Philosophy Commons^™

Philosophy And Theology: Artificial Wombs, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Two Concepts Of Intellectual Humility, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Puzzle Of Humility And Disparity, Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, Daniel Howard-Snyder

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Democracy, Information Technology, And Virtue Epistemology, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Bump: Reconceiving The Philosophy Of Pregnancy, Hazel T. Bianas, Leni Dlr Garcia, Ninotchka Mumtaj B. Albano

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

French philosopher Hélène Cixous (1976) stressed the importance of feminine writing. She believes that women should take part in sharing their experiences from their own novel points-of-view. We discuss that while pregnancy is an experience unique to women; it has been misappropriated by patriarchal structures throughout the years. The pregnancy bump; which is more than just evidence of the uterus stretching to accommodate the fetus; is a symbol of a woman's triumphs and struggles all throughout conception; pregnancy and childbirth. We show that women have already gone beyond the bump and challenged existing patriarchal systems through different means; as Cixous …

Situationism, Capacities And Culpability, Adam Piovarchy

IHR Papers and Journal Articles

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people’s behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects’ responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded …

On 'Synderesis' And Moral Imagination: An Inquiry Into The Beneficence Of ‘Imaginative Prudence’ In Moral Development Via The First Principles Of Natural Law Of Saint Thomas Aquinas And The Imagination Ethic Theory Of Darcia Narvaez, Pierangelo Dela Cruz Repuyan

Theses

he Thomistic habit of synderesis innately inclines moral agents to the first principles of natural law which state that good is to be done and pursued and evil to be avoided. Serving as an ethical foundation in moral development, these primary moral principles direct practical reason to those acts that actualise the essence of human nature. Since the act of synderesis involves pre-cognitive (intuitive) and cognitive (apprehensive) processes, moral formation is necessary for the formal knowledge of the primary moral principles to inchoately foment through virtue habituation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, virtues are habitual acts that form moral agents …

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Modern Dance, Embodiment, And Society: The Graham Technique’S Resistance To Conditioned Physicality, Cara Mcmanus

Dissertations and Theses

Martha Graham, foremost pioneer of American Modern dance, is the originator and developer of what is known today as the Graham technique. When this technique is removed from performative contexts, the philosophy of its practice can add insight to a discussion of embodiment and what it means to resist socially prescribed embodiments. This paper will examine the ways in which the Graham technique cultivates awareness of embodiment’s origins and processual nature, and therefore how a conscious resistance to social conditioning can arise. The neuroscientific and physiological processes behind this cultivation of awareness will be discussed, and several examples of resistance …

‘A Contradiction In Essence’: Eroticism And The Creation Of The Self In Henry Miller, Cian Doyle

Dissertations and Theses

The intention of this paper is, in the first, to demonstrate that Miller’s work has been labeled ‘erotic’, and that this obscures the true contribution of his work – but that as much as it obscures his work, this label also provides us an avenue to access it. In the second, it is to explore what actually constitutes the ‘erotic’, how this is featured in Miller’s work, and how it functions as an analytic tool to reveal what is significant in that work. Lastly, with specific regard to the works Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the intention …

A Content Analysis Of Euthanasia Polls In Australia And New Zealand: Words Do Matter, Graham Grove, Ian Hughes, Melanie Lovell, Megan Best

IES Papers and Journal Articles

Aim: To explore whether public support for and opposition to Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide (EPAS) as measured in historic Australian and New Zealand polls has been influenced by the wording of survey questions.

Methods: Australian and New Zealand random-sample post-1995 EPAS poll questions asked of the general public were identified and subjected to content analysis. Individual phrases and words were considered in terms of their favourability towards or unfavourability against EPAS and each poll question was assigned a net favourability score. Variation of support for EPAS based on year, location and favourability of language was analysed by various statistical …

Factors Influencing Nurse Spiritual Care Practices At The End Of Life: A Systematic Review, Rita Mascio, Megan Best, Sandra Lynch, Jane Phillips, Kate Jones

IES Papers and Journal Articles

Objectives: The aim was to identify determinants of nurse spiritual/existential care practices toward end-of-life patients. Nurses can play a significant role in providing spiritual/existential care, but they actually provide this care less frequently than desired by patients.

