Philosophy Commons^™

Caring Globally: Jane Addams, World War One, And International Hunger, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Several feminist philosophers, including Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, and Fiona Robinson, see the need for, and the potential of, care ethics for achieving far-reaching political and even global transformation. Tronto recommends that care be used as "a basis for political change" and a "strategy for organizing" (Tronto 1993, 175). Held advocates that "the ethics of care should transform international politics and relations between states as well as within them" (Held 2006, 161).

During and immediately after World War One, Jane Addams attempted to do just that. She sought to bring perspectives and moral sensibilities that have since been theorized in …

Strokes Of Existence: The Connection Of All Things, Mari Gorman

Graduate Student Publications and Research

Acted or real—and all life is real whether one is acting or not—the common denominator and consistent, ubiquitous reality of life and all behavior is that it manifests in the form of relationships on all scales. But what is a relationship? Until now, the answer to this question has not been sufficiently known. As a result of many years of empirical research that began with the aim of discovering what is going on in a gifted actor when s/he is playing a character that can be observed and experienced as a living, intuitive being, and based on the knowledge that …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

A Pragmatist Cosmopolitan Moment: Reconfiguring Nussbaum's Cosmopolitan Concentric Circles, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Robert Fine and Robin Cohen conclude their essay “Four Cosmopolitan Moments” by stating that developing cosmopolitanism “has become an urgent moral necessity” (2002, 162). As resources for this task they offer the Stoics, Kant, Arendt, and Nussbaum as particularly important “moments” in the history of cosmopolitanism. David Held (2002, 57) shares their sense of urgency but worries that a Kantian understanding of political communities gives an inadequate basis for this task. David Hollinger identifies as “new cosmopolitans” an array of scholars who articulate alternatives to Nussbaum's universalism and Kymlicka's pluralism, in attempting “to connect the notion of a species-wide community …

History As A Detective Story, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Josephine Tey (nom de plume of Elizabeth MacKintosh). The Daughter of Time, with Introduction by Robert Barnard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; original copyright 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh). 206 pages. $14.00.

Between The Bounds Of Experience And Divine Intuition: Kant’S Epistemic Limits And Hegel’S Ambitions, James Kreines

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Hegel seeks to overturn Kant's conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic limits: First, we can have knowledge only within the “bounds of experience”. Second, we cannot have knowledge of objects that would be accessible only to a divine intellectual intuition, even though the faculty of reason requires us to conceive of such objects. Hegel aims to drive a wedge between these two characterizations, showing that we can have knowledge beyond Kant's bounds of experience, yet …

Review: Shepherds After My Own Heart: Pastoral Traditions And Leadership In The Bible, Donald L. Fowler

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Moral Philosophy And Moral Cultivation, William J. Prior

Philosophy

Moral cultivation is a practice, any practice, by which one attempts to direct the course of moral development either of oneself or others. The aim of this practice is the attainment of moral wisdom, or the closest approximation to that ideal that human beings can attain. In the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy, as well as in the Chinese tradition, the name often given to one who has attained moral wisdom is "the sage." Writers in the ancient Greek tradition, with which I shall be concerned here, attempt to show that the life of the sage is one that we …

Trading Quality For Quantity, Christopher Morgan-Knapp

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This paper deals with problems that vagueness raises for choices involving evaluative tradeoffs. I focus on a species of such choices, which I call ‘qualitative barrier cases.’ These are cases in which a qualitatively significant tradeoff in one evaluative dimension for a given improvement in another dimension could not make an option better all things considered, but a merely quantitative tradeoff for the given improvement might. Trouble arises, however, when one of the options constitutes a borderline case of an evaluative kind. I argue that in such cases we can neither affirm nor deny that trading off losses in one …

A Philosophical Examination Of Proofs In Mathematics, Eric Almeida

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Human Behavior: Self-Discrepancy Reduction, Derek Drake

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Moral Status, Moral Value, And Human Embryos: Implications For Stem Cell Research, Bonnie Steinbock

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Human embryonic stem cells (ES cells) are of scientific and medical interest because of their ability to develop into different tissue types and because of their ability to be propagated for many generations in laboratory culture. Grown in a laboratory, they might one day be used in the treatment of degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. They could provide bone cells for the treatment of osteoporosis, eye cells for macular degeneration, blood cells for cancer, insulinproducing cells for diabetes, heart muscle cells for heart disease, nerve cells for spinal cord injury. The potential for benefit to so many people …

Mcmahon On Workplace Democracy, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper offers a sympathetic critique of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management. Although I find fault with some of his arguments, my goal is not to show that these arguments are irreparable, but to highlight issues that deserve further consideration. After defining some terms, first, I raise an objection to McMahon’s rejection of the moral unity of management (MUM) thesis. Second, I draw attention to his “moralization” of the workplace, and examine the role it plays in his arguments about the relative strengths of the different kinds of authority. Third, I raise …

Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study In Philosophy And The Empirical, Jessica De Villiers, Robert Stainton, Peter Szatmari

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Hegel On Music, Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Ends Of Narrative, Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

We can begin to approach what might be called the peculiarity of literature as a form of cognitive practice by comparing how literary works end with how other pieces of intellectual work end. A proof in mathematics ends by reaching its final line, where each line that is not an axiom is generated in explicit accord with a rule of inference that in principle anyone might follow. Reports of experimental results generated in a lab specify procedures that were followed in setting up equipment and carrying out tests. While they often also offer conjectural interpretations of results and suggestions for …

How Sexist Is Aristotle's Developmental Biology?, Devin Henry

Data and Test Instruments

No abstract provided.

For Dignity Or Money: Feminists On The Commodification Of Women’S Reproductive Labour, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Aristotle, Females & Wind Eggs, John Thorp

Philosophy Presentations

No abstract provided.

Temples Of Caesar: The Politics Of Renaissance Georgics Translations, Kimberly Johnson

Quidditas

Between the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the regicide of Charles I, three major English translations of Virgil’s middle poem, the Georgics, were published. Each translation appeared at a moment of religio-political crisis in England, a coincidence made more significant by the ambivalent political stance of Virgil’s text, which simultaneously communicates praise for Octavian and suspicion about an imperial program that disenfranchised the agricultural classes, an oversight which Virgil records in the Georgics as impiety. This paper charts the ways in which seemingly innocent translation decisions manage to perform a critical interrogation of monarchal authority, particularly as it …

William Of Auvergne And Popular Demonology, Thomas De Mayo

Quidditas

Theologian and bishop of Paris during St. Louis’ early reign, William of Auvergne (d. 1249) aimed in his life and writings to combat the myriad threats he perceived as facing Christianity. The early thirteenth century saw many potential competitors to official doctrines concerning the natural and supernatural worlds—Arabic philosophy imported into the universities, heretical attacks on the institutional church, and persistent folk beliefs and practices. William attributed these challenges to an underlying demonic conspiracy directed against humankind. This paper examines William’s treatment of popular beliefs on the Wild Hunt, a mysterious congregation of spirits, and related beliefs about female spirits …

Rendering Shakespearean Rhetoric Visible In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Katherine Kickel

Quidditas

Traditionally, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery is considered an important moment in England’s art history narrative. In this essay, I argue that the Boydell collection also reflects a new preference for reading Shakespeare’s plays in the eighteenth century via its editorial illustration of parts of the plays that would not normally be emphasized in theatrical productions.

Vico’S New Science Of Interpretation: Beyond Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Hermeneutics Of Suspicion, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur, Habermas, Freud) and a redemptive hermeneutics (Gadamer, Benjamin). It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others.

The Powers Of Silence: Cistercian Monasticism As A Radical Critique Of Information Age Epistemology, Brad Rubin

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Universals And Particulars: Aristotle's Ontological Theory And Criticism Of The Platonic Forms, Brad Vezina

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

The Scepticism Of Francisco Sanchez, Damian Caluori

Philosophy Faculty Research

The Renaissance sceptic and medical doctor Francisco Sanchez has been rather unduly neglected in scholarly work on Renaissance scepticism. In this paper I discuss his scepticism against the background of the ancient distinction between Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism. I argue that Sanchez was a Pyrrhonist rather than, as has been claimed in recent years, a mitigated Academic sceptic. In keeping with this I shall also try to show that Sanchez was crucially influenced by the ancient medical school of empiricism, a school closely allied with Pyrrhonism.

“Once More Into The Breech…”, Dewey I. Dykstra

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Is There A Problem Of Induction For Mathematics?, Alan Richard Baker

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Implications Of New Vocabulary Assessments For Minority Children, Jill De Villiers, Valerie Johnson

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Decision Structuring In Important Real-Life Decisions, Kathleen M. Galotti

Cognitive Science Faculty Work

No abstract provided.