Comparative Philosophy Commons^™

Semantic Holism Revisited, Chun-Ping Yen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend semantic holism, the view that the meaning of an expression is determined by its relations to every other expression in the language of individual competent users. I argue that, once properly understood, most disadvantages attributed to holism can be dissolved and suggest that the core division between the holist and the non-holist is on the question whether invariant meanings shared across all possible occasions where the corresponded expressions are uttered are necessary for the explanation of meaning sharing. I give reason why the answer is negative and demonstrate how to explain our linguistic interaction without such invariant meanings.

Vol 7 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 2 Information Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 2 Cover Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

A Case For A Husserlian Willardarian Approach To Knowledge, Joseph Gibson

Masters Theses

This thesis introduces certain aspects in the thought of Dallas Willard and Edmund Husserl as a new way forward in the internalism externalism debate. Husserl’s detailed analysis of cognition has application to epistemology and addresses in great depth an area which in the current discussion is often tertiary and shallow at best. It is argued that in both internalist and externalist camps there is a common assumption about cognition which Husserl argues forcibly against. This assumption is that thought, or cognition, is essentially linguistic. (The notion that ‘thought is essentially linguistic’ means that thought requires the use of language.) Whatever …

Vol 7 No 1 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 1 Information Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 1 Cover Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (Fa13) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Power, The Subject, And Technological Rationality", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description and Objectives:

In this course, we will examine mechanisms of power and the processes by which these produce categories of subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, we will begin by considering these processes at the level of society and then dwell on their human experience at the level of the psyche. Here, we will aim to discover processes by which the subject reproduces conditions of domination by power at the level of psychic experience. Power-practices assume their condition of possibility by positing, on the one hand, that the category of the subject is a priori existent and, on the other, that …

From The Sublime To The Political: Some Historical Notes, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Let me document my suggestion that modernist poetics tends to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime by adducing two examples from rather disparate traditions. Martin Heidegger's ontological poetics can reasonably be viewed as a renewal of the aesthetics of the sublime -- although Heidegger never uses the term sublime, so far as I know -- and is explicitly hostile to the limitations of aesthetics, conceived as an autonomous study of a certain kind of experience. Harold Bloom does recur to the Romantic terminology of sublimity in his attempt to construct a poetics which …

Some Genres Of Post-Hegelian Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There are a number of important texts, sometimes treated as philosophical and sometimes as literary works, which do not usually find an appropriate audience. Paradigms of what I have in mind are: Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, almost all of Nietzsche, Marx's narratives of capital and class-struggle, Sartre's complex series of fictions, plays, treatises, critical performances and autobiography, and Heidegger's hypnotic meditations and textual exegeses. Responses by philosophers, especially Anglo-American ones, seldom take account of the specific literary forms of these works or of their authors’ very self-conscious concern with the problems and strategies of writing. It is true that the texts …

The Owl Of Minerva And The Colors Of The Night, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What I wish to do, however, is to call attention to the manner in which Hegel speaks of Minerva's owl and to juxtapose both the manner and the substance of his thought about the twilight of philosophy and civilization with some of Hölderlin's dichterisch and Heidegger's denkerisch meditations on similar themes. For if Hegel has announced the coming of the night, Hölderlin and Heidegger have sought to make the night their very own territory and to comprehend it from within. If Hegel has rather gingerly allowed himself to lapse into that famous figurative discourse of the owl and the gray …

Habit And Meaning In Peirce's Pragmatism, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The pragmatic movement has often been misunderstood; the most frequent misconceptions, which assimilated the philosophies of Peirce and James in particular to forms of positivism, reductionism, or crude voluntarism seem to be on the wane. Peirce's scholastic realism, his doctrine of signs, and his conception of truth as the unique and destined goal of inquiry now tend to receive the attention that was formerly reserved for his empiricism and pragmatism. A similar change in the estimation of James seems to be taking place insofar as his theory of truth is seen as much less simplistic than was formerly supposed; and …

Dialectic As A Philosophical Method, Pierre Grimes

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Philosophy is the quest for wisdom and hence it may share a common end with religion. Not all philosophies are, however, concerned with this end, nor, again are all religions involved with a quest for wisdom. There may be different techniques and tools employed in the accomplishment of wisdom, but this dissertation is concerned only with the study of the nature and use of reason. In the philosophy of Plato reason is employed in diverse fields including mathematics, myths, and elaborate analogies, but when he turns to reason itself, then it becomes important to this analysis. Reason may be utilized …

Metaphysic And Distorted Analogies, Pierre Grimes

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

A philosophical analysis of the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual that "the world we are confronted with is nothing but words, words, words" is a difficult one upon which to embark. The difficulty does not lie in assuming this argument, but in examining it from the opponent's position. It is equivalent to an evaluation of the New York Giants in Brooklyn. If we assume the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual, finding the proper arguments and quotations to substantiate its claims, all that we would be doing is claiming a victory for "our side” when, indeed, no …

A Comparative Study Of Two Groups Of Graduates Of Garfield High School Over A Period Of Years, From 1924 To 1934, Nelle Ageng

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.