Methods: A systematic search was performed for peer-reviewed articles that reported factors that influenced nurses’ spiritual/existential care practices toward adult end-of-life patients.

Results: The review identified 42 studies and included the views of 4,712 nurses across a range of hospital and community settings. The most frequently reported factors/domains that influenced nurse practice were patient-related social influence, skills, social/professional role and identity, intentions …

Arbitrariness Arguments Against Temporal Discounting, Timothy Smartt

IES Papers and Journal Articles

Craig Callender [2022] provides a novel challenge to the non-arbitrariness principle. His challenge plays an important role in his argument for the rational permissibility of a non-exponential temporal discounting rate. But the challenge is also of wider interest: it raises significant questions about whether we ought to accept the non-arbitrariness principle as a constraint on rational preferences. In this paper, I present two reasons to resist Callender’s challenge. First, I present a reason to reject his claim that the non-arbitrariness principle only targets pure time preferences. Second, I criticize the inference Callender draws from a modest claim to a much …

Thunder Boy Jr. (2016) By Sherman Alexie, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

The uplift and the burden of a name given but not chosen are keenly felt by Thunder Boy Smith Jr., the young protagonist of this thought- and emotion-provoking picture book. Like most children at one time or another, Thunder Boy welcomes some aspects of the identity his name imposes on him and chafes against others. But unlike many of us, at any age, Thunder Boy reflects on his problem with a remarkable degree of self-knowledge and self-possession. And each of the reasons he gives for wanting a different name offers a moment for philosophical reflection.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Teaching Premodern Women And Gender, Lucy C. Barnhouse

Quidditas

In her influential History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Judith Bennett asked “Who’s afraid of the distant past?” Fifteen years after this book’s publication, the question remains relevant. Teaching the history of women and gender in the premodern world presents linked pedagogical challenges. Most students enter college with little to no background in premodern history. Many find premodern primary sources, when taught with the same pedagogical scaffolding as modern sources, inaccessible due to real or perceived strangeness. These challenges can be compounded by the challenges of teaching women’s and/or gender history. This roundtable addresses strategies for productive …

The Good, The Bad, And The Violent: Analyzing Beowulf’S Heroic Displacement And Transgressive Violence During The Grendel Quest, Jessie Bonafede

Quidditas

Heroic actions are often associated with altruistic feats of humanitarianism, but in Beowulf, the connection between heroism and performative acts of violence reveal significant complications concerning how the poem codifies violence for social honor. A central conflict arises with the poem’s contrasting presentation of Beowulf’s dominance and physical power before and during the Grendel quest with the relatively low social status he incurs amongst his maternal kin group, the Geats. In this paper, I use anthropological and sociological theories of collective violence and dominance versus prestige hierarchies to rethink how violence interplays with the poem’s treatment of lineage and other …

Contemporary History In Early Tudor English Chronicles: 1485-1553, Barrett L. Beer

Quidditas

English chronicles published between 1485 and 1547 are studied here to determine how they dealt with contemporary history. These chronicles obviously covered the distant past, but many end well before the date of publication. Today contemporary history is of great importance to the public as evidenced by a variety of published works, periodicals, and most recently the internet. An analysis of early Tudor chronicles reveals that while many were indifferent to the recent past, others clearly laid the foundation for a focus on the contemporary era. The recognized authors of the chronicles included in this study are Richard Arnold, John …

What She Said: Recovering Early Modern Women’S Experiences Through Court Records, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Much of the fame of early modern England’s church courts today is based on their reputation as “women’s courts.” Because ecclesiastical law allowed women to initiate suit and to be sued in their own names, the courts’ records are full of women’s words. But the task of discovering women’s experiences through these records is a methodologically complex one. Words attributed to women, for example, come to us courtesy of the male church court clerk, whose education and legal experience shaped the written record of legal oral proceedings. And while women filing suit gives the appearance of female agency, it was …

Sir John Cheke, Chamberlain Of The Exchequer, 1552-53, James D. Alsop

Quidditas

The most obscure aspect of Sir John Cheke’s public career is his tenure as a Chamberlain of the English Exchequer. This study confirms that Cheke’s chamberlainship was a sinecure, albeit one of prestige and profit. Attention is also paid to the three rising gentlemen who held office under Cheke: Robert Creswell, Roger Higham, and William Hunwyke.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

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

Recipient of the Breck Award for 2021

Jessie Bonafede

University of New Mexico

Humorous Spaces And Serious Magic In William Baldwin’S Beware The Cat, Ashley Jeanette Ecklund

Quidditas

When spaces transform in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, the transition is marked with humor, consistently signaling magic to follow. As an amalgamation of folklore, including magic that manifests around, for, and through cats, Baldwin’s work offers adventure, laughter, and danger alike. Some cats are diabolical, worshiping or holding the soul of a witch; however, their wit constitutes a jocular contrast to that of our interior narrator, Maister Streamer, whose quotation above demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of St. Augustine’s beliefs. Though Beware The Cat was published at the start of the early modern period, the folklore it contains speaks …

“There’S Rosemary, That’S For Remembrance:” Suicide Ideation And Portraying Ophelia’S Madness, Ian M. Borden, Sarah Imes Borden

Quidditas

Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet is too often portrayed or understood in a generalized fashion. Historical analysis of the play, as well as historical and recent reviews of Ophelia’s performance show how Ophelia has been considered a character controlled by outside forces, and her madness lacking direction or purpose. Applying the concept of suicide ideation to the character’s actions illuminates both our historical understanding of the character, and provides modern day performers a cohesive and focused model from which to draw.

The Fable As A Global Genre: Marie De France, Ulrich Bonerius, Don Juan Manuel, And Kalila And Dimna, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

As much as recent scholarship has tried to develop a new approach toward world or global literature, the essential problem continues that in those efforts simply writers and poets from the various countries and continents are placed side by side without any consideration of inter- and transdisciplinarity, if not shared meaning and critical exchange. Drawing from the tradition of medieval fable literature, however, we face a truly productive approach in recognizing what global literature could really entail since the various writers across the continents addressed, broadly speaking, the same issues and fundamentally agreed on the critical values in all of …

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

ความทุกข์กับเนื้อหนังในความคิดของเอมมานูเอล ฟาลค์, เกรียงศักดิ์ ประสูตร์แสงจันทร์

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

รากฐานสำคัญของเทววิทยาคริสต์ศาสนาคือการอธิบายความทุกข์ในประสบการณ์ของมนุษย์ในฐานะผลของบาป และมีหลักความเชื่อว่าพระเยซูเจ้ายอมรับความทุกข์แทนมนุษย์เพื่อไถ่บาปและช่วยให้มนุษย์คืนดีกับพระเจ้า นอกจากนี้ ขนบคำสอนของคริสต์ศาสนาให้ความสำคัญกับวิญญาณแต่มองข้ามกาย จึงเกิดข้อวิพากษ์ว่าเทววิทยาคริสต์ศาสนาไม่สามารถอธิบายความทุกข์ในประสบการณ์ของมนุษย์ อาทิ ความวิตกกังวล ความกลัว และความเจ็บปวดได้อย่างแท้จริงและเพียงพอ เอมมานูเอล ฟาลค์ (Emmanuel Falque) เสนอข้อโต้แย้งว่า ความทุกข์ไม่ใช่ผลของบาป แต่เป็นความจริงเชิงภววิทยา (ontological reality) ของมนุษย์ในฐานะสิ่งที่เสื่อมสลายได้ ความทุกข์เป็นภาวะแห่งข้อจำกัดในเนื้อหนัง (finitude in the flesh) วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้เสนอบทวิเคราะห์จุดยืนของฟาลค์ซึ่งอ่านและตีความความวิตกกังวล ความกลัว และความเจ็บปวดในประสบการณ์แห่งความทุกข์ของพระเยซูเจ้าในสวนเกทเสมนีด้วยวิธีการแบบปรากฏการณ์วิทยา และแสดงเหตุผลเพื่อปกป้องแนววิเคราะห์ของฟาลค์โดยอธิบายว่า ความทุกข์ในฐานะข้อจำกัดในเนื้อหนังเป็นความเข้าใจใหม่ในเอกเทวนิยมที่อธิบายความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างความทุกข์และเนื้อหนังที่ไม่ใช่บาป และไม่ปฏิเสธความจริงแท้ของความทุกข์ในประสบการณ์ของพระเยซูเจ้าและประสบการณ์ของมนุษย์

