Philosophy Commons^™

Review Of Essays On The History Of Ethics By Michael Slote, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Philosophy For Life And Other Dangerous Situations: Ancient Philosophy For Modern Problems By Jules Evans, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of What Happened In And To Moral Philosophy In The Twentieth Century? Edited By Fran O'Rourke, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers To The Usual Questions By David Boonin, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Platonism Vs. Nominalism In Contemporary Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

Ontological theories of musical works fall into two broad classes, according to whether or not they take musical works to be abstract objects of some sort. I shall use the terms 'Platonism' and 'nominalism' to refer to these two kinds of theory. In this chapter I first outline contemporary Platonism about musical works—the theory that musical works are abstract objects. I then consider reasons to be suspicious of such a view, motivating a consideration of nominalist theories of musical works. I argue for two conclusions: first, that there are no compelling reasons to be a nominalist about musical works in …

Nietzsche And Darwin, Babette Babich

Working Papers

Abstract

I argue against the popular view of Nietzsche as Darwinist and I concur with other Nietzsche scholars who have also noted that other authors worked in Nietzsche’s thinking in association with Darwin, not only Spencer and Malthus but also Roux and Haeckel among others which also for Nietzsche included Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche offers plain condemnation of Darwin’s views but he is also often associated with Darwin owing to Darwin’s racism and his own vision of rank-order. I conclude with an emphasis on style and Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity to highlight the distinction he sought to make …

Music, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

It is unsurprising that there are chapters on literature, painting and music in this volume - if they're not arts, nothing is. It is almost as predictable that there are chapters devoted to topics such as depiction and metaphor. The issues raised by depiction and metaphor are central to the artistic use of pictures and language, yet these topics do not pertain exclusively to art (there are lots of pictures that are not artworks, such as maps, diagrams and holiday snaps; people use metaphors in all sorts of contexts). Should it be surprising that there is no such counterpart chapter …

Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality And Phenomenology In Constructive Body Theologies, Heike Peckruhn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience …

The Content Of Thought Experiments And Philosophical Context, Kevin G. Gilfether

Honors Papers

Thought experiments are one common method of trying to make a philosophical point. However, there is the question of how useful thought experiments are in telling us about the world: what does thinking about killing a king tell us about actually killing a king? Timothy Williamson offers an account of thought experiments based upon a general cognitive capacity to consider counterfactuals. Anna-Sara Malmgren is critical of such a capacity. This work assess both accounts in the context of common philosophical thought experiments and finds Williamson's could be sharpened by considerations from philosophical context and facts from cognitive science.

Ua68/11 Philosophy & Religion News, Vol. 6, No. 2, Wku Philosophy & Religion

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter regarding upcoming events and activities of the WKU Philosophy & Religion Department.

Teaching Witchcraft In The Digital Age: Adventures In An Online Village, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Perhaps nothing is more valued in the modern classroom than student engagement. Pedagogical strategies and exercises for encouraging active learning are both wide-ranging and plentiful. Among the most popular at present is Barnard College’s Reacting to the Past (RTTP) role-playing games: “Reacting to the Past (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Philosophy, Religion And The Politics Of Bildung In Hegal And Feuerbach, Todd Gooch

Philosophy and Religion Faculty and Staff Research

In 1828 a twenty-four-year-old Ludwig Feuerbach, who had previously spent two years listening to Hegel lecture in Berlin, sent his teacher a copy of his recently completed doctoral dissertation along with what Laurence Dickey has described as a "monumentally important letter" in which he suggested that Hegel might detect in his dissertation "traces of a manner of philosophizing which could be called the actualization and secularization of the idea, the ensarkosis or Incarnation of the pure logos", while at the same time rejecting Hegel's identification of Christianity as the consummate religion.

The Desert Of The Ethical, Jules Simon

Selected Works Temporary Series

As far as I can tell, the concept of “desert” in Levinas’s thought seems to retain itsfamiliar associations, namely, as an environment that can be empirically characterizedas inhospitable, barren, and destitute of the kinds of material resources necessary forthe growth of the autonomous and autochthonous subjective self. It also seems plausiblethat a relevant extension of desert conditions to human community in Levinas’stopography would be the “cities” of concentration camps of the Holocaust. In otherwords, there is a correlative interior type of desert that, with Levinas, can be intuitedas what I am calling a desert of the ethical . In what …

Angels, The Space Of Time, And Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit — Endtime, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of being and time: the sheer that of its having been used (where the Nietzschean dialectic of the ‘having been’ reflects the essence of modern technology) as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic of sheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages of evil. Violence …

Speaking The Language Of Destiny: Heidegger’S Conversation(S) With Hölderlin, James Magrini

Philosophy Scholarship

This essay offers the reader a unique interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of authentic destiny as it develops in the Hölderlin lectures and essays written in the 1930s through the 1950s. Ultimately, for Heidegger, the destiny of Germany, and perhaps beyond, that of humanity, is contingent on the receptivity of a people to the founding and grounding words of the “poet of poets” Hölderlin, who calls Dasein to participate in the awakening to a future that is as of yet indeterminate and historical in the highest degree, wherein, attuned by Hölderlin’s poetry, participants resolutely anticipate the potential “historical” arrival of Being …

Hirsch, Sebald, And The Uses And Limits Of Postmemory, Kathy Behrendt

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory articulates the ethical significance of representing trauma in art and literature. Postmemory, for Hirsch, “describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right”. Through appeal to philosophical work on memory, the ethics of remembering, and Peter Goldie’s discussion of empathy, I explore the virtues and limitations of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and the risks involved …

Review: Myth, Metaphysics And Dialectic In Plato's Statesman, Audrey L. Anton

Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications

David White’s Myth, Metaphysics and Dialectic in Plato’s Statesman is an ambitious work that aims not only to interpret the message of Plato’s Statesman, but also to situate the dialogue within Plato’s corpus as one that serves as a transition between Plato’s earlier metaphysics and his more mature views in later dialogues such as Philebus and Laws. White makes several adept observations of oddities sprinkled throughout Statesman, and he frequently connects these observations to thoughtful claims concerning possible motivations on the part of Plato as well as possible revelations concerning Platonic metaphysics and philosophy. However, justifiably made inferences …

Science, Sentience, And Animal Welfare, Robert C. Jones

Ethics and Animal Welfare Collection

I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on …

Trolley Cases And Autonomy Violation, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetic Unconscious, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Within the context of recent European history, examines the phrase "aesthetic ideology" and attendant conceptual considerations. Discusses Jacques Rancière’s work and his unequivocal rejection of what he calls “this great anti-aesthetic consensus,” and the central category of the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible). Rancière calls some level of political engagement “primary aesthetics” and opposes it to actual “aesthetic practices.”

Further, considers Alain Badiou’s critique of Rancière’s Disagreement. Badiou summarizes Rancière’s argument by calling it “a democratic anti-philosophy that identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the collective that sublates the …

On Thinking (And Measurement), Raymond A. Younis

Philosophy Conference Papers

We do indeed “live and work in a time when the issues facing education, many of which have been with us for a considerable period, are being approached primarilythrough measurement – classroom assessment, research methods, standardized testing, international comparisons”. It is also true that “we do not often stop to consider what counts – and alternatively, what doesn’t count – in a climate where measuring up to a standard is the name of the game. At a deeper level, we rarely raise questions about measurement itself.” Heidegger argued that what is “most thought provoking [in this ‘thought provoking age’] is …

Self-Love And Neighbor-Love In Kierkegaard's Ethics, Antony Aumann

Book Sections/Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Three-Fold Significance Of The Blaming Emotions, Zac Cogley

Book Sections/Chapters

Many philosophers working on moral responsibility understand that concept in a Strawsonian way; they follow P.F. Strawson in thinking that we should understand claims about someone’s moral responsibility in terms of the appropriateness of a certain class of emotions. In this paper, I use recent work in psychology of emotion to direct attention to the reasons why emotions are so tightly connected to our moral responsibility practices. Using the blaming emotions (anger, indignation, and resentment) as a model, I identify three different functions that emotions serve: motivation, appraisal and communication. Identifying discrete functions that the blaming emotions serve then allows …

Basic Desert And Reactive Emotions, Zac Cogley

Publication

It is common for philosophers to invoke the idea that someone deserves an emotion like anger because she has done something morally wrong. While appeals to this notion of desert are common in the literature, such references aren’t thoroughly examined. For example, what do we mean when we say that someone deserves anger because she wronged us? This question is important because it is common for one philosopher to claim that someone deserves anger for a moral wrong while another denies it. Without an account of desert claims it is difficult to evaluate which position is more plausible.

We can …

Ape Autonomy? Social Norms And Moral Agency In Other Species, Kristin Andrews

Moral Standing and Animal Rights Collection

No abstract provided.

Review Of Thieves Of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine By Tom Koch, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Reason's Debt To Freedom: Normative Appraisals, Reasons, And Free Will By Isgtiyaque Haji, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Bioethics Critically Reconsidered: Having Second Thoughts Edited By H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Intuitionism By David Kaspar, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.