Metaphysics Commons^™

Platonism And All That…, Robert P. Burn

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy Of Mind, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

"Time Is One": The Temporal Aspect Of The Hopi Language And Its Experimental Application In Postmodernist Novels, Peter Buru

Masters Theses

My thesis examines the relationship between the temporal aspects of the language of the Hopi Indians, based on Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic analyses, and postmodernist narrative theory. Within postmodernism itself, the study focuses on the narratives' handling of time and space, as illustrated by the following novels: Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson; Time's Arrow by Martin Amis; Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; and Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko.

The study investigates how these postmodernist novels experiment with the application of a timeless temporal scheme. This scheme originates from what I refer to as Benjamin Lee Whorf’s …

A Philosophic Inquiry Into Causation Comparing Diverse Metaphysical Systems, Jane Fisher

Masters Theses

Causation is a problem for philosophers because in explaining causation one must explain reality itself. Since the metaphysical systems of history are carefully reasoned claims concerning reality, they will be employed in this discussion of causation. We will examine the foundational posits of four metaphysical positions -- Buddhism, Platonism, Nominalism, and Realism -- and review the meaning each assigns for causation. We can then observe how the meaning of causation is altered depending on the system of metaphysics that serves as its context.

Individuality, Identity, And Relation: Ontological And Moral Dilemmas, Stephen Barnes

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

What Bernard Lonergan Learned From Susanne K. Langer, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Debts Due And Overdue: Beginnings Of Philosophy In Nietzsche, Heidegger, And Anaximander, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What sort of text is On the Genealogy of Morals, this work that Nietzsche called the "uncanniest" of all books? Is it only a book about morals, as the title might indicate? Even the superficial reader will see that much more is at stake, since questions concerning politics and aesthetics are prominent. But could we also read more attentively and with an ear to hearing a certain diagnosis of the metaphysical condition and its tradition that are necessarily implicated in the genealogy of morals? Certainly Nietzsche begins to suggest ideas of this sort quite early in the text, as in …

Rethinking Reverence For Life, Mike W. Martin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Albert Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life is more complex and interesting than first appears. It contains themes relevant to contemporary environmental ethics, including a virtue-ethics approach that emphasizes personal responsibility and tolerance, empathy for living organisms, and the fundamental unity of life. Not surprising, then, Schweitzer has recently been acknowledged for pioneering a biocentric (life-centered) ethical theory.

At the same time, Schweitzer’s ethic has four unpalatable features: pantheism, anthropomorphism, excessive subjectivity, and guilt mongering. I trace these features to the metaphysical framework in which Schweitzer develops his ideal of reverence for life. I also show how the framework can …

Strategic Meaning: Words As Tools Or Traps, Debra Blankenship

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

Upon initial glance, Plato’s Cratylus appears to be a grand romp of words with Socrates’s wit front and center. But a closer examination of the text shows a deadly serious, carefully plotted battle by Socrates to establish his philosophical perspective as preeminent. Plato thus reveals, by the end of the dialogue, that the true battle that Socrates is waging is the struggle to establish what foundation knowledge shall be built upon.

Protagoras: Recollection Of Return, Roger Zemke

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

The Homeric forms that Plato uses as a template for the Dialogues all contribute to a fictional recasting of the historical figure of Socrates as an epic Hero: the philosopher-king. This paper traces the idea of a recollection of return in the Protagoras as a means by which Plato creates this fictional image of Socrates. The traditional Greek notion of agon, with all its attendant functions and forms, helps Plato reveal a Socrates whose divine right as a philosopher-king would be the best hope for a return to the power and glory of Athens.

Heidegger And Levinas And The Crisis Of Phenomenology: Thinking The Propriety And A-Propriety Of Time, Travis Tenney Anderson

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche And The Future Of The University, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche's first generation of readers tended to see him as a thinker, philosopher or prophet of the future; he was the teacher of the superman, the transvaluator of all values, the founder of a new philosophy of the will to power. In the many discourses of the early twentieth century that are devoted in various ways to 'Nietzsche and the Future' there are obvious signs of the nineteenth century cult of progress, although interpreted divergently by social Darwinism, socialism or anarchism. Now we are more sophisticated. Those first readers saw Nietzsche as radicalizing and rewriting the modernist metanarrative (substituting the …

Lonergan On The Catholic University, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the quintessential man of letters, Roland Barthes had the genial gift of being able to sympathize with an endless variety of discourses, texts, myths, and semiotic systems. The profusion of apparent subjects-Japan, Brecht, Balzac, photography, "mythologies," classical writing, the theater-is perhaps calculated to provoke the purist who insists on the values of thoroughness and well-grounded inquiry. At the same time, one would have to be obtuse to fail to recognize the critical projects that animate the many books, essays, and studies; these are explorations that put into question the often closed and crabbed commitment of the scholar or critic …

Habits And Essences, Michael L. Raposa

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Examines the relationship between the notion of habit according to philosopher Charles S. Peirce and philosopher Duns Scotus' understanding of the real essence. Problems raised by both scholars regarding their concepts; Comparison of the philosophy of Peirce and Scotus; Criticism of Peirce on Scotus' metaphysics.

Nietzsche's Graffito: A Reading Of The Antichrist, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Even those writers who have good things to say about Nietzsche usually do not have good things to say abut his penultimate book, The Antichrist. Like Ecce Homo it is often described as at least prefiguring Nietzsche's madness if not (as is sometimes the case) said to be part of that desperate glide itself. Those inclined to reject the book may be encouraged in this view by Nietzsche's statement to Brandes, in November 1888, that The Antichrist is the whole of The Transvaluation of All Values (originally announced as a series of four books) and that Ecce Homo is its …

The Guardians At The Gate: Archetypes, Angels And A Priori Forms, Philip Novak

Collected Faculty Scholarship

"In response to the growing cross-disciplinary interest in the transformability of human consciousness, this paper explores the doctrines of t consciousness as found in the work of four great Western metaphysicians -- Plato/Plotinus, St. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. In Plato and Poltinus, in St. Thomas, and possibly in Kant as well, there lie oft-overlooked doctrines of at least two distinct forms of consciousness -- a normal, egoic, subject-object consciousness on the one hand, and , on the other hand, a transcendental consciousness in which one understands the true end of human life to be knowledge of and union with …

The Cosmological Argument, Sufficient Reason, And Why-Questions, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

I propose to take a fresh look at the cosmological argument for God by focusing on one contemporary version defended by Richard Taylor in his book Metaphysics. I have selected Taylor’s argument, first, because of its wide circulation and influence on contemporary philosophers of religion, but more importantly, because it is a contemporary version of a classical argument and will enable me to evaluate traditional themes.

I find that Taylor, like many cosmologists, runs together two importantly different motivations for the cosmological argument—one which starts from a certain causal property of things in the world, another which emphasizes a …

Dialectical Laws And Elementary Catastrophes, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the newly developed Catastrophe Theory of Rene Thorn and E.C. Zeeman, it is possible to find mathematical interpretation of certain aspects of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. Specifically, the three "classical" dialectical principles, (1) the transformation of quantity into quality, ( 2) the mutual interpenetration(or - the unity and struggle) of opposites, and (3) the negation of the negation, can be modeled using the seven "elementary catastrophe " given by Thom , especially the catastrophe known as the "cusp." Far from being an empty metaphysics or scholasticism, as critics have argued , these principles embody genuine insights into a class …

Theology As Intellectual Conversion, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

The Doctrine Of Experience In The Philosophy Of Jonathan Edwards, Puritan Divine, Joseph S. Trachtenberg

Dissertations and Theses

A number of basic themes suggest themselves as focal points for a study of the thought of Jonathan Edwards. The dissertation is an attempt to argue that experience is one of them, and that an attentive eye to the doctrine of experience will reveal it as the unifying theme of his philosophy. Specifically, at the center of Edwards' aesthetic and religious vision there lies a rich and profound sense of experience, and of the relation of all things to some form of perception.

The evidence is to be found in Edwards' extensive published and unpublished writings. Among the several editions …

"Like Some Forgotten Door" (...Into The Realm Of Psychic Of Phenomena), Mary Ellen Moylan

Student Scholarship

The paper titled Like Some Forgotten Door explores the intersection of ancient Chinese wisdom and modern psychic research to understand the nature of human consciousness and existence. It begins with a detailed examination of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which serves as a guide to human relations and universal transformations. This ancient text utilizes sixty-four hexagrams and the dual principles of yang and yin to represent the constant state of flux in nature, man, and the mind. The author suggests that by meditating on these symbols, individuals can achieve a sagely personhood and a deeper understanding of the …

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 …

Kant, Quine, And Human Experience, Kenton Machina

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

In this paper I provide an account of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason approach to how humans automatically shape the interpretation of their sense experiences in order to create a picture of themselves enduring in and interacting with an objective world. I contrast Kant's view with those of W.V. O.Quine, who also talks about how we create theories about what we are sensing. I claim that although Quine and Kant are both talking about making sense of our "experiences", they actually have different conceptions of "experience". The primary point of the paper is to elucidate Kant's views on these matters.

The Reconciliation Of Science And Religion In Symbolo-Fideism, Shirley Brown Moon

Wayne State University Dissertations

From the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, religion was in open warfare against science. By the end of the century the war was not going well for religion. Biology, anthropology, archeology, the "higher criticism" united in an attack on Christian premises, while "applied science" — technology-provided, the materialistic comforts which made Christian promises utopian and unnecessary. The reaction of some Protestant and Catholic leaders to this threat from science was a retreat into funda­mentalism. Others hastened to show that the recent discoveries were not really in conflict with religious truths at …

The Metaphysics Of Paul Weiss, Philip G. Heim

Bachelors’ Theses

This thesis is an exposition of the metaphysical position set down by Paul Weiss in his Modes of Being. It is written in answer to the question, "How is it that there are four irreducible modes of being as held by Paul Weiss?" While the bulk of material with which this thesis deals derives directly from Modes of Being, several of Weiss' central arguments in support of his position were taken from an earlier work, Reality, written in 1939. The fundamental metaphysical positions of both works are compatible with one another.

The Origin Of Living Things, By Julius Seiler, Translated By Gerard Farley, Gerard Farley

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Metaphysic And Distorted Analogies, Pierre Grimes

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

A philosophical analysis of the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual that "the world we are confronted with is nothing but words, words, words" is a difficult one upon which to embark. The difficulty does not lie in assuming this argument, but in examining it from the opponent's position. It is equivalent to an evaluation of the New York Giants in Brooklyn. If we assume the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual, finding the proper arguments and quotations to substantiate its claims, all that we would be doing is claiming a victory for "our side” when, indeed, no …

Indigenous Philosophy In The Valley Of Mexico, John F. Newcomer

Philosophy ETDs

This study has been undertaken in the hope of helping to open new avenues of research in both philosophy and anthropology, avenues that have heretofore been largely overlooked. It has used as an example the pre-Conquest culture-complex of the Valley of Mexico. It is not intended to be an exhaustive exposition of every aspect of that complex, for that would take it out of the realm of philosophy and too far into that of anthropology. It is rather an examination of the salient features of Aztec culture in a philosophical light. It begins with a discussion of primitive philosophy in …