History of Philosophy | Open Access Articles

Returning To Reality: Christian Platonism For Our Times, Paul Tyson, Derek A. Michaud

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

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Auctor In Fabula: Umberto Eco And The Intentio Of Foucault's Pendulum, Douglas Stephens Iv

Senior Honors Theses

Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum weaves together a wide range of philosophical and literary threads. Many of these threads find their other ends in Eco’s nonfiction works, which focus primarily on the question of interpretation and the source of meaning. The novel, which follows three distinctly overinterpretive characters as they descend into ruin, has been read by some as a retraction or parody of Eco’s own position. However, if Foucault’s Pendulum is indeed polemical, it must be taken as an argument against the mindset which Eco has termed the “hermetic”. Through an examination of his larger theoretical body, including …

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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 …