Philosophy Commons^™

Do Ceos Get Paid Too Much?, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In 2003, CEOs of the 365 largest U.S. corporations were paid on average $8 million, 301 times as much as factory workers. This paper asks whether CEOs get paid too much. Appealing to widely recognized moral values, I distinguish three views of justice in wages: the agreement view, the desert view, and the utility view. I argue that, no matter which view is correct, CEOs get paid too much. I conclude by offering two ways CEO pay might be reduced.

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 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 …

Cartesian Certainty And The Infinity Of The Will, Joseph K. Cosgrove

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper interprets Descartes' conception of "certainty" as most fundamentally a function of the human will, controlling the cognitive encounter with the world.

Technology And Trust, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

We think of trust as the animating spirit of a prosperous society. Trust makes promises workable, credit extendable and contracts reasonable. If you try to make trust dispensable through a system of fail-safe controls, you end up with a stultifyingly cumbersome apparatus, and the cost of handling things would exceed the price of producing them. If there is no trust at all in the person who is buying a 50p ballpoint pen, you have to frisk the person to make sure he or she is not planning a hold-up, ascertain their identity by checking their fingerprint or retina, get at …

Bonhoeffer And The End Of Christian Ethics, Thomas D. Pearson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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.

A New Formalization Of Anselm's Ontological Argument, Timothy A. Robinson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Confronting Pornography: Some Conceptual Basics, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There can be no doubt, at this moment in history, that pornography is a truly massive industry saturating the human community. According to one set of numbers, the US porn industry's revenue went from $7 million in 1972 to $8 billion in 1996 ... and then to $12 billion in 2000.

Now I'm no economist, and I understand about inflation, but even so, it seems to me that a thousand-fold increase in a particular industry's revenue within 25 years is something that any thinking person has to come to grips with. Something is happening in this culture, and no person's …

Woman Centered: A Feminist Ethic Of Responsibility, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Feminists have been especially concerned, of course, with the particular personal and moral perils that may be associated with the sociopolitical situation( s) of women. In particular, as many have observed, the cultural assignment of women to various forms of "caring labor" can be harmful to women, both individually and collectively, by rendering them dangerously vulnerable to exploitation. Women who fail to rein in their "caring" for others may maintain relationships at all costs (including to themselves), avoid legitimate self-assertion in order to keep the peace, devote their energies to others at the expense of seIf-development, and protect even those …

Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution And Pornography, Christine Stark, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Including the latest research on prostitution and pornography, this essay anthology shows how the sex industries harm those within them while undermining the possibilities for gender justice, human equality, and stable sexual relationships. From sex industry survivors to social activists and theorists such as Taylor Lee, Adriene Sere, and Kristen Anderberg, this volume addresses from a feminist perspective the racism, poverty, militarism, and corporate capitalism of selling sex through strip clubs, brothels, mail-order brides, and child pornography.

Africa's Quest For A Philosophy Of Decolonization, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.

Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics And Social Theory, Peggy Desautels, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Book abstract: Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception, and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

Chapter abstract: Most of us view ourselves as having moral commitments and expect that when given the opportunity, we will follow through on these commitments. …

Kant And The Logic Of Aristotle, Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers his best-known—indeed, notorious—remark about Aristotle's logic:

• Since Aristotle . . . logic has not been able to advance a single step, and is thus to all appearance a closed and completed doctrine (Bviii).1

I wish to explore here the following question: is Kant in fact saying that since Aristotle, there need be no more concern about logic as a discipline or a field of study, that Aristotle (with some minor embellishments, in terms of presentation) is the last word in logic? Certainly that is how …

Book Review: Reading Lolita In Tehran By Azar Nafisi, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Azar Nafisi, now the Director of the Dialogue Project at John Hopkins University, does a fine job in this book of piecing together her life as an academic, especially the last two years of her residence in Tehran when she embarked on an adventure to supplement the education of a select group of university students. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a multilayered memoir about teaching Western literature in revolutionary Iran in the late 1990s.

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. …

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 …

Sylvester: Ushering In The Modern Era Of Research On Odd Perfect Numbers, Steven Gimbel, John Jaroma

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In 1888, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) published a series of papers that he hoped would pave the way for a general proof of the nonexistence of an odd perfect number (OPN). Seemingly unaware that more than fifty years earlier Benjamin Peirce had proved that an odd perfect number must have at least four distinct prime divisors, Sylvester began his fundamental assault on the problem by establishing the same result. Later that same year, he strengthened his conclusion to five. These findings would help to mark the beginning of the modern era of research on odd perfect numbers. Sylvester's bound stood …

Kinds Of Pragmatism, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It is hard to appreciate now what a liberating and invigorating force John Dewey's philosophy must have been. He did away with imperious dichotomies and absolutes, reconnected philosophy with the sciences, confronted technological revolutions, attended to the perils

