Chinese are an old and traditional people who have preserved their own culture for thousands of years. The Chinese have lived inside walls, and formed their own particular life style. Today, in a multicultural era, every culture inevitably has to communicate with other ones. In these last hundred years, China has faced a strong western impact on its old way of life, the door has suddenly been opened and the walls have been torn down. China is standing on the crossroads (...) between tradition and modernity. Being a Chinese and also a resident of the world village, raises the question of how to realize the essence of Chinese traditional culture and still keep these good characteristics assimilating them into a new modern world. This is the core of my topic. Chinese traditional architecture is "based on quantity, not on mass," which is the complex of construction, not the single one. The focus does not emphasize the sculptural forms of a single building but the relationship among spaces. The meaning of space and the methods of organization in Chinese traditional architecture are based on Chinese philosophies and folk traditions. The walls have civilized the long-held philosophies and values which have set the parameters for Chinese traditional architecture. As Nelson I Wu said, "Inside his four walls he, (Chinese man), regulates human relationships to achieve internal harmony, to him the highest goal on earth." The purpose of this study is to explore these parameters of the world inside the walls, and examine the physical design methods which are feasible for today. (shrink)

Trauma is a concept widely recognized, explored, and dissected by scholars, clinicians, and everyday people all over the world. Considering the never-ending exposure people have to trauma in the modern world, this exploration seeks to reconcile how trauma is constructed, experienced, and understood in a world structured by systems of power and domination. By engaging in a critical analysis of the socio-cultural trauma construction process (as defined by trauma scholars in the field of sociology) this work details the connection between (...) where individuals and groups are situated in a transnational system of intersectional domination and how they construct, articulate, and experience traumas. Through use of racial analysis and engagement with multiple historical and fictional examples, I detail the necessity of thinking critically about axes of power when theorizing trauma in the social sciences and beyond. (shrink)

The work of investigating and reconstructing historical events does not bear any obvious relation to that of formulating theories of historical development or asking metaphysical questions about history’s meaning and direction. Yet every historian must make choices about which facts to highlight and how to represent and arrange them, and these choices have definite theoretical stakes. Elaborating these stakes and exploring their implications is one of the tasks of the critical philosophy of history, a mode of thought I examine in (...) this dissertation by connecting it to French decolonization in North Africa. As this connection helps us understand, the critical philosophy of history also entails an essentially political task: judging and condemning the past in order to allow new life to emerge. For North African intellectuals, decolonization was an occasion to rethink history and reimagine the future. How to break free of histories defined by foreign domination without being reduced to passive victimhood or completely renouncing France’s significant cultural influence, which continues to mark the region? This question was central to the political and intellectual work of anticolonial nationalists for much of the twentieth century, taking on particular urgency for a broad public after World War II. I examine the resulting discussions and debates in order to contribute to a reframing of twentieth-century French intellectual history, which I seek to extend beyond the hexagon and onto new conceptual ground. The dissertation consists of four chapters following a loose chronological organization: the first two chapters begin with the interwar period—when mounting anxieties about Western decline coincided with heightened anticolonial agitation—and the second two focus on the era of decolonization. Chapter 1 examines the life and work of Mohand Tazerout (1893-1973), an Algerian-born intellectual best known for his translation into French of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In chapter 2, I develop my conception of the critical philosophy of history by reading works by the French political philosopher Raymond Aron (1905-1983) alongside a critique by his Moroccan student, the historian Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933). Chapter 3 delves more deeply into Laroui’s work through a reading of his first book L’idéologie arabe contemporaine (Contemporary Arab ideology, 1967). Chapter 4 considers the postwar revival of interest in the medieval North African historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun among Maghrebi and French anticolonial intellectuals. I conclude with a brief reflection on one of the dissertation's central themes, the concept of historical or cultural rebirth. (shrink)

The works of the German writer Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) have not received sufficient literary investigation. The frequent classification of Döblin in literary histories as an expressionistic or futuristic writer remains ambiguous and unfounded. Rather, Döblin created a new concept of reality and realism which calls for the inclusion of a surreality. Döblin sets forth his new ideas in philosophical writings concerned with man and reality and with theoretical essays about a new novel. Döblin's dimension of a new reality shows similarity (...) to the philosophical and literary characteristics of the vision of surreality as advanced by French Surrealists. Guillaume Apollinaire, an important precursor of the French literary movement recognized such similarities in 1913. He hailed Döblin's literary work with the words "Vive le doeblinisme." An investigation of doeblinisme reveals philosophical, thematic, and linguistic features akin to those of French surrealism. Moreover, Döblin's novels display many of the characteristics of a surrealist novel which Breton proclaimed in 1944. The surrealist facets generally appear as demonic manifestations of non-rational, unconscious forces in man. Döblin's heroes are searching for self-identification and ontological justification, thereby equating the surrealist motif of "Hamletism." While embarked upon the quest for identity man experiences a distortion of himself and his environment due to a continuous metamorphosis of nature and man. Such transformations are caused by non-rational forces and disintegrate objective reality, the rational conception of man, and traditional human sensibilities. Within such negation of mere objective reality Döblin creates a surreality which manifests the unconscious in man in form of dreams, hallucinations and stages of mental disorder. Moreover, the realm of surreality contains the miraculous encounters between persons and between individuals and objects. The encounters are caused by the power of Resonanz, as Döblin calls it, which bears similarity to the surrealist idea of objective chance. The surreal dimension in Döblin's works becomes enhanced by mythopoeia which attests to his ability of mythic thinking. Striking parallels exist between Döblin's philosophical ideas, surrealist philosophical tenets, and the facets of mythic thinking. The subject matter and linguistic form of Döblin's writings are interwoven. Metaphors and images constitute motifs in their linguistic genesis. Until the end of his life, Döblin attempted the creation of a surreality in aesthetic form. (shrink)

Architectural projects and/or sites mentioned: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Dominique Perrault, 1989-1996) (Paris, France).

