Comparative Philosophy Commons^™

Subversion Of System / Systems Of Subversions, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What might it mean to think outside or beyond the Hegelian system of philosophy? Already in Hegel's own time this was a question that came to occupy those who labored under the weight of his speculative and comprehensive system of thought. The easiest and most immediately appealing strategy was to seize upon some category that seemed to be relatively neglected within the system, something that seemed to have been too easily aufgehoben into the totality. Kierkegaard is sometimes represented as centering his challenges to the Hegelian system around the valorization of the unhappy consciousness; that is, the consciousness aware of …

Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise.” If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have …

High Art, Folk Art, And Other Social Distinctions, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most discussions of the arts by critics and philosophers could be characterized in terms of a rather studied neglect of folk and popular art. This neglect is hardly absolute, however, for it is important in order to articulate a specific conception of aesthetic taste, beauty, or style to contrast the standard being used or praised with some other, less desirable, even degraded way of producing or appreciating something similar. It is perhaps more than a historical coincidence that the formation of the modern concept of taste and aesthetic judgment, in the eighteenth century, coincides roughly with the discovery and valorization …

To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the quintessential man of letters, Roland Barthes had the genial gift of being able to sympathize with an endless variety of discourses, texts, myths, and semiotic systems. The profusion of apparent subjects-Japan, Brecht, Balzac, photography, "mythologies," classical writing, the theater-is perhaps calculated to provoke the purist who insists on the values of thoroughness and well-grounded inquiry. At the same time, one would have to be obtuse to fail to recognize the critical projects that animate the many books, essays, and studies; these are explorations that put into question the often closed and crabbed commitment of the scholar or critic …

Philosophy, Ethics, And Virtuous Rule: A Study Of Averroes' Commentary On Plato's "Republic", Charles E. Butterworth

Faculty Books

No abstract provided.

Foreword To Antonio De Nicolas Powers Of Imagining, Patrick Heelan

Research Resources

Patrick Aidan Heelan, "Foreword" to Antonio de Nicolas, Powers of Imagining: Ignatius: a hermeneutic of St. Ignatius de Loyola using a new translation of his Spiritual exercises, his Spiritual diary, his Autobiography Autobiography, and some of his letters. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). ix-xiv.

Gadamer, Habermas And The Death Of Art, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Since the appearance of Jurgen Habermas's critical review of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode], there has been talk of the ‘Gadamer-Habermas debate' among those who are interested in the nature of historical understanding and social rationality. More recently a number of philosophers have come to see that the issues involved are of wider scope, and that the opposition of the two can be seen as emblematic of two very general styles or approaches to philosophy, which are at the centre of contemporary discussion. As one might expect, differences at fundamental levels concerning truth and understanding …

Considerations Of Economic Justics: A Movement Towards A New Definition Of Poverty, Steven Medema

Bouwsma Paper Contest

Poverty, throughout the pre-modern and modern periods, has elicited a variety of attitudes and responses. Attitudes of the middle and upper classes toward poverty have alternated between thinking of it as an unavoidable natural phenomenon cast upon an unfortunate group of people, and seeing it as being caused by slothful indigents who are too lazy to work. Responses to the problem of poverty have run the gamut from moral chastisement to indoor relief (laboring in a workhouse forinordem to qualify for benefits), to the outright granting of benefits. Yet until the early twentieth century, little was done in terms of …

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 …

Habits And Essences, Michael L. Raposa

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Examines the relationship between the notion of habit according to philosopher Charles S. Peirce and philosopher Duns Scotus' understanding of the real essence. Problems raised by both scholars regarding their concepts; Comparison of the philosophy of Peirce and Scotus; Criticism of Peirce on Scotus' metaphysics.

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 …

Peirce's Critique Of Hegel's Phenomenology And Dialectic, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Although Peirce clearly and repeatedly stated his intention to construct a philosophical system, each of his attempts in that direction is at best fragmentary and some are ultimately incoherent. The ambiguities of Peirce's cosmology, his theory of meaning and his conception of truth cannot be avoided by anyone who carefully considers his own "guess at the riddle." Rather than cataloguing these puzzles, I hope to give at least a partial account of why they remain in the work of a philosopher who was avowedly systematic, possessed great analytic and synthetic powers, and had an acute sense of the physiognomy of …

Peirce And Hegel On Absolute Meaning, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

When Peirce's philosophy is approached in terms of his theory of meaning, it is usual to think of the connections between the pragmatic maxim and the more reductive accounts of classical empiricism or modern operationalism. The point of this paper is to suggest that this angle of approach is narrow and makes several aspects of Peirce's philosophy difficult to understand; on the positive side, I want to show how both the glories and miseries of Peirce's philosophical endeavor are thrown into high relief by noting his affinities and breaks with Hegel's dialectical theory of meaning. Peirce himself often pointed to …

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 …

Hegel's Dialectic Of Artistic Meaning, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Whatever else they are, works of art are intentional human products. Our responses to such works are understandings and interpretations. That the works are or may be physical objects, cultural symptoms, or commodities and that audiences may be shocked, sexually excited, or politically instructed are irrelevant to the cognitive poles of intention and interpretation; these make art philosophically significant and differentiate it from that which has no meaning, despite possible similarities in apparent structure or emotional effect. Cognitivist theories of art usually tend to focus rather exclusively on just one of the two poles which characterize art so conceived - …

The Fundamental Reality In The Ontology Of African People, Charles Ereraina Osume

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

“The fundamental reality in the ontology of African people” is an effort to alert the reader to a crucial omission in most contemporary studies on the religion or culture of African people. The majority of the current anthropologists (scholars in the field of contemporary religions) only make a passing reference to the spirit beings that infest the world of traditional Africa.

Apart from inadequate attempts to psychologize the religions of pre-literary man, investigators of pre-scientific cultures have for the most part been unable to account for the unflinching loyalty and meticulous devotion of traditional man to spirit beings. The reason …

An Existential Appraisal Of Selected Nigerian Fiction, Jim Nesin Omatseye

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

One of the two aims of this research was to elucidate from a philosophical perspective a selected body of Nigerian fiction. The second objective has been to investigate the dominant themes of the two selected novelists and relate them to existentialism.

The most essential theme was found to be colonialism and its disruption of the African culture. It was implied in the works of the novelists that authentic African culture was dislocated by British imperialism in Nigeria. The use of force and other features of power was manifested in the takeover. Through various literary devices and innuendo they suggest that …

A Philosophy Of Expression, Carolyn Blythe Johnson

All Master's Theses

This thesis presents a general theoretical framework and descriptive methodology for helping students develop the capacity and confidence to educated themselves by learning to trust their senses, to develop the ability to explore, to synthesize, to think about their own nature and the meaning of life and the relation between their world and the world. The framework could be termed "a philosophy of expression" which has as its basic tenet the belief that knowledge gained from experience and reflection is only fully realized when expressed.

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 …

A Historical Survey Of The Relevance Of Music In Man's Philosophy, Annette R. Arnold

All Master's Theses

Some concern with music in relation to man's well-being has been evidenced throughout history. Many philosophers have acknowledged that man's ethical and emotional well-being could be influenced by music. On the other hand, other philosophers have asserted that music had no meaning outside itself and therefore could have no significant impact on man. Some philosophers went further by contemplating the sociological implications of music as it relates to man's concept of self and his cognitive reality. This study is the outgrowth of a response to Nietzsche's cormient that "Life without music would be a mistake" (Nietzsche 81 :6 Vol. 16). …

Soren Kierkegaard's Philosophy Of Authentic Existence, John B. Merrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This undergraduate honors thesis discusses the life and philosophical works of Soren Kierkegaard as it relates to the concept of authentic existence.

Comparative Study Of Indiana Coaches, James L. Wittenauer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Comparative Study Of Indiana Coaches, James L. Wittenauer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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 …

Conceptions Of Formative Processes In Western Science And Eastern Philosophy, Glenn E. Kaufmann

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The central theme of this paper concerns the way Eastern and Western (sometimes termed Oriental and Occidental) thought view the formation of the world; the means of arriving at these conclusions and the concepts or pre-conceived ideas upon which they are based. Western thought has been limited to views that have developed out of modern science, post-1500; they are mechanistic science, evolution, Whitehead's philosophy pertaining to God and modern physics. For the purpose of this paper, the emphasis in Eastern thought is placed on Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Madhyamika school of philosophy. In India it developed in contact with many …

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 Subjective Measurement In General Science, Elizabeth A. Ridenour

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Machiavelli On Francis Bacon: A Critical Examination, Blanche E. Ferguson

Graduate Thesis Collection

The association of the name of Francis Bacon with that of Niccolo Machiavelli is no novelty to the modern reader. But in most instances this association is brief and fleeting, possessed of a will-o'-the-wisp character that is at once unsatisfying and challenging. The natural conclusion to which one is tempted to leap is that Bacon, since he is the more recent in point of time, was influenced by the great Florentine in matters of philosophy and style. A second possibility is that both men were influenced by similar conditions of political and cultural backgrounds. A still further consideration lies in …

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.