Philosophy Commons^™

Heidegger's Way Of Being By Richard Capobianco, Brian Mccormack

The Goose

A review of Richard Capobianco's Heidegger's Way of Being.

Serving The Public First: Archives 2.0, Matthew D. Laroche

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

The hallmarks of contemporary archival philosophy, known casually as “Archives 2.0,” have everything to do with making archives open, attractive resources for researchers of all persuasions. These rotate around a few main assertions. First, that archivists should endeavor to make their repositories as attractive as possible to users—this means offering friendly, all-inclusive access, being responsive to user desires, being tech-savvy, and leaving some discovery and processing of collections to the researcher. Secondly, modern archiving stresses accessibility—having a standardized way of organizing collections that will be easily understood by visiting researchers, utilizing language familiar to average people for finding aides, and …

The Time Of Liberation: Angela Davis's Prison Abolition And Giorgio Agamben's Coming Community, Amy M. Pommerening

Open Access Dissertations

The project explores the ethical, social, and political subject of incarceration. I investigate Angela Davis’s multifaceted critique of the prison industrial complex – focusing primarily on the tenets of racism, classism, and capitalism – and take an interdisciplinary approach to advancing her call for prison abolition by way of Giorgio Agamben’s radical adjustments to traditional discourses about ontology in his work The Coming Community. Agamben’s rendering of ontology in terms of impotentiality and indifference, when put in dialogue with Davis, exposes latent and unexplored philosophic suggestions Davis is making – specifically regarding a non-normative interpretation of temporality and an operation …

An Inquiry Into The Distinction Between Belief And Imagination, Maxwell M. Gatyas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theories of mind typically see belief and imagination as distinct cognitive attitudes. While most admit that imagination is belief-like in many ways—e.g. in its capacity to guide action, cause emotional responses, and aid in decision-making processes—the popular view is to separate the two attitudes when constructing a theory of mental architecture. The similarities are not enough for theorists to admit that the two attitudes are indistinct. Imagination, then, is construed as an “analogue” of belief, similar in many ways, but nevertheless fundamentally different. In what follows I examine these methods of distinguishing between belief and imagination. My method of examination …

Biocentrism In Environmental Ethics: Questions Of Inherent Worth, Etiology, And Teleofunctional Interests, David Lewis Rice Iii

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Some biocentrists argue that all living things have "inherent worth". Anything that has inherent worth has interests that provide a reason for why all moral agents should care about it in and of itself. There are, however, some difficulties for biocentric individualist arguments which claim that all living things have inherent worth.

Some biocentrists maintain that all living things have inherent worth and that artificial living things do not because the former, but not the latter, have interests by recourse to their natural selection etiology. Some also argue that synthetic forms of life do not have moral standing because they …

Contra Lewisian Naturalness, Dylan Abney

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Some ways of talking or thinking about the world are better than others. Most obviously, it is often better to say or believe true things rather than false things. Perhaps less obvious is the notion that our speech and thought ought to, or often in fact does, reflect the natural formation or structure of the world. This idea—that we ought to be carving the world at its natural joints—can be found at least as far back as Plato’s Phaedrus. More recently, we can see a related idea in the work of David Lewis. In “New Work for a Theory of …

Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand at least one prevalent religious epistemology in the Churches of Christ by exploring the work of Thomas B. Warren. To accomplish this goal, I first offer a descriptive analysis of Warren’s theory of knowledge followed by an assessment of its strong and weak points. Ultimately finding his epistemology unsatisfying, I conclude the thesis by highlighting recent developments in religious epistemology that might point the way forward in accounting for knowledge of God in a theologically and philosophically robust way.

Think, Pig! Beckett At The Limit Of The Human [Table Of Contents], Jean-Michel Rabate

Literature

“Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety of Beckett’s work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett’s texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic, and thematic maneuvers; an encyclopedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few.” —Derek Attridge, University of York

Philosophy And Theology: Reflections On Speciesism, Christopher Kaczor

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

“Recognizable Goodness” A Response To Beversluis’ Understanding Of God’S Goodness, Emily Mccarty

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

In her rebuttal to John Beversluis’ C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, Emily McCarty makes the following arguments. Lewis maintains throughout these three works that God’s goodness is recognizable. In The Problem of Pain, what seems unlike or even not good to us, is upon reflection, good. In fact, there are similar human examples that show God’s goodness is not so very unlike our own. In “The Poison of Subjectivism,” Lewis does not empty good of meaning: rather he sources that meaning in the divine so that our morals have enduring meaning. In A Grief Observed …

Ghost Stories: Doing Philosophy Through Literature, Paige Foreman

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Ghost Stories is a collection of three short stories that all make philosophical arguments. I define philosophy as an activity of thought that aspires to inquire into the nature of existence. I believe there are many ways to express philosophical thoughts, and I do philosophy in story form. The title story, Ghost Stories, is a Christian theodicy responding to The Book of Job that argues God should be held responsible for evil that happens in the world and that humans have the power to forgive God. The Palaces of Memory illustrates a new theory of personal identity as well as …

Fundamental Awareness: A Framework For Integrating Science, Philosophy And Metaphysics, Neil D. Theise, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The ontologic framework of Fundamental Awareness proposed here assumes that non-dual Awareness is foundational to the universe, not arising from the interactions or structures of higher level phenomena. The framework allows comparison and integration of views from the three investigative domains concerned with understanding the nature of consciousness: science, philosophy, and metaphysics. In this framework, Awareness is the underlying reality, not reducible to anything else. Awareness and existence are the same. As such, the universe is non-material, self-organizing throughout, a holarchy of complementary, process driven, recursive interactions. The universe is both its own first observer and subject. Considering the world …

Humanity’S Capability Of Transcendence Through Artificial Intelligence, Zena Mccartney

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

In the 21st century artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as robots, mind uploading and cyborgs have probed at these questions:

Who is in control the machine or human?

What is the purpose of autonomous robots to humanity?

If a machine can pass the Turing Test then is it appropriate to be in society acting on free will?

How would a robot understand how to make someone feel loved?

Do their deep expressions of understanding the human condition make them like us?

Once a human has a cyborg technology are they then human or machine?

How and why would we want …

Veritas Fax Ardens – Truth Is A Flaming Torch, Meret A. Luthi

Senior Theses

Based on the vast amount of truth theories that have been suggested by a myriad of thinkers from various disciplines, it can be inferred that the question of truth has occupied humankind since the beginning of its existence. Even though some of these theories appear more promising than others, it also seems that every suggested answer poses yet further questions about what truth really is. This seemingly endless stream of debates and contradictory theories further indicates that the nature of truth remains an enigma and subject to interpretation. Reflecting on Dominican University’s Latin motto “Veritas Fax Ardens” (Truth Is a …

Authenticity As Compassionate Being In The World, Rosemary Season

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This paper will present a thesis on what it means to be authentic in the world and how a person can cultivate an authentic being. I will argue that being authentic leads to a healthier self that lives her life to its fullest potential and how being authentic will result in a more compassionate and ethical self.

The Epistemology Of Enculturation, Joshua D. White

Open Access Dissertations

Is it irrational to believe something when that belief reflects the influence of one's culture or community? Some have argued that it is, especially when it comes to beliefs about controversial matters like religion, morality, and politics. I begin by situating the problem of cultural influence within the broader discussion surrounding irrelevant influences on our beliefs. After clarifying the way in which our beliefs are influenced by our cultures, I argue that neither the fact nor the recognition that one's belief has been influenced by one's culture is sufficient to render that belief unjustified or irrational.

The Principle Of Dong Zhongshu's Omen Discourse And Wang Chong's Criticism Of Heaven's Reprimand In The Chapter “Qian Gao”, Xun Yang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Omen discourse, the investigation of aberrant natural disasters and miraculous celestial phenomena, provided a sophisticated ideological model that could be exploited to expostulate with the sovereign for his transgressions, and to denounce the misgovernment of the imperial bureaucracy. The first of this political model is the personification of the supreme Heaven and the elevation of Heaven’s status. From the perspective of ru 儒 (Confucians) scholars, the establishment of Heaven’s supreme authority upon the human realm and the restriction of the sovereign in power guarantee the rectification of political mistakes as well as an applicable way for ru scholars to actively …

Centralization And Its Discontents: Exploring The Relationship Between Measures Of Moral Development, Happiness And Technology Driven, Centralized Ways Of Being, Kirsti Svendsen

Ph.D. Dissertations (Open Access)

This interdisciplinary, qualitative dissertation offers an exploration into possible intimate relationships between recently expanding, technology driven forms of centralization of our social institutions and a supposed decline in moral development and happiness among Americans today.

According to Jacques Ellul, technology in itself is not the problem. Instead, he believes the tragedy is that the new idea or spirit of technique , technical efficiency and economic progress, which may have started with the Industrial revolution, and has become the western world s new "religion", the new salvation for humanity. Ellul and other thinkers suggest that the single-minded focus on material progress …

Police, Technique, And Ellulian Critique: Evaluating Just Policing, Andy R. Alexis-Baker

Theology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A chapter by Andy Alexis Baker called "Police, technique, and Ellulian critique : evaluating just policing" from the book Jacques Ellul on Violence, Resistance, and War edited by Jeffrey M. Shaw and Timothy J. Demy.

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

A Racism Without Race: A Moroccan Case Study Of Race Denial, Leila Chreiteh

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This article aims to articulate the ways in which race and race relations are conceptualized in Morocco. Using the concept of racialized discourse as the preconceptual theoretical field for race and racist expressions, the author analyzes the different converging factors which influence the performance of “Moroccan-ness” and how subjectivity can be influenced by a State-driven communal linguistic episteme. Through its insistent hyper-nationalist campaigns, the Moroccan State has deployed racist expressions as a means of face-keeping and sociopolitical management, which have become naturalized through its reproduction in individual subjectivity and interpellation. However, from the independent research conducted by the author, the …

Better Together

DePaul Magazine

Faculty have taken full advantage of the university's innovative intercollegiate grant program, and the resulting research is as interesting and diverse as the collaborators themselves. What is resulting is research on "Patient and Primary Care Provider Perspectives on Recreational and Therapeutic Cannabis Use Within a Changing Socioculltural and Political Context;" a new minor in climate change science and policy; a new class, Communication, Coding and Entrepreneurship; brain inflammation research; and the project "Cosmology Meets Continental Philosophy: Natural Laws and Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing"

Ethical Dilemmas When Refusing Medical Treatment: Modernized Bioethical Principle Of Autonomy, Melissa A. Micek

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

In 1978, Mary C. Northern was admitted to Tennessee Nashville General Hospital for an infection in both of her feet. It was discovered that Ms. Northern was suffering from untreated and severely gangrenous frostbite, which is deemed fatal if left untreated. The healthcare professionals agreed that in order to prevent the gangrene from spreading, both of her feet would need to be amputated. However, Ms. Northern strongly refused the life-saving operation. Ms. Northern posed no threat to anyone; however, it is questionable what the most ethical course of action is when a patient refuses treatment. This raises the question, should …

Meeting Students Where They Are Online, But Leading Them Somewhere More Interesting: Reflections On Teaching The Facebook Class, Jeffrey T. Manuel, Matthew Schunke

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This article describes a unique interdisciplinary course on social media and the self developed and taught by the authors at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The article describes challenges facing humanities faculty who wish to teach on topics with high societal currency and student interest. Current research into humanistic approaches to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is summarized. The authors discuss their inquiry-driven pedagogy in the classroom, how the course was redesigned based on student feedback, and assignments designed to encourage critical thinking about students' use of social media. Finally, the article argues that humanities faculty should offer …

Christian Faith And The Scientific Explanation Of Religion, Donald H. Wacome

Northwestern Review

The cognitive theory of religion seems to threaten to debunk religion, including Christianity, as irrational. The cognitive theory explains human religiosity as an accident, a mere byproduct, of the interaction of mental mechanisms evolved for other purposes. The threat to religion can be neutralized by finding good reasons for religious beliefs which can be identified independent of the operation of the cognitive mechanisms the theory posits. Christian faith should be understood not as sub-rational belief, but as trust in the God who resurrected Jesus Christ. Our natural religiosity, like our natural morality, has no necessary connection to God, but God …

The Confluence Of Philosophy And Biology: An Excavation Of Philosophical Issues In Molecular And Developmental Biology, Patrick Johnson Mendie, Emmanuel Bassey Eyo (Ph.D)

Journal of Health Ethics

Philosophical evaluations have played an influential role in the growth and development of molecular and developmental biology to ensure that every individual is born healthy, born wanted and has the privilege to fulfil his or her potentials for a life free from disease and disability. This is why it becomes necessary for biologists to carefully understand human genes, evolution, cells and general human anatomy to fulfil this project. During this process, they are faced with challenges where they also lack the foundation on how to solve them. This challenge gave birth to a philosophical excavation of molecular and developmental biology. …

Philosophy For Children Meets The Art Of Living: A Holistic Approach To An Education For Life, L D'Olimpio, C Teschers

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

This article explores the meeting of two approaches towards philosophy and education: the philosophy for children (P4C) approach advocated by Lipman and others, and Schmid’s (2000a) philosophical concept of Lebenskunst (the art of living). Schmid explores the concept of the beautiful or good life by asking what is necessary for each individual to be able to develop their own art of living and which aspects of life are significant when shaping a good and beautiful life. One element of Schmid’s theory is the practical application of philosophy through the notions of Bildung, (self) reflection, prudence and practical wisdom, as well …

Cultural Decoding: A Humanities Program For Gifted And Talented High School Students Seeking University Entrance, Laura D'Olimpio, Angela Mccarthy, Annette Pedersen

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

This article details Cultural DeCoding, a humanities based high school extension program for gifted and talented Year 11 and 12 students in Western Australia. The brainchild of Dr Annette Pedersen (UWA & John XXIII College) and Dr Angela McCarthy (UNDA), the program runs for four days across the summer holidays before the start of the school term. The program fills a gap that exists in the education of gifted and talented secondary students who are interested in the humanities. It is comprised of sessions run by academics who facilitate discussion and activities based on their area of research and teaching …

Trust As A Virtue In Education, L D'Olimpio

Philosophy Papers and Journal Articles

As social and political beings, we are able to flourish only if we collaborate with others. Trust, understood as a virtue, incorporates appropriate rational emotional dispositions such as compassion as well as action that is contextual, situated in a time and place. We judge responses as appropriate and characters as trustworthy or untrustworthy based on these factors (namely context, intention, action as well as consequence). To be considered worthy of trust, as an individual or an institution, one must do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons, and the action should have its intended effect. By …

The Ethics Of Environmentalism For The Individual Consumer, Molly Collins

Honors Theses

Climate change harms the well-being of humans. It is the poor choices of individual consumers that contribute to climate change. I argue that it is immoral to cause harm to others, thus climate change is an ethical dilemma for individual consumers. I begin with a pluralistic discussion of harm, before discussing the duties of individuals to make choices that will mitigate the current harms of climate change and the wrong moral assumptions that individuals make regarding their contribution to climate change. I discuss the principles of ethical consumerism, specifically in housing, food, and transportation. Lastly, I argue that climate change …