Under the guiding thread of a de-struction of world political history, and from the position of suffering living corporality, Enrique Dussel presents the context of modern politics in the fifth section of Política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica. Modernity is not in this case a merely intra-European phenomenon that belongs to a periodization of history enunciated from the West. It is, on the contrary, a moment that arose from the experience of colonization of the non-European Other. As Dussel (...) argues, 1492 will be the moment of the ‘birth’ of Modernity as a concept, the concrete moment of the ‘origin’ of a very particular ‘myth’ of sacrificial violence and, at the same time, a process of ‘covering up’ of the non-European. Understanding the context of the emergence of this colonizing experience, that is to say, of the other worlds of life before and outside of this European Modernity, is the objective of this fifth section. For this, four moments are addressed in the text: China, the Ottoman Empire, pre-modern and eastern Venice, the Italian Renaissance. (shrink)

Only in his Statesman does Plato present a philosopher of the caliber of the Eleatic Stranger giving a non-Socratic teaching on politics and political philosophy with the mature Socrates in the audience. The Stranger and Socrates, as I aim to show here, share a basic agreement about the purpose of political inquiry: inquiry into politics and human nature is according to both thinkers necessary for a defense of philosophy as a whole. In the following, I argue that the Stranger, like (...) Socrates, turned to political theorizing to respond to the anti-rationalist challenge posed by the claims of the great poet-teachers of Greece, Homer and Hesiod, whose poems, by asserting either that irrational, omnipotent divinity exists or that the universe came into being without a cause, deny the existence of necessary causes. I argue as well that although they understand this challenge in a similar way, Socrates and the Stranger focus on different puzzles of political and ethical life, and that those different focuses lead to different approaches to defending rationalism. Socrates, on my reading, thinks that a critical analysis of our opinions about virtue and happiness is the decisive ingredient in a response to the theological challenge, while the stranger thinks that a critical analysis of law as such is the decisive ingredient in such a response. (shrink)

We come to the end of this Critical World History to discover what Dussel sees as bringing critical political reflection up to date. In this sense, the entire journey that is made throughout this work only takes on its true dimension in the final section, with a philosophy that seeks the critical voice of the people. This culminates in political thought of the Zapatistas that emerged at the end of the 20th century with the awareness of inaugurating a new moment (...) in the history of world politics. Dussel places the origin of the Philosophy of Liberation in that Argentine decade between 1966 and 1976. Many things have happened since then, and the Philosophy of Liberation has received continuous attacks that have tried to question its coherence and political commitment, as well as to dismiss its relevance not only in the history of Latin American philosophy, but also worldwide. This essay tries to respond to these attacks and show how it is that thought, born in a political situation not without contradictions, may flourish due to its ability to articulate historical reality and a political commitment to the denied and excluded. Philosophy, when it is true philosophy, thinks about concrete reality. Therefore the critique of philosophy, Dussel tells us, must be done, not from thought, but from reality. In that sense, reality is the beginning and the end, the orientation and the course. (shrink)

The Timaeus is perhaps the most unusual of Plato’s dialogues. In this paper, I attempt to interpret Timaeus’s strange speech, which makes up most of the dialogue. I argue that Timaeus has grasped the grave challenge posed to philosophic reason by men like Hesiod who claim that mysterious gods are the first causes of the world, and therefore one cannot say that there are any true necessities governing this world. If this is true, then philosophy, as the study of nature, (...) which depends on the existence of necessity, would be impossible. Timaeus articulates two serious attempts to meet this challenge by demonstrating the stability and rational comprehensibility of the world from solid first principles: one according to which mind is the cause of all things; another according to which everything comes to be through mindless necessity. But he ultimately suggests that neither of these attempts have been successful, thereby demonstrating the limits of natural science’s ability to meet the religious challenge. Timaeus’s speech also has a rhetorical purpose related to this failure: insofar as he finds himself unable adequately to meet the religious challenge, and yet is still attracted to and finds worthwhile the pursuit of philosophy, he thinks a rhetorical account of the cosmos is necessary to shore up faith in reason for elite and educated young men who find themselves inclined to natural science. The more rhetorical aspects of Timaeus’s speech, and above all his account of the triangles, serve this purpose. (shrink)

This dissertation is a collection of three papers, “Why undermining evolutionary debunkers is not enough,” “Absence of evidence against belief as credence one,” and “Suspending belief in credal accounts.” The role of suspension—the agnostic’s attitude that sits between belief and disbelief—is central in each paper. The first paper demonstrates that though mere undermining of the evolutionary debunker is a tempting response to their argument, it requires suspension on a premise. That is incoherent with belief in the other premise and disbelief (...) in the conclusion. Therefore, mere undermining does not make believing we have moral knowledge epistemically permissible. The second paper demonstrates that Jane Friedman’s objection to an account of suspension as credence between 0 and 1 relies on equivocation or a false premise. Friedman’s objection entails that suspension on p is rationally permissible while one is maximally confident that not-p. I argue that these two attitudes are incoherent and so her objection fails. The third paper demonstrates that suspension should not be thought of as a credence of any kind whether precise or imprecise. Unique problems are associated with every possible credal account of suspension. This means that a traditional picture of belief, suspension, and disbelief cannot be reduced to a credal picture. Suspension is either fundamental or should be eliminated. (shrink)

My dissertation, “Pope’s Double Mistress: Oriental Philosophy and the Scriblerian Dialectic,” addresses the aesthetic form and literary history of an eighteenth-century genre known as Scriblerian satire. The study recovers a hitherto unacknowledged technique of Orientalist imitation crafted by Alexander Pope and featured in the “Double Mistress” episode in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. By uncovering Pope’s esoteric Scriblerian design, we gain a clearer understanding of his archive and reception into the literary canon. My study documents the surprising impact of Pope’s (...) Scriblerian Orientalism on British literary history, tracing its influence over a series of controversies surrounding the posthumous suppressions and revelations of his Double Mistress episode. (shrink)

