Philosophy Commons^™

Food, Justice, And Animals: Feeding The World Respectfully, B.V.E. Hyde

Between the Species

[no abstract for reviews]

Navigating The Ethical Maze: Emerging Technologies And Pedagogies In Higher Education, Harika Rao

Faculty and Staff Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Williams’ Account Of Positive Obligation And Speciesism: Extending Ashford’S Internal Argument Against Williams, Nathan Bray

Between the Species

In Ethics and The Limits of Philosophy and elsewhere, Bernard Williams presents a formidable objection to utilitarianism. Dubbed the integrity objection, the worry is that utilitarianism is too demanding in requiring agents to abandon their projects in favor of complying with moral injunctions. Elizabeth Ashford (2000) has replied, in part, by arguing that Williams’ account of positive obligation (WPO) is similarly susceptible to exacting burdensome demands on moral agents, such as care for those in emergency situations (pp. 428-431). If these charges of over-demandingness apply to each theory, and if utilitarianism is seen as obligating agents to care for nonhuman …

Teaching The Grateful Dead With Nietzsche’S Birth Of Tragedy, Stanley J. Spector

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Ideally, in a teaching situation one can use parts of Nietzsche to help explain aspects of the Grateful Dead phenomenon(a) or use aspects of the Grateful Dead to help explain parts of Nietzsche; in either case, there is heuristic back and forth between the text and the phenomenon(a). Both Nietzsche and the Grateful Dead speak to the subjective experience of life affirmation, not as mere cognitive recognition, but rather as a physiological state of being. For both Nietzsche and the Grateful Dead, the Dionysian dimension of life comes to the forefront through the body, whether experiencing the unity of nature …

Communication In Noise Is The Window On Cognition, R. Haven Wiley

Animal Sentience

As Griffin surmised, communication is the window on cognition, but as shown here, only if it is noisy. This commentary is an invitation to consider the full implications of the evolution of noisy communication. A combination of Information Theory, Signal Detection Theory, and Natural Selection, in a unified theory of the evolution of communication, reveals that noise is inevitable. All organisms are thus decision makers. Perception, thought, freedom of decision, self-awareness, metabolism, and natural selection all share the consequences of signals in noise. A full understanding of each requires attention to the errors of receivers. Griffin’s hunch is correct with …

Speculum Feminarum: Feminine Representation And Identity In Fifteenth-Century France, Karli R. Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

Late medieval views of women in Western European culture, specifically in fifteenth-century France, were predicated on the ideologies of "other." According to normative sociocultural attitudes of this period, women were immoral, lascivious, and indulged in frivolity. Their culturally acceptable and, therefore, natural roles were delineated solely as that of wife and mother. Although the origin of these views is obscured by time, there are scores of textual and visual examples of this cultural labeling. This thesis focuses on how the ideologies of feminine sociocultural roles developed and matured during the late Middle Ages. By comparatively analyzing copies of the visual …

Ethical Responsibility In The Design Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai) Systems, David K. Mcgraw

International Journal on Responsibility

This article aims to provide an overview of the ethical questions surrounding the responsibilities of designers of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. First, the author delves into the philosophical underpinnings of this responsibility, examining various ethical theories to grasp the moral obligations individuals have towards others and society. The author contends that designers of technology bear the responsibility of considering the broader societal implications of their creations. Subsequently, the author scrutinizes the fundamental question of whether AI systems present unique ethical concerns compared to conventional technologies, pinpointing factors such as complexity, opacity, autonomy, unpredictability, uncertainty, and the potential for significant social …

Grounded Aesthetics: Pedagogy For A Post-Truth Era, Becca Cragin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

With the rise of cultural studies, positivism and formalism fell out of favor. But in recent years, altered versions of these methodologies have been suggested as solutions to the deficiencies of the ideological approach dominating the field. Where the ideological approach looks at the content of texts to determine their meaning, the aesthetic approach adopted by media scholars in recent years returns to the close textual readings of formalism (while abandoning its assertion that meaning resides in the text alone). Similarly, where the ideological approach tends to use textual analysis devoid of sociological empiricism, the use of “big data” in …

Attempting To Answer The Question Of Animal Awareness, Alexandra Horowitz

Animal Sentience

It was as a graduate student that I first encountered the work of both Donald Griffin and Carolyn Ristau. Griffin's The Question of Animal Awareness (1976) and Animal Minds (2001) helped a budding animal-minds researcher appreciate both the possibilities of studying non-human animal consciousness and the struggle that such an undertaking would face. Now Ristau's (2024a,b) timely biography helps explain how Griffin became the figure in animal cognition that he is.

Mapping Gender And Territory: The Continent Allegories On European World Maps From The Late Middle Ages To The Renaissance Until The Early Enlightenment, Katharina Eva Oehmichen

Comparative Woman

The four-part set of female continent allegories, which originated in the early Renaissance, was born out of a European need for a new vehicle of thought that served the functions of representing imperial expansion and the superiority of Western science and civilization, while gratifying the curiosity of the readers about newly discovered lands at the same time. The shift from the Christian symbolic tradition of the representation of the continents on world maps mirrored the shift in Western perception and knowledge of the world and Europe’s position in it. Apart from geo-political and imperial agendas that might have favored a …

The Universal And The Unique, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper explores the abstract dyad of universality and uniqueness. It notes that the two might be complementary and even synergistic, or that they might be alternatives that oppose one another. It also explores how the unique might be an emergent from a primal universality, as well as how the universal might be an emergent from a primal uniqueness. Finally, it offers an interpretation of this dyad in which the universal and the unique are equivalent transforms of one another and thus two sides of the same coin.

Keywords: Universality, uniqueness, general and particular, similarity and difference, fundamental dyad, dualism

King Lear'S "Poor, Bare, Forked Animal" And The Cross, Paul J. Stapleton

Quidditas

In William Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear describes the “unaccommodated man” as a “poor, bare, forked animal.” Lear’s comments are ostensibly about Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, but critics have detected in the passage a more general expression about human nature. The term “forked” is regularly glossed as “two-legged,” but there are philological problems with this reading. This paper, therefore, takes into consideration an alternate meaning for “forked” based on sixteenth-century usages that relate the noun “fork” to instruments of torture. The paper discusses the depiction of the cross as a “fork” (Latin – furca) in the antiquarian Justus Lipsius’s …

Cover

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Delno C. West Award Winner

Quidditas

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the West Award for 2024

Paul J. Stapleton

North Carolina Central University

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Review: The Poems Of Ben Jonson, Steven Hrdlicka

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Mobility In The Middle Ages - Literary Evidence As A Mental Map For Travel Imaginations: A Critical Reconsideration Of Modern Myths About The Past, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Literary fantasy has often served as a meaningful reflection of historical, material, or political developments, and events. This also applies to many works from the European Middle Ages. While popular opinion continues to assume that most medieval people were home-bound, the very opposite can almost be claimed, especially for the late Middle Ages. After the Crusades, the stream of pilgrims to the Holy Land grew tremendously, but many other people were on the roads as well, whether for economic, religious, or political reasons. Constructive contacts between West and East only developed in the course in time, but the basic foundations …

Donald Griffin, Sentience, And Animal Research Ethics, John Gluck

Animal Sentience

Recollection of early encounters with Donald Griffin’s pioneering work on animal awareness, provoking intense, often hostile academic responses, later forgotten.

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 2024

Jonathan Seyfried

Teaching Margaret Cavendish And Early Modern Women Writers: 1982 - 2013, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

I first came across Margaret Cavendish during the summer of 1982 in an innocuous trade collection of early modern women writers. Like many teachers of English, I made a habit of dropping into used book stores, and in such a place I found the collection. It contained a very few selections from Sociable Letters, in among the work of other women. Those few letters set me off on a new path of formal classroom teaching in person and online first at Northern Arizona University and later at the University of Sheffield. Those letters and other material from early modern …

Medieval Hypebeast: The Conspicuous Consumption Of Joan I Of Aragon, Jonathan Seyfried

Quidditas

Limited releases, celebrity culture, and insane profit margins: these features define the hypebeast phenomenon of the early twenty-first century. The rise and fall of this cycle of conspicuous consumption bears remarkable resemblance to the craze for French culture in the Crown of Aragon in the late fourteenth century. King Joan I, starting from the time of his youth as the Duke of Girona, funded several projects to import French culture. In 1380, Joan married Violante de Bar, niece of the French King Charles V and the Duc de Berry. Once Joan and Violante ascended to the throne, they co-created a …

Review: White Before Whiteness In The Late Middle Ages, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Teaching Boccaccio's Decameron And The Black Death Post Covid-19, Vanessa Dimaggio

Quidditas

Giovanni Boccaccio’s introduction to the Decameron depicts one of the most gruesome and vivid portraits of the effects of the Black Death in Florence to come out of medieval Italy. Until 2020, students’ understanding of the plague in medieval Florence was, at best, one of lurid interest in the gory details of a disease that killed nearly 1/3 of the population of Europe, an interest far removed from their reality. However, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, students began to understand the difficulties medieval Florentines faced in a way that was all too familiar. This shift in students’ perspective …

