Philosophy Commons^™

Darwinism And The Meaning Of Life, Arthur Falk

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

Papers presented for the Center of the Study of Ethics in Society Western Michigan University.

Systems Metaphysics: A Bridge From Science To Religion, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

'Systems theory' is familiar to many as the scientific enterprise that includes the study of chaos, networks, and complex adaptive systems. It is less widely appreciated that the systems research program offers a world view that transcends the individual scientific disciplines. We do not live, as some argue, in a post-metaphysical age, but rather at a time when a new metaphysics is being constructed. This metaphysics is scientific and derives from graph theory, information theory, non-linear dynamics, decision theory, game theory, generalized evolution, and other transdisciplinary theories. These 'systems' theories focus on form and process, independent of materiality; they are …

Systems Metaphysics: A Bridge From Science To Religion [Presentation], Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

'Systems theory' is familiar to many as the scientific enterprise that includes the study of chaos, networks, and complex adaptive systems. It is less widely appreciated that the systems research program offers a world view that transcends the individual scientific disciplines. We do not live, as some argue, in a post-metaphysical age, but rather at a time when a new metaphysics is being constructed. This metaphysics is scientific and derives from graph theory, information theory, non-linear dynamics, decision theory, game theory, generalized evolution, and other transdisciplinary theories. These 'systems' theories focus on form and process, independent of materiality; they are …

On The Aims And Responsibilities Of Science, Hugh Lacey

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Zhong Hui (Chung Hui, 225–264 C.E.) In Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Zhong Hui (Chung Hui) was a major philosophical figure during China’s early medieval period (220-589 CE). An accomplished interpreter of the Laozi and the Yijing, Zhong Hui contributed significantly to the early development of xuanxue—literally “learning” (xue) of the “dark” or “mysterious” (xuan) Dao (“Way”), but sometimes translated as “Neo-Daoism“. He also was a major political figure whose ambition eventually led to his untimely demise. Virtually all of Zhong Hui’s writings have been lost, which perhaps explains why he has been given scant attention by students of Chinese philosophy. Had he not failed in his attempt to overthrow the regime …

[Book Review Of] After Asceticism: Sex, Prayer And Deviant Priests, By The Linacre Institute, Daniel B. Gallagher

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S Doctrine Of Eternal Return, David R. Gadon

Senior Honors Projects

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche challenges the reader to imagine that every moment of his or her life, every joy and every sorrow, every smile and every tear, will be repeated in exactly the same way from beginning to end. He asks us to envision these things recurring, not one more time, but for all infinity into the past and future alike. Amongst the many revolutionary and profound concepts put forward by the witty and vitriolic Nietzsche, there is none as inscrutable and seemingly inapproachable as this doctrine of eternal return of the same. In just three of his …

Commentary: Who Am I? Why Am I? (The Anguish Of A Clone), William Kevin Stoos

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Religiosity On Contraceptive Use Among Roman Catholic Women In The United States, Jennifer M. Ohlendorf, Richard J. Fehring

The Linacre Quarterly

No abstract provided.

The Tragedy Of Death In The Pursuit Of Spiritual Immortality, And The Physician’S Response, Rachel Furman

Senior Honors Projects

Life is a tragedy in the sense that it amounts to one single contradiction: man will die, and knows this, yet he still does not want to die. He thus spends his entire life fighting the battle to survive, though he knows that victory is impossible. That is, victory in the sense of corporeal immortality is impossible – but what happens to the soul? That human soul, which we have come to distinguish from the body by placing it above the temporal world, and equating it with eternity. Belief in immortality, in this case, spiritual immortality, is, according to Miguel …

Toward Salvation: Italo Calvino’S Wakeful Phenomenology, May C. Peckham

Senior Honors Projects

“Lightness.” The word remains inescapable when attending to the mysterious work of Italo Calvino. It appears elusively in the texts of his novels and acts as a catalyst to many of his critical endeavors. Calvino addresses most explicitly this concept of lightness in his collection of lectures entitled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Although these lectures were never delivered, they exist as a testament to the idea that “the boundless universe of literature” contains “new avenues to be explored, both very recent and very ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world” (Six Memos 7-8). …

Danto’S Embodied Meanings: Artworks As Morphemes, Alexander Douglas Coon

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract not Included

The Practice Of Self-Overcoming: Nietzschean Reflections On The Martial Arts, Michael Monahan

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Leaving A Leadership Legacy, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Research

The author reflects on the concept of leaving a leadership legacy on public administration. She states that it is all about making a difference and that means taking stands on things that matter in the field. It also means acting courageously where there is no money-back guarantee. Furthermore, she stresses that legacies are not just wishful thinking where public managers choose to leave will be based upon the life they lead.

Holding Onto Belief, Benny Nyikos

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

It seems that every major book of philosophy is composed of the author's personal views on the world. The philosopher presents his or her views not only to convince readers to take up his or her views but also to send the ideas in the book out for review and debate in order to test the reaction they receive. With this in mind, this paper will present ideas I have encountered in philosophy classes, read in books, and observed in the world at large. The focus will be on the claim that God is dead and what this means to …

Never November, Michael Ettel

Whittier Scholars Program

This is a two-part project. Part one is a 181-page novel titled Never November. The novel explores many universal questions about what it means to be human and to be alive. Part two is an afterword, notes on writing the story, a creative database of characters and important terminology, and a bibliography.

Aristotle On Mathematical Existence, Phil Corkum

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Do mathematical objects exist in some realm inaccessible to our senses? It may be tempting to deny this. For one thing, how we could come to know mathematical truths, if such knowledge must arise from causal interaction with non-empirical objects? However, denying that mathematical objects exist altogether has unsettling consequences. If you deny the existence of mathematical objects, then you must reject all claims that commit you to such objects, which means rejecting much of mathematics as it is standardly understood. For, as David Papineau (1990) vividly puts it, it is doublethink to deny that mathematical objects exist but to …

On The (In)Consistency Of Aristotle's Philosophy Of Time, Tiberiu Popa

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle’s mind-dependence theory of time is considerably more than an eccentric afterthought formulated in a short passage, as many believe; rather, it is firmly anchored in Physics IV, especially in Ch. 11. A number of formulations that may seem purely epistemic or propaedeutic in nature do in fact have ontological significance, pointing to the fact that time’s existence hinges crucially on our capacity to perceive change. Aristotle seems to be echoed in crucial respects by contemporary theories of time, notably by A. Grünbaum’s.

In Defense Of Boredom, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

Distributed Cognition And The Task Of Science, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This paper gives a characterization of distributed cognition (d-cog) and explores ways that the framework might be applied in studies of science. I argue that a system can only be given a d-cog description if it is thought of as performing a task. Turning our attention to science, we can try to give a global d-cog account of science or local d-cog accounts of particular scientific projects. Several accounts of science can be seen as global d-cog accounts: Robert Merton's sociology of scientific norms, Philip Kitcher's 20th-century account of cognitive labor, and Kitcher's 21st-century notion of well-ordered science. Problems that …

The Myth Of Technological Progress, Patrick Ryan

Inquiry Journal 2007

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, And The Horror Of Existence, Philip J. Kain

Philosophy

Nietzsche believed in the horror of existence—in a world filled with meaningless suffering. He also believed in eternal recurrence—that our lives will repeat infinitely and that in each life every detail will be exactly the same. Furthermore, it was not enough that eternal recurrence simply be accepted—Nietzsche demanded that it be loved. Thus the philosopher who introduces eternal recurrence is the very same philosopher who also believes in the horror of existence—a paradox that is completely overlooked by commentators (who thus fail to adequately understand Nietzsche). All of this demands careful explanation.

