History of Philosophy Commons^™

Buddha For Beginners, Stephen Asma

Stephen T Asma

Originally published by Writers and Readers in 1998, this is an iconoclastic, illustrated romp through the life of the Buddha both a credible exploration of his life and teachings and an entertaining introduction to the philosophy of Buddhism.

Many Westerners know about the meditation practices of Buddhism, but few understand the Buddha's philosophical teachings. This book puts the teachings (dharma) in their proper context and unravels some of the more dense knots of Buddha's thinking. And it does all this while entertaining the reader with humorous illustrations and pop-culture sensibility. This primer, constructed like a graphic novel, cuts through the …

Sagp Newsletter 2008/9.1 East Philol, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Announcement of SAGP programs with the American Philological Association and with the American Philosophical Association 2008/2009 academic year.

International Terrorism:Role ,Responsibility And Operation Of Media Channles, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

"Terrorism" is a term that cannot be given a stable defintion. Or rather, it can, but to do so forstalls any attempt to examine the major feature of its relation to television in the contemporary world. As the central public arena for organising ways of picturing and talking about social and political life, TV plays a pivotal role in the contest between competing defintions, accounts and explanations of terrorism. Which term is used in any particular context is inextricably tied to judgemements about the legitimacy of the action in question and of the political system against which it is directed. …

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Program, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Abstract Collection, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Place Of Theology In A World Come Of Age: A Comparative Analysis Of The Writings Of Dietrich Bonhoeffer And Paul Ramsey., Dave Buckner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the twentieth century dawned in the western world, there were voices both inside and out of the Christian Church that began to question religion's central place in man's daily life. Had humanity finally progressed to the point where religion was no longer necessary? Had we at long last developed the characteristics and perspectives that religion had attempted to engrain within us? Or were the rules and regulations of religion still needed to ensure the continued advancement of civilization? This is a study of two opposing voices in that debate: theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and ethicist Paul Ramsey. What follows is …

Inter-Generational Youth Ministry And The Solution To Volunteers, Steve R. Vandegriff

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Rousseau, The Anticosmopolitan?, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Rousseau's repeated criticisms of the Enlightenment's ideal of cosmopolitanism has led to his thought being characterized as 'anticosmopolitan'. His work abounds in denunciations of the ideals of equality of treatment and universal rights supported by his contemporaries. Moreover, his liking of solitude, introspection and socialization in small circles and his preference for patriotism over equity among all men seem to set him up as the counterpoint of the universalism his contemporaries defended. However, a deeper insight into the work of the author of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker shows that, far from being incompatible with true cosmopolitanism, the moral …

Belief And Persuasion In The Socratic Elenchus, Dylan Futter

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Socrates’ philosophical method is how unsuccessful it is. One problem is that elenchus seems able only to destroy common belief without generating anything substantive in its place. Another is that it seems incapable of getting anyone to relinquish his unsupported beliefs. Plato is acutely aware of these problems. In the Meno, he undertakes to show that Socrates’ method of inquiry is capable of generating substantive results. In the Gorgias, he reveals why some people are not moved by reasoned argument. And in the Republic he proposes a complex model of moral belief-formation, …

The Responsibility Of Thinking In Dark Times: Hannah Arendt Versus Hans Jonas, Lawrence A. Vogel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Aristotle's Abstract Ontology, Allan Bäck

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle has a metaphysics of individual substances, substrata persisting through time that are neither in nor said of a subject. That I do not dispute. However, when we move from the individual to the universal, from perception to knowledge, Aristotle has a metaphysics of relations. This I will try to sketch out here.

Aristotle appeals to abstraction at key places in his philosophy. Somehow abstraction gets us to the first principles and to the objects of the most fundamental sciences. Somehow universals are abstracted from singulars and have no transcendent existence.

Aristotle never states his theory of abstraction formally or …

Plato And Aristotle On The Instant Of Change - A Dilemma, John Bowin

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

There is an ancient puzzle about motion in Plato at Parmenides 155e-157b which has been the subject of scholarship by Richard Sorabji and more recently, Nico Strobach.1 The puzzle, as Plato gives it, can be roughly summarized as follows: At every time, a given object must either be in motion or at rest; there is no third possibility. Also, an object can never be simultaneously both in motion and at rest. The only way for an object to be both in motion and at rest is for it to be in motion and at rest at different times. But how …

Sagp Newsletter 2007/8.2 Pacific Central, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Reports Relating To The Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting Of The Society, James A. Borland

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Memorials 2008, James A. Borland

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Trapped In The Creation Museum, Stephen Asma

Stephen T Asma

Into the swampy debate over evolution has waded the new Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky. In an America divided between those who accept Darwin's theories and those who believe God created the world in six days, it seeks to win moderates and compromisers over to its side. Shortly after the museum opened last spring, I made a pilgrimage to witness this quirky new spectacle of Americana...

Appetites And Actions In Aristotle's Moral Psychology, Tom Olshewsky

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The so-called practical syllogism is best understood in dispositional terms. Animate movement originates with orexis (appetite), but appetite is the result of the coming together of dual dispositions, the orektikon and the orekton. For calculative appetite, multiple objectives can be imagined, and deliberation determines which objective is best for this person in this circumstance. Deliberation is an antecedent of the actualized appetite, not its consequence. This psychology makes clear that satisfaction of appetites is a two-stage process for calculative beings: first the determination of the appetite, then movement to fulfillment in its objective. In deliberation, the determination is which …

Persuasion And Force In Plato's Republic, Christopher Moore

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Despite the frequent pairing of and contrast between persuasion and force, Plato’s Republic undermines any coherent split between these two modes of handling others. This paper provides two major pieces of evidence to support this claim: (i) Book I dramatizes the weakness of the distinction; and (ii) the arguments that the best rulers will rule only under coercion (in Books I, V, VII, and IX) makes the distinction into an obvious conundrum. Further evidence omitted here is Plato’s tendency to subvert this same rhetorically popular binary elsewhere, especially Statesman, Sophist and Laws. Given that Plato doesn’t explicitly question the persuasion-force …

Emmanuel Levinas And The Judaism Of The Good Samaritan, Lawrence A. Vogel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Semantics Of Sense Perception In Berkeley, Kenneth L. Pearce

Kenneth L Pearce

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a …

How Newness Enters The World: The Methodology Of Sheldon Pollock, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Droits De L'Homme, Droits Du Citoyen: Les Présupposés De La Jurisprudence Américaine Et Européenne, Gregory Lewkowicz

Gregory Lewkowicz

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of some rulings of the US Supreme Court and of the European Court of Human Rights. Reviewing cases related to international legal problems or using comparative legal reasoning, the paper suggests that the difference of attitudes between the two courts in human rights cases is embedded in the classical opposition between men and citizen.

Civil War And Political Contractualism Incomplete (Guerra Civil Y Contractualismo Político Incompleto) Spanish, Fernando Estrada

Fernando Estrada

This chapter presents an interpretation of armed conflict in Colombia since reading "negative" of the Coase theorem. The relations of the civil war with limited conditions of policy and constitutional order, offer advantages to agents in a society threatened violent.

Cover Songs: Ambiguity, Multivalence, Polysemy, Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The notion of a “cover song” is central to an understanding of contemporary popular music, and has certainly received its share of attention in writing about contemporary music, from the mainstream press to slightly more technical ethnomusicological studies such as “Cross-Cultural ‘Countries’: Covers, Conjuncture, and the Whiff of Nashville in Música Sertaneja (Brazilian Commercial Country Music)” (Dent, 2005). In many major U.S. cities, musicians make a living in “cover” bands, recreating the music of well-known groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, U 2, the Who, ABBA, the Dave Matthews Band, the Grateful Dead, and others. Consumers …

Necessity And Possibility: The Logical Strategy Of Kant's 'Critique Of Pure Reason', Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If logic provides rules for thought, can there be similar rules for human experience? Kurt Mosser argues that reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an argument for such a logic of experience makes more defensible many of Kant's most controversial claims, and makes more accessible Kant's notoriously difficult text. By pursuing this strategic hint, Kant's philosophical claims about human experience are seen as extraordinarily strong―as universal and necessary―but only as providing the conditions for experience to be possible. Thus, just as logic does not determine what thoughts are about, logic of experience does not determine the content of experience. …

Pornography, Contemporary-Mainstream, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Once a relatively small‐niche market, pornography in recent years has become a mainstream, technologically sophisticated multi‐billion‐dollar industry, one that plays a significant role in shaping our ideas about gender and sexuality. Like many complex and politically contested concepts, pornography can be defined in a number of different ways. While some defined pornography simply as any sexually explicit written or graphic material, others include additional criteria, such as that the material be produced for the purpose of sexually arousing its audience or that the material convey certain (typically sexist and degrading) ideas and attitudes about women, men, and sexuality. While these …

Lucian Blaga On The Existence Of God, Michael S. Jones

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Stephen James On The Challenge Of Human Rights: Origin, Development And Significance By Jack Mahoney. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 215pp., Stephen James

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development and Significance by Jack Mahoney. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 215pp.

"Zhu Xi's Spiritual Practice As The Basis Of His Central Philosophical Concepts", Joseph Adler

Joseph Adler

No abstract provided.

How Serious Is Our Divergence?, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle