Philosophy Commons^™

Freedom And Rights, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberalism, of course, is quite a capacious theory, with room for liberals to debate quite vigorously among themselves, as well as with others, the meaning and significance of freedom, rights and other concepts. It is also capacious enough to allow for a rethinking of these concepts at a time of pressing environmental problems. Such a rethmking, I shall argue, should lead us to conceive of freedom and rights less as barriers or shields that protect individuals against interference - as forms of independence - and more as matters of organic growth and connection, or interdependence. Indeed, we must conceive …

Introduction: Comparative Ethics And The Crucible Of War, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Michael Howard takes the title of his recent essay, The Invention of Peace, from the nineteenth-century jurist and historian of comparative law Henry Maine, who wrote that "war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modem invention."' We moderns tend to assume that the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aberrant eruptions marring the peaceful status quo, but the opposite better describes the long view. Outside the Garden of Eden, human communities have always been involved in political conflict and that conflict has regularly escalated to the use of lethal force, both …

Toward A Genealogy Of Aryan Morality: Nietzsche And Jacolloit, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

While Nietzsche’s writings of the late 1880s reveal waxing interests in Hinduism, Sanskrit philology, Aryan culture, and the related Indo-European hypothesis, these interests have been remarkably understudied by Nietzsche scholarship, with the exception of a scant few articles that have recently appeared. The presence of the aforementioned topics was crucial for the configuration of the works written in 1887 and 1888: On the Genealogy of Morality, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist, as well as for some of the notions at hand in Nietzsche’s correspondence with Heinrich Köselitz, but the provenance of the ideas that …

Are We Responsible For Our Emotions And Moods?, Michael Schleifer, Miriam S. Mccormick

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The short answer to the question in the title of this paper is "yes." Our thesis is that we are indeed responsible for our emotions and moods. We want to help children understand that just as they are responsible for what they do and say, or omit to do or say (along with the consequences of these acts), so are they responsible for much of their affective life. What remains is to explain what we mean by "responsibility," "emotions," and "moods."

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

When we analyze the source of humor, one ingredient is surely incongruity, the juxtaposition of opposites. So when Tom Lehrer, the consummate Harvard mathematician, openly calls for plagiarism, this is funny because it is exactly the opposite of what we expect - it is absurd. And yet, from the viewpoint of modern economics, is plagiarism really so absurd? We teach our students to maximize short-term profits (in a moral vacuum). We drill them that producers minimize private costs of production (without reference to ethical codes of conduct). We expect economic agents to operate with atomistic selfishness, assuring them that this …

Review Of Johanna Oksala's Foucault On Freedom, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Johanna Oksala has produced a provocative reading of Michel Foucault's work on the issues of freedom and resistance to normalizing oppression. Although many commentators have contended that Foucault's historicization of subjectivity leads to metaphysical determinism and eliminates the very possibility of freedom in human life, Oksala argues that his radical rethinking of both bodies and freedom largely escapes the simplistic criticisms routinely put forward since the early 1980s. She does subject Foucault's work to criticisms of her own, however. While the title of her book leads the reader to expect a tight focus on the question of freedom, much of …

Politics, Rights, And The Refugee Problem, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed to the years between World War I and World War II as the time when the plight of refugees became a pressing political problem.' If Arendt were still alive (she died in 1975), she would no doubt agree that the problem is at least as pressing in the early twenty-first century as it was sixty or more years ago, when she herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Who would not agree? According to a report of the U.N. Population Division, 16 million people were refugees at the …

The Limits Of The Senses In The Zhongyong, Jane Geaney

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The Zhongyong ends with an odd statement about de 德 (charisma or virtue).² It cites a line from the Book of Songs that appears to say that de resembles a piece of hair—perhaps in being equally light—but the Zhongyong rejects this analogy, noticing that de is without smell or sound.³ This seems to be a strange comment since, while it might be plausible to think of hair as smelling, there seems to be no way around the incongruity of speaking of hair in terms of whether or not it makes sound. Perhaps the passage is attempting to say, …

Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which first appeared in three installments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861, was intended as a defense of the notorious doctrine identified with the liberal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and with the author's father, James Mill (1773-1836). The defense was successful. While "the principle of utility, or as Bentham has latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle," may have scandalized Victorian England, Mill's Utilitarianism became one of the defining documents of modern British and American liberalism. It is impossible to appreciate contemporary social and political life without coming to grips with utilitarianism.

Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …

Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The virtues of greed have been widely promoted by some economists in the 20th century. Allegedly it is Adam Smith who provides this new dignity to greed (Lerner, 1937, ix). Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn in the General Equilibrium Analysis (1971), for example, implicitly assume that Adam Smith's self-interest is the greed that promotes economic efficiency (quoted in Evensky, 1993, 203). Walter Williams (1999), a devoted follower of Smith, writes in his column that, "Free markets, private property rights, voluntary exchange, and greed produce preferable outcomes most times and under most conditions." These pronouncements have become part of the cultural …

[Introduction To] The Quest For Moral Leaders: Essays On Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, Susan E. Murphy

Bookshelf

The quest for moral leaders is both a personal quest that takes place in the hearts and minds of leaders and a pursuit by individuals, groups, organizations, communities and societies for leaders who are both ethical and effective. The contributors to this volume, all top scholars in leadership studies and ethics, provide a nuanced discussion of the complex ethical relationships that lie at the core of leadership.

Autonomy, Domination, And The Republican Challenge To Liberalism, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Like Sunstein and other advocates of 'republican' or 'civic' liberalism, I believe that it is historically unsound and politically unwise to insist on a sharp distinction between liberalism and republicanism. Others disagree, however, and there is much to be learned from their position even if, ultimately, we should not adopt it. Those who take this more radical neo-republican view advance two main lines of argument: first, that the liberal emphasis on neutrality and procedural fairness is fundamentally at odds with the republican commitment to promoting civic virtue; and, second, that republicans and liberals conceive of liberty or freedom in incompatible …

The Technology Of Biopower: A Response To Todd May's "Foucault Now?", Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Because the occasion for his essay was the inaugural conference of the newly formed Foucault Society in New York City in the spring of 2005, Todd May takes as his point of departure the question of whether Foucault’s work is valuable to the sort of people who have come together to form that society: philosophers, artists, political activists, and in general to concerned citizens today, twenty years after Michel Foucault’s death. As might be expected given the Society’s raison d’être, May answers this question in the affirmative. But exactly how is Foucault’s work still relevant? It is his answer …

The Perverse Paradox Of Privacy, Gary L. Mcdowell

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

The most recent effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to define the judicially created constitutional right to privacy has demonstrated once again why that contrived right poses such a pronounced threat to constitutional self-government. In writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) to overrule a case of only seventeen years' standing that allowed the states to prohibit homosexual sodomy, Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that the idea of liberty in the Constitution's due process clauses is not limited to protecting individuals form "unwarranted governmental intrusions into a dwelling or other private places" but has "transcendent dimensions" …

Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla

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

What is it about human nature that makes ethical leadership in any context or culture difficult? This chapter examines leadership in terms of the basic philosophic question concerning human nature. To what extent does free will shape our lives and to what extent are our lives determined by our genes and by fate?

The Reach Of Abduction: Insight And Trial (Book Review), G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Reach of Abduction is the second volume in a planned three-volume set - A Practical Logic of Cognitive Systems - spanning relevance, abduction, and fallacious reasoning. Despite this fact, Gabbay and Woods write in the preface that "we have written the individual volumes with a view to their being read either as stand-alone works or as linked and somewhat overlapping items in the series" (p. xvii). The aim of The Reach of Abduction is to embed abduction "within a practical logic of cognitive systems" and in so doing, provide "an adequate stand-alone characterization of abduction itself' (p. 9). At …

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 …

Guarding Moral Boundaries: Shame In Early Confucianism, Jane Geaney

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Claims that China is a ‘‘shame culture’’ tend to presume that guilt is the superior moral motivation. Such claims characterize guilt as internally motivated and operative even if no outsider is aware of any wrongdoing. By contrast, they assume that shame occurs only when someone is observed. The observer represents the moral opinion of an outsider, and, as a result, shame is said to be externally motivated. In this view, genuinely moral motivation is internal. Internality is seen as a requirement for moral autonomy (the ability to make decisions independent of particular social norms), and only guilt cultures are thought …

Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Modern, scientific, man doesn't see miracles, only odd phenomena that call out for more thorough study. Ethics, like the miraculous, doesn't defy scientific explanation; it just doesn't exist. In what follows I hope to do two things., On the one hand, I want to embrace Wittgenstein's rejection of ethics as theory, in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge about the world. On the other, I hope to suggest that this rejection opens up conceptual space for understanding ethics as a critical human enterprise.

[Introduction To] The International Library Of Leadership, J. Thomas Wren, Terry L. Price, Douglas A. Hicks

Bookshelf

The International Library of Leadership brings together in one place the most significant writings on leadership, the process by which groups, organizations, and societies seek to satisfy their needs and achieve their objectives. Volume 1 focuses on classic discussions of perennial leadership issues including the moral purpose of leadership, the nature of legitimate authority, and the role of followers. Volume 2 turns to investigations of leadership in the modern era and makes available the seminal social scientific works that inaugurated the modern theories of leadership. Volume 3 builds upon the analyses of power, culture, and gender in the first two …

Moral Imagination, Joanne B. Ciulla

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

Moral imagination provides leaders with insight into others and the world and helps them make moral decisions and form visions. Leaders need imagination to determine the values they embrace and the feelings that these values engender in themselves and others. Leaders use imagination to animate values, apply moral principles to particular situations, and understand the moral aspects of situations. Imagination and moral values are the fundamental components of a vision.

Rites Of Passing: Foucault, Power, And Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to Catherine Bell, "The popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to modernization has been something of a sociological truism since the mid-19th century". Conventional wisdom maintains that ritual practices just don't hold central importance in the lives of those raised in the industrialized world as compared with the importance such things had for our distant ancestors or for our contemporaries in non-industrial societies. Some have contended that this is because ritual tends to be strongly correlated with pre-scientific cosmological beliefs that our society has for the most part outgrown. But for whatever reason, " [c]omparatively speaking," …

The Halcyon Tone As Birdsong, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Contained in one of Nietzsche's favorite words is the name of a seabird that flits back and forth across the landscapes and seascapes of Mediterranean reality, classical myth, and Nietzsche's imagination. Lexical authorities credit Nietzsche with reintroducing the word "halcyon [halkyonisch]" into the German language. That word will recall the "halcyon days," part of the metamorphic complex in the story of Alcyone, who lost her husband Ceyx at sea but was transformed along with him into a pair of seabirds, the female having the extraordinary characteristic of building a floating nest, in which she hatched her eggs during the weeks …

Dogs, Domestication, And The Ego, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In Zarathustra's "On the Vision and the Riddle," three animals-a spider, a snake, and a dog-make significant appearances, as do three human or quasihuman figures-Zarathustra himself, the dwarf known as the Spirit of Gravity, and the shepherd who must bite off the head of the snake. Of these animals, it is the dog who receives the most extended attention. Here, in the passage that along with "The Convalescent" (with its eagle and serpent) is usually and rightly taken to be Nietzsche's most articulate and yet highly veiled approach to explaining the teaching of eternal recurrence, the riddling vision involves animals. …

Sympathy And Approbation In Hume And Smith: A Solution To The Other Rational Species Problem, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart

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

This paper examines a key implication of the different conceptions of sympathy and the approbation associated with sympathy in the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. For Hume, sympathy is an empathy we feel for those like us and hence we are motivated to obtain the praise or approbation of those with whom we sympathize. In Hume’s construction there is a direct link from sympathy to motivation because sympathy is reflected self-love. By contrast, in Smith’s construction sympathy is an act of imagination which only habit makes motivational. The abstraction by our imagination means we earn the approbation (or …

Practicing Practicing, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"There is something ludicrous in philosophical discourse," Michel Foucault writes, "when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it... " (Foucault 1985, 9). In our age of moral relativism and multiculturalism, it is easy to hear in this sentence a simple condemnation of intellectuals who pose as authorities on questions of belief, and it is all too easy to agree; yes, of course, we ought not tell other people what to think. But given the issues, directions, and investments of Foucault's work, especially in The Use of …

Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Some economists consider their discipline a science, and thereby divorced from messy ethical details, the normative passions of right and wrong. They teach in a moral vacuum, perhaps even advocating economic agents' operating independently and avariciously, asserting that this magically produces the greatest good for society.

[Introduction To] Archaeologies Of Vision: Foucault And Nietzche On Seeing And Saying, Gary Shapiro

Bookshelf

While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that "the infinite relation" between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.

Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault's writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows …