Philosophy Commons^™

"Obviously Propositions Are Nothing": Russell And The Logical Form Of Belief Reports, Lenny Clapp, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Varieties Of Empiricism, David Matheson, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We argue that a sufficiently strong Empiricism calls into question key Quinean doctrines about analyticity and the indeterminacy of translation. This critique of Quine, the arch-Empiricist of the 20th Century, has a paradoxical air about it: under one construal, it looks as though we are using Empiricism to undermine itself. We explain away the air of paradox by highlighting quite distinct facets of traditional Empiricism. Ultimately, we suggest, the combination of an epistemological variety of Empiricism and a doxastic variety of Rationalism might in fact be the most defensible position - depending on how the empirical chips fall.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

“Women Of The Wild Geese”: Irish Women, Exile, And Identity In Spain, 1596–1670, Andrea Knox

Quidditas

Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was subject to major invasion and settlement. Tudor foreign policy towards Ireland attempted to introduce an English model of government and, during the reign of Elizabeth I, attempts were made to introduce the Protestant religion. During the sixteenth century both England and Ireland were the regular focus of European Catholic plots. This led the Tudor monarchs to invade Ireland with a double agenda: to prevent European invasion, and to subdue a country over which it had always been difficult to exercise any influence. Henry VIII invaded Scotland and France in the 1540s, and …

Interpreting Early Modern Woman Abuse: The Case Of Anne Dormer, Mary O'Connor

Quidditas

[T]hese hard laws I live under must keepe us from seeing one another.

Anne Dormer

When Anne Dormer, of Rousham, Oxfordshire, wrote to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, in August 1686, she complained that she would not be able to greet her on her return from a tumultuous year in France. Elizabeth (sometimes called Katherine) was married to the special envoy William Trumbull and had just endured the events of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Anne’s husband, Robert Dormer, had certain “laws” under which his wife had to live, one of which prohibited her from going to London to …

The Fall Of Troy And The Rise Of Elizabethan Drama: Empowering The Audience, Charles Whitney

Quidditas

The English Reformation, along with urbanization, commercial development, and other major social and cultural changes, both reflect and affect a multifaceted contestation of authority among genres and modes of discourse in the sixteenth century. Robert Weimann finds the Elizabethan period marked by clashes “between diverse authorities engaging in rivalry for the more persuasive image, logic, truth, and form of saying things,” as “the claims on God-given legitimacy of secular and ecclesiastical institutions...were irretrievably undermined.” Rather than accept the authority of a document, according to its type and status, before it was actually read, audiences tended to approach representations as sites …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

Marie Kelleher

This article does not appear in the current volume of Quidditas

Review Essay: Lucrezia Tornabuoni De’ Medici. Sacred Narratives, Deanna Shemek

Quidditas

Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici. Sacred Narratives. Ed. and trans. Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 286 pages plus notes and index.

Review Essay: Melitta Weiss Adamson, Ed. Regional Cuisines Of Medieval Europe: A Book Of Essays, Debby Banham

Quidditas

Melitta Weiss Adamson, ed. Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: a Book of Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Review Essay: Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, And English Renaissance Literature, Ken Jackson

Quidditas

Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Review Essay: J. A. Burrow. Gestures And Looks In Medieval Narrative, E. Ann Matter

Quidditas

J. A. Burrow. Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 200 pp.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Fearfully And Wonderfully Made, David L. Smith

Phenomenology Center Books

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction & The Department's Philosophical Anthropology (p. 15)

Chapter 2: The First Decennial (1959-1969) (p. 29)

Chapter 3: The Second Decennial (1969-1979) (p. 54)

Chapter 4: The Third Decennial ( 1979-1989) (p. 74)

Chapter 5: The Fourth Decennial (1989-1999) (p. 104)

Chapter 6: The New Millennium (1999-2000) (p. 136)

Oedipus And The Anoedipal Transsexual, Tamsin E. Lorraine

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Glimpsing Medusa: Astoned In The Troilus, Timothy D. O'Brien

Quidditas

In these pages I would like to consider the role of Medusa in Chaucer's Troilus—a modest enough enterprise except for the fact that there is not a single reference to this puzzling figure in the entire work, or in any of Chaucer’s other works for that matter. Such an absence does not of course mean absence of influence. After all, Chaucer does not mention Boccaccio, even though his Il Filostrato supplies the narrative material for and fundamental shape of the Troilus. Obscuring authorial indebtedness because of some “anxiety of influence” is one thing; alluding to a figure from …

An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A significant theoretical shift in the research community examining a class of terminal, infectious neurological disorders that includes Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru was assisted by rhetorical production. The local rhetoric of one laboratory, that of Professor Stanley B. Prusiner, involved first situating an heretical hypothesis within the framework of the orthodox narrative and then audaciously promoting that heresy. Another aspect of rhetorical production in this case involved situating a new language associated with the heretical hypothesis. To promote their new lexicon, the Prusiner team evoked orthodox values of consistency, efficiency, and collective ratification. Eventually, what was once …

Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain objections to Salmon's account of causal-mechanical explanation. I conclude by discussing how mechanistic explanations can provide understanding by unification.

