Philosophy Commons^™

The Stakes Of Spinoza’S Language: A Moderate Necessitarian Understanding Of 'Ethics' And Spinoza’S Conception Of Freedom As Both Positive And Negative Liberty, Jeffrey J. Horvath

Student Publications

This paper explores different readings of Spinoza's "Ethics" with a specific focus on Spinoza's understanding of the relationship between infinite and finite modes in his constructed universe. These different readings suggest that Spinoza's conception of human freedom can be read both as examples of positive liberty and negative liberty.

The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, And Safety, John N. Williams, Neil Sinhababu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We present Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge, which works differently from other putative counterexamples and avoids objections to which they are vulnerable. We then argue that four ways of analyzing knowledge in terms of safety, including Duncan Pritchard’s, cannot withstand Backward Clock either.

Knowledge, Virtue, And Onto-Theology: A Kierkegaardian (Self-)Critique, Jack E. Mulder Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Marion Helps Us To Understand Kierkegaard’S Fear And Trembling, Mark Tazelaar

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

In the past decade, many interpretations of Fear and Trembling highlight the significance of the “eschatological”—the marvel of Abraham’s expectation that he will get Isaac back. For these interpretations, the central issue is the contrast between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation. Merold Westphal, however, contends that these interpretations lead us away from the main contrast between the hero of faith and the tragic hero. Kierkegaard scholarship is at an impasse. I argue that Marion’s phenomenology of sacrifice, together with the important idea of veritas redarguens that he appropriates from Augustine, offer insights that can resolve the …

Is Intimacy Sex, Or Is Sex Intimacy?, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

Are There Really Two Different Bell’S Theorems?, Travis Norsen

Physics: Faculty Publications

This is a polemical response to Howard Wiseman’s recent paper, “The two Bell’s theorems of John Bell”. Wiseman argues that, in 1964, Bell established a conflict between the quantum mechanical predictions and the joint assumptions of determinism and (what is now usually known as) “parameter independence”. Only later, in 1976, did Bell, according to Wiseman, first establish a conflict between the quantum mechanical predictions and locality alone (in the specific form that Bell would sometimes call “local causality”). Thus, according to Wiseman, the long-standing disagreements about what, exactly, Bell’s theorem does and does not prove can be understood largely as …

A Natural Case For Realism: Processes, Structures, And Laws, Andrew Michael Winters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent literature concerning laws of nature highlight the close relationship between general metaphysics and philosophy of science. In particular, a person's theoretical commitments in either have direct implications for her stance on laws. In this dissertation, I argue that an ontic structural realist should be a realist about laws, but only within a non-Whiteheadean process framework. Without the adoption of a process framework, any account of laws the ontic structural realist offers will require metaphysical commitments that are at odds with ontic structural realism. In arguing towards this aim, I adopt an attenuated methodological naturalistic stance to show that traditional …

Selling Citizenship: A Defence, Javier S. Hidalgo

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Many people think that citizenship should not be for sale. On their view, it is morally wrong for states to sell citizenship to foreigners. In this article, I challenge this view. I argue that it is in principle permissible for states to sell citizenship. I contend that, if states can permissibly deny foreigners access to citizenship in some cases, then states can permissibly give foreigners the option of buying citizenship in these cases. Furthermore, I defend the permissibility of selling citizenship against the objections that selling citizenship values citizenship in the wrong way, corrupts civic norms, and unfairly discriminates against …

Considering Triple Self-Portraiture In The Work Of María Izquierdo, Brooke Lashley

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper looks to María Izquierdo’s paintings, Prisioneras (Prisoners) of 1936 and Sueño y presentimiento (Dream and Premonition) of 1947, as case studies for activating a theory of triple self-portraiture. The theory reflects how plurality arises in the singular or in single significations of the self and disrupts homogeneity in thinking about identities for the self and others within the genre of self-portraiture. In activating a theory of triple self-portraiture, I found three forms of the self in Izquierdo's works: the self as oppressed (the past); the self as oppressing (the current); and the self as an emancipator (future). Although …

