Metaphysics Commons^™

The Mystery Of Lonergan, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

A Privatization Of Politics: Anthony Elliot's Concepts Of The Self (2001), Paula Murphy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate image of selfhood in the modern world than that found in Ezra Pound's poem In a Station of the Metro. It is a selfhood which is at once unique and conglomerative, fleetingly visible then tantalizingly out of focus. It is this slippery, indefinable entity that is the subject of Anthony Elliot's book. The title bears witness to the enormous breadth of its subject matter: Concepts of the Self is an attempt to engage with the various contemporary theoretical frameworks through which selfhood is explicated. Elliot's approach is admirably inter-disciplinary, …

To See More Clearly And Broadly: Science And The Postmodern Sentiment, C. Jason Smith, Robert Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What we call postmodernism, whether we refer to the sciences or the humanities, is a certain preoccupation with the role of the human observer in the composition and perception -- perhaps even construction -- of reality. The postmodern condition, so to speak, is the moment in history when the hard sciences and the sciences of man seem to be suffering from the same anxieties about the relevance of the self-reflexive interaction between the observer and the subject to the fabric of existence and the web of knowledge. In simplest terms, we would define the postmodern question as this: …

Intelligence And Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the ramifications of the lack of epistemological underpinnings from which the rightness or wrongness regarding WMD in Iraq can be constructed and adjudicated.

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

Poetry And The Question Of God, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Augustine's Intellectual Conversion, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

An Extended Lewis-Stalnaker Semantics And The New Problem Of Counterpossibles,, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Closest-possible-world analyses of counterfactuals suffer from what has been called the ‘problem of counterpossibles’: some counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents seem plainly false, but the proposed analyses imply that they are all (vacuously) true.  One alleged solution to this problem is the addition of impossible worlds.  In this paper, I argue that the closest possible or impossible world analyses that have recently been suggested suffer from the ‘new problem of counterpossibles’: the proposed analyses imply that some plainly true counterpossibles (viz., ‘counterlogicals’) are false.  After motivating and presenting the ‘new problem’, I give reasons to think that …

A Defense Of Creationism In Fiction, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Creationism is the conjunction of the following theses: (i) fictional individuals (e.g. Sherlock Holmes) actually exist; (ii) fictional names (e.g., ‘Holmes’) are at least sometimes genuinely referential; (iii) fictional individuals are the creations of the authors who first wrote (or spoke, etc.) about them.  CA Creationism is the conjunction of (i) – (iii) and the following thesis: (iv) fictional individuals are contingently existing abstracta; they are non-concrete artifacts of our world and various other possible worlds.  Takashi Yagisawa has recently provided a number of arguments designed to show that Creationism is unjustified.  I here critically examine three of his challenges …

The Halcyon Tone As Birdsong, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Contained in one of Nietzsche's favorite words is the name of a seabird that flits back and forth across the landscapes and seascapes of Mediterranean reality, classical myth, and Nietzsche's imagination. Lexical authorities credit Nietzsche with reintroducing the word "halcyon [halkyonisch]" into the German language. That word will recall the "halcyon days," part of the metamorphic complex in the story of Alcyone, who lost her husband Ceyx at sea but was transformed along with him into a pair of seabirds, the female having the extraordinary characteristic of building a floating nest, in which she hatched her eggs during the weeks …

Dogs, Domestication, And The Ego, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In Zarathustra's "On the Vision and the Riddle," three animals-a spider, a snake, and a dog-make significant appearances, as do three human or quasihuman figures-Zarathustra himself, the dwarf known as the Spirit of Gravity, and the shepherd who must bite off the head of the snake. Of these animals, it is the dog who receives the most extended attention. Here, in the passage that along with "The Convalescent" (with its eagle and serpent) is usually and rightly taken to be Nietzsche's most articulate and yet highly veiled approach to explaining the teaching of eternal recurrence, the riddling vision involves animals. …