Review Of Sharon Anderson-Gold, Unnecessary Evil: History And Moral Progress In The Philosophy Of Immanuel Kant (2001), Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Harry van der Linden's review of: Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant. By Sharon Anderson-Gold. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 138. ISBN 0-7914-4819-3 (hbk) $50.50; 0-7914-4820-7 (pbk) $17.95.

Reading Well: Notes On The Prayersand Tears Of Jacques Derrida, Margret Grebowicz

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Outer Spaces: Lyotard And Feminist Epistemology, Margret Grebowicz

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Vagueness, Ignorance, And Margins For Error, Kenton Machina, Harry Deutsch

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

We argue that the epistemic theory of vagueness cannot adequately justify its key tenet–that vague predicates have precisely bounded extensions, of which we are necessarily ignorant. Nor can the theory adequately account for our ignorance of the truth values of borderline cases. Furthermore, we argue that Williamson's promising attempt to explicate our understanding of vague language on the model of a certain sort of "inexact knowledge" is at best incomplete, since certain forms of vagueness do not fit Williamson's model, and in fact fit an alternative model. Finally, we point out that a certain kind of irremediable inexactitude postulated by …

The Essence Of Transpersonal Psychology Contemporary Views, S. I. Shapiro, Grace W. Lee, Philippe L. Gross

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The authors compiled 80 chronologically ordered passages from the contemporary psychology

literature that address the essence of transpersonal psychology. A thematic analysis of

these passages revealed that the two most frequent categories, occurring 53 (66.2%) and 49

(61.2%) times respectively, were: (a) Going beyond or transcending the individual, ego, self,

the personal, personality, or personal identity; existence of a deeper, true, or authentic Self;

and (b) Spirituality, psychospiritual, psychospiritual development, the spiritual, spirit. Other,

less frequent, themes included: special states of consciousness; interconnectivity/unity; going

beyond other schools of psychology; emphasis on a scientific approach; mysticism; full range

of consciousness; greater …

Unattached Mind, Shoshin Lchishima

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

NA

Arrest, Interrogation, Prison Life, V. V. Nailmov

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

NA

Dinomor: Evoking Memories Of Dino's Dreams And Death, Tonu R. Soidla

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This is a transpersonal fantasy about the last days of the dinosaurs ca. sixty-five million years ago. I suppose that communication with the Timeless (or if one prefers to put it--with Another) in one's mind precedes intraspecies communication and that one of the first recognizable acts of mystical life is surrender. A more specific and of course more far-out and irreverent hypothesis underlying this fantasy is that--unlike the bulk of individual memory records--Timeless memory "seeds" of unspecified origin are transmittable by a [retro]enterovirus. This leads to the possibility of horizontal transmission of this type of memory. In the new host, …

A Priestly View Of Bible Arithmetic: Deity's Regulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology, Ernest G. Mcclain

Research Resources

Reading arithmetic proportion in the bible via musical hermeneutics, this essay emphasizes the important role of music in predominantly aural cultures. Applying Patrick Heelan's non-distributive lattice logic to examples extracted from the bible, McClain applies the notion of regulative aesthetic activity to the Davidic musicology embedded in Bible mathology.  Includes several illustrative diagrams.

Getting At The Rapture Of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly And Visual Experience, Leo J. O'Donovan Sj

Research Resources

Leo J. O'Donovan offers an art-critical account of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly including a comprehensive overview of his career and his attention to color and to vision. O'Donovan explores context and situation to raise questions of painterly color and atmosphere:

Citation:

Leo J. Donovan, "Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly and Visual Experience." In: Babette Babich, ed., Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Hermeneutic Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 295—300.

The Virtue Of Civility In The Practice Of Politics (Chapter Three Of The Virtue Of Civility In The Practice Of Politics), Philip D. Smith

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Excerpt: "This chapter has more than one goal. First, I want to introduce readers to the apparatus of practices, institutions and virtues (PIV) that helps us understand what virtues are. Second, I want to explore the notion of politics a little, to see what its main problem is. (I will claim, perhaps surprisingly, that business management is largely a variation of politics.) Third, I want to reintroduce civility and suggest that it is an important contributor to solving the political problem (and problems of management).

Throughout this chapter, I will emphasize process. As we shall see, process is integrated in …

The Demonization Of Sidney’S Cecropia: Erasing A Legal Identity, Stephanie Chamberlain

Quidditas

In October fo 1533, fourteen-year-old Catherine de' Medici married Henri, duc d'Orléans in a union meant to secure a favorable political alliance between Francis I, the King of France and Pope Clement VII, her uncle and legal guardian. When, however, the Pope unexpectedly died less than a year later, Catherine’s symbolic worth virtually died as well: leaving a less than enamored France to bear the burden of one whose status, as R. J. Knecht has noted, “was immediately reduced to that of a foreigner of relatively modest origins.”1 When Henri unexpectedly died following a ceremonial jousting match in 1559, Catherine …

Review Essay: Richard Utz. Chaucer And The Discourse Of German Philology: A History Of Reception And An Annotated Bibliography Of Studies, Anita Obermeier

Quidditas

Richard Utz. Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793–1948. Making the Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. xxi + 446 pp.