Philosophy Commons^™

Karlsgrab: The Site And Significance Of Charlemagne’S Sepulcher In Aachen, John F. Moffitt

Quidditas

The intention of what follows is to clear up one of the mysteries still surrounding the Charles the Great, now most commonly known by his later appellation “Charlemagne.” Born in 742, the son of King Pepin the Short (ca. 714-768), Charlemagne ruled as king of the Franks after 768; he additionally ruled as Emperor of the West, from 800 until his death in 814. Sources in his time presented him as an emulator and successor of Constantine the Great, and successive Western Emperors presented their own personae as successors of Charlemagne. In 1165, 350 years after Charlemagne’s death, Emperor Frederick …

Utopia Transformed: The Calculated Indirection Of Thomas Starkey’S Dialogue Between Pole And Lupset, Robert W. Haynes

Quidditas

Thomas Starkey’s effort to employ guarded speech and to distance himself from some of the risky views discussed in his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (1529- 1536?) emulated similar features of Thomas More’s Latin Utopia and, in fact, sought to improve on More’s striking dialogue. Though doomed by the break between Henry VIII and Rome (and that between the king and Starkey’s dialogue’s chief speaker), this unfinished work exhibits a particularly ambitious and in some ways quite skillfully wrought humanist project.

The Education Of The Son In Paradise Regained: Milton’S Of Education As A Guide, Alice Matthews

Quidditas

“The Education of the Son in Paradise Regained: Milton’s Of Education as a Guide” argues that the character of Christ provides a model for effective learning, which is outlined in Milton’s treatise On Education. In the treatise, first published in 1644, some twenty- seven years before his brief epic, Milton explains the purpose for education as strengthening one’s relationship with God, and the best method for acquiring it— gradually, progressing from the easy to the more difficult. In my essay, I will analyze each step in Christ’s education, beginning with his boyhood and culminating in his temptation on …

The Italian, Spanish, And English Fencing Schools In Shakespeare’S England, Stewart Hawley

Quidditas

Three styles of fencing are were taught in England during the Elizabethan era: Italian, Spanish, and English. Non-historical plays of the Elizabethan period are examined to consider what style of fencing was used on stage, and perhaps taught to the actors in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and others. Historically, scholars have chosen to argue that actors of this period were taught an Italian or Spanish style of fencing, often glossing over the English style. I argue that the unique English style of fencing was probably taught to Elizabethan actors. Showing that these three fencing styles have distinct …

Traditions Of Philanthropic Order, Christine Dunn Henderson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Individuals act more or less simultaneously as economic agents, citizens, and participants in civil society. Their interactions and their ways of fulfilling these roles take many forms. Not all of them can be said to be self-organizing, yet in several instances patterns of organization emerge spontaneously without being deliberately designed. Of course, the market economy—or “catallaxy,” as F. A. Hayek called it—remains the best example of such “spontaneous orders.” But there are others. Gus diZerega (2000), for example, has identified science and democracy as being similarly constituted by self-referential, self-organizing (some authors prefer the term autopoietic) processes. In this paper …

Integrative And Disintegrative Art, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article compares and analyzes two seemingly opposite approaches to visual arts that can be called integrative and disintegrative. They are usually seen to be contradictory, and the latter is often favored in contemporary art discourse. The article suggests, however, that the integrative approach can still be quite as favorable to art as the disintegrative one. Both views are useful for certain purposes and in the context of individual art works they are often actually intertwining. Especially from the perspective of art education, it is easy to understand the different implications of these views. This is because in that context …

Mixed-Method Analyses Of Federal Court Decisions During 1980-2007 Involving Race And Sex Discrimination Under Title Vii Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 And Faculty Tenure Denial Decisions In Higher Education, Jannifer Crittendon

Dissertations

Purpose

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has become the foundation of modem federal equal employment opportunity law. The application of this law to adverse tenure decisions, however, may differ from other adverse employment decisions because of judicial deference toward institutions of higher education. This present study analyzed published federal court cases decided during the period 1980-2007 involving Title VII, tenure denial, and higher education. This will contribute to understandings of the relationship between federal courts, faculty, and higher education by analyzing the extent of a statistical association between case and/or plaintiff characteristics and case outcomes; and isolating those institutional …

Machiavellian Heroes Through The Prism Of Aristotle, Robert Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Thesis examines the relationship between the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Aristotle. It hypothesizes that Machiavelli incorporates three fundamental premises of Aristotle's political philosophy: 1. Politics is the master science 2. Man is a political animal 3. Aristotle's conception of human nature. In order to test the hypoThesis the Thesis utilizes case studies in the form of Machiavelli's four excellent men (Theseus, Romulus, Cyrus, and Moses) that are named explicitly in Chapter VI of The Prince . It is concluded that there is an element of Aristotle's fundamental political philosophy that is incorporated by Machiavelli. This relationship is often …

The Problem Of Time In Quantum Mechanics, Crisol J. Escobedo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of my Thesis is to gain a better understanding of the nature of time and the problems associated with time. For example, I aim to explore the problem associated with the energy-time uncertainty relation due to the lack of a universal operator for time. Using Jan Hilgevoord's work, I will explore the idea that if a measure of time is to be obtained in quantum mechanics, then time has to be a property of physical systems that can only be measured in relation to other systems. As such, time cannot be independent of physical systems. This implies that …

Moral Reasons Arbitrariness, Brad Seeman

Dissertations

Bradley Nelson Seeman

Loyola University Chicago

MORAL REASONS ARBITRARINESS

The moral philosophies of Allan Gibbard, Christine Korsgaard, and John Post (following Ruth Garrett Millikan's "teleosemantics") each succumb to moral reasons arbitrariness. If a moral philosophy suffers from moral reasons arbitrariness, it fails to establish support relations for moral judgments that uniquely justify those judgments in terms that make essential reference to a person's ability to consider and weigh those support relations in making a moral decision. Moral reasons arbitrariness arises when (1) moral reasons are rooted in factors adventitious to the consideration of support relations, or (2) conflicting moral judgments …

Of Sweatshops And Human Subsistence: Habermas On Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this paper I argue that the discourse theoretic account of human rights defended by Jürgen Habermas contains a fruitful tension that is obscured by its dominant tendency to identify rights with legal claims. This weakness in Habermas’s account becomes manifest when we examine how sweatshops diminish the secure enjoyment of subsistence, which Habermas himself (in recognition of the UDHR) recognizes as a human right. Discourse theories of human rights are unique in tying the legitimacy of human rights to democratic deliberation and consensus. So construed, their specific meaning and force is the outcome of historical political struggle. However, unlike …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Art, Terrorism And The Negative Sublime, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The range of the aesthetic has expanded to cover not only a wider range of objects and situations of daily life but also to encompass the negative. This includes terrorism, whose aesthetic impact is central to its use as a political tactic. The complex of positive and negative aesthetic values in terrorism are explored, introducing the concept of the sublime as a negative category to illuminate the analysis and the distinctive aesthetic of terrorism.

Davidson On Rorty's Postmetaphysical Critique Of Intentionalism, Kalle Puolakka

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this article I shall address the standing of intentionalist theories of interpretation through Richard Rorty’s critique. Rorty’s criticism arises from the position literature holds in the post metaphysical, liberal culture Rorty sketches As a counterbalance to Rorty’s critique, I shall develop an intentionalist theory of interpretation drawing on Donald Davidson’s late philosophy of language and his view of literary interpretation that have sadly not been taken into proper consideration in the on-going debate in analytic aesthetics on the role of authorial intentions in interpretation. The prospects of Davidson’s intentionalism for meeting Rorty’s criticism are related to the position of …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

On Hanging Laundry: The Place Of Beauty In Managing Everyday Life, Pauliina Rautio

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The data of my empirical research in the field of education discussed in this paper consist of letters produced through correspondence. I asked the participants to write about beauty in their everyday lives, giving substance to the concept as freely as they could. In this paper it is only the letters of one participant, Laura, which I limit my attention to. The aim is to find out what kind of place beauty, as defined and used by herself, holds in the managing of her everyday life. The concept of beauty is virtually missing from educational research or is misguidedly restricted …

Musical Formalism And Political Performances, Jonathan A. Neufeld

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Musical formalism, which strictly limits the type of thing any description of the music can tell us, is ill-equipped to account for contemporary performance practice. If performative interpretations are in a position to tell us something about musical works—that is if performance is a kind of description, as Peter Kivy argues—then we have to loosen the restrictions on notions of musical relevance to make sense of performance. I argue that musical formalism, which strictly limits the type of thing any description of the music can tell us, is inconsistent with Kivy's quite compelling account of performance. This shows the difficulty …

Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I call 'relevantly similar' to one other. In the end, I endorse the second principle. There are no trumping features over and above …

Intentions And Interpretations: Philosophical Fiction As Conversation, Jukka Mikkonen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Appeals to the actual author's intention in order to legitimate an interpretation of a work of literary narrative fiction have generally been considered extraneous in Anglo-American philosophy of literature since Wimsatt and Beardsley's well-known manifesto from the 1940s. For over sixty years now so-called anti-intentionalists have argued that the author's intentions – plans, aims, and purposes considering her work – are highly irrelevant to interpretation. In this paper, I shall argue that the relevance of the actual author's intentions varies in different approaches to fiction, and suggest that fictions are legitimately interpreted intentionally as conversations in a certain kind of …

The Sensory Intention -- Art, Motif, And Motivation: A Comparative Approach, Yves Millet

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze claimed a new outlook for aesthetics asking for a rethinking of the traditional separation between the theory of sensibility and the theory of art. From a comparative standpoint, this article examines the concept of 'sensory intention' which in our view might be able to bridge the gap between acting and doing and therefore to link the theory of sensibility and the theory of art.