This article explores black girls and women’s experiences with school, police and state disciplinary torture in the ‘afterlife of slavery.’ More precisely, this work explores the punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and ultimate genocide black girls and women are subjected to by white supremacist, antiblack, hetero-patriarchal, hetero-sexist, and heteronormative school staff, police and state forces in public schools and beyond. A few research questions are explored: What are black girls and women’s experiences with punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and genocide by police (...) and state forces in public schools and general public spaces and consciousness? And, what are the gendered, racialized and sexualized dimensions of violence black girls and women experience at the hands of U.S. state and state apparatuses? This text exposes the danger of silencing just how lethal and grotesque these disciplinary technologies are and the gendered, racialized and sexualized nature of violence black girls and women are subjected to in these material and imaginative spaces. At the same time, this text illuminates black girls and women’s sonic and physical resistant strategies that challenge and disrupt oppression within a larger structure of antiblack genocide in the United States. Black girls and women proactively resisting the disciplinary torture of state and state forces are ‘scenes of subjection’ and, simultaneously, scenes of subjectivity. Largely, this article asserts that these spaces reveal the essential nature as well as the potentiality of radical social transformation for black life, autonomy and freedom. Finally, this article uses Moorish-Palestinian extraterrestrial epistemology to suggest how these sites also reveal the necessity for dark matter communities to settle for nothing less than their freedom and move towards an intergalactic consciousness and peace and love state of being to recalibrate—whether astrally, figuratively, and/or literally—to the interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic regions. (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on the subject, scholars of drama and philosophy have almost entirely avoided discussing analytic philosophy. Although not of concern to most dramatists, analytic philosophy—a key development in the discipline during the 20th century—is central to the theatre of Tom Stoppard, who has written numerous plays that either engage with analytic thought or feature analytic philosophers as main characters. Yet in the critical account of Stoppard's philosophical plays, scant few talk about how Stoppard's discourse with philosophy centers (...) on analytic thought. Grouping six of Stoppard's works across several media into the "analytic plays," this paper argues that analytic philosophy affords Stoppard a wealth of unique dramatic opportunities. Of the six analytic plays, which consist of Dogg's Hamlet, Jumpers, Professional Foul, Hapgood, Darkside, and The Hard Problem, the radio drama Darkside best exemplifies Stoppard's analytic dramaturgy through its satiric use of "the trolley problem," the most famous thought experiment in analytic ethics. Stoppard utilizes the trolley problem as the dramatic scenario of Darkside, a radio play wherein he lampoons the trolley problem's inability to meaningfully frame ethical issues. Darkside tells the audience that far-fetched analytic thought experiments like the trolley problem are harmful for good philosophy while also showing that these thought experiments offer meaningful dramaturgical value for the theatre, particularly for the "drama of ideas." In doing so, Stoppard bridges the oft-discussed divide between theatre and philosophy. For Stoppard, the implausible yet imaginative scenarios devised by analytic philosophers are an unwitting case of philosophy and theatre working alongside each other. Darkside does not reject analytic thought, even as it parodies it; instead, it devises limitations on the applicability of analytic thought to the real world, while extracting from analytic philosophy dramatic tools that can be seen in Stoppard's analytic plays. (shrink)

This thesis project imagines future possibilities of humanity for Black women of the African Diaspora. It provides a lay of the land of decolonial projects in Latin American and Information Studies, suggesting alternative directions, strategies and methods for the work. These directions are guided by the knowledges of my ancestors. Using a spiritual-cosmological-pedagogical approach to ground endogenous epistemologies of Black Women in the African Diaspora, the fundamental elements of love connect us back to the essences of nature, so that we (...) may move into alignment and find balance. This thesis imagines future possibilities for Black women that help us to save our own lives and live well. (shrink)

It is possible to act for a reason. We do it all the time. You might have brought her medicine for the reason that she is ill. He might go to the store to get milk. Edmund might skate in the middle of the pond because the ice in the middle of the pond is thin. What must be true of us, and of the world, such that we can act for reasons? In normal cases, when someone acts for the (...) reason that the ice in the middle of the pond is thin, it really is the case that the ice in the middle is thin. This is mostly due to the fact that we are not often wrong about such mundane ways the world is. But what if one takes it that the ice is thin, and in fact it is not thin? Can one still act for the reason that the ice is thin? In my efforts to give a sufficient answer to this question, I have been led to a package of views, the core tenets of which are at least the following five. First, it is possible to act in the light of a falsehood: a consideration that is not the case can be an agent’s reason for acting. Second, it is not possible to act in unbelief: in order for an agent to act for a reason, the agent must at least believe that reason to be the case. Third, the reasons for which agents act can play a role in explaining the actions done for those reasons –– even when agents act in the light of falsehoods. Fourth, there are very few formal rules or principles constraining the explanatory role of reasons. Any action explanation that specifies the content of the reason for acting has reserved a legitimate explanatory role for the reason. Fifth, all of these claims apply equally to motivating and normative reasons, so-called practical and epistemic reasons, and reasons for action and reasons for belief. (shrink)

Joining an active conversation within rhetorical theory and beyond about the agency, boundaries, and conditions of possibility for contemporary subjectivity within online environments, this dissertation aims to articulate the transformative capacity of digital media for contemporary rhetorical subjects. Positioned at the intersection of rhetorical studies, media ecology, and poststructuralist criticism, this project attempts to break with rhetoric’s abiding humanist inheritance, including many of the foundational presuppositions about a writer’s autonomy, being, and consciousness that have historically subtended rhetorical theory. Couching my (...) argument within the evocative wordplay and enigmatic lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this research complements work by a growing number of rhetoricians from various other-oriented vantages who contend that the conventional belief in a rational and independent human mind at the center of communicative practice is no longer tenable in the face of emergent ecosystems of online presence and digital rhetoric. Technological developments such as these not only have not only threatened the accustomed priority of human being, but can moreover provide novel ways of inventing and enacting an original posthumanist subjectivity, I argue, especially when approached from a psychoanalytic standpoint that emphasizes the convolutions of anfractuous signification, indestructible desire, forged onto-epistemology, and a tropical unconscious. To this end, I suggest that Lacan’s reconfiguring of the classical Freudian unconscious as a cybernetically structured symbolic network of signifiers that he characterizes as the extimate Other provides one avenue for rethinking how modern media affect the means of communicating with and conceiving of one another, helping rhetoricians to theorize a compositional practice that embraces rather than represses the various ways technological developments disturb and displace customary notions of solidified and singular human being. From a position that grounds rhetorical subjectivity not according to static sovereign selfhood but in the precarious disruptions of the Other and taking the figure of the social media post as my model for posthumanism, this project opens a way for rhetoricians to reconceive pedagogical practice from a perspective that would relinquish customary commitments to raising consciousness and objective reason in favor of the jocose and allusive contingencies of a hybridized digital unconscious. (shrink)

This dissertation develops—partly by building upon the work of British philosopher Gareth Evans—a novel account of the perception-based concepts of natural kinds that subjects form on the basis of ordinary sense perception. The account developed is named the ‘information-based account’. Its main claim is that in order for a subject to have a concept of the sort in question, they should establish certain causal-perceptual links with a natural kind that allow the subject to treat that natural kind as a spatially (...) located object in their environment which constitutes a source of perceptual information. A subject who is equipped with such a concept is able to represent a natural kind in a rationally engaged manner that is commensurate with the intellectual profile of a rational subject who is able to purposefully direct their thought towards objects and features in their environment. By attributing this kind of concept to a rational subject, the dissertation is able to give an account of the conceptual and epistemic practices through which subjects rationally engage with perceptible natural kinds in their environment. Thus, the dissertation achieves a theory of perceptual representation that is both rationalist and empiricist, adopting a perspective that is referred to as ‘rational empiricism’. Interpreted as such, the information-based account is presented as an alternative, within rational empiricism, to a model of representation developed mainly by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson known as two-dimensionalism. It is argued that the information-based account preserves the advantages of the latter approach while avoiding many of its problems. Additionally, the dissertation discusses the implications of the information-based account with respect to anaphora, a linguistic phenomenon involving the use of pronouns, and the problem of phenomenal knowledge, which concerns the introspective knowledge that a conscious subject can obtain of the character of the perceptual or sensory states which they experience. (shrink)

The renewed interest in the utility of historical study — sometimes referred to as “applied history” — is a growing trend in both Europe and the United States. But while an invaluable foundation for understanding political, economic, and social issues, the movement often lacks a deeper examination into the way that individuals regularly gather, arrange, interpret, and incorporate historical facts into their daily existence. Every man and woman, whether consciously or unconsciously, engages in these activities, giving rise to a notion, (...) unique unto themselves, of the way that history unfolds. Such historical constructs — sometimes known as “speculative philosophy of history” — represent a more powerful intellectual force than is often recognized, and it should be interrogated more in the future, especially as it relates to foreign policymaking. For scholars and practitioners of foreign policy, in particular, there is something to be gained by embracing what is here termed “applied historicism.” At its root is a wariness of large generalizations in history, including various philosophies of history, and a reliance on approaches to historical study that value the uniqueness of individuals, societies, and phenomena across time and space. (shrink)

Social conditions have increased in complexity in all fields of activity; as a consequence the public junior college is facing grave doubt and perplexity as to its achievement of significant results in the midst of these complexities. These institutions have grown so rapidly in the past several decades that their leaders and administrators have had little time to give critical consideration to their purposes and methods. Attention has been directed chiefly toward the concrete and physical aspects of the problem, leaving (...) little of the time of practical school men for consideration of the underlying philosophical issues and problems involved. These issues are now growing in intensity and can no longer be avoided nor submerged in more immediate and practical considerations. The procedure is to survey first the general philosophy of the American junior college; secondly, to study the philosophy of the Texas public junior colleges in terms of their catalogue statements and standards of their accrediting agencies; third, to survey the organizational and administrative practices of the Texas public junior colleges, and in terms of these practices to show the relationships of these junior colleges to secondary education. (shrink)

The specific purpose of this investigation is to determine the nature of existing concepts, trends, practices, and beliefs relative to discipline as they concern administrators of this state. It involves a recapitulation of the historical background of educational thought and practice with respect to problems of child behavior, a review of related studies in the field, and the gathering of information from teachers, principals, and superintendents about the various aspects of the subject under consideration. From an analysis of the data (...) obtained by methods which are described later, it is hoped that some definite conclusions can be reached which will be of value to the teaching profession, generally. The term "concept" as used herein applies to the disciplinary philosophy held by Texas educators and is given considerable emphasis as being a factor of major significance. By "trends" are meant well-defined movements within the field of public school discipline which have been discernible during the period covered by the teaching or administrative experience of participants in the study. The "practices" set up for investigation are limited to certain procedures which are thought to be of primary interest and importance, although it is recognized that they are by no means all-inclusive in this respect. Among the "beliefs" upon which attention is centered are various opinions of teachers, principals, and superintendents based largely upon observation and experience rather than objective data. (shrink)

The procedure used in this study will be to survey the general social and cultural conditions in the United States to determine whether there was a general philosophy of the status of women; second, to study the sociological conditions in the Mexican province of Texas, in the Republic, and in the State, and the factors which controlled education for women; third, to study the changing aims and objectives of women's education, and the changing curriculum, extracurricular changes, graduation requirements; fourth, recent (...) social and cultural trends effecting a change in the education of women; fifth, to determine how higher education for women has been helpful in facilitating women's changing functions in society. (shrink)

Libertarianism is a thesis according to which free will is incompatible with determinism and human agents possess free will to some degree. Three formidable objections have been raised against this thesis by its opponents: Libertarianism requires the falsity of philosophical naturalism or materialist theories of mind; Indeterminism threatens freedom by undermining the rational, volitional control of agents; If indeterminism does not threaten our freedom, then neither does it enhance our freedom or add to human agency anything of appreciable value. I (...) address these challenges in novel ways by assessing recent work on mental causation and consciousness and applying that work to the problems at hand, arguing that progress may be made in the free will debate by reorienting it toward an examination of those conditions which are essential to agency simpliciter. In response to I argue that a coherent account of libertarian agency requires no greater an ontological inventory than naturalism allows provided that there is a naturalistic solution to the problem of mental causation, one that secures the causal efficacy of mentality, coheres with the characteristic purposiveness of intentional behavior, and illuminates what it is for an agent to produce or bring about an action. I show that is unfounded on a causal construal of action, since the most promising sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for purposive behavior are adeterministic, and therefore do not require the obtaining of deterministic causal connections between intentions and matching behavior. Since agents exercise the relevant capacities of control just in case they act purposively, it follows that indeterminacy does not in itself vitiate agential control. I analyze the claim expressed in as a special case of the conceptual gap between the first-person and the third-person perspectives, arguing that the conceptual irreducibility of agential production, which results from the deployment of phenomenal concepts in our thinking about agency generally, is what lies at the root of the present objection, but that such conceptual irreducibility does not entail that the exercise of genuine free will cannot consist in suitably related indeterministic event causes. (shrink)

