Epistemology Commons^™

Rocky Horror Sublimation: Identity As A Contingency Of Experience, Josh Harper

Senior Theses

Queer theory, as a subfield of feminist theories concerned with revealing epistemic, political, and humanitarian problems of a male-dominated society, has been heavily influenced by its founding thinkers, including Judith Butler, the theorist focused on herein. In critiquing various problems of our western society, Butler preserves the structure underlying such problems: through her approach of a gay/straight framework critiquing a male domination of female, the binary is preserved. This is problematic for many reasons, including its exclusion of perspectives that do not fall cleanly into such dichotomies, namely trans and polysexual ones. By appealing to these, as well as to …

Arts-Based Education For Enchanting, Embodied And Embedded Sustainability, Hans Dieleman

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article sketches two contrasting ideal-typical narratives of sustainability, a disenchanting and an enchanting one, and argues that current thinking in sustainability is mainly situated in the narrative of disenchantment. This narrative is based on various obsolete philosophical assumptions, and hampers the transformation process, as it distances the population from being part of this. It then sketches the narrative of enchanting sustainability and shows how this has the capacity to engage, intrigue and motivate people to be involved. It is rooted in an arts-based approach of connecting aesthetics, associative thinking, reflective practice, emotion-based working, aspiration and intentionality. The article moves …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

The Quest For Ethical Truth: Wang Yangming On The Unity Of Knowing And Acting, Weimin Shi

Comparative Philosophy

Drawing an analogy between Wang Yangming’s endeavor to know ethical truth and Descartes’ quest for epistemic certainty, this paper proposes a reading of Wang's doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting to the effect that the doctrine does not express an ethical teaching about how the knowledge that is already acquired is to be related to acting, but an epistemological claim as to how we know ethical truths. A detailed analysis of Wang’s relevant texts is offered to support the claim.

Reflective Knowledge: Confucius And Virtue Epistemology, Chienkuo Mi

Comparative Philosophy

Most of sScholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This paper seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought of the Analects is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of the Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The third goal is to show that the Confucian thought is not only of epistemological significance, but that it can make a contribution to progressing contemporary …

Taking Skepticism Seriously: How The Zhuang-Zi Can Inform Contemporary Epistemology, Julianne Chung

Comparative Philosophy

This paper explores a few of the ways that the Zhuang-Zi can inform contemporary analytic epistemology. I begin, in section 1, by briefly outlining and summarizing the case for my fictionalist interpretation of the text. In section 2, I discuss how the Zhuang-Zi can be brought into productive dialogue with the question of how we should respond to skeptical arguments. Specifically, I argue that the Zhuang-Zi can be reasonably interpreted as exemplifying an approach that is different from dominant contemporary responses to skeptical arguments in three ways: (i) it is fictionalist; (ii) it motivates a skeptical perspective rather than a …

Vol 8 No 2 Editor's Words, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Information Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Cover Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics And Citation In Philosophy, Asphodel And Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour And The ‘Science Wars, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The attached file is a proof copy.

Please see the printed version. Das interpretative Universum

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Tolkien’S Sub-Creation And Secondary Worlds: Implications For A Robust Moral Psychology, Nathan S. Lefler

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his work, “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien offers a detailed account of what he calls Sub-creation, along with the corresponding notions of Primary and Secondary Worlds. In this paper, I suggest that Tolkien’s concept of Sub-creation can be creatively appropriated in the realm of moral psychology and there applied to the fundamental relationship between self and other – or in Judeo-Christian terms, “I” and my neighbor. Through appeal to Tolkien’s thought and to the wider Christian theological tradition, and in constructive tension with the contemporary psychoanalytic attention to “intersubjectivity,” I attempt to elucidate the power and appropriate …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Revolution In Ideology: Crafting A Holistic Scientific Dialectic, Nathan Neill

Dialogue & Nexus

Ideology drives scientific research far more than is acknowledged. Since science itself is conducted by individuals, each scientist has a biased conception of themselves and their surroundings relative to the rest of the universe, even if it is never explicated. This sense of relation to the greater universe is what defines the ideology of the individual. It is this sense of relation and self that creates the individual, who goes on to investigate the natural world by the scientific method. In this paper I will examine extant scientific ideology, particularly in Western science, and propose changes that could be helpful.

Contemporary Jesuit Epistemological Interests, James G. Murphy

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Apart from an orientation to and interest in the discernment of spirits as laid out in St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, there does not exist a Jesuit epistemology as such. Compared to the numbers of Jesuit systematic theologians, scripture scholars, metaphysicians, and ethicists, there have been few Jesuit epistemologists.2 In metaphysics, Jesuits have been Thomist or Suarezian, even Platonist. In ethics, they have ranged from proportionalist through deontologist to virtue ethicist. No similar distinctive Jesuit presence is to be found in epistemology....

On Craft, William Lentjes

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Craft is a relationship - a dialogue - between craftsman, tool, and material. Craft begins with the intent of all of these loci, and all of these loci are rooted in Being.

Being is known through the consciousness, awareness, and perception of a subject. Being is the inherent existence and totality of "what is."

Being crafts us; Craft imbues Being.

This thesis re-examines the pedagogical approach of an architectural education. The focus is placed on craft through presuppositionless phenomenology.

In an age of endless mechanized production and spiritless materialism, the practice of craft can teach us to return to the …

Friedrich Schelling: Soteriological Redemption And Ontological Renewal In The Intellectual Intuition Of The Life Of Life, Thomas Christopher Seay

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Schelling calls for the restoration of originary revelation by the true philosopher and, for the successful anagogue, the creation of a philosophical-religion; in so summoning man back to his innermost beginnings in the Absolute prius, the life of life, this paper claims that Schelling revalorizes and retranslates the ancient Orphico-Pythagorean and Platonic traditions and Hellenic mystery teachings onto European soil. Accordingly, drawing on correspondences and concordances with and insights from traditionalist philosophy, the German Pietist reform movement and the antique contemplative tradition, this paper reads the Schellingian project as an initiatic mystagogy to intellectual intuition, in which the anagogic traveler …

How Trump Won: Media And The Silent Majority In The 2016 Us Presidential Election, Joshua K. Miller

Senior Honors Theses

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign ended in victory because of two powerful forces: enormous media advantage gained through sensationalism and a strong coalition made up of evangelicals, pragmatic conservatives, and the silent majority. The work of Neil Postman sheds light on the underlying cultural foundation of Trump’s media advantage. Parallels from the video game industry explain how intentional sensationalism played into Trump’s success in the primary process. Evangelicals and pragmatic conservatives joined Trump’s coalition in spite of his scandals, and Eric Hoffer’s work helps explain his appeal to the silent majority. Ultimately, the patterns of Trump’s victory yield significant learning …

The Epistemic Status Of Moral Conceptual Truths, Kara D. Boschert

Theses

Evolutionary debunking arguments assume that morality could, conceptually speaking, be about anything. A response to this contention is that there are some moral conceptual truths which counter assertions that we could be in error about basic moral truths. According to proponents of moral conceptual truths, some things, by definition, cannot count as moral. Putative moral conceptual truths, such as “stealing is wrong,” are thought to enjoy a privileged epistemic status because anyone who denies them forfeits their ability to engage in competent moral reasoning. This paper explores whether moral conceptual truths can offer a satisfactory response to the debunkers’ premise …

Justify This! The Roles Of Epistemic Justification, Tamala L. Endriss

Theses

Since Gettier's (1963) paper, epistemology has exploded with ideas of how to overcome cases where an agent has a justified true belief, and yet, does not have knowledge. Some epistemologists have tried to escape the Gettier Problem by stating knowledge is true belief plus something else, whereby removing justification, which seems to be the key player in Gettier Problems. Still, others suggest that any addition to true belief will cause issues. Timothy Williamson (2000) contends that knowledge is not analyzable. For Williamson, knowledge is the most basic state of mind; it is a factive mental state that cannot be explained …

Relational Power, Music, And Identity: The Emotional Efficacy Of Congregational Song, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song

The power of congregational song to unify (or divide) people along various lines is well documented. Yet, how this process of uniting or dividing is accomplished has proven necessarily difficult to document. This paper examines the complex and polyvalent factors that contribute to the meaningfulness of congregational music making, seeking to offer a synthetic, conceptual framework with which to engage this often murky milieu.

Employing interdisciplinary research techniques drawn from sociology, ritual studies, and ethnomusicology, I construct a conceptual framework with which to understand the profoundly formative power of …

Society, Scientific Authority, And Linguistics: The Need For Epistemic Justification, Libby C. Chernouski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Many have considered Linguistics a science for decades, though linguists themselves have debated the accuracy of this characterization of the study of language. These conversations about linguistics as a science reveal a discipline intent on securing scientific status, often through rigorous methodology and theoretical frameworks mirroring the traditional sciences. If successful, however, linguistics inherits the authority of modern science, which maintains an epistemically hierarchical relationship with non-scientists. By examining and representing the epistemic relationships between expertise, authority, and science, I ask us to think of all linguistics not as a socially neutral endeavor, but as perpetuating the juxtaposition of scientific …

An Unjust Dogma: Why A Special Right To Religion Wrongly Discriminates Against Non-Religious Worldviews, Kenneth Einar Himma

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I will argue that a special right to religious freedom is not morally warranted, and that hence such a right illicitly discriminates against non-religious worldviews. The principal argument here is that there is no adequate reason to think that religious worldviews implicate any interests distinct from those implicated by non-religious worldviews. While it is certainly true that religious worldviews warrant, as a matter of political morality, all the protections that non-religious worldviews receive, there is good reason to question what seems to have become a dogma among Western nations—namely, that religious worldviews deserve special protection....

Content Individuation And Evolutionary Content Emergence, Yujian Zheng

Comparative Philosophy

This short paper addresses two connected issues which were brought to some focused light by Searle’s comments on my contributed article to the anthology Searle’s philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement. The first issue concerns the claim that animals cannot have observer-independent intentional content of the same type as that of human beings. The second is my denial that mental content can be merely caused in specific brain states, given its holistic and normative character. I defend my position on the second issue by distinguishing content individuation from content realization while I elaborate my relatively more sophisticated argument for …

The Perspective And Perspective-Transcending Dimensions Of Consciousness And Its Double-Aboutness Character: Bridging Searle And Zhuang Zi, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

What I intend to do here are closely related three things. First, in response to Searle’s “reply” comments on my previous article “Searle, Zhuang Zi, and Transcendental Perspectivism”, I will clarify and further elaborate one of the central points concerning the “perspective” dimension and “perspective-transcending” dimension of consciousness there. Second, more substantially, I will strengthen my point by explaining the “double-aboutness” character of consciousness which is intrinsically related to the foregoing two dimensions of consciousness concerning its “hooking-up-to-objects” capacity; through a semantic-ascent strategy, I will also explain how the point has substantial theoretic implications for exploring the issue of how …

Searle’S Master Insight And The Non-Dual Solution Of The Sixth Patriarch: Sorting Through Some Problems Of Consciousness, Robert E. Allinson

Comparative Philosophy

The Platform Sutra, which dates back to the seventh century C.E., is one of the classic documents of Chinese philosophy and is the intellectual autobiography of Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Ch’an Buddhism. In the Platform Sutra, the Sixth Patriarch demonstrates that the spiritual and intellectual problems of consciousness stem from a false adherence to the dualistic standpoint. The Sixth Patriarch utilizes ingenious arguments to demonstrate how one can escape the problems of dualism. An example of a constructive engagement between Chinese philosophy and Searle is to compare and contrast the arguments of Hui Neng with those of …

Between The Internal And The External: Kant’S And Patañjali’S Arguments For The Reality Of Physical Objects And Their Independence From Mind, Ana Laura Funes Maderey

Comparative Philosophy

Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies to refute the skeptic argument that denies the real and independent existence of physical objects. This essay examines both strategies through the reconstruction of Kant’s and Patañjali’s twofold refutation of idealism: one based on the perceptual distinction between the real and the illusory, and the other one based on the ontological necessity of a permanent external object to understand change. I argue that the second strategy is philosophically stronger due to its phenomenological recognition of the body as a grounding point, and that this is possible …

Editor's Words, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 1 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.