Philosophy Commons^™

On The Sublime And Beautiful: Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, And Reverberations Of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano’s aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke’s discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit …

V.1 Fall 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2022 issue centers on the theme "what do you see?" and contains articles on a lecture by Camille Norment, the curator for the student exhibition "No Longer Transparent," the new RISD identity, elevators at RISD, various objects, crabs, the Prov-Wash bathrooms, the history of the drinking straw, drawing, Charles Mingus, and the 2022 grad show, along with other student creative writing.

Market Feminism In Morocco, Claire Madsen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Despite widespread views of “Moroccan Exceptionalism,” Morocco continues to rank poorly on international evaluations of gender equality. This project seeks to understand the extent of the influence neoliberal economic forces in Morocco have had on the feminist landscape. Analysis of Moroccan political history, Foucauldian theories of power relations, and relevant literature on state feminism set the groundwork for the evaluation of the extent state feminism in Morocco can be understood as market-based, in accordance with the definition from From State Feminism to Market Feminsim (2012) by Kantola and Squires. Through interviews of three experts, three meetings with women’s empowerment NGOs, …

Gender Roles And The Social Agent: Framing The Women’S Movement(S) In Postcolonial Morocco, Lily Ross

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For my Independent Study, I conducted a four-week research project on what I will refer to as the “Women’s Movement” in Morocco. My initial goal was to understand the framing and aims of this movement. To do so, I sought to explore the different forces impacting the movement – such as local cultural contexts, religion, globalization and colonization – and to analyze the impact of these forces on how different women conceptualize their goals surrounding gender. I studied a variety of scholarship on the Moroccan Women’s Movement, focusing on a critical analysis of the state, international interests and non-profit organizations. …

The Political Economy Of Capitalism In The Digital Age, Economic Democracy, And The Case For The Digital Commons, Alec Stubbs

Dissertations

Autonomist Marxism, capitalism, digital commons, digital economy, economic democracy, social factory

Life In The Multiverse: Bringing Chaos Out Of Order?, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper was given as the opening keynote address at the International Conference on Religion and Film at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on June 8, 2022, and is here presented in that form.

My thanks go to those who organized the conference for Vrije Universiteit, notably Professor Johan Roeland and Miranda van Holland.

From Post-Pantheism To Trans-Materialism: D. T. Suzuki And New Buddhism, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

In modern Western thought, pantheism remains a powerful if controversial undercurrent. Recent re-evaluations of the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) point to pantheism’s radical implications for metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Pantheism (Jp. hanshinron 汎神論) also has significant valence within Japanese Buddhist modernism, particularly in the work of scholars and lay activists who articulated the outlines of a New Buddhism (shin bukkyō 新仏教) from the 1880s through the 1940s. For these thinkers, pantheism provided a “middle way” between materialism and idealism, as well as between theism and atheism. In the postwar period, lapsed radical turned Buddhist Sano Manabu …

A Question Of Fundamental Methodology: Reply To Mikhail Katz And His Coauthors, Tom Archibald, Richard T. W. Arthur, Giovanni Ferraro, Jeremy Gray, Douglas Jesseph, Jesper Lützen, Marco Panza, David Rabouin, Gert Schubring

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

This paper is a response by several historians of mathematics to a series of papers published from 2012 onwards by Mikhail Katz and various co-authors, the latest of which was recently published in the Mathematical Intelligencer, “Two-Track Depictions of Leibniz’s Fictions” (Katz, Kuhlemann, Sherry, Ugaglia, and van Atten, 2021). At issue is a question of fundamental methodology. These authors take for granted that non-standard analysis provides the correct framework for historical interpretation of the calculus, and castigate rival interpretations as having had a deleterious effect on the philosophy, practice, and applications of mathematics. Rather than make this case by reasoned …

An Enterprise Risk Management Framework To Design Pro-Ethical Ai Solutions, Quintin P. Mcgrath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effective use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has immediate business benefits for an organization and its stakeholders through efficiency and quality gains, and the potential to explore and implement new business models. However, there are risks of unintended ethical consequences. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) focuses on managing risk while maximizing business value from exploiting opportunities. Using applied ethics as a basis and the perspective that ethics includes both enabling human flourishing and not violating accepted norms, I argue that greater business value is achieved when an organization simultaneously targets the maximization of benefits and the minimization of harms for the …

Selfless Selfishness: The Me And We Of Individuality, Jacob Bennett

Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education

In this provocation, I argue against contributors to the global publication The Economist that the biggest threat to western liberalism is not equity but rather an incomplete and misplaced definition of individualism. Such a definition does not take the history of racism in the context of the United States (U.S.) into consideration. Through lessons taught by a heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people, Black Elk, a refined conceptualization of individuality could center both the personal and communal to set the stage for truly equitable policy development within the U.S.

Rethinking Ethical Questions In Life-History Interview Research, Anne Rothe

The Qualitative Report

Having interviewed Germans who emigrated to Israel and, in most cases, converted to Judaism, I experienced a paralyzing sense of ethical conflict when I began analyzing the first order discourse my participants and I had co-constructed to transform it into the second-order discourse of research publications. So, I set out to rethink the ethics of life-history interview research. My quest into our ethical responsibilities began with rule-based deontological and consequentialist ethics and the guidelines in the social sciences they inform. It led me to reconsider such core notions as informed consent, privacy, and risk-benefit analysis. I came to realize that …

Ethics And Governance Of General Models: Challenges And Countermeasures, Yan Teng, Guoyu Wang, Yingchun Wang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

In recent years, the general model is one of the most important development trends of artificial intelligence. With the rapidly increasing research and deployment of general models, the social and ethical effects of general models have received extensive attention. Grounded in the characteristics of general models, this article analyzes the potential ethical challenges of the models at three levels:algorithm, data, and computing power. The detailed challenges include uncertainty, truthfulness, reliability, bias, toxicity, fairness, privacy, and environmental issues. Also, through the lens of philosophy of technology, it elaborates the important reasons for the ethical challenges:the "mirroring" effect and transparency problem caused …

Relational Ecologies: Artistic Engagement And Mentorship Of Adults In Community Spaces, Rebecca Bourgault

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

In this article, I share insights from research and experience working as a teaching artist and mentor inside and outside traditional institutions. I investigate how relational and contemplative pedagogies promote and sustain authentic relationships of reciprocity. Narrating recent experiments with mentoring practices that emerged from the cultural landscapes of adults engaged in arts learning, the paper highlights new connections discovered through a research model borrowed from intuitive inquiry. Findings are presented as reflective stories, journal entries, or field notes gathered while mentoring graduate art education students and participating in a community of practice in the visual arts. The article demonstrates …

Minding The Gap: Computing Ethics And The Political Economy Of Big Tech, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Paul John Gibson, Dympna O'Sullivan, Anna Becevel

Articles

In 1988 Michael Mahoney wrote that “[w]hat is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only when computing acquires a proper history, one that ties it to other technologies and thus uncovers the precedents that make its innovations significant” (Mahoney, 1988). Today, over thirty years after this quote was written, we are living right in the middle of the information age and computing technology is constantly transforming modern living in revolutionary ways and in such a high degree that is giving rise to many ethical considerations, dilemmas, and social disruption. To explore the myriad of issues associated with the …

“Be A Pattern For The World”: The Development Of A Dark Patterns Detection Tool To Prevent Online User Loss, Jordan Donnelly, Alan Dowley, Yunpeng Liu, Yufei Su, Quanwei Sun, Lan Zeng, Andrea Curley, Damian Gordon, Paul Kelly, Dympna O'Sullivan, Anna Becevel

Articles

Dark Patterns are designed to trick users into sharing more information or spending more money than they had intended to do, by configuring online interactions to confuse or add pressure to the users. They are highly varied in their form, and are therefore difficult to classify and detect. Therefore, this research is designed to develop a framework for the automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns, and from there to develop a software tool that will provide a highly useful defensive tool that helps detect and highlight these patterns.

