History of Philosophy Commons^™

Socratic Metaethics Imagined, Steve Ross, Lisa Warenski

Sophia and Philosophia

A time machine mysteriously appeared one day in ancient Athens. Curious about the future of philosophical dialogue, Socrates entered the device and traveled to the 21st Century. He spent several months in the United Kingdom and United States discussing metaethics before returning to Athens, now a devoted and formidable quasi-realist moral expressivist.

Platonism Of The Future, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester.[1] Perhaps the most dramatic since then has been at Reed College.[2] There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals.

The Foundations Of Revealed Religion 100 Years Before David Hume: The Contribution Of Anthony Collins, Nicholas Bryant Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation I examine the contributions of Anthony Collins (1676-1729) to the eighteenth-century debate about the grounds of Christianity. I show that by the early eighteenth-century British philosophers addressing this topic had begun to abandon appeals to miracles in favor of appeals to the completion of Old Testament prophecy. I argue that this alternative was short lived, in large part because of the critical work of Anthony Collins. This episode in the debate is often overlooked but without it, later discussions of miracles, including those of David Hume in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, would have been anti-climactic. …

Sagp Fordham Program 2017 As Of 0ctober 9, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Hermeneutic Philosophies Of Social Science: Introduction, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Aftermath, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Aftermath

The question after any disaster is the question of what remains and that, to the extent that there is still something that remains, is the question of life. It is life that is the question after Auschwitz—how go on, how write poetry, how philosophize? What is called thinking after Heidegger? Are we still inclined to thinking, after Heidegger? And what of logic? What of history? And what of science? In addition, we may ask after ethical implications, including questions bearing on anti-Semitism, but also issues of misogyny, as well as Heidegger’s critical questions concerning technology and concerning animal life …

La Violenza Della Violenza, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

ünther Anders, al pari di Hannah Arendt, fu un teorico del potere che sviluppò un’esplicita riflessione filosofica sulla violenza. Tuttavia, anche gli esperti delle sue opere trovano solitamente che le riflessioni di Anders sul potere (in tedesco Macht) implichino una certa difficoltà interpretativa, specialmente perché la sua scrittura è stilisticamente impegnativa, ma anche perché, in modo più decisivo, Anders scrisse sulla natura della tecnica, argomento inusuale per la maggior parte dei teorici della politica e dei filosofi. Questo interesse può essere riscontrato a cominciare dalle primissime riflessioni del filosofo tedesco sulla musica, e in tutti i suoi studi sull’essere …

We Scholars, Mark Anderson

Sophia and Philosophia

As a graduate student in my late twenties, I began one winter to experience attacks of migraine fever while conducting research preliminary to the writing of my doctoral thesis. Long hours sitting alone in the basement rooms of university libraries, hunched over a creaking desk, chasing down references to obscure manuscripts, translating ancient languages from small-print editions of old books, copying extended extracts into my notes, formulating and recording my own insights and arguments—all this intellectual labor executed while hidden away from the sun drained me of the vigor I’d acquired as a child on walking tours with my father. …

Philosophy Bakes No Bread, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Philosophy Bakes No Bread

Far from baking bread, far from practical applicability, philosophy traditionally sought to explain the world, ideally so. Thus, when Marx argued that it was high time philosophy “change the world,” his was a revolutionary challenge. Today, philosophy is an analytic affair and analytic philosophers seek less to explain the world than to squirrel out arguments or, more descriptively, to resolve the minutiae of this or that name problem. Faced with diminishing student demand, analytic philosophers have taken to urging that everyone from primary school students to scientists be required to study (analytic) philosophy. Just so, applied …

W.E.B. Du Bois: Freedom, Race, And American Modernity, Elvira Basevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation defends W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophy of modern freedom, which he grounds in the historical reconstruction of the American civic community on the moral basis of free and equal citizenship. Rather than ascribe to him an elitist politics of racial ‘uplift’ and assimilation to Anglo- American folkways, I instead argue that he defends black moral and political autonomy for securing state power and civic equality. Additionally, he challenges both historical and the contemporary political philosophers, including John Rawls, Axel Honneth, and Philip Pettit, to articulate the racial dimension of the development of a social order that actualizes the moral …

Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, And Their Aftermath, David Ingram

David Ingram

Developments in Anglo-American philosophy during the first half of the 20th Century closely tracked developments that were occurring in continental philosophy during this period. This should not surprise us. Aside from the fertile communication between these ostensibly separate traditions, both were responding to problems associated with the rise of mass society. Rabid nationalism, corporate statism, and totalitarianism (Left and Right) posed a profound challenge to the idealistic rationalism of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies. The decline of the individual – classically conceived by the 18th-century Enlightenment as a self-determining agent – provoked strong reactions. While some philosophical tendencies sought to re-conceive …

Sagp Fordham Program 2017, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Draft (91117) Program of the 2017 SAGP Annual Meeting at Fordham University Lincoln Center, October 21-22, 2017.

The Ontological-Ontic Character Of Mythology, Jeffrey M. Ray

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates the concept of mythology within the opposing philosophical frameworks of the world as either an abstract totality from which ‘truth’ is derived, or as a chaotic background to which the subject brings a synthetic unity. Chapter One compares the culturally dominant, classical philosophical picture of the world as a necessary, knowable totality, with the more recent conception of the ‘world’ as a series of ideational repetitions (sense) grafted on to material flows emanating from a chaotic background (non-sense). Drawing on Plato, Kant, and Heidegger, I situate mythology as a conception of the false—that which fails to …

The Nature Of God & Predestination In John Davenant's Dissertatio De Praedestinatione Et Reprobatione, Jonathan Roberts

Theses

This paper is an exposition and defense of John Davenant's critique of the lapsarian understanding of the ordering of God's decrees. I evaluate Davenant's use of theology proper in his critique of said debate and contend that if Davenant is correct about divine simplicity and divine immutability, his critique of lapsarianism is successful.

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

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

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

Differentiating Averroes’ Accounts Of The Metaphysics Of Human Epistemology In His Middle And Long Commentaries On Aristotle’S De Anima, Caleb H A Brown

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

Averroes (an Islamic Andalusian philosopher in the 12^th century) discusses the metaphysics of human epistemology extensively, and his socio-religious context sheds light on this discussion. Several of his works, most prominently his three commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, attempt to explain how finite, particular minds interact with universal, eternal intelligibles. Current scholarship focuses on the two longer commentaries, the Middle Commentary and the Long Commentary, but there is no consensus regarding which of these presents Averroes’ final articulation of the metaphysics of human epistemology. Those who maintain that Averroes wrote the Middle Commentary last tend to minimize …

Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized …

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 …

Epicurus, Sententia Vaticana Xxiii, Eric A. Brown

Eric A. Brown

Sententia Vaticana 23, as usually emended, says that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this sentence should not be attributed to Epicurus. No other evidence supports the attribution of this view to Epicurus, and much other evidence counts strongly against it. It would be better to reject the emendation, so that the sentence says, in somewhat awkward but not entirely unprecedented Greek, that every friendship is by itself a virtue, or to attribute the emended sentence not to Epicurus but to the later, more timid Epicureans who, according to Cicero, conceded more value to friendship …

Advising The Cosmopolis, Eric A. Brown

Eric A. Brown

Plutarch charges that Stoic theory is inconsistent with Stoic political engagement no matter what they decide to do, because the Stoics' endorsement of the political life is inconsistent with their cosmopolitan rejection of ordinary politics (Stoic.rep., ab init.). Drawing on evidence from Chrysippus and Seneca, I develop an argument that answers this charge, and I draw out two interesting implications of the argument. The first implication is for scholars of ancient Stoicism who like to say that Stoicism is apolitical. The argument I reconstruct turns on the political importance of the practice of giving and taking advice, and in this …

The Goal Of Habituation In Aristotle: A Neo-Mechanical Account, Dioné Harley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Standard interpretations of Aristotle’s ethics construe the habituation phase in his theory of moral education as markedly robust regarding the moral condition that must be achieved before the learner can attend lectures on the noble and political questions in general. These “intellectualists” argue that habituation engages the rational part of the soul so that the learner develops the capacity to identify that an action is noble, which involves taking pleasure in the nobility of the act. Practical reason will provide an understanding of why the action is noble. I argue against intellectualist readings of habituation and defend a neo-mechanical account …

Hegel On Indian Philosophy: Spinozism, Romanticism, Eurocentrism, Gino Signoracci

Philosophy ETDs

This study examines nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s appraisal of philosophies of India. In Hegel’s time, classical Indian texts such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads, and Bhagavadgītā had only recently been translated into European languages, and were generating tremendous controversy. Hegel carved out a unique and hugely influential position by devotedly reading fledgling translations of source texts alongside European interpretations, attempting to comprehend the philosophical significance of Indian thought. Hegel’s legacy proved deeply problematic, however, both because his views were not entirely consistent or unambiguous over time, and because his evident relegation of Indian ideas to pre- or unphilosophical status …

Philosophers On The Fringe: Albert Schweitzer, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Aldo Leopold, And The Wrongful Polarization Of Environmentalist History 2017, Minnie A.M. Lauzon

Master's Theses

This thesis includes three articles (chapters) intending to encourage clarification of an area of environmental history that has not received adequate attention since the publication of Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind. Since its publication in 1967, little research has been dedicated to understanding the scholarly or philosophical influence Albert Schweitzer and Liberty Hyde Bailey had on Aldo Leopold. Since my undertaking of this topic, I have established two primary goals. First, I want to provide clarification to environmentalists, academics, and the populace at large that environmentalism does not have to be bound by rules and convention, but can …

Politics, Technology, And Libertarianism, Thomas J. Perry

Honors Projects

In recent years, technology has started to play a major role in the U.S. political climate. Specifically, it has created a platform for outside groups, such as libertarians, to have their voices heard. This brought forward an important research question: How has technology helped or hindered the ability of individually focused libertarians to organize for collective action? Through the exploration of previous research, two major findings are discovered: 1) technology and the growth of individualism in politics are intertwined and 2) technology and individualism both have ties to libertarianism. The implications of libertarianism are analyzed further through the study of …

Degrees Of Altruism As Dependent Upon Degrees Of Relations, Bobbi Jackson

Theses

In David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), he asserts that humans act most altruistically toward people in the closest relations to us, e.g., in family or friendship relations, and somewhat less so toward those who are merely in our own ethnic group, of our own nationality, etc., and least altruistically toward people in the most distant relations to us. But, current empirical data appears to indicate vast multitudes of exceptions to Hume's claim. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to determine the cause of this apparent conflict and suggest potential solutions that might allow Hume's theory …

The Eternal Hero: A Study Of The Evolution Of The Literary Character Throughout History, James Simms

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

The Literary character has always existed, and I intend to show how he or she has changed the times, and, in turn, been changed by the times. Literature is a powerful force of culture and morality, liberalism and conservatism, engines of fate, and forces of chaos. As each era has its own values, so each character reflects those values (and might even go against some in order to convey the authors’ understanding of them). The characters, if powerful enough, often cause social change, defining major thoughts of various eras. Literature can both define a period, but can also be the …

How To Interpret Spinoza’S Theory Of Attribute: The Subjective And Objective Interpretations Revisited, Xiangnong (Herbert) Hu

Critical Reflections

Scholars disagree on how to interpret two terms, ‘intellect’ and ‘as’, in the definition of attribute given by Spinoza in his Ethics and thus divide themselves into two rival camps: one is known as the subjective interpretation, and the other, objective interpretation. In this essay, I argue that both interpretations are problematic in one way or another, and a better interpretation should take a middle path between the subjective and objective. By this new interpretation, ‘intellect’ should be understood as infinite and finite intellects, and ‘as’ to be ‘as in fact’. Therefore, what the definition of attribute really means is …

Health And Sickness: An Examination Of The Question Of The Affirmation Or Negation Of Life In The Face Of Suffering, Frank M. Scavelli

Student Publications

In this thesis, I examine a line of thought that stretches from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who regarded his own work merely as an interpretation and continuation Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) philosophy, through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who reacted to Schopenhauer’s negation of life with an affirmative philosophy, to Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who, operating from within this tradition, attempted a synthesis of it as well as a critical analysis of some of its aspects and their relation to seemingly-pathological fascistic sentiment he witnessed in the Germany of the 1920s and 30s. This line of thought deals with the essential question of Life. It …

Sagp Newsletter 2016/17.4 Pacific, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.