Philosophy Commons^™

Complex Thinking: The Emergence Of Everything?, Alan Richard Baker

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

From Epistemology To Aesthetics, Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Science And Human Well-Being: Toward A New Way Of Structuring Scientific Activity, Hugh Lacey

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Philosophy Of Religion, Hugh Lacey, D. V. Porpora

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Invented Worlds: India Through The Camera Lens Of Waswo X. Waswo, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Geoaesthetics: New Orleans, Landscape, And Eros, Robert Frodeman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The success of contemporary society in producing knowledge serves to highlight the breakdown between knowledge production and its use. New Orleans and Katrina offer one example of this breakdown. All the knowledge necessary for acting beforehand was available; the problem was not one of knowledge but of will. Geoaesthetics, appropriating the erotic nature of our relationship to the land, is offered as an inter- and transdisciplinary means for making disciplinary knowledge more pertinent.

Implied World Views In Pictures: Reflections From A Cognitive Psychological And Anthropological Point Of View, Michael Ranta

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In traditional art history, iconological attempts to analyze visual works of art by treating their formal and semantic features as symptoms of more general, implied world views or cultures have occurred rather frequently. Still, such attempts have been criticized for permitting subjective and non-verifiable interpretations. In this paper, however, I will argue that (i) pictorial works of art indeed imply wider world views or schemata, and (ii) that our comprehension of these schemata can be explained by taking into account recent research within cognitive psychology. More specifically, I will argue that intelligence partly consists of the storage and retrieval of …

Nietzsche's Debt To Kant's Theory Of The Beautiful In 'Birth Of Tragedy', R. Kevin Hill

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Nietzsche describes Birth of Tragedy as a contribution to “the science of aesthetics”. In this paper, I will argue that a crucial influence on his emerging views was Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Nietzsche’s early aesthetic views are often attributed to some combination of Schopenhauer’s analyses of the plastic arts (inspiring Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollinian) and his analysis of music (inspiring Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian) along with Nietzsche’s own original insights into how these combine to form the tragic. As we shall see, the resources of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics were unavailable to Nietzsche due to epistemological commitments he had …

The New York Police Officer: Democratic And Moral Accountability In Conflict, Sarah Ryan, Dan Williams

Publications and Research

The following case draws upon two views of accountability. One is democratic accountability the other is accountability to one's own moral conscience. As the story unfolds, other facts may get in the way but these central views should not be forgotten. The focus of this case is on the individual. However, the material also covers institutional decisions and policies that deserve considering. The institutional story is the background, not the foreground, of this case. Yet, when the institutional features are considered, they may give new insight to the individuals' decisions.

Resembling Nothing: Image And Being In Plato, Yancy Hughes Dominick

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

A crucial application of Plato’s views on the use of images in philosophy occurs through the use of the image relationship as an image for the relation of forms and particulars. The relation of a picture to the object it depicts, or that between a reflection and what it reflects, can be seen as analogous to the relation of a particular to the form in which it participates. Although the attack on the image model as analogous to the relation of forms and particulars in the Parmenides threatens to undermine any reliance on that model, this essay will present a …

Leibniz And China: A Commerce Of Light By Franklin Perkins (Review), Robin R. Wang

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

On The Reliability Of Moral And Intellectual Virtues, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Philosophy And Theology: Notes On Pro-Life Consistency, Personhood Potentiality, And Prayer For Healing, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Why Is Beauty Form? Plotinus’ Theory Of Beauty In Phenomenological Perspective, Eric Perl

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Not A Four-Letter Word, Timothy Shanahan

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

What Is Democracy, And Is It The One?, Scott Smith

The University Dialogue

No abstract provided.

Review: Biblical Faith And Other Religions: An Evangelical Assessment, Michael S. Jones

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S Conception Of Friendship, Ryan C. Kinsella

Theses

Interpreting Friedrich Nietzsche’s unorthodox conception of friendship is the focus of the following dissertation. In couching his conception of friendship within his naturalistic philosophy of the human person and his morality, I aim to establish the central importance of friendship in Nietzsche’s philosophy. An equally important second aim is to demonstrate how Nietzsche’s philosophy of friendship is distinctly constructive in contrast to other aspects of his philosophy. These aims are addressed in three chapters: in the first chapter I examine how Nietzsche discusses friendship in his works, in what tone he discusses friendship, and I will briefly discuss how his …

A Theory Of Argument (Book Review), G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

A Theory of Argument is an advanced textbook “written for upper-level undergraduate students who have completed at least one prior course in argumentation theory, critical thinking, informal logic, formal logic, or some other related discipline” (ix). This puts Vorobej’s book in a unique position since, to my knowledge, there are no other second course undergraduate textbooks with a nonsymbolic focus. (Second course symbolic logic textbooks written for undergraduates, rather than primarily for graduate students, were relatively rare until recently; the past decade has seen a proliferation in such texts.)

Walton On Argument Structure, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In previous work I argued against (i) the likelihood of finding a theoretically sound foundation for the linked/convergent distinction and (ii) the utility of the distinction even if a sound theoretical basis could be found. Here I subject Douglas Walton’s comprehensive discussion of the linked/convergent distinction found in Argument Structure: A Pragmatic Theory to careful scrutiny and argue that at best Walton’s theory remains incomplete and that attempts to fill out the details will run afoul of at least one of the problems adduced above—i.e., result in either a theoretically unsound distinction or a theoretically sound, but unnecessary distinction.

On A Moral Right To Civil Disobedience, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this essay I argue that citizens of a liberal-democratic state, one that I argue has a morally justified claim to political authority, enjoy a moral right to engage in acts of suitably constrained civil disobedience, or what I will call a moral right to public disobedience. Such a claim may well appear inconsistent with the duty usually thought to correlate to a legitimate state’s right to rule, namely, a moral duty to obey the law. If successful, however, the arguments that follow entail that the duty correlative to a liberal-democratic state’s justified claim to political authority is in fact …

Old Icelandic Gaglviðr, Aurelijus Vijūnas

Quidditas

This essay discusses a debated word form gaglviðr occurring in stanza 42 of the Old Icelandic poem VÄluspá 'The Prophesy of the Seeress'. The noun gaglviðr is problematic both from the semantic point of view (Old Icelandic gagl 'gosling', viðr 'tree; forest' 'gosling forest'?), and because it possesses a variant spelling galgviðr ('gallows' tree;’gallows' forest') which occurs in another manuscript containing the same poem. In the present paper, the form gaglviðr is considered to be the correct and the original form of this word, whereas the form galgviðr is interpreted as a scribal error. Various existing semantic analyses of the …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2006)

Quidditas

Margaret Harp

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Twentieth-Century Illustrators’ Interpretations Of The Works Of Rabelais, Margaret Harp

Quidditas

Gustave Doré's mid-nineteenth-century illustrations of François Rabelais's oeuvre have become as well-known as the text itself: their fanciful details capture the literally larger-than-life personality of the French sixteenth-century humanist's protaganist-giants, Pantagruel and Gargantua. Equally intrigued by the thematic complexity and imaginative narrative of this Renaissance masterpiece, subsequent artists and illustrators of Rabelais continue to create new and unexpected artistic representations. This paper presents the illustrations of a lesser-known twentieth-century French wood engraver, Jean Chièze. His notable contributions to a 1935 commemorative edition of Pantagruel simultaneously highlight the medieval woodcut, emphasize the playful tone of Rabelais's narrative and allude to contemporary …

Cockroaches, Or Worlds As Images, Nathalie Blanc

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The cockroach is an insect of tropical origin whose presence in urban space draws our attention to the fact that the city is not only an artificial and controlled universe but also a porous one because of the interstices through which the animals slip. This article analyzes the role of animals in cities, and more particularly of the cockroach, in the city dweller's imagination and in the construction of an aesthetic experience of urban life. Imagination, metaphor, and domestication are the clues to understanding a sharp, active thought of the lived environment. One will thus approach the place of aesthetics …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Aesthetics And The Environment: Repatriating Humanity, Nikolaos Gkogkas

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

If aesthetics is to claim its place among the fundamental philosophical disciplines, it must adequately deal with the ecological challenge, that is, the need to explain the continuity-relation between human and non-human environments. To that effect, Arnold Berleant's aesthetics of engagement constitutes an attractive proposal. Its critics (Allen Carlson and others) seem to miss its point and attack it on the basis of a particular understanding of Kantian aesthetics (mainly the disinterestedness thesis). But not only can Berleant's aesthetics meet the ecological challenge; it is also possible that it encourages a re-evaluation of traditional aesthetic categories (like disinterestedness) without necessarily …

Words And Worlds: Irony Makes Literary Creations, Alastair Goff

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I take up anew the suggestion recurrent in the work of Kierkegaard and Lukács, among others, that literature is fundamentally ironic. Literary creations, I argue, are ironic because they convey the real world, even though the worldhood of this world is ineffable. In creating a world from words in a novel or poem, the author confronts his or her own skepticism about the possibilities of written expression. Literary creations are only completed when the reader is able to engage with the world of words that is constituted in the work, and to realize that what is said …

Paleolithic Flints: Is An Aesthetics Of Stone Tools Possible?1, Riva Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper asks whether an aesthetics of Paleolithic tools is possible, and if so, what it might be. The application of our own aesthetic sensibilities to artifacts of prehistory is not difficult. We easily recognize and appreciate their visual and tactile qualities. The more complicated questions that the paper explores are whether we can uncover the aesthetic sensibilities of their makers and, if we cannot, whether aesthetic examination of prehistoric tools from our own perspectives is adequate or useful. The paper is based on study of Paleolithic flints from French archaeological sites dating from about 500,000 years ago to about …

Architecture Vs. Art: The Aesthetics Of Art Museum Design[1], Larry Shiner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Many art critics have complained that the most dramatic art museum designs of the last decade have upstaged or interfered with the art within. This essay examines eight contemporary cases before drawing some lessons for art museum design, and ends by setting the architecture vs. art problem in the context of the philosophy of architecture, focusing on the issues of function and symbolism.