Philosophy Commons^™

Framing Intelligibility, Identity And Selfhood: A Reconsideration Of Spatio-Temporal Models, Sally Munt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The relationship between intelligibility and identity over the past thirty years has largely been approached through the linguistic construct of the subject. Proposing that our subjectivities be theoretically comprehended (made intelligible) as discursive effects is now common sense. Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that the subject is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the subject, formulated as it has been …

When Artists Fail: A Reply To Trivedi, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

In a recent article, ‘An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism’, Saam Trivedi argues that the way we ought to interpret artworks is best understood using the model proposed by hypothetical intentionalism. Trivedi alleges that actual intentionalism faces a serious dilemma, the upshot of which is that actual intentionalists must choose between redundancy and indeterminacy. Largely on the basis of this dilemma, he concludes that even if actual intentionalism is descriptively accurate, it is prescriptively untenable. In this essay, I focus on this alleged dilemma and argue that, contra Trivedi, it fails to undermine the prescriptive legitimacy of moderate actual intentionalism. …

Neutrosophy, A New Branch Of Philosophy, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper is presented a new branch of philosophy, called neutrosphy, which studies the origin, nature, and scope of neutralities, as well as their interactions with different ideational spectra. The Fundamental Thesis: Any idea is T% true, I% indeterminate, and F% false, - where T, I, F are standard or non-standard subsets included in ]0-, 1+[. The Fundamental Theory: Every idea tends to be neutralized, diminished, balanced by ideas (not only , as Hegel asserted) - as a state of equilibrium. Neutrosophy is the base of neutrosophic logic, a multiple value logic that generalizes the fuzzy logic, of neutrosophic …

Analisa Kritis Pemikiran India : Kajian Kes Ke Atas Sistem Astika Darshana, Rajaretnam Vejayan

Student Works (2000-2009)

Secara naluri, dalam hati sanubari setiap manusia terdapat keinginan bagi metafizik iaitu untuk mengetahui dan memahami apa yang wujud di luar misteri dan tabir ilusi alam semulajadi dan dunia material ini. Keinginan manusia ini merangkumi semua manusia dari orang gasar kepada masyarakat yang berperadaban tinggi. Falsafah India klasik yang bermula pada sejak zaman veda tidak sahaja melatih pengikutnya untuk melihat kebenaran metafizik, ia menawarkan satu cara pemikiran yang membolehkan seseorang untuk memahami secara rasional realiti yang telah dialami oleh tokoh-tokoh yang terkabul dan sempurna,' dengan itu ia memimpin manusia untuk menyedari kebenaran. llmu kebenaran yang terkandung di dalam sistem astika …

Breaking The Mimetic Contract: Notes On Ideology, Intersubjectivity, And Film Theory, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this essay we would like to sketch out a few notes outlining historical and theoretical trajectories of the confusing, and often confused, relationships between ideology, history and subjectivity in Marx, Marxism and post-Marxism. Marx and Engels' approach to ideology in The German Ideology (1845-46), spawned and influenced a variety of interpretations and philosophical positions from not only the numerous schools of Marxism proper, but also structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis up to the very raison d'être of discourse theory and new historicism. This reaching influence occurs only at the cost of contradiction, however, between Marxist factions -- disagreements …

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …

Ideology And Public Sphere: A Preliminary Bibliography, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Bibliography accompanies Bertellini & Sellors article Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory

Navigating The Starless Night: Strategies For Understanding Autobiogeography, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestrial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once …

Theistic Activism And The Euthyphro Dilemma, David Baggett

Faculty Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on the Euthyphro question, from one of the Socratic dialogues, understood in terms of the following dilemma posed against theistic ethics: (1) Either what is good/right is moral because God commands it, or it is not. (2) If what is good/right is moral because God commands it, then the good/right is arbitrary and vacuous. (3) If what is good/right is moral for reasons other than that God commands it, then God is superfluous from the standpoint of morality. (4) So, either the good/right is arbitrary and vacuous or God is superfluous to morality.

The dilemma is really …

Kant And Capital Punishment Today, Nelson T. Potter

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

We will consider alternative ways that Kant’s philosophical views on ethics generally and on punishment more particularly could be brought into harmony with the present near consensus of opposition to the death penalty. We will make use of the notion of the contemporary consensus about certain issues, particularly equality of the sexes and the death penalty, found in widespread agreement, though not unanimity. Of course, it is always possible that some consensuses are wrong, or misguided, or mistaken. We should not put too much philosophical weight on the notion of a consensus here. If there is a consensus for the …

Ultra-Strong Internalism And The Reliabilist Insight, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

When someone believes something that is justified for her, what part does the subject play in her state of being justified? I will answer this question by developing a strong internalist account of justification according to which the justification of a believing for a subject consists in her having grounds for her belief, and holding the belief in recognition of those grounds. But the internalist theory I defend incorporates key elements of reliabilism into its account. Using perception as a model for justification, I show how ordinary perceivers would appeal to external factors to support their perceptual beliefs, and normally …

The 'Most Important And Fundamental' Distinction In Logic, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper I argue that the debate over the purported distinction between deductive and inductive arguments can be bypassed because making the distinction is unnecessary for successfully evaluating arguments. I provide a foundation for doing logic that makes no appeal to the distinction and still performs all the relevant tasks required of an analysis of arguments. I also reply to objections to the view that we can dispense with the distinction. Finally, I conclude that the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments is not one of the most important and fundamental ideas in logic, but rather is unnecessary.