This dissertation examines animals in Greek and Roman literature and the use of zoological knowledge in poetic and non-technical works. While not quite so rigorous as to be called ‘animal science’, the accumulation of a vast body of knowledge pertaining to animals’ lives and behaviors found in Greek and Latin writing belonged to a ‘zoological culture’ which permeated Greco-Roman thought. This zoological culture was one in which animals and knowledge about them were both elements with which to think, devices authors (...) could use to develop aesthetics, characters or themes, as well as the subjects of poetic attention themselves. I approach animals, zoology and zoological culture in Greek and Latin literature through a series of case studies. While by no means an exhaustive survey of animals in Greco-Roman thought, they demonstrate the range of ways authors could incorporate zoological knowledge into their work and their underlying motivations. The Introduction introduces the theoretical frameworks of animal studies and posthumanism informing my analyses as well as a preliminary case study: Herodotus’ Histories. Incorporating both symbolic usages of animals as well as specific pieces of zoological knowledge into his historical investigation, Herodotus presents one of the earliest cases of technical zoological learning integrated into non-technical literature. The focus of each core chapter moves from more animalizing to more humanized depictions of animals. In Part I, animals appear primarily as things to be avoided, killed or consumed. Chapter 1 focuses on depictions of venomous serpents by Nicander and Lucan, where information about snakes and their venom creates dark, terrifying worlds in conflict with other poetic or philosophical views of nature. Chapter 2 pivots to fish and how knowledge could both reinforce animal objectification as well as push against it. This tension of understanding aquatic species as both itemized, consumable products as well as creatures capable of intelligence, compassion and other virtues is developed most fully in Oppian’s Halieutica. Part II turns to animals presented as resembling or even equivalent to people. Chapter 3 explores the relation of human and animal first through the qualities by which they were distinguished, chiefly speech and reason, and then through the tradition of anthropomorphism in fables and the poetry of Homer and Vergil. Continuing these themes, Chapter 4 focuses on works which reposition the animal in literary imagination. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the recurring motif of transformed individuals being unable to communicate their human intelligence implies a possibility of an ignored likeness between human and animal experience, a notion made explicit in Pythagoras’ speech and again in Ovid’s Fasti. Relatedly, Pseudo-Oppian’s Cynegetica presents animals as fully realized poetic subjects, bearing all the trappings and even speech of epic and tragic characters. I conclude that while knowledge about animals facilitated serious consideration of their lives and subjectivity, it was also largely informed by an anthropocentric worldview which evaluated them by an ultimately human metric. (shrink)

This study examined differences in engagement among developmental and non-developmental students at Tallahassee Community College. The researcher employed a multi-method approach. The following two research questions guided this study: How does the engagement of developmental students differ from the engagement of non-developmental students? In what ways do developmental and non-developmental students experience student engagement? Quantitatively, the researcher examined pre-existing data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. CCSSE’s survey instrument, The Community College Student Report 2004, was administered to 748 (...) TCC students. Of the 748, a total of 431 students reported that they were either taking or planned to take a developmental course in reading, writing, and/or mathematics. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences was used to analyze descriptive statistics and one way Anova. Qualitatively, focus group participants included a total of 24 students from TCC—12 developmental and 12 non-developmental students. Key themes were used to analyze focus group data. Quantitatively, there is no significant difference on many CCSSE items. However, where there are statistically significant differences in engagement levels of developmental and non-developmental students, the developmental students consistently are more engaged for items identified on the following CCSSE benchmarks: Academic and Collaborative Learning, Student Effort, Academic Challenge, Student-Faculty Interaction, and Support for Learners. Key themes emerged from focus group respondents: ACL yielded two themes, SE produced one theme, AC generated two themes, SFI produced four themes, and SFL identified ten themes. Conclusions and recommendations are included in Chapter Five. (shrink)

The basic philosophy of the University of Houston, as revealed through its aims, emphasizes those educational services growing out of the individual and community educational needs of the citizens of the area. Present trends in the organization, aims, and growth of municipal institutions indicate a general acceptance of this philosophy. However, no extensive investigation has been made of the organization, aims, and growth of the University of Houston for the purpose of determining what similar patterns, if any, other municipal institutions (...) have followed in their organization, aims, and growth. A study of this nature was recently suggested by President E. E. Oberholtzer, of the University of Houston, and interest has been repeatedly manifested by other educators in such an investigation. The fact that sixteen municipal institutions now exist in the United States offers evidence that there is a growing need for such schools in large cities where the educational services may be made more responsive to the particular needs of the citizens as well as to the industrial and business enterprises of the community. The general interest of municipal university administrators, who are in part responsible for the direction of the organization, aims, and growth of such institutions, indicates that such a study may be of service to them. Typical problems in this field of service are as follows: enrollments have increased enormously at the University of Houston during the last five years. This has affected every phase of the organization, aims, and growth of the University in the fields of instruction, administration, operation and maintenance, sources of income, salaries and welfare of personnel, growth of plant and equipment, library facilities and curriculum. What has taken place during this time in these categories at the other sixteen municipal universities? Do these institutions have any problems in common? Have they grown because of their aims as community service institutions? Answers to these problems have been sought through a check-list or questionnaire to the administrators of all municipal universities in the United States. (shrink)

University of Arizona Philosopher David Schmidtz discusses the nature and features of corruption, and how concentrated power may aggravate corruption problems.

This quasi-experimental study was conducted to test the effects of nurses practicing the HeartTouch technique on hardiness, spiritual well-being, and perceived stress, as compared to the comparison group who did not practice the HeartTouch technique. The HeartTouch technique is a brief, internal maneuver designed to help the nurse notice and change thoughts and feelings, and can be practiced during daily activities. This study supported Martha Rogers’ nursing paradigm, the Science of Unitary Human Beings. Instruments used to measure the outcome variables (...) included the Dispositional Resilience Scale to measure hardiness, the Spiritual Well-being Scale to measure spiritual well-being, the Perceived Stress Scale to measure stress, and the HeartTouch Questionnaire to assess nurses’ experience of practicing the HeartTouch technique. Participants included female RN’s, 58 in the experimental group and 40 in the comparison group, employed in the hospital setting. The nurses were primarily Caucasian and from many different nursing specialties. Due to the quasi-experimental nature of the investigation and some pretest differences, the pretest scores were treated as covariates and a series of analysis of covariance was performed to compare the experimental and comparison groups on each of the adjusted posttest scores. Although there were no statistically significant results, all means were in the expected directions with the improvement in the experimental group greater than the comparison group on all variables. To assess practical significance of the findings, were computed for each outcome variable, ranging from.14 to.35, with Perceived Stress, d=.14, Hardiness, d=.21, and Spiritual Well-being=.32. The effect sizes obtained in this study suggested that nurses who practiced the HeartTouch technique would most likely notice a decrease in their perceived stress and an increase in their spiritual well-being and hardiness compared to nurses who did not practice the technique. The qualitative data in this study supported the practical significance of practicing the HeartTouch technique, with nurses reporting various mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits in their work and home life, including decreased stress and increased control and meaningful connection with others and Higher Power. (shrink)

Any insights we can hope to gain with respect to what is going on with our mental lives and our agency will almost certainly require a close examination of the “worst-case scenarios”, since it is when things break down that the joints of the phenomena are revealed. This is a philosophical intuition of mine that pervades everything I work on, and the papers that make up this dissertation are no exception. In keeping with this guiding sentiment, this dissertation tackles three (...) philosophical issues related to the so-called “loss of control” that occurs in mental disorder, and it does so in a way that places the phenomenology of agency at the forefront in some way or other. In my first paper on the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa, I try to resolve an apparent discrepancy between the phenomenology of anorexics in the grip of their disorder and the psychological and neurological data that purport to describe what they are undergoing. I provide a solution to this apparent incongruency by offering an account of the sense of agency in AN that grants sincerity to anorexic testimony while also being able to explain why the relevant experiences of agency come to be illusory. Then, in my second paper, I broaden my scope to include not just AN but also substance use disorder. After outlining the debate surrounding the question of whether addiction ought to be categorized as a form of akrasia, I show that the phenomenon at issue is far more complex than either side has supposed. I then propose a “horseshoe model” of loss of control that is able to capture the complexity that is brought in by examining the similarities and differences between SUD and AN. Finally, in my third paper, I pursue a question that arises from the exposition of the horseshoe model introduced in the previous paper. The question is, roughly, “Why is one ‘half’ of the horseshoe model associated with the phenomenology of loss of control while the other “half” is associated with the phenomenology of extreme self-control?”. This line of inquiry ultimately leads to an understanding of how one’s pathological desires can be experienced quite differently depending on the content of one’s self-image. Taken together, it is my hope that these papers can contribute to the philosophical goal of unearthing the realities of our mental lives and our agency by examining the fault lines formed by psychopathology. (shrink)

Washington County was the center of early Anglo-American culture in Texas. Many Texans know that it was at Washington on the Brazos that the Declaration of Texas Independence was written, and that the capital of the Republic was for a time located there. Many also know that Baylor University was first established at Independence, and that the Methodists at one time maintained institutions of learning at Chappell Hill. What caused the far-reaching changes in the educational life of that county during (...) the past century has, however, not been fully explained. Of the developments which have taken place in the culture of that county, the most significant was the change in population. Education as an aspect of culture is related to, and is largely determined by, prevailing sociological conditions. ln view of the change in the population of that section of Texas since the period of the Republic, one may ask: What effect did such change in population have upon educational developments? Moreover, what were the distinctive educational theories of the various culture groups which influenced the character of educational institutions? These and similar questions have created within the writer a desire to make a careful study of the factors which played a determining role in the educational development of Washington County. The problem of this study, as well as its limits, is suggested by the title: The Social and Philosophical Determinants of Education in Washington County from 1835 to 1937. It is not the purpose to produce a history of education, but rather to discover and explain the sociological factors which determined the educational development since the time of the establishment of the first Anglo-American school at Coles' Settlement. It was desirable, however, to approach the problem from the historical viewpoint, as it was found necessary to study the history of educational institutions, the lives of the men and women who contributed most to the development of education; and to trace the most significant aspect of the general cultural background of the county. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the semantics, logic, and metaphysics of plurality, focusing especially on the issues that arise from the interpretation of different plural readings in sentences containing plural terms like ‘Kerri and Misty’ and ‘three students’. The topic has generated a good deal of research in the last three decades that has produced significant results in understanding plural sentences. The main contribution of this dissertation is to adopt two methodological turns that take us beyond sentential boundaries and the syntax-semantics interface (...) to reconsider some fundamental issues which are still unclear in research on this area. By going beyond sentential boundaries, the dissertation shows that different plural readings not only have truth conditional effects on the interpretation of sentences, they also have semantic effects beyond the sentences and substantially affect the interpretation of discourse. This leads to the exploitation of dynamic semantics in interpreting plural sentences. The requirement for going beyond the syntax-semantics interface arises from the difficulty of identifying both the syntactic and semantic categories of factors contributing to plural readings. This leads to the separation of the construction of logical forms and their interpretation. An underspecified semantics, which is essentially type driven, is provided for the compositional and consistent construction of logical forms. The proposed dynamic semantics applies to the logical form interpretation. Some theses emerge from working out the elements of the methodological turns. First, the meaning of ‘plurality’ can be identified as the epistemic modal semantic notion ‘possibly more than one.’ This notion can be applied to the semantics of the pronominal number of anaphors, the identification of plural terms across languages, and the plurality constraint of plural readings. Second, it is further argued that the number markings of head nouns and verbs are semantically uninterpretable. Third, the proposed dynamic semantics provides a unified mechanism for both quantificational and plural readings. Fourth, the proposed dynamic semantics provides a nominalist thesis of plural reference and plural quantification: plural terms ’singularly’ refer to or quantify over nothing other than normal singular objects. (shrink)

This dissertation is a collection of three papers – “Knowing Oneself for Others,” “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge,” and “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice” – in which I address the connections between self-knowledge production and social inequality. I explain, using a variety of contemporary political and cultural examples, that marginalized individuals are more likely to be required to know certain things about themselves than socially privileged individuals, especially about those aspects of their lives and identities which are essential (...) to their being marginalized. I argue that this should make us rethink our basic understanding of epistemic injustice, which is typically thought of as involving the prevention of marginalized individuals from producing knowledge. More specifically, in “Knowing Oneself for Others,” I introduce the notion of “compulsory self-disclosure,” a social phenomenon in which an individual is forced to reveal things about themselves, often in ways that further contribute to their oppression. “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge” addresses how self-ignorance can actually be desirable for individuals facing stereotype threat, and I argue that treating stereotype threat as an epistemic injustice issue can actually harm rather than help individuals in certain cases. Finally, in “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice,” I assess the reasoning behind the assumption that marginalized people are self-ignorant; I argue that we need to appreciate the central role that epistemic work plays in self-knowledge production to understand why the standard assumption about marginalized self-ignorance is misguided. Ultimately, I would have us think of self-knowledge production as not just epistemic work but as work that is often emotionally difficult and even metaphysically transformative – coming to have self-knowledge in certain ways can quite literally change who you are. In light of this, the overarching aim of this work is to argue for there being an inextricable link between an individual’s knowledge of themselves and their social status, as well as to discourage readers from thinking of the production of self-knowledge as inherently desirable or as a wholly epistemic issue. (shrink)

"Race," and the ideologies surrounding this concept, have traditionally been approached as phenomena separate from gender and sexuality. This research provides insight into the construction of racist ideologies and the many ways in which gender and sexuality are integral to this project. The resurgence in the post-Civil Rights Era U.S. of the contemporary white supremacist movement provides a case study of unabashedly racist ideologies and is the focus of this dissertation. Using qualitative content analysis, I analyze 369 publications from six (...) different white supremacist organizations. The object of the research is to examine the ways in which notions of gender and sexuality are integral to the construction of racist ideologies in the U.S. in the late 20th century. The dissertation includes a description of racist themes in white supremacist rhetoric surrounding whites, Blacks, and Jews. I conclude that the process of rearticulating "whiteness" is integral to the white supremacist project. "Race" within white supremacist rhetoric is a contested terrain, that is, "race," that which is presumably most taken-for-granted category is that which is most explained and justified within the pages of white supremacist publications. I conclude that the process of rearticulating "whiteness" is also fundamentally about reasserting hegemonic notions of gender and sexuality in a framework which privileges white, heterosexual men. (shrink)

Architectural projects and/or sites mentioned: Artist House & Studio.

Our psychological lives have a personal character. The subject is the subject of experience, but also of agency and ownership. Why is this, and what does it mean for the existence and nature of the self? Being Someone attempts to answer this question. I offer an original analysis of the personal subject, supported in part by the observations and insights of philosophers such as William James and Mary Calkins. I then engage with Nyāya arguments in favour of and Buddhist arguments (...) against the existence of substance selves, as part of my own case for the former view. My argument is that personalness is unique and irreducible, so that nothing but the existence of a self that is concrete, property-bearing, enduring, and unified can adequately explain its existence and nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this report is to examine core themes of my artistic practice: human relationships with nature and knowledge, trace influences of related ideas from the history of science and philosophy on my studio process, and a body of work I completed over the last two years. I examine the roots of my interest in metaphors of nature to analyze my approach to object- and video-making. I note and discuss the shift from formal ways of knowing and making towards (...) an embodied practice grounded in hands-on knowledge of the landscape and history of the American West. I provide context for language and material references used in the work to hint at the danger of recurring expansionist narratives and reductionist views of the natural world throughout history. Additionally, I describe the epistemological approach I have adopted as an important part of my studio practice. (shrink)

This study examines the presence of Zen Buddhism in Robert Bresson’s unique method of film construction. I argue that Bresson’s minimalist choices regarding film form and his emphasis on sensory experience at the expense of intellectual analysis overlap significantly with Zen. In addition, I explore Bresson’s unique theory of film acting and discuss the parallels between his idea of the actor-as-model and the process of transcending the self through Zen meditation. The aim of this thesis is to open the door (...) to a new approach to film studies: a method that highlights direct experience and the achievement of a meditative state as opposed to the Western tradition of critical thinking and conceptual analysis. (shrink)

Allen Guelzo is the Director of Civil War Era Studies and a Professor of History at Gettysburg College.

Thomas Hibbs is the Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.

This dissertation is about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment and the literary efforts to reunite those fragments. The tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up until the Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called “latitudinarians,” English theologians (...) of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian moral teachings. This conflict was memorably articulated by Richard Steele at the start of the century when he asked in The Christian Hero, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” While Steele’s concern that his contemporaries had become too enthralled with the ancient world at the expense of Christianity is echoed throughout the period, what makes Steele’s essay especially noteworthy is the way he carves out a place for literature’s crucial role in this philosophical and religious crisis. Hs rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity and win back not just the minds, but the hearts of its readers by offering attractive and powerful Christian “heroes” is one, I argue, that prompts the response of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, later, Jane Austen. (shrink)

Dr. Schulman is a visiting professor at MIT.

Great revolutions in the study of nature in the past century have brought forth an onslaught of philosophical complications to the clarity of the classical perspective to which natural science was espoused prior to the twentieth century. The objective, intuitive principles by which we determined the reality of the world were beset by the ontological implications that flowed out of quantum mechanics and relativistic law. Wary of philosophical problems, a great number of the physical sciences lodge themselves in the comfort (...) of empirical dogmatism as its only means of progression. But in light of the success of quantum systems, the ambiguity that buds must be taken into greater consideration. This paper discusses the background, development, objections, and interpretations of quantum mechanics and concurrent ontological premises to argue that such a philosophical tenet is inherent to nature, and, as such, is capable of producing results and predictions consistent with its physical and mathematical counterparts. To do so, the properties of measurement and the premises of causality are treated in terms of their physical terminology and foundations. The frameworks of Carroll, Everett, Heisenberg, Popper, and others analyze established interpretations and abstractions of quantum mechanics; its ties to the metaphysical and ontological descriptions of an existing entity are explored by means of the contrived spacetime allegory, which in principle determines the parameters that bound real systems. It is evident that ontological accounts for physical phenomena are not only viable and admissible but are necessary as our ability to describe the universe surpasses our ability to test and quantify these descriptions. These realizations allow us to better understand our world and move beyond empirical data when it is technologically unattainable, enabling us to build on statistical bases and approach the structure of realism through its essence of ambiguity. (shrink)

David DiPasquale is an instructor in the Political Science Department at Boston College.

Power and Caring Embodied through Bilingual Preservice Teachers’ Choice of Participant Structures is a qualitative multicase study about the ways in which three Mexican-origin preservice teachers drew from their pedagogical philosophies of authentic cariño to make sense of their choice of participant structures in bilingual student teaching contexts. This dissertation project drew from a larger study investigating seven Latin@ preservice teachers’ choice of participant structures in one-way and two-way dual language pre-kinder and kindergarten classrooms from the same bilingual education cohort (...) at a large public Texas university in a medium-sized city. Guided by a critical framework that weaves together sociocultural literature on multilingual learning environments, LatCrit theory, and pedagogy as authentic cariño viewed through a lens of power as caring relations, the goals of this project were two-fold: 1) to explore the types of participant structures that bilingual preservice teachers were implementing during their student teaching semester and 2) to investigate their sensemaking process around those decisions of which participant structures to implement. Findings revealed that the three maestr@s implemented a variety of participant structures in their one-way dual language student teaching placements, and that they made sense of these choices guided by their pedagogical philosophies of authentic cariño that they had constructed through their life experiences. Additionally, their mentor teachers’ choice of participant structures and degree of alignment with the maestr@s’ philosophies, the supportive space of the post-observation conference, and the maestr@s’ perceived competencies with classroom management intersected with the participant structures that they chose. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of factors that bilingual preservice teachers consider when selecting the ways that their students may actively participate during a lesson, but also that their identities, past experiences, and pedagogical philosophies really do matter. This work has important implications for teacher preparation in bilingual and ESL contexts, teaching, and policy in supporting the use of empowering participant structures for emergent bilingual students. (shrink)

Imagine holding a cone of mint chocolate chip ice cream on a hot day. As you eye the ice cream, you see that it’s melting. If you don’t act quickly, you’ll wind up with sticky hands. Now pause this scene and ask yourself, ‘What should I do?’ The answer seems obvious: you should lick the melting ice cream. To say why this answer seems so reasonable, we need to say something about the normativity of perception. Perception, after all, is what (...) tells you that the ice cream is melting. But we might also say something about the perception of normativity. Perception might also tell you that the ice cream calls for a lick. According to this latter story, perception doesn’t just tell you what to believe, it tells you what to do. I defend a version of this story in my dissertation. Ultimately I argue that charged experience is a source of immediate justification for normative beliefs. Such experiences are characterized by a feeling of being called to respond. The melting ice cream, for example, calls for a lick. Drawing upon phenomenological analyses of such cases, I argue that felt calls are reflected in the contents of charged experiences. Charged experiences have normative contents; they present certain considerations as reasons to respond in specific ways. According to this story, the belief that you should lick the melting ice cream is reasonable because charged experience tells you that you have reason to do so. Charged experience is thus a form of normative perception. (shrink)

When somebody we love gives us a gift, it becomes a shared skin. We can move in this skin—we can touch and feel our loved one through a common surface. Whether it be object, clothing, or a note, the potency of our beloved’s imprint fills a once empty slate with meaning. Everything has the potential to become this shared third skin—something I can touch to generate a deeper understanding of my longings. My work questions underlying power dynamics within language and (...) seeks to frustrate common assumptions about reality. I use poetic imagery to disrupt our static conceptions of language. This poetic action challenges our assumed conceptual structure. Using ideas gathered from object theater, the language of film, and linguistic inquiry, I create dreamlike situations that utilize sound, text, and image reconstruction to form nonlinear narratives. (shrink)

This project won third place in the 2021 Signature Course Information Literacy Award. The award recognizes exemplary student work that achieves the learning outcomes of the Signature Course information literacy requirement, that students will be able to create and execute a research strategy, critically evaluate information, and navigate the scholarly conversation. The paper was nominated by Kristin Schulz from her fall 2020 course "Law and Literature" taught with Paula Murry. Samantha Seal's project was chosen for her ability to synthesize a (...) close reading of her primary source, Of Mice and Men, with well-chosen secondary texts. Prof. Schulz supported this project by saying "Her analysis and discussion of deontological and utilitarian principles were excellent and very advanced. She used scholarly research and publications to analyze the principle of "mercy killings" in contemporary and historical literature.”. (shrink)

There is a tension, allegedly, between traditional epistemology and standpoint epistemology. Traditional epistemologists, on the one hand, hold that knowledge is sensitive to epistemic features alone. By contrast, standpoint epistemologists argue that knowledge, in some cases, is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to the agent's social identity. My goal here is to vindicate this thesis. Though the thesis of standpoint epistemology is controversial, it plays an important role in illuminating a phenomenon that emerges in our epistemic practices - epistemic oppression. (...) Epistemic oppression occurs when an epistemic agent is excluded from the practices of knowledge production. If the aim of epistemology is to bring us closer to truth, then any practice that subverts this aim ought to be thoroughly investigated. However, as I will argue, our capacity to root out epistemic oppression is limited to the extent that we continue operating within the traditional epistemological framework. In this dissertation, I will argue that the traditional epistemologist can either acquiesce to the standpoint epistemologist's claim that knowledge is sensitive to non-epistemic features related to an agent's social identity, or consider social identity an epistemic feature. I further clarify the standpoint thesis, and examine why standpoint epistemology is able, where traditional epistemology fails, to understand epistemic oppression. I close by considering applications of the thesis to other questions in epistemology, with a particular eye towards issues in the peer disagreement literature. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Politics I.8-11 contains a profound reflection on the relationship between moneymaking and the divergent needs of individuals and politics. It offers not only a clear confrontation with the issue of scarcity, but, unlike modern economics, also a causal explanation of limitless demand. Moreover, Aristotle suggests that the psychological consequences of scarcity pull human beings away from the satisfaction of a fuller range of their needs, and that clarity about those needs greatly weakens the human passion for limitless moneymaking. Need (...) and utility, not unlimited acquisitiveness, are the focus of Aristotelian economics. Yet he also shows that clarity about human needs is quite rare, and, in political life, necessarily absent. I argue that Aristotle’s teaching in Politics I.8-11 is that the philosopher, an essentially private individual, is the true economist on account of his unique clarity about human neediness. (shrink)

Sustainable cities are not only a desirable future but a necessary one yet we still haven’t achieved fully sustainable cities. We have the technological and economic means to create sustainable cities but attempts like Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates have failed to meet their potential. To create a sustainable city we also need to have harmony between the three E’s of sustainability: environment, economy, and equity. The most essential element of sustainability isn’t one of these E’s though, it (...) is community. Community is the thing that holds these principles together and without it, a city cannot succeed. We need more than just a successful community though, we need sustainable design to support the community and vise-versa. (shrink)

Sāṅkhya, with its rigorous introduction to metaphysics, revolutionizes Indian philosophy by delineating the constituents of reality: puruṣa and prakṛti. Yoga, the sister school of Sāṅkhya, borrows from the latter’s metaphysics and introduces a psychologically based paradigm that allows for practitioners to apply the metaphysical teachings of Sāṅkhya. Using the metaphysical and psychological constructs of the mind in both schools, this paper serves to ask the question: Which school of thought, through their authoritative texts, generates more of a sense of agency (...) for the practitioner? In other words, which text encourages the practitioner to feel that he is an agent of his actions? Using the Sāṅkhyakārikā to represent Sāṅkhya, this paper explores the impersonal feelings evoked by the predominance of metaphysics in this text. Using the Yogasūtra to represent Yoga, this paper reveals the highly personal and egoic reading provided by psychology and practice based verses. Using four concepts to measure an SoA it is clear that theoretically, the Yogasūtra provides the practitioner with a more promising feeling of ownership over his pursuits. (shrink)

This paper argues, first, that, while philosophical treatments of friendship in the western tradition have typically taken Aristotle's account of virtue friendship as their starting point, we can already find, in Plato's Phaedrus, an account of friendship which comes close enough to Aristotle's in its most philