Philosophy Commons^™

Lucky Assassins: On Luck And Moral Responsibility, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Ethics Of Species: An Introduction By Ronald L. Sandler, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Deontic Cycling Problem, William Simkulet

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

In his recent article "Deontic Cycling and the Structure of Commonsense Morality," Tim Willenken argues that commonsense ethics allows for rational agents having both ranked reasons (A > B, B > C, and A > C) and cyclical reasons (A < B, B < C, and A > C). His goal is to show that not all plausible views are variations of consequentialism, as consequentialism requires ranked reasons. I argue instances of apparent deontic cycling in commonsense morality are the byproducts of incomplete characterizations of the cases in question.

Self-Proclaimed Hippie Inspired By Existentialist, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Estetikk Som Kosmologi, Graham Harman

Faculty Book Chapters

Norwegian translation of "Aesthetics as Cosmology"

’Not For The Faint Of Heart’: Accessing The Status Quo On Adoption And Parental Licensing, Carolyn Mcleod, Andrew Botterell

Philosophy Publications

The process of adopting a child is “not for the faint of heart.” This is what we were told the first time we, as a couple, began this process. Part of the challenge lies in fulfilling the licensing requirements for adoption, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. The question naturally arises for many people who are subjected to these requirements whether they are morally justified. We tackle this question in this paper. In our view, while strong reasons exist in favour of licensing adoptive parents, these reasons support the licensing not only of …

Conscientious Refusal And Access To Abortion And Contraception, Chloë Fitzgerald, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

"Doch Sehnend Stehst /Am Ufer Du” (“But Longing You Stand On The Shore”): Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity, And Finitude, Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

This essay first surveys Hölderlin’s mature philosophical sense of the human subject as caught ineluctably between abstract reflection and concrete receptivity, and it contrasts that sense briefly with the stances of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. It then traces the consequences of this sense for Hölderlin’s poetology, and it concludes by showing how both this philosophical sense and this poetology are enacted in Hölderlin’s late, major fragment “Rousseau.”

The Moral Status Of Micro-Inequities: In Favour Of Institutional Solutions, Samantha Brennan

Data and Test Instruments

This chapter is about micro-inequities and their connection to the problem of implicit bias. It begins by defining micro-inequities, goes on to discuss what makes them wrong and what solutions might be appropriate given the institutional context in which they occur.

Justification For Conscience Exemptions In Health Care, Lori Kantymir, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

Some bioethicists argue that conscientious objectors in health care should have to justify themselves, just as objectors in the military do. They should have to provide reasons that explain why they should be exempt from offering the services that they find offensive. There are two versions of this view in the literature, each giving different standards of justification. We show these views are each either too permissive (i.e. would result in problematic exemptions based on conscience) or too restrictive (i.e. would produce problematic denials of exemption). We then develop a middle ground position that we believe better combines respect for …

Aristotle & Cancer, John Thorp

Philosophy Presentations

No abstract provided.

What Experience Can’T Tell: How To Show Reality In Young Adult Fiction, A Female Warrior’S Story, Jessica A. Walker

Departmental Honors Projects

Young adult literature is a medium that catapults our youth into fictional realms, gives them courage, and prepares them for realities of our world. As a female warrior, having served as a soldier in Afghanistan, I learned firsthand what a female warrior must be. While there are many YA novels written with women warriors as main characters, there’s a significant lack of female warrior representation that resembles our modern day military and the trials female warriors face in a primarily male-dominated field.

I have examined four authors who have tackled the issue of strong female warriors. While each author depicts …

Friends With Benefits! Distributed Cognition Hooks Up Cognitive And Social Conceptions Of Science, P.D. Magnus, Ron Mcclamrock

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

One approach to science treats science as a cognitive accomplishment of individuals and so defines a scientific community as an aggregate of individual enquirers. Another treats science as a fundamentally collective endeavor and so defines a scientist as a member of a scientific community. Distributed cognition has been offered as a framework that could be used to reconcile these two approaches. Adam Toon has recently asked if the cognitive and the social can be friends at last. He answers that they probably cannot, posing objections to the would-be rapprochement. We clarify both the animosity and the tonic proposed to resolve …

Know Yourself And You Will Be Known: The Gospel Of Thomas And Middle Platonism, Seth A. Clark

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus and is primarily composed of rhetorical statements that were used to preserve the teachings of itinerant Greek philosophers. These collections were used to persuade individuals to join the philosophical schools represented, much like the early followers of the Jesus movement would use his teachings to convince others to join them as well. However, the theological background for the text is still debated because it contains esoteric and enigmatic references not fully understood by most scholars. This work argues that the theological and philosophical background for the Gospel …

Allen D. Breck Award (2014)

Quidditas

Kristin Bovaird-Abbo

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Causality In La Mort Le Roi Artu: Free Will, Accident, And Moral Failure, David S. King

Quidditas

The thirteenth-century French La Mort le Roi Artu indicates forthrightly how the Arthurian world comes to an end, but the text leaves less clear what motivates the disaster. Many critics attribute the cause to an external force, God or the goddess Fortune, that obliges Arthur and others to pursue their own destruction. A few offer greater insight into the nature of causality in the romance. They see the characters as exercising some degree of free will or even complete liberty. But these critics err in alienating the notion of free choice from moral concerns. In their reading, the heroes suffer …

The Intersection Of Music Philosophy, Performance And Genre In The Middle English Breton Lay Sir Orfeo, Lisa Myers

Quidditas

The Middle English romance Sir Orfeo is a dynamic and creative retelling of the classical Orpheus myth in which the wife of the English king, Orfeo, is abducted by fairies but eventually restored to her position and husband through Orfeo’s musical prowess. While any retelling of the Orpheus myth would necessarily contain references to music and would, therefore, likely use music as an important cue within the text, the poet of Sir Orfeo displays a sophisticated understanding of musical philosophy, composition and performance, as well as the Breton lay genre. The intersection of these elements all work together not only …

Visual Representations Of Prester John And His Kingdom, Michael E. Brooks

Quidditas

The mythical figure of the priest-king known to late medieval and early modern Europeans as Prester John fascinated literate Europeans for many centuries. Historians have weighed in on textual depictions of the legendary figure, but visual interpretations by European artists of the physical appearance of this eastern potentate have not been examined in any significant depth. These portrayals primarily took the form of map and book illustrations, and this essay examines the evolving visual representations that European artists developed of Prester John. In general, there was a gradual evolution over time in European artistic depictions of the legendary Prester John, …

Public Shaming: Milton And The English People, Courtney O. Carlisle

Quidditas

“Public Shaming: Milton and the English People” discusses the role of shame and its performance in John Milton’s First and Second Defence of the People of England. As Milton attempts to shame Salmasius and More, he focuses on bodies and their relationship to shame. For Milton, shame should be morally productive—it is meant to produce a sense of self-consciousness and an appropriate moral awareness. Milton argues that Salmasius and More are shameless and therefore not self-conscious or morally aware. Involved with shame and self-consciousness is a profound awareness of one’s body and its relationship to others and to the environment. …

The Pilgrim’S Intuitive Cognition In Pèlerinage De La Vie Humaine, David Strong

Quidditas

This article maintains that the Pilgrim in Guillaume de Deguileville’s allegorical dream vision, Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, acquires a previously unrecognized importance through his cognitive abilities. Each personified figure’s significance depends not upon a general introduction, but the Pilgrim’s ability to identify those traits unique to their person. This mode of intellection mirrors the late Scholastic epistemology of intuitive cognition as championed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. This theory allows the Pilgrim to grasp a particular object’s certitude without relying upon universals. Since this philosophy extols intellectual surety, it serves as a framework for interpreting the …

The End Of An Era: John E. Wills Jr’S 1688: A Global History As A Capstone, Nikolas O. Hoel

Quidditas

When designing a course, an appropriate question is how to end it. What great primary or secondary source will send students off into the larger academic world, outside the immediate class at hand with a better understanding of the period they had just been studying? The quandary is important in every medieval or early modern course; for example, does one end the medieval survey with Dante or Petrarch, or even Erasmus? The necessity for a capstone is no less great in classes that are entitled “England to 1688,” which populate many university course catalogues today. Many monographs and articles have …

A Matter Of Habitus: Character Development In The Literary Productions Of Garcia Lorca, Lisa Britt Montes

Wayne State University Dissertations

A MATTER OF HABITUS: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN THE LITERARY PRODUCTIONS OF GARCIA LORCA

by

LISA MONTES

December 2014

Advisor: Dr. Francisco Javier Higuero

Major: Modern Languages (Spanish)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores the development of the characters in particular plays and poems of Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. The main theory that is applied in the analysis is that of Habitus, which was greatly elaborated upon by French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. The first chapter discusses the character development of the women in the rural trilogy which includes the plays Yerma, Bodas de sangre and La casa de Bernarda …

Marx's Democratic Critique Of Capitalism And Its Implications For A Viable Socialism, C. David Schweickart

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism is not, as commonly believed, a critique of the “free market.” I argue that the “market” under capitalism should be understood as a three-fold market—for goods and services, for labor and for capital. I argue that Marx’s critique is essentially a critique of the latter two markets, and not the first. Hence theoretical space opens up for “market socialism.” I proceed to elaborate briefly what specific institutions might comprise an economically viable socialism that would not be vulnerable to Marx’s critique.

The Public Sphere As Site Of Emancipation And Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique Of Digital Communication, David Ingram, Asaf Bar-Tura

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Habermas claims that an inclusive public sphere is the only deliberative forum for generating public opinion that satisfies the epistemic and normative conditions underlying legitimate decision-making. He adds that digital technologies and other mass media need not undermine – but can extend – rational deliberation when properly instituted. This paper draws from social epistemology and technology studies to demonstrate the epistemic and normative limitations of this extension. We argue that current online communication structures fall short of satisfying the required epistemic and normative conditions. Furthermore, the extent to which Internet-based communications contribute to legitimate democratic opinion and will formation depends …

The Value Of Public Philosophy To Philosophers, Massimo Pigliucci, Leonard Finkelman

Faculty Publications

Philosophy has been a public endeavor since its origins in ancient Greece, India, and China. However, recent years have seen the development of a new type of public philosophy conducted by both academics and nonprofessionals. The new public philosophy manifests itself in a range of modalities, from the publication of magazines and books for the general public to a variety of initiatives that exploit the power and flexibility of social networks and new media. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of public philosophy in its several facets, and investigate whether and in what sense it is itself a mix …

Minimal Model Explanations, Robert W. Batterman, Collin Rice

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

This article discusses minimal model explanations, which we argue are distinct from various causal, mechanical, difference-making, and so on, strategies prominent in the philosophical literature. We contend that what accounts for the explanatory power of these models is not that they have certain features in common with real systems. Rather, the models are explanatory because of a story about why a class of systems will all display the same large-scale behavior because the details that distinguish them are irrelevant. This story explains patterns across extremely diverse systems and shows how minimal models can be used to understand real systems.

Three Pluralisms: Theories, Methodologies, And Levels Of Analysis In The Study Of World Politics, Lucas M. Dolan

Departmental Honors Projects

For much of its history, the discourse of International Relations (IR) has been characterized by clashes between paradigms, exclusion of non-positivist research methodologies, and the marginalization of various subfields. Since the fourth debate “pluralism” is rapidly becoming a buzzword within the literature, but without serious conceptual analysis “pluralism” risks becoming another intellectual fad given lip-service but not engaged with in a way that could produce positive change within the discipline. This project examines three varieties of pluralism: theoretical, methodological, and pluralism of level of analysis. A brief intellectual history of pluralism in international relations is outlined, culminating in the works …

Thoughts On Film: Critically Engaging With Both Adorno And Benjamin, Laura D'Olimpio

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a sub-category of Art proper, it is worth re-considering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. T. W. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’; mass produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a …

Virtuous Soldiers: A Role For The Liberal Arts?, Matthew Beard

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

The modern soldier is faced with a complex moral and psychological landscape. As Nancy Sherman puts it in The Untold War: Inside the Hearts and Minds of our Soldiers, ‘soldiers go to war to fight external enemies… but most fight inner wars as well.’ The modern soldier is no longer simply a warrior: he (or she) is at once a peacekeeper, diplomat, leader, sibling and friend. In the face of such challenges, some responsible for the teaching of soldiers have endeavoured to incorporate a character-based training programme, designed to develop virtues that will assist soldiers in fulfilling the multiple …

Urban Desertification And A Phenomenology Of Sustainability: The Case Of El Paso, Texas, Jules Simon

Departmental Papers (Philosophy)

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 8.5px Times} My thesis is that current cities and the way that cities are beingdeveloped is unsustainable and poses global problems for the long-termflourishing of the world’s inter-related and interdependent economies, formatters of justice and happiness in socio-cultural relations between peoples,and for the health of our natural environments. I argue that ‘urbandesertification’ happens in the complex relationship between cities (both urbanand suburban) and rural environments that support them as both a natural andethical phenomenon that I study using a form of analysis calledphenomenological ethics. First, I briefly present sketches of phenomenologyand sustainability in …