Critical Thinking By Alec Fisher (Book Review), G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The aim of Critical Thinking is to explicitly and directly teach critical thinking skills and to facilitate the use of these skills to subjects and contexts beyond critical thinking (v, 1). Though the book is primarily intended as an introductory textbook for the teaching of critical thinking, Fisher maintains that the "material is presented in such a way that it can be worked through on a self-study basis"(vi).

The Genesis Of Feyerabend's 'Incommensurability Thesis' And Its Relationship To His Philosophy Of Science And Society, Sim Hui Tee

Student Works (2000-2009)

This thesis explores the genesis of Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis and its relationship to his philosophy of science and society. The exposition commences with an introduction to the origin of incommensurability thesis in chapter one. A brief outlook of the concept is introduced. In the second chapter, intellectual influences of Popper and Wittgenstein on Feyerabend is examined. With these intellectual linkages in sight, Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis is elaborated in the light of philosophy of science, in chapter three. In the consequent chapter, the focus shifts towards Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis in the perspective of his philosophy of society. In the last chapter, …

Philosophical Counseling For Counselors, Lou Matz

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

One promising form of philosophical practice is to conduct workshops on philosophical counseling for counselors. Since licensed professionals, such as Marriage and Family Counselors and Licensed Clinical Social Workers sometimes confront situations that raise philosophical issues and usually have a philosophical perspective that informs their practice, they could profit from a workshop on philosophical counseling; the workshop also qualifies for continuing education units (CEUs) that are typically required to renew their licenses. This paper describes the principal purposes of a workshop for counselors, the structure of two such workshops, and suggestions for improvement of future workshops.

The Observing Body: Quantum Mechanics, The Anthropic Principles, And Panopticism, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When philosopher of history and science Michel Serres wrote of that rare and narrow passage between the human sciences and the exact sciences [1], he intended to suggest not only the infrequency and difficulty of such contact, but also the unwillingness on either side to engage in what could be a dangerous, low-profit venture. It seems a long haul back to our common origins in philosophia, and typically, efforts to regain common ground between the disciplines have approached the problem as a one-sided move from the exact sciences to the study of the humanities. Notable exceptions such …

Pengaruh Falsafah Pascamoden Dalam Pemikiran Barat, Nafisiah Abdul Rahman

Student Works (2000-2009)

Postmodermisme is one of the idea which first discussed since the First World War. The prime development of the idea is obviously seen since the last three decades until now, especially in the aspects of epistemology, art, music and architecture. The development of the idea has urged the writer to study the pattern of this idea specially on how it adopts/spreads into the western thought. To complete this writing, the writer took nearly six months just to study on all relevant references of available resources before the writing began. All the references were borrowed from the main library of University …

Externalism And Knowledge Of Comparative Content, Yoo Guan Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts, which in turn, are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are also what the predicates of our language express. According to a tradition going back to Plato, questions about comparative content – questions of the form Is concept F the same as concept G? – are purely about relations of ideas, and so are answerable a priori. This does not mean that no experience at all is necessary to answer such questions, for experience may be needed to grasp their content. Call a piece of information about Fs extraneous if it is not required …

Ethical Pluralism From A Classical Liberal Perspective, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Is the ideal society one that embodies or aims for ethical uniformity, orone that emphasizes instead the accommodation of ethical pluralism?From a classical liberal perspective the answer can only be that ethicalpluralism should be accommodated.

Husserl's Notion Of The Natural Attitude And The Shift To Transcendental Phenomenology, Sebastian Luft

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Paintings And Photographs, Introduction To "William Wegman", Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Qu'est-Ce Qu'une Loi Dans Les Lois?, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Ethical Values Of Islam And Confucianism : A Comparative Study, Omar Min Ke Qin

Student Works (2000-2009)

Islam and Confucianism are two great traditions of mainly Asian people. which have encountered in China since very beginning of Islam's advent to this world, and are in direct confrontation to one another especially in the South East Asian and Pacific Region in the modern time. With the rapid development of the region in all aspects of sciences particularly economic enhancement, works in making the two traditions understand each other increasingly appear important and inevitable. Major common senses between Islam and Confucianism lie mainly in ethics, in which a considerable amount of values are almost having the 􀀝e implications, and …