On Pi Day, A Serving Of Why We Need Math, Darren B. Glass

Math Faculty Publications

Today, our Facebook feeds will be peppered with references to Pi Day, a day of celebration that has long been acknowledged by math fans and that Congress recognized in 2009. Every high schooler learns that pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and that its decimal expansion begins 3.14 and goes on infinitely without repeating. [excerpt]

The Encultured Mind: From Cognitive Science To Social Epistemology, David Alexander Eck

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There have been monumental advances in the study of the social dimensions of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it has been common within a wide variety of fields--including social philosophy, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of science--to approach the social dimensions of knowledge as simply another resource to be utilized or controlled. I call this view, in which other people's epistemic significance are only of instrumental value, manipulationism. I identify manipulationism, trace its manifestations in the aforementioned fields, and explain how to move beyond it. The principal strategy that I employ for moving beyond …

Augustine’S De Musica In The 21st Century Music Classroom, John Macinnis

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Augustine’s De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica’s content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my …

The Role Of Memory In Forgiveness: A Post-Forgiveness Investigation, Zachariah Berry

Library Research Prize Student Works

There is a fundamental importance and value in maintaining a memory of wrongs done in the past. What do we do, however, when we think that we have forgiven someone, but aspects from the past wrong continue to manifest in our conscious awareness? Some may argue that the victim ought to suppress the memory of the wrong. Yet, as I maintain, doing so causes the victim to lose the moral value associated with the memory of the wrong. Maintaining the memory of a past wrong, however, may cause the victim to re-experience the negative emotions corresponding to a past wrong …

Penal Substitution And Divine Forgiveness, Daniel Thweatt

Library Research Prize Student Works

According to Keith Ward, “One must...reject those crude accounts of Christian doctrine which...say that Christ has been justly punished in our place so that he has taken away our guilt and enabled God to forgive us. Almost everything is ethically wrong about these accounts.” This statement is just one instance of a commonly occurring dismissal of the penal substitution theory of the atonement. For various reasons, many today find the theory morally (and theologically and exegetically) untenable. Some, such as Gregory Boyd and Eleonore Stump, formulate moral objections to penal substitution based on beliefs about the concept of forgiveness. In …

Embodying A "New" Color Line: Racism, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment And Racial Identities In The "Postracial" Era, Grant J. Silva

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the color line that is meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that …

Two French Variations On Truth: Ricoeur's Attestation And Foucault's “Parrhesiastic” Attitude, Pol Vandevelde

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

Both Ricoeur and Foucault, apparently independently of each other, dedicated much effort to provide an account of truth that goes far beyond the truth of sentences, propositions, or judgments. While well aware of the speech act theory and pragmatics, they want to go beyond a formalism of rules of speech or arguments and integrate the attitude of the one who speaks in the very notion of truth. They see truth not merely as a property of statements, but as an existential process in such a way that the truth of statements is linked to the historically situated speaker. Truth as …

Sagp Newsletter 2014/15.3 Pacific, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Can One Love The Distant Other? Empathy, Affiliation, And Cosmopolitanism, Gregory R. Peterson

School of American and Global Studies Faculty Publications with a Focus on History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion

An ongoing debate in political and moral philosophy concerns the nature of international obligations. While cosmopolitans argue that duties of justice are independent of national borders, statists argue otherwise, sometimes basing their account on the limitations of our empathic concern, a line of argument found much earlier in Adam Smith. Although critics argue that empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality, and although statists imply that psychological limitations of the kind that would be based in empathy prevent the realization of commitments to distant others beyond humanitarian aid, I argue that both these views are incorrect. While the possession …