Traditional Chinese art, and more specifically the script style caoshu[草書],has been chosen as the medium through which to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Analysis of traditional Chinese thought on art allows us to …

Mixed-Race Looks, Ronald Sundstrom

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The multiracial population is growing larger and so is popular awareness about multiracial or mixed-race identity. Simmering beneath the growing public recognition of multiracial identity are questions about the legitimacy of mixed race, multiracial, or biracial as social categories, and further questions about the ethics and politics of those identities. Behind some of these questions are worries about how multiracial identity interacts with racialized aesthetic standards. This essay addresses these issues by investigating whether those affirmations are racist and betray monoracial groups. This essay concludes that such affirmations are not necessarily racist or traitorous. Instead, they are consistent with modern …

Sensation As Civilization: Reading/Riding The Taxicab, Monique Roelofs

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Aesthetics, race, and nation are densely imbricated with one another. This essay examines their interactions in a newspaper column that describes an aesthetic confrontation between a presumably Arab taxi driver and his passenger, a white European-Dutch columnist. In this column, taste engenders acts of identification and abjection, transmits projections of fear, and underwrites a division of labor and virtue. It thereby serves as a racial border patrolling technology and institutes racial boundaries. To clarify the racial power of aesthetic constellations in the taxicab case, the paper turns to the dualities and integrations that theorists such as Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and …

Encountering The Other: Aesthetics, Race And Relationality, Mickaella Perina

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay examines the links between aesthetics and race through the lenses of accepted distinctions between Western and non-Western, colonial and postcolonial, national and transnational aesthetics, and questions the validity of the claim that there is an inherent and incommensurable difficulty in translating non-Western aesthetic thought into Western aesthetic thought. First, I argue that Manichean models are insufficient to understand the dynamics of the encounter between Western and non-Western aesthetics. Second, I illustrate the complexity of non-Western and Western aesthetics relations through the example of the encounter between Aimé Césaire’s Negritude and André Breton’s surrealism. I argue that this encounter …

In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyer’s analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is “in but not of the body,” Carolyn Korsmeyer’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist analyses of aesthetic “taste” demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something “of” but not “in” the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance: the hipster proves his elite status within white culture by positioning himself as, in the words of James Chance’s song title, “Almost Black.” The notion of hip contributes …

The Last King Of Scotland Or The Last N----R On Earth? The Ethics Of Race On Film, Paul C. Taylor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper undertakes four tasks. It examines a tradition of cinematic and narrative representation that we might call “the narrative of moral gentrification.” It insists on the importance of excavating the racialist and often racist images, motifs, and myths that constitute this tradition. It recommends a form of philosophical aesthetics, located at the intersection of aesthetics, ethical perfectionism, and critical race theory, as a resource for doing this work. And it insists on the importance of subjecting problematic or qualitatively inferior expressive objects to critical scrutiny for the sake of developing proper iconographies and archives of white supremacist expressive culture.

Red, Gold, Black, And Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper tries to show that black nationalist movements have been pervasively influential on the music and visual culture of the world. In particular, it focuses on the Marcus Garvey movement and some of its religious expressions or extensions - Rastafarianism and the Nation of Gods and Earths - and on reggae and hip hop music. This is also an illustration of a wider conceptual point: that political ideologies are not only constellations of texts and doctrines but multi-media aesthetic environments. Race itself is articulated in aesthetic categories, not only in terms of body appearance and color, but in cultural …

The Empire Sings Back: Aesthetics, Politics, And Postcolonial Whimsy, Namita Goswami

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay recovers the devalued aesthetic dimension of the Bollywood film/song from its political over-determination as national allegory. The qualities attributed to the film/song, such as effeminacy, irrationality, fantasy, and non-synchronicity, which I term its postcolonial whimsy, and its surplus value as the Bollywood film’s most transnational component, allow for the free play of the imagination. This admits the possibility of another performative public culture and imagined community not premised on exploitation, calculability, and passive spectatorship and consumption. The film/song enables affect without literal linguistic comprehension, especially among those unfamiliar with the indigenous languages and musical traditions. What is derided …

[Introduction To] Heidegger And The Earth Essays In Environmental Philisophy, Ladelle Mcwhorter, Gail Stenstad

Bookshelf

Some of the fundamental questions of our time are ecological - urgent environmental problems demand newly conceived solutions for the betterment and preservation of life on this planet. In this newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Heidegger and the Earth, the contributors approach contemporary ecological issues through the medium of Heidegger's thought.

Amid pressing concerns about wildlife and wilderness preservation, agricultural practices, and technological innovation, contributors discuss how thinking with Heidegger in the twenty-first century yields creative ideas about the natural world that are unconstrained by traditional theoretical frameworks. The conflicting viewpoints in some of the essays will …

Two Constructions Of Libertarianism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The libertarian first principle—a belief in individual freedom—can lead to two different and not necessarily acceptable societies from the standpoint of liberty. One is the “Union of Liberty,” in which communities, associations, and intermediate bodies are held to rigorous standards of voluntariness (and thus face sharp limits on their internal associational freedom because of the knowledge that children will be born into them). In the other, the “Federation of Liberty,” they are not (thereby allowing children to be born into locally unfree environments).While in any free society individuals may voluntarily join together and waive some of their rights (in institutions …