creator, signifies the presence of one of the many offices of the Grameen Bank, a credit institution founded in 1976 by the charismatic economist Muhammed Yunus. The history of the Grameen Bank, and of how the bank has worked to alleviate poverty through an innovative entrepreneurial approach to development in one of the poorest nations in the world, is the subject of David Borstein's readable and often entertaining book.

A Participatory Approach To The Teaching Of Critical Reasoning, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

For those of us who teach critical reasoning, our task of presenting its tools in an interesting way has been facilitated by a number of relatively easy to understand textbooks that include "fragments" of political, social, and economic issues of our day (albeit sometimes contrived and artificial as well as a chapter or two on the analysis of extended arguments, such as those found in essays, editorials, and letters to newspaper and magazine editors. Generally speaking, authors of these texts have made a concerted effort to arouse students' interest in learning critical thinking skills by inserting issues and reasoning situations …

Aesthetic Alienation And The Art Of Modernity, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Not long ago the walls of the world's great art museums were covered with realist portraiture, landscapes, and sacred scenes. That was pretty much the extent of canvas art. During the last hundred years. However, the scope of museum collections has become much more diverse. One can still find a lifelike portrait by Rubens, an idyllic landscape by Constable, or a sublime Christ scene by Raphael. Indeed, there even seems to be a bias towards realist and, what the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the "objectivist" prejudice.¹ It is as though we expect art to function as a description …