The Moral Value Of Envy, Krista Karbowski Thomason

Philosophy Faculty Works

It is common to think that we would be morally better people if we never felt envy. Recently, some philosophers have rejected this conclusion by arguing that envy can often be directed toward unfairness or inequality. As such, they conclude that we should not suppress our feelings of envy. I argue, however, that these defenses only show that envy is sometimes morally permissible. In order to show that we would not be better off without envy, we must show how envy is not merely morally permissible, but morally valuable. Here I provide a defense of envy's moral value. I argue …

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Philosophy, Spring 2015, Richard Harrison

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Quantificational Credences, Benjamin Lennertz

Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications

In addition to full beliefs, agents have attitudes of varying confidence, or credences. For instance, I do not believe that the Boston Red Sox will win the American League East this year, but I am at least a little bit confident that they will – i.e. I have a positive credence that they will. It is also common to think that agents have conditional credences. For instance, I am very confident – i.e. have a conditional credence of very-likely strength – that the Red Sox will win the AL East this year given that their pitching staff stays healthy. There …

The Fragility Of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, And Democratic Activism By William E. Connolly, Brian Mccormack

The Goose

Review of William E. Connolly's The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism.

What Is Justice?, Philosophical Discussion Group, Armstrong State University

The Philosopher's Stone

No abstract provided.

Questions And Inquiry: Some Epistemological Applications, Jason Rourke

Dissertations - ALL

Abstract: A recent and innovative research program in epistemology aims to connect the related phenomena of questions and inquiry with epistemological concerns. This dissertation project contributes to that program, taking as its inspiration the contrastive theory of knowledge developed by Jonathan Schaffer in a series of recent papers. The dissertation is comprised of three main parts. I begin by articulating a positive account of the evaluation of knowledge attributions, an account that aims to respect the basic insights of Schaffer's contrastivism while situating them in a modal framework that makes manifest the utility of questions for epistemological theorizing. Then I …

Review: Animal Oppression & Human Violence, Corey L. Wrenn

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

The Logical Problem Of Evil And The Limited God Defense, Darren Hibbs

Quadrivium: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship

Formulated theories on the Logical Problem of Evil, the Evidential Problem of Evil and the Limited God Defense.

The Philosophical Side Of Contemporary Art Forms, Kristina Bodetti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to show that contemporary art forms, specifically popular music, film and comics/graphic novels, are capable of, and do in many cases work as philosophical pieces. I believe that an analysis of these mediums will reveal instances in which the works of art explicate established philosophical theories, expand upon them, and in some cases invent new theories.

Each new medium of art gets examined by philosophy in its turn and its merits as a unique art form are debated. From these arguments it is possible to extrapolate the ways in which these works can become …

Eliminativism, Dialetheism And Moore's Paradox, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

John Turri gives an example that he thinks refutes what he takes to be “G. E. Moore's view” that omissive assertions such as “It is raining but I do not believe that it is raining” are “inherently ‘absurd'”. This is that of Ellie, an eliminativist who makes such assertions. Turri thinks that these are perfectly reasonable and not even absurd. Nor does she seem irrational if the sincerity of her assertion requires her to believe its content. A commissive counterpart of Ellie is Di, a dialetheist who asserts or believes that: Since any adequate explanation of Moore's paradox must handle …

The Finales Of Robert Shumann's Piano Sonatas And Fantasie, Emiko Sato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation sets out to examine the finales of Robert Schumann's Piano Sonatas (opp. 11, 14, 22 [original finale]), and Fantasie (op. 17), with an especial focus on their form, which can be broadly categorized as parallel form. The introduction examines historical criticisms of Schumann's large-scale works, pointing out some of the idiosyncratic features found in Schumann's finales. Each chapter will present a comprehensive analysis of one of the finales. I make use of color diagrams in the formal analyses, which expeditiously and efficiently elucidate the repeating patterns of thematic and transitional materials; they also visually reflect the actual …

Educating Desire: Auto/Bio/Graphical Impressions Of Addiction In/And Alcoholics Anonymous (Aa), Peter Waldman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.