Philosophy Commons^™

After Utopia: Three Post-Personal Subjects Consider The Possibilities, Jeffrey P. Cain

English Faculty Publications

Review essay.

The task for those exploring the relationship of Deleuze to cultural issues is not to extend his thought in a straight line, but to swerve or veer into thinking a productive approach to the cultural events that actualise themselves in our time. Cain states that the virtue of these three books is that they do not simply go back to the same old questions; all of them represent departures in thinking in the best sense of the word.

William E. Connolly (2008). Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Alexander García Düttmann (2007). …

Teaching The Black Death, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

John Alberth, ed. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348- 1350: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 200 pages. $14.95.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ed. The Black Death. Problems in European Civilization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 206 pages. $37.99.

Using John Wilders To Teach Shakespeare’S Second Tetralogy, Edmund M. Taft

Quidditas

John Wilders. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. 154 pp.

“O thoughts of men accurst!

Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.”

(2 Henry 4.1.3.107-108)

The Practice Of Ethics, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

The point of this talk is not to school you in the practice of ethics, but to raise questions about the practice of ethics. There is a standard picture of the practice of ethics that goes like this:

Ethical theory is done in a classroom. It is divided into normative theory, meta-ethics, and descriptive ethics. Students learn to see how the ethics in their society and community works; they learn how to discover true ethical beliefs and sometimes discover them during class. Through meta-ethics, they understand what it is to have an ethical belief. Then –and here comes the practice …

Price Gouging, Non-Worseness, And Distributive Justice, Matt Zwolinski

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops my position on the ethics of price gouging in response to Jeremy Snyder's article, "What's the Matter with Price Gouging." First, it explains how the "nonworseness claim" supports the moral permissibility of price gouging, even if it does not show that price gougers are morally virtuous agents. Second, it argues that questions about price gouging and distributive justice must be answered in light of the relevant possible institutional alternatives, and that Snyder's proposed alternatives to price gouging fare worse on the dimension of justice than a system in which goods are allocated by a system of market …

Barack Obama, Resort To Force, And U.S. Military Hegemony, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Just War Theorists have neglected that a lack of “just military preparedness” on the side of a country seriously undermines its capability to resort justly to military force. In this paper, I put forth five principles of “just military preparedness” and show that since the new Obama administration will seek to maintain the United States’ dominant military position in the world, it will violate each of the principles. I conclude on this basis that we should anticipate that the Obama administration will add another page to the United States’ history of unjust military interventions.

Ephemeral Mechanisms And Historical Explanation, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms—e.g., clocks or synapses – actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and capricious. In this paper I shall argue that, notwithstanding their ephemeral nature, these processes deserve to be …

Questioning The Resort To U.S. Hegemonic Military Force, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This paper seeks to defend the thesis that this American project of military hegemony has a variety of global security costs of such combined magnitude that there is a strong prima facie case against the resort to armed force by the United States, so that its wars might be wrong even when there is a just cause. My thesis is based on the jus ad bellum principle of proportionality.

From Hiroshima To Baghdad: Military Hegemony Versus Just Military Preparedness, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this paper I question the morality of U.S. military supremacy or hegemony in terms of what constitute the legitimate use of military force and the proper preparation for using such force. I first discuss in a somewhat synoptic fashion how American hegemonic military force (from its very beginning with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) has been justified in dishonest ways and wrongly executed. Next, I show that Just War Theory (JWT) needs to be revised in order to come to a convincing assessment of U.S. military hegemony and its use of military force. This leads me …

Invariance: A Tale Of Intellectual Migration, Steven Gimbel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The plotline of the standard story told about the development of intellectual history at the end of the 19th/turn of the 20th century follows the move from absolutism to perspectivalism. The narrative takes us, on the one hand, from the scientism of late Enlightenment writers like Voltaire, Mill, D’Alebert, and Comte and the historical determinism of Hegel, all of which were based upon a universal picture of rationality, to, on the other hand, the relativistic physics of Einstein, the perspectival art of Picasso, and the individualism of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard leading to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to and …

Paratragedy In Plato's Gorgias, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Gender And Violence In Focus: A Background For Gender Justice In Reparations, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Sticks And Stones: The Philosophy Of Insults, By Jerome Neu, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Parody In Plato’S Menexenus, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Preface Of "The History Of Analytic Aesthetics", Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impression Of Peter Lamarque And Others' Visits, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Phänomenologische Und Mundane Reduktion, Sebastian Luft