The Headaches And Pleasures Of General Education, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

General education is one of the glories of American higher education; it is one of its major headaches as well. The concern for general education highlights some of the distinctive virtues of American universities and colleges. First it illustrates the ability to be open to different traditions and to forge them into something new. Liberal education, the older and still widely used term for general education, is the bequest of British higher education where it was taught to an elite of young gentlemen, destined for careers in politics and the professions. The notion of the well‐rounded gentleman in turn goes …

Despair, Liberation, And Everyday Life: Two Bundle Views Of Personal Identity, Kathy Behrendt

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper, intended for general readership, discusses the real-life effects that personal identity theory either has had or has apparently failed to have upon two philosophers: David Hume and Derek Parfit. Both arrive at similar and quite radical beliefs about personal identity. And both have documented the difficulty of sustaining these beliefs in their day-to-day lives. For those considering embarking upon philosophical study – whether formally or not – this last point may seem discouraging, reinforcing a picture of a discipline that even on the admission of its own practitioners has little impact on everyday life or concerns. I explore …

Against The Asymmetry Of Desert, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The concept of desert has traditionally played a central role in theories of both distributive and retributive justice. But while desert continues to play a central role in most contemporary theories of retributive justice, it plays little or no role in most contemporary theories of distributive justice. This asymmetric treatment of desert is prima facie strange. If people should have the punishment they deserve, shouldn’t they also have the social benefits they deserve? I first offer an intuitive argument against the asymmetry, then consider and reject four potential justifications of it. I do not claim that the asymmetry cannot be …

From Marxism-Leninism To Ethnicity: The Sideslips Of Ethiopian Elitism, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

For many scholars, colonialism and neocolonial policies remain the root causes of Africa's numerous impediments to its progress, ranging from the persistence of poverty to the ravages of ethnic conflicts. However, the number of scholars who prefer to ascribe these impediments essentially to the persistence of traditional views and methods and to the lack of reforms radical enough to trigger a sustained process of modernization is not negligible. My position contests this either-or debate and identifies the culprit as the rise of African elitism—a phenomenon implicating the specific effect of colonialism in conjunction with internal African contributions. I take the …

Book Review: Culture, Ideology And Society, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Fatos Tarifa’s Culture, Ideology and Society was my companion on a recent trip to the Balkans. Having read and reviewed one of his other books, The Quest for Legitimacy and the Withering Away of Utopia, I thought Culture, Ideology and Society would not only offer a glimpse of how a social scientist turned enlightened diplomat examines the lenses through which sociologists, philosophers, and film makers look at the world, but also some insight into the categories and concepts that are useful in better understanding the Balkans. I believe the book was somewhat successful at doing both.

Subjecting Dasein, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"Das 'Subjekt' ist eine Fiktion," Nietzsche declares in aphorism 370 of Der Wille zur Macht. There is no such thing as an ego, a unitary center of personhood that can be appraised and approved for its virtue and wisdom or blamed for its premeditated transgressions and irresponsible beliefs. Subjectivity does not exist. Despite Nietzsche's pervasive influence, however, the question of subjectivity - the ontological nature, the ethical status, and the epistemological significance of the human subject - has been a preeminent theme in Continental philosophy for the entirety of the twentieth century. Virtually all Conti­nental philosophers have found it …

Foucault's Political Spirituality, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recently, while rereading some material in The Essential Works of Foucault, I came upon a passage that pulled me up short and then sent me flying from my English translation to the French original. The passage, from an interview in May, 1978, contains one of Foucault’s infamous attempts to sum up his life’s work. It starts with the assertion that “since the beginning,” Foucault has been asking himself a certain question: “What is history, given that there is continually being produced within it a separation of true and false?” He elaborates, then, expanding that question into four sub-questions: (1) …

Against The "Ordinary Summing" Test For Convergence, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

One popular test for distinguishing linked and convergent argument structures is Robert Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. Douglas Walton, in his comprehensive survey of possible candidates for the linked/convergent distinction, advocates a particular version of Yanal's test. In a recent article, Alexander Tyaglo proposes to generalize and verify Yanal's algorithm for convergent arguments, the basis for Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. In this paper I will argue that Yanal's ordinary summing equation does not demarcate convergence and so his Ordinary Summing Test fails. Hence, despite Walton's recommendation or Tyaglo's generalization, the Ordinary Summing Test should not be used for distinguishing linked argument …

Ariadne's Thread: Walter Benjamin's Hashish Passages, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In a letter of 1932 to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin outlines his literary ambitions; he plans four major books, one of which would have been on hashish. The others were to include the Passagenwerk, his essays on literature, and his letters. It could be said that we now have those three books, if only in the form of sprawling and gigantic ruins. The Passagenwerk has been the object of many inspired and yet hopeless projects of reconstruction; the literary essays are available in German and other languages; and letters from throughout his life have been collected and published. All can be …