The Epistemic Role Of Ai Decision Support Systems: Neither Superiors, Nor Inferiors, Nor Peers, Rand Hirmiz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Despite the importance of discussions over the epistemic role that artificially intelligent decision support systems ought to play, there is currently a lack of these discussions in both the AI literature and the epistemology literature. My goal in this paper is to rectify this by proposing an account of the epistemic role of AI decision support systems in medicine and discussing what this epistemic role means with regard to how these systems ought to be utilized. In particular, I argue that AI decision support systems are not epistemic superiors, inferiors, or peers. Instead, I recommend that they be classified in …

Can We Use Judgement Bias To Assess The Welfare Of Fish In Aquariums And Zoos?, Culum Brown

Animal Sentience

This commentary examines the potential of tests of judgment bias to assess fish welfare in aquariums and zoos. Judgment bias offers a non-invasive approach to interpreting affective states in animals, using cognitive responses to ambiguous stimuli as indicators of mental wellbeing. Despite the constraints of captive environments—such as limited handling and species diversity in exhibits—recent adaptations of judgment-bias protocols make them suitable across taxa, including fishes. Collaborations with progressive zoos and aquariums could facilitate this research, based on the shared goal of enhancing animal welfare and promoting public education.

Don’T Be Cruel: Cruelty, Complicity, Self-Knowledge, And Growth, Sherman J. Clark

Articles

The papers in this symposium, and the larger body of scholarship to which this symposium is a contribution, ask us to attend to the often brutal and inhumane conditions in American jails and prisons. But why should we do that? Why should we confront the suffering of the incarcerated? Why should we ask ourselves whether that suffering is unjust, unnecessary, or even unconstitutional? The main reason, of course, is that we want to remedy those injustices. We care about the suffering of our fellow human beings, and people do not cease to be our fellow human beings merely because they …

Dinamika Kehidupan Sosial Belanda Depok Dalam Mempertahankan Budaya Leluhurnya Periode 1913-1945, Amanda Uma Zahra, Fajar Muhammad Muhammad Nugraha

Multikultura

Cornelis Chastelein membeli tanah di daerah Depok dan mempekerjakan budak yang ia merdekakan untuk membentuk kehidupan komunitas sosial yang berpemerintahan mandiri. Sepeninggal Cornelis Chastelein, harta kekayaannya diwarisi sepenuhnya oleh para pengikutnya. Melalui pewarisan ini kemudian budaya Depok mulai berkembang. Penelitian ini dimaksudkan untuk mengungkap proses terbentuknya Kaum Depok, budaya yang mereka anut, serta identitas yang melekat pada mereka dalam periode 1913-1945. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode historis, terbagi dalam empat langkah, yakni Heuristik, Kritik Sumber, Interpretasi, dan Historiografi. Data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini meliputi sumber primer, seperti arsip, dokumen foto, dan surat-surat pribadi Cornelis Chastelein, serta …

Pengelolaan Arsip Digital Pribadi: Studi Kasus Mahasiswa Manajemen Rekod Dan Arsip Ui, Asma Zulfa Fauziah, Ike Iswary Lawanda

Multikultura

Setiap individu menghasilkan arsip dalam kehidupan sehari-sehari, baik dalam bentuk fisik maupun digital. Pengelolaan arsip digital pribadi sangat penting untuk dilakukan demi menjaga informasi dapat tetap diakses. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengidentifikasi proses pengelolaan arsip digital pribadi serta tantangan yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa Manajemen Rekod dan Arsip Universitas Indonesia. Menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan studi kasus oleh mahasiswa MRA yang aktif melakukan Personal Digital Archiving (PDA). Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa mahasiswa telah menerapkan langkah-langkah PDA seperti pengumpulan, penilaian, pendeskripsian, penyimpanan, dan pemeliharaan arsip digital pribadi mereka dengan efektif. Layanan cloud seperti Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, dan Dropbox digunakan untuk memudahkan …

Tema Korupsi Dalam Dua Puisi Penyair Palestina, Ibrahim Touqan, Nur Hidayati Istiqomah

Multikultura

Karya sastra dalam genre puisi telah eksis sejak dulu dan sampai saat ini pun masih digandrungi oleh para sastrawan. Tak heran, penelitian tentang puisi pun banyak dilakukan. Penelitian ini akan mengkaji tema korupsi dalam dua puisi Ibrahim Touqan, karena korupsi merupakan masalah universal yang ada di berbagai negara. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan stilistika Arab dan teori isotopi, serta metode analisis komponen makna yang dikemukakan oleh Kempson. Adapun, dalam pengumpulan data, digunakan teknik studi pustaka. Tujuan utama dari penelitian ini yaitu untuk mengetahui bentuk korupsi seperti apa yang terdapat pada kedua puisi Ibrahim Touqan, serta menganalisis dan mengidentifikasi …