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Cultural Identity Of Art Works, Curtis Carter, Disikate Ke, Min Yu, Chengji Liu

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

A History Of Contemporary Aesthetics 1996-2006, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Friedrich Schelling, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Ink Paintings, Curtis L. Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Artists And Social Change, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Taming Augustine’S Monstrosity: Aquinas’S Notion Of Use In The Struggle For Moral Growth, Theresa W. Tobin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

In Book VI of his Confessions, Saint Augustine offers a detailed description of one of the most famous cases of weakness of will in the history of philosophy. Augustine characterizes his experience as a monstrous situation in which he both wills and does not will moral growth, but he is at odds to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s action theory offers important resources for explaining Augustine’s monstrosity. On Aquinas’s schema, human acts are composed of various operations of intellect and will, and thus are subject to disintegration. In order to capture the gap in …

Sagp Newsletter 2008/9.2 Central, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

A Logistic Approximation To The Cumulative Normal Distribution, Shannon R. Bowling, Mohammad T. Khasawneh, Sittichai Kaewkuekool, Byung R. Cho

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper develops a logistic approximation to the cumulative normal distribution. Although the literature contains a vast collection of approximate functions for the normal distribution, they are very complicated, not very accurate, or valid for only a limited range. This paper proposes an enhanced approximate function. When comparing the proposed function to other approximations studied in the literature, it can be observed that the proposed logistic approximation has a simpler functional form and that it gives higher accuracy, with the maximum error of less than 0.00014 for the entire range. This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the …

Truth And Healing A Veteran's Depression, Mike W. Martin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Comments on an article by Christopher Bailey (see record 2009-24345-002). Dr. Christopher Bailey portrays an American veteran, Colin, who slips into a "serious but not severe" depression upon returning from the Iraq War, After ruling out post-traumatic stress disorder, the psychiatrist comes to believe that Colin's depression is tied to his feelings of being a wimp, of not having "done his part or proven his manhood," and of losing his chance to become a hero because he had been assigned non-combat duty—feelings that the psychiatrist glosses (misleadingly?) as a "painful lack of wounds." (I speak of the "the psychiatrist," rather …

(2009) The Invention Of Hugo Cabret: A Novel In Words And Pictures (2007) By Brian Selznick, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a demanding book, initiating the reader into a specific time and place, Paris in 1931, and into a set of unfamiliar ideas and metaphors. The young reader must learn his way around this world, and believe in it. I imagine a young child encountering this book, following its trail of pictures, making up a story, and then running up against a page of beautifully printed prose. The child will naturally ask, “What do these strange marks mean? How are they going to help me understand this story?” That question is an entry point into …

The Ethics Of The Other, Luis Ruben Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

I consider that our society is going through a globalization process where different vantages are being forced to face other cultures. This process revealed the weakness of our traditional moral systems where conflicts could be solved through a belief system that was accepted by the majority of the individuals of a given society. Since a global society needs to incorporate different beliefs systems in its moral considerations, and this implies that there will undoubtedly be a clash between the different moral codes, we need to find a way where individuals relate to the other in an ethical way. In my …

Secularism, Religion, And Liberal Democracy In The United States, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is divided into three categories: some brief remarks about forms of secularism, an outline of American constitutional law as it relates to religion, and a discussion from the standpoint of political philosophy of the proper place of religion (and other similar perspectives) in making political decisions within liberal democracies. Because the audience for whom the oral comments from which the essay is derived was mainly non-American, the middle part of the essay sets out many propositions familiar to anyone acquainted with this branch of constitutional law. And because of the informal nature of the original presentation, I offer …

The Metaphysical Underpinnings Contemporary Attitudes In Consumerism: An Pontification?, Jason Stigliano

Honors Theses

Contemporary philosopher and activist, John Zerzan, critiques modern civilization, and then in hindsight the history of civilization, on two central grounds, which form the basis for the rest of his criticism and theory. Firstly, we are alienated from existence in as much as our experience is, in various ways, mediated rather than immediate. Through language (or symbolic thought), a sense of measured time, symbolic ritual, technology and all the other constituents of civilized culture, we become alienated. His ideal existence might be something like the state of animals as described by John Gardner in his novel Grendel, “he stares at …