Socrates's Great Escape: Philosophy And Politics In The Crito, Matthew King

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Many contemporary students of Plato hold that the arguments Socrates gives the personified Laws in the Crito do not represent Socrates’s own views, but rather work on assumptions to which Crito adheres, but Socrates does not. But if the Laws’ arguments are not Socrates’s own, then we seem to be left with a bewildering problem: why would Plato provide us with arguments that Socrates does not believe in, for a conclusion which Socrates evidently does believe in? After all, Socrates does remain in prison to face his execution; evidently, he believes that that is what he ought to do. This …

The Tension Between Altruistic Character And Self-Serving Possession In A Classical Socio-Political Ethic, Jeremy S. Neill

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Much of the Nicomachean Ethics treats egocentrism as an ineffectual and pernicious social vice out of which humans ought to be habituated. In the Politics self-centeredness is almost universally portrayed as a useful and enduring constituent of human psychology. The system of private property described in the Politics can hardly be a necessary social institution when Aristotle claims in the Ethics that the habituation process is capable of permanently fixing our attention upon public and altruistic fiscal ventures. This interpretive discrepancy between the two texts demonstrates that Aristotle’s defense of private property is ineffectual in its attempt to preserve the …

"Wenn Vernunft Volle Gewalt Über Das Begehrungsvermögen Hätte": Über Die Gemeinsame Wurzel Der Kantischen Imperative, Konstantin Pollok

Faculty Publications

Kant hat mit seiner universalistischen, formalistischen und kognitivistischen Konzeption moralisch-praktischer Gründe in Gegenüberstellung zu seiner instrumentalistischen Konzeption nicht-moralisch-praktischer Gründe eine Begrifflichkeit geschaffen, die es erlaubt, handlungsleitende Überzeugungen hinsichtlich ihres Geltungsanspruchs und ihrer Verbindlichkeit zu differenzieren. Von einem ‚Sollen‘ spricht Kant in beiden Fällen. Nicht nur der kategorische Imperativ, der unbedingt gebietet, „ich soll niemals anders verfahren als so, daß ich auch wollen könne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden“ (GMS, AA 04: 402), sondern auch hypothetische Imperative, die bedingt gebieten, „ich soll etwas thun, darum weil ich etwas anderes will“1, nehmen bei Kant die normative Form eines ‚Sollens‘ an. …

Complexity, Fine-Tuning, And Multiple Universes: The Insufficiency Of Scientific Theories For Determining Metaphysical Views, Ashley Graham Kennedy

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Many argue that science can provide empirical evidence for the existence of God or a designer. In this thesis I examine three such arguments: the irreducible complexity argument from biochemistry, the fine-tuning argument from physics and the rare earth/privileged planet hypothesis from astronomy. I conclude that all three of the arguments fail to show whether or not the universe was designed, because science is not prepared to answer this question. Further, I argue that scientific theories, in general, cannot be used as the sole basis for metaphysical propositions.

An Ideal Approach To Global Warming, Hannah Lee Varn

Inquiry Journal 2007

No abstract provided.

The Philosophical Approach To God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

Philosophy & Theory

This book is a revised and expanded edition of three lectures delivered by the author at Wake Forest University in 1979. Long out of print, in its new edition it should be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of the philosophy of religion.

The first two lectures, after a critique of the incompleteness of St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous Five Ways of arguing for the existence of God, explore lesser-known resources of Aquinas’s philosophical ascent of the mind to God: the unrestricted dynamism of the human spirit as it reaches toward the fullness of being, and the strictly metaphysical ascent …

Reports Relating To The Fifty-Eighth Annual Meeting Of The Society, James A. Borland

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Review: 'Challenging Liberalism: Feminism As Political Critique', Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique, Lisa Schwartzman brings her sharp interpretive and critical perspective to bear on the vexed relationship between feminism and liberal political philosophy. Noting (as have others before her) that the latter's central values -- such as autonomy, individual rights, and equality -- are both indispensable to and sometimes problematic for feminism, Schwartzman argues that these values must be reinterpreted in light of the insights gained from an alternative, non-liberal, and specifically feminist philosophical methodology. In this book, she explains why such an alternative methodology is needed, outlines some of its distinctive features, and …