Technical Debt Is An Ethical Issue, Paul John Gibson, Yannis Stavrakakis, Massamaesso Narouwa, Damian Gordon, Dympna O'Sullivan, Jonathan Turner, Michael Collins

Conference Papers

We introduce the problem of technical debt, with particular focus on critical infrastructure, and put forward our view that this is a digital ethics issue. We propose that the software engineering process must adapt its current notion of technical debt – focusing on technical costs – to include the potential cost to society if the technical debt is not addressed, and the cost of analysing, modelling and understanding this ethical debt. Finally, we provide an overview of the development of educational material – based on a collection of technical debt case studies - in order to teach about technical debt …

Worker Ownership And The Public-Private Dichotomy: Disparity In Cudd’S Capitalism: For And Against, Zane R. Phelps

The Cardinal Edge

Ideological traditions, movements, and their associated developments are riddled with interpretation and disparity: human affairs are too complex and too riddled with contradiction to be narrowed down, to be sure. To maximize clarity, as well as its benefits in dialectics and discourse, critical analysis of these disparities in authored research can be a step towards maximizing the utility of debate, wherein both sides reach a conclusion or synthesis, ending up better off than before. This is the formula to be applied in the case of Cudd and Holmstrom. I take Cudd’s reading and interpretation of concepts such as worker ownership …

Vagabond: The Trans-Species Ecologies Of Plant/Human Encounters, Hubert Alain

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[First paragraph] The opening scene of the acclaimed documentary King Corn (2007) shows Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, main protagonists, learning that corn constitutes one of the main carbon molecules of their hair. Segue to introduce the crop’s omnipresence in North American processed foods, principally used as sweetener, starch and animal feeds, the almost banal scientific fact presented in this scene is mesmerizing, providing a somewhat embodied support to the popular environmentalist saying “you are what you eat,” or to Donna Haraway’s poetic understanding of bodies and species as “full of their own others, full of messmates, of companions” (Haraway …

Recognizing The Dualism To Overcome It: The Hybridization Of Reality, Fabio Valenti Possamai

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[First paragraph] Bruno Latour’s project attempts to overcome the dualism between nature and culture that still persists in our world. My focus will reside on three of Latour’s books, namely, We Have Never Been Modern, Reassembling the Social, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Since the way we live our lives greatly influences the way we think and, consequently, our philosophical positions, it is important to say something about Bruno Latour’s biography. His life was extremely inter and transdisciplinary, a strong reason for his work to be so non-orthodox (Blok and Jensen 8).

Home To Roost: Some Problems For The Nested-Types Theory Of Musical Works, Versions, And Authentic Performance, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Three Dimensions Of Intimacy In Literary Reading, Kalle Puolakka

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

While numerous literary researchers, readers, authors, and philosophers have tried to articulate the peculiar feeling of intimacy they have sensed in literary reading, new angles can still be brought to bear on this issue. This paper develops an account of the intimacy of literary reading based on three concepts: silent performance, routine, and trust. By combining an interpretation of the history of silent reading with an understanding of literary reading as a particular kind of performance, I show, in the first part, how a focus on some internal qualities of reading helps to understand its intimate nature. Then, the picture …

The Planetary Sublime Part Ii Of The Problem Of An Unloving World, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay interprets Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age in light of the European tradition of thought about the sublime. The first half of the essay stages Chakrabarty’s historiography within that tradition focusing on a critical understanding of Kant. Then, the essay considers how the trace of the sublime in Chakrabarty’s approach to planetary history is interpretable as a form of social alienation. That argument draws on the critical theory of Steven Vogel and decolonial critique. Finally, the essay considers the moods of protest as non-alienated responses to the planetary bypassing the coloniality of the sublime.

Poem Vol. 5 (1)

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

New Coyote Stories

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

Book Review Vol. 5 (1) 2022

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents (Vol. 5.1): Foundations Ii, Editorial Board

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

Book Recommendation Vol. 5 (1)

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

New Ije Logo

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

Loving Truly: An Epistemic Approach To The Doxastic Norms Of Love

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and defend what I call the epistemic view. On the epistemic view, love also issues norms of belief. But these say simply (and …

Beating “Love” To Death: Emotion Junkies, The Unnatural Affectations Of “Loving Earth,” And Other Ghostly Infatuations

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

If the sentiment, or more precisely, an emotion that one identifies as ‘love’ becomes the protagonist of and footnote to almost everything we do, that is, if that thing ‘love’ reigns supreme and is definitive of what most humans do or want, then grinding and packing everything else into the same ‘love’ sausage casing becomes commonplace if only to add provenance to ‘our feelings’ – in order to, unnecessarily perhaps, validate them. When we beat ‘love’ to death (virtual signalling) it is more likely, it seems, that we are in the shadows of its scarcity. In its clamoring we know …