ความทรงจำและการนำเสนออดีตในปอล ริเคอร์, เจษฎากร บุญครองธรรม

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์นี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษาข้อถกเถียงเรื่องความทรงจำในงานเขียนเรื่อง Memory, History, Forgetting ของปอล ริเคอร์ แม้ว่าการถกเถียงเรื่องความทรงจำมักจะเป็นการถกเถียงระหว่างแนวคิดเรื่องความทรงจำของปัจเจกและแนวคิดเรื่องความทรงจำร่วม แต่ริเคอร์ได้แสดงให้เห็นว่าความทรงจำเป็นการปรากฏของสิ่งที่ไม่มีอยู่แล้ว สำหรับริเคอร์ ความทรงจำจึงเป็นการนำเสนออดีต การนำเสนออดีตของความทรงจำทำให้เราสามารถอธิบายความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างความทรงจำของปัจเจกและความทรงจำร่วมได้ แม้ว่าความทรงจำจะเป็นสิ่งที่ปรากฏในสภาวะการระลึกรู้ของปัจเจก แต่การคงอยู่ของภาพความทรงจำกลับอาศัยการสนับสนุนของคนอื่นและสังคม ในทางกลับกัน ความทรงจำยังอาจถูกปฏิเสธโดยสังคมได้ เช่น ในกรณีของความทรงจำบาดแผล ในมุมมองของริเคอร์ ความทรงจำจึงเป็นสิ่งที่คงอยู่ได้โดยอาศัยแนวคิดเรื่องความยุติธรรมและความทรงจำยังต้องอยู่ในความสัมพันธ์กับประวัติศาสตร์ ในวิทยานิพนธ์นี้ ผู้เขียนแจกแจงความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างความทรงจำและประวัติศาสตร์ในแนวคิดของริเคอร์ จากการชี้ให้เห็นว่าความทรงจำและประวัติศาสตร์มีสถานะเป็นการนำเสนออดีตร่วมกัน ความทรงจำจึงเป็นสิ่งที่แยกไม่ขาดจากประวัติศาสตร์ ภายใต้การมีอยู่ของประวัติศาสตร์ ความทรงจำจึงจะไม่ใช่สิ่งที่เราต่างคนต่างจำ แต่การจดจำอดีตยังต้องเกิดขึ้นผ่านการสืบหาความจริงของประวัติศาสตร์ อย่างไรก็ตาม แม้ประวัติศาสตร์จะมีความสำคัญ แต่การมีความทรงจำเท่านั้นที่จะทำให้เราจดจำสิ่งที่ถูกหลงลืมได้ ภายใต้การเผชิญหน้ากับความอยุติธรรมที่ไม่อาจลืมได้ลง การมีความทรงจำจึงเป็นสิ่งสำคัญที่ทำให้เราสามารถที่จะมีความยุติธรรมต่อคนอื่น

The Way Of Longevity: Blue Zones As Unselfconscious Models Of Daoist Living, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Demographic researchers have identified five geographic regions around the world with unusually high proportions of nonagenarians and centenarians. Studies of these longevity hotspots or “blue zones” are now trying to distill lessons for how people everywhere can live long and active lives with minimal impediments. In this study, I compare lifestyle observations and longevity prescriptions derived from studies of blue zone centenarians with long-standing recommendations for the practice of nourishing life (yangsheng) to achieve a long and healthy life in the Daoist tradition. Observing a high degree of similarity across the four lifestyle domains of diet, exercise, mindset, …

Wisdom, Not Veritism, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this response to Pritchard's "In Defence of Veritism", I defend the view that it is wisdom rather than truth that is fundamental in epistemology. Given that recent philosophical discussions of the nature of wisdom may be unfamiliar to some epistemologists, a brief overview of these discussions is provided and that which is relevant for the subsequent discussion in this piece is highlighted. I explain that scholars working on the topic tend to accept that wisdom comprises at least one familiar epistemic standing and that, unlike other epistemic goods, wisdom is thought to be tied to a narrowly specified content. …