Philosophy Commons^™

The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The point of everyday aesthetic activity is well-being

Nancy And Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love, Joshua M. Hall

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as “thinking love.” To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay “Shattered Love.” Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda al Limón,” to Nancy’s understanding of poetry vis-à-vis “Shattered Love.” This response, in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged

(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper investigates the relationship between architecture and theories of the avant-garde in the critical projects of the 1970s, with a focus on the theories of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. Both Tafuri and Bürger were writing from within the context of a radicalized Marxism and were fueled by an intellectual pessimism towards the totalizing systems of cultural production that questioned the role of resistance in aesthetics and the inability of the historical avant-gardes to engage within the political and economic fields of contemporary society. While there is a common ancestry to these two approaches, and mutual acceptance of the …

Schiller Revisited: "Beauty Is Freedom In Appearance" Aesthetics As A Challenge To The Modern Way Of Thinking, Wolfgang Welsch

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay re-evaluates Schiller's idea of beauty as “freedom in appearance,” as brought forward in his Kallias or On Beauty(1793), against the backdrop of early modern and modern thinking that based itself on a fundamental split between nature and freedom, world and man. Schiller's claim that natural beauty results from freedom in nature bridges this gap. His suggestion is confirmed by modern science. Schiller's view is recommended and defended as a way of escaping modern bigotry

Fitness For Function And Dance Aesthetics, Eric C. Mullis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay discusses the manner in which the appreciation of fitness for function can be applied to dance aesthetics. Drawing on Allen Carlson and Glenn Parsons’ work, the essay considers the problems of indeterminacy, translation, and dysfunction as they pertain to the appreciation of dance movement. It then argues that fitness for function can be used to critically assess post-modern task dances and contemporary dance works that do not rely on the execution of codified dance technique.

Smell And Anosmia In The Aesthetic: Appreciation Of Gardens, Marta Tafalla

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant defined the garden as a visual art and considered that smell plays no role in its aesthetic appreciation. If the Kantian thesis were right, then a person who has no sense of smell (who suffers from anosmia) would not be impaired in his or her aesthetic appreciation of gardens. At the same time, a visually impaired person could not appreciate the beauty of gardens, although he or she could perceive them through hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In this paper I discuss the role of smell and anosmia in the aesthetic …

The Concept Of Privilege: A Critical Appraisal, Michael Monahan

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

In this essay, I examine the use of the concept of privilege within the critical theoretical discourse on oppression and liberation (with a particular focus on white privilege and antiracism in the USA). In order to fulfill the rhetorical aims of liberation, concepts for privilege must meet what I term the ‘boundary condition’, which demarcates the boundary between a privileged elite and the rest of society, and the ‘ignorance condition’, which establishes that the elite status and the advantages it confers are not publicly recognised or affirmed. I argue that the dominant use of the concept of privilege cannot fulfill …

Moral Vulnerability And The Task Of Reparations, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

This essay seeks to understand the domain and demands of reparative justice in terms of moral vulnerability. Significant harms raise the question of whether victims stand in truly reciprocal practices of accountability; if they do, they enjoy the power of calling others to account as well as bearing the liability of being accountable to others. In the aftermath of harms, victims’ moral vulnerability is tested: they may be exposed to the insult and injury of discovering that they do not enjoy the moral standing of holding others accountable. While the occasion of reparative justice is significant wrongs and wrongful harms …

Religion Beyond The Limits Of Criticism, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Hermeneutics, Pol Vandevelde

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Deontological And Utilitarian Cases For Rectifying Structural Injustice In Sweatshop Labor Ethics: A Critical Assessment, Clark J. Kissiah

CMC Senior Theses

Sweatshop labor has been condemned by scholars, activists, students and consumers in more developed countries on charges of wrongful exploitation, and a failure to respect the dignity, and basic needs of sweatshop workers. This paper surveys charges against sweatshop labor, and some of the more influential arguments for, and against, rectifying the background structural injustices that perpetuate it. I argue that in certain sweatshop cases, compensating workers below a prima facie morally acceptable level can be most successful in striving towards the duty of beneficence that employers owe to their employees. Therefore, we ought to pursue utility-maximizing acts over others …

(2014) Dialogic Schooling, David K. Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children (and therefore of adults as well), but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes …

Intuition And Its Proper Uses, Chris Boss

Honors Theses

What is intuition? Is it nothing but a nagging conviction in certain beliefs? Is it the same thing as common sense? When, if ever, is intuition a legitimate epistemological tool? Is the use of intuition in philosophical inquiry not just legitimate, but also inevitable? The aim of the present research project is to answer these and related questions. This research project will prove important due to the regularity with which intuitions are evoked in philosophical discourse, and the judgment errors that can result from a misunderstanding of the proper scope of these intuitions.

In section (1), I define and explain …

Art As Person: Correlative Personhood In Aesthetic Representation, Michael Dufresne

UNF Undergraduate Capstone Projects and Honors Theses

In this paper, I argue that the metaphor of art as person should be implemented as a way to understand artistic interaction, such that the relationship between artworks and spectators should be understood as one between persons. I begin this argument by first juxtaposing Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of aesthetic representation with the values that constitute correlative person in Confucianism. This juxtaposition draws similarities between artworks and persons that make the metaphor of art as person a plausible means for understanding artistic interaction. I then appeal to Michel Foucault for two significant reasons: his subjectfication of the self solidifies the comparisons …

When Words Do Things: Perlocutions And Affordances For Social Action, Charles Lassiter

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

When my spouse once asked me ‘Where’s the milk?’ I thought that my answer ‘In the refrigerator’ was fine. Turns out, I was less helpful than I thought I was. The intended effect of my utterance turned out to be different from what it actually brought about. This feature of utterances is especially salient in discussions of perlocutionary acts, which are utterances that cause an effect in others (Austin 1975: 101). On the one hand, an utterance is produced by the speaker and so facts about the speaker’s mental life should play an important role in understanding what perlocutions are. …

Valuing The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: A Defense Of Countercultural Environmentalism, Mae Manupipatpong

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Ecology, Emotion, And Culture: The Moral Psychology Of Environmentalism, Camille G. Veri 14

Honor Scholar Theses

None

Cutting Out Worry: Popularizing Psychosurgery In America, Antonietta Louise Iannaccone

Scripps Senior Theses

We think of the lobotomy as utterly primitive and brutal; we shudder at the idea of it. The archetypal image of creepiness, violence, and unnecessary brutality was expressed in the book and movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This procedure weighs heavy on America’s conscience but in 1945 the procedure was characterized as being as gentle as ‘cutting through butter’ and the therapeutic effect was described as ‘cutting out worry’. How did the lobotomy gain such widespread acceptance? One part of the answer is that Walter Freeman advocated for it not just among his colleagues, but through the popular …

On Moral Supervenience, Ramon Alvarado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conventional accounts of moral supervenience are not fit for the moral realist to use against skeptic objections. In particular, they do not provide a sufficiently robust account of dependence or determination needed to counter the argument from queerness.This is shown in their inadequacy to deal with cases of minimal discernibility and cases of moral gradation. A similarity-base account of supervenient seems to be the one that the moral realist ought to incorporate instead.

Practicing Philosophical Pluralism With `Forrest Gump' A Speech-Act Body-Mind Analysis, Robert Lorenzo Oropeza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This essay looks at three different types of philosophy: Pragmatism and communication, phenomenology and Zen Buddhism. I discuss these philosophies using the film, Forrest Gump as a guide to get through the convoluted ideas and make the concepts easier to understand. We first wade through the waters of analytical philosophy and the language game in communication. We discuss speaker's intention in meaning according to Paul Grice and Forrest's problems with the implicatures of language. In the second chapter I focus on the phenomenology of the characters as well as the perspective of the person viewing the film. How do we …

The Problem Of Using Evil Against The Possible Existence Of God, Juan Rafael Torres

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis has two modules, which entail two different approaches about the problem of evil. In module one, which consists of chapters one and two, I consider the difficulties of defining `evil' and the case against the `logical problem of evil' respectively. Module two is a phenomenological and skeptical approach to the problem of evil. Specifically, it is a response to those that do not agree with Plantinga's arguments and it is a critique of the traditional paradigms about God, evil and ethics. For instance, I reject the so called category of "natural evils" and I categorize `evil' as a …

Externalizing Normativity In Design Reviews: Inscribing Design Values In Designed Artifacts, Colin M. Gray, Craig D. Howard

Design Thinking Research Symposium

The design community has discussed issues of ethics and values for decades, but less attention has been paid to the question of how an ethical sensibility might be developed or taken on by design students. In this analysis, we explore how normative concerns emerge through the process of design reviews—where a developing designer’s normative infrastructure is engaged with the artifact they are designing. We focused on the normative concerns that were foregrounded by two undergraduate and two graduate industrial design students across a series of five design reviews, addressing the possible relationship between the emergence of normative concerns and the …

A Genealogy Of Ecological Rhetoric: Heraclitus, Bacon, Darwin And Huxley, Jared Grogan

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a genealogical study of historical intersections between rhetoric and ecology. Studying the works of Heraclitus, Francis Bacon, T.H. Huxley and Darwin as "bridge figures" in the history of rhetoric, science and ecological thought, I examine how their rhetorical theories and strategies (as discursive practices, performances and techniques) form a genealogy that bridges rhetorical and ecological theories and practices. My analysis studies their critical assessments and uses of rhetoric as it intersects with each figure's new investigations into natural philosophy, nature, and evolutionary biology, while drawing out relevant lessons for contemporary ecological and rhetorical thinkers. The main threads …

Sophia: Theoretical Wisdom And Contemporary Epistemology, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Philosophy And Theology: Duties To Children, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

The article offers the author's insights related to adoption of children and the duties of parents on their children. The author discusses the criticisms of author Mhairi Cowden on philosopher professor Matthew Liao regarding the right of children to be loved which according to Liao, love is necessary to flourish children in terms of emotional, physical, and social well-being.

The Motion Of Intellect On The Neoplatonic Reading Of Sophist 248e-249d, Eric D. Perl

Philosophy Faculty Works

This paper defends Plotinus’ reading of Sophist 248e-249d as an expression of the togetherness or unity-in-duality of intellect and intelligible being. Throughout the dialogues Plato consistently presents knowledge as a togetherness of knower and known, expressing this through the myth of recollection and through metaphors of grasping, eating, and sexual union. He indicates that an intelligible paradigm is in the thought that apprehends it, and regularly regards the forms not as extrinsic “objects” but as the contents of living intelligence. A meticulous reading of Sophist 248e-249d shows that the “motion” attributed to intelligible being is not temporal change but the …

Review Of Darwinism And The Divine: Evolutionary Thought And Natural Theology, Timothy Shanahan

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Political Perfectionism And Aesthetic Experience, Michael R. Spicher

Theses and Dissertations

Many people share the belief that the state can lend support to the arts and the natural environment for their cultural and aesthetic qualities. However, the question remains open as to what justifies this support. This question hinges on whether the state must be neutral in reference to judgment of values. The political anti-perfectionist positions of Rawls and Dworkin are inadequate to justify this kind of state support because the funding of art necessarily involves a judgment of value in two ways. First, the fact that the state funds any art requires that, in general, art is valuable. Second, determining …

The Place Of Eucharistic Adoration In The Apostolate Of The Laity In Light Of Magisterial Teaching, Jessica Leach

Theses

No abstract provided.

Why We Still Do Not Know What A “Real” Argument Is, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his recent paper, “What a Real Argument is,” Ben Hamby attempts to provide an adequate theoretical account of “real” arguments. In this paper I present and evaluate both Hamby’s motivation for distinguishing “real” from non-“real” arguments and his articulation of the distinction. I argue that neither is adequate to ground a theoretically significant class of “real” arguments, for the articulation fails to pick out a stable proper subclass of all arguments that is simultaneously both theoretically relevant and a proper subclass of all arguments.