Philosophy Commons^™

The Promise Of A Liberal Arts Education, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It's an age-old concern. Just what is a liberal arts education supposed to be? It's far more than practical skills, argues Provost Dan DeNicola. Judging by the success of Gettysburg alums who majored in one field and now work in another, learning to think clearly and critically is key to the liberal arts.

The Self-Growth Of Vision And The Self-Repose Of Color: A Heideggerian Meditation On The Studio Paintings Of Jean Koeller, Charles Taylor

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Beyond Pluralism: Foucault's Strategic Counter To Heterosexist Categories, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most nonheterosexuals want to be guaranteed civil rights without regard to sexual practices; nevertheless, quite often, gay and lesbian activists formulate demands in ways that de-emphasize practice and emphasize identity. For example, instead of saying, "My having sex with women is irrelevant to the question of whether I should have custody of my child," a lesbian activist might say, "My lesbian identity is as moral and healthy as heterosexual identity and therefore should not prevent me from having custody of my child." The general claim is that lesbian or gay personhood is as good as heterosexual personhood, so lesbians and …

Nietzsche And Visuality, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Those who take Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts about the arts and related matters seriously have usually stressed his significance as a critic and theorist of literature, rhetoric, or music. From a biographical point of view, Nietzsche's notoriously poor eyesight would seem to make him a bad candidate to play a similar role with regard to the visual. His optical disability can also be turned into an asset by those who have been critical of the alleged ocularcentrism of Western thought. From that perspective, the philosophical tradition has been dominated by the model of what Plato called "the noblest of the senses," …

An Intervening Cause Counterexample To Railton’S Dnp Model Of Explanation, Stuart Gluck, Steven Gimbel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, nonpragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptiblet o a class of counterexamplesin volvingi nterveningc auses which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have …

Japan And Ethiopia: An Appraisal Of Similarities And Divergent Courses, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The idea of a comparison between pre-1935 Ethiopia with Japan before and during the Meiji Restoration arouses contradictory reactions among students of Ethiopia. Some find the idea indefensible, others judge it quite reasonable and instructive. Those who reject the parallel do so by emphasizing the social gap which separated Japan and Ethiopia, while those who welcome the idea base their arguments on historical similarities and on the identity of objectives of their respective modernizing circles. Thus, among the first group, Shiferaw Bekele contests the seriousness of a parallel between Japan and Ethiopia, arguing that the Ethiopian leaders had only a …

Descartes On Love And/As Error, Byron Williston

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Jane Addams On Autonomy And Responsibility, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Addams understands autonomy and responsibility from the perspective of American pragmatism. Like her collaborator and friend, John Dewey, Addams believes one ascertains an idea's meaning and truth by applying it in practice. Hull House was founded explicitly as a pragmatist test for her ideas on ethics and social change (Lagemann 1994, 77).

Verifying philosophical ideas rests on two methodological prerequisites: concrete experience and sympathetic understanding. Addams repeatedly stresses how emotions serve as the starting point for ethical change, although they need to be cultivated and guided by experience and reason. In addressing social problems, Hull House residents first gathered statistics …

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.

Pipe Dreams: Eternal Recurrence And Simulacrum And Foucault's Ekphrasis Of Magritte, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Michel Foucault invokes Andy Warhol at the conclusion of This is Not a Pipe; this comes at the end of a chapter entitled 'Seven Seals of Affirmation,' so that the words must be read with a Nietzschean resonance (recalling Zarathustra's 'The Seven Seals'):

A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.

I propose to explore the approach to the visual here which proceeds by deploying or presupposing conceptions of similitude, simulacrum, eternal recurrence and …

Bewitched, Bothered, And Bewildered: Reflections On Art, Fundamentalism, And Democracy, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This philosophical lecture explores the tension between art and morality, beginning with the opposing viewpoints—aestheticism and moralism—that one should trump the other. As exemplary case studies, several controversial art exhibits—works that fueled the culture wars of the 1980’s are examined to identify the concerns of advocates and critics. This leads to deeper reflections on the artistic assumptions of religious fundamentalism, the role of art in a democracy, and the possibility that artistic exploration can be a form of moral action.

Descartes' Meditations - Trilingual Edition, David B. Manley, Charles S. Taylor

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The publication of this English-Latin-French edition of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is quite simply an experiment in electronic scholarship. We decided to make this edition available and to encourage its free distribution for scholarly purposes. The idea behind the experiment is to see how others involved in electronic scholarship might put these texts to use. We have no predetermined ideas of what such use may be when transformed from this origin. The texts have no hypertext annotations except for those used for navigation. We invite others to download this edition and to create their own hypertext annotated editions and …

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 …

Deep Ecology And Natural Resource Industries: Some Lessons From A Fishing Boat, Christopher J. Preston

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Commercial fishing is one natural resource industry that has so far almost escaped the attention of the deep ecology movement. In this paper I will bring fishing into the debate. However, rather than write as a supporter of the deep ecology platform making certain recommendations about how fishermen ought to behave, I write as a part-time Alaskan fisherman who is familiar with the platform but anticipates conflicts between the platform and his trade. By reversing the usual direction of critique I hope to emphasize that the practical task of changing the way the industrialized world does business can only be …

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 …

Gestalt Shifts In Moral Perception, Peggy Desautels

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Moral philosophers often assume that there are clear and unambiguous single descriptions of particular moral situations, and thus they view their primary task as that of determining the most moral action to take when in these situations. But surely there is less chance of there being a single and final way to describe a given moral situation than there is of there being a single and final way to organize and describe a visual display. Although we perceive many of our day-to-day moral experiences in an unreflective and even reflexive manner, it is also possible for us to (and we …

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.

Textuality And Imagination: The Refracted Image Of Hegelian Dialectic, Frank Schalow

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Examines textuality and imagination with reference to the refracted image of Hegelian dialectical method. Attempts to modify, improve and revamp Hegel's dialectic; Suggestions made by Hegel in his discussion of the three realms of Absolute Sprit.

Information And Reality At The Turn Of The Century, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

The New Fuzziness: Richard Rorty On Education, Phillip E. Devine

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The New Fuzziness: Richard Rorty and Education is an examination of the works of Richard Rorty, focusing on his impact on education. Richard Rorty is "one of the most provocative and influential of contemporary thinkers writing in English." This unpublished manuscript is written by Dr. Philip E. Devine, Professor of Philosophy at Providence College.

Übersehen: Nietzsche And Tragic Vision, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Toward the end of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sketches the possibility of a rebirth of tragedy and tragic culture. At this point Nietzsche's seductive language reaches a kind of crescendo; all along he has been inviting the reader to share his sense of what ancient tragedy was, and he does this in part by implying that the question of one's tastes and sensitivities here are crucial in determining whether one is hopelessly caught in the anemic Alexandrian world of modernity (sometimes called "the culture of the opera," later to be called nihilism) or whether one is a candidate for …

Scientific Discipline And The Origins Of Race: A Foucaultian Reading Of The History Of Biology, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Foucault's "power-knowledge" is a controversial concept. Brought into English-speaking theoretical circles less than two decades ago, its meaning and range of applicability are still in dispute. While no one denies that some fields of social scientific knowledge (such as criminology) intersect institutionally with mechanisms of power, these intersections do not seem, to many, to constitute any essential relation of "mutual reinforcement" between knowledge and power. If, in rare cases, politics and scientific research are admitted to be mutually constitutive, the results of their mingling are typically dismissed as propaganda or pseudo-science. A few thinkers are willing to allow the entirety …

Go Figure! Refiguring Disfiguring, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his extraordinary book, Disfiguring, Mark Taylor bursts into the marketplace of the contemporary artworld by bringing together the idea of the death of God with that of the death of art. In the artworld prices of Van Goghs, Monets, and Warhols go up and down; the glossy journals like Art in America chronicle these values discreetly and contain prospectuses for investments, whether in the form of actual advertising or in the pieces pushing the latest artist or style, or looking for hidden value in an old one. In this marketplace the death of God is also, it seems, …

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 …

Moral Addicts, Anthony Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Moral exemplars are often depicted as those who go to extraordinary lengths in preventing suffering and eradicating injustice. Thus, figure like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King are apt to be identified as moral saints in the sense of being the morally best people. However, any adequate conception of moral excellence must be broader and more complex.

The Emergence Of The New American College, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The story of the "New American College" is about the development of a new kind of institution embodying a set of ideals which may resonate across all of higher education. It begins, however, with the humble matter of institutional taxonomy. How we classify our schools and colleges may seem an unexciting issue, but our classification systems reveal our assumptions, our expectations, and ultimately our values. Recall that a conceptual revolution, a breakthrough, is often presaged by an accumulation of classification problems, an accretion of anomalies, a proliferation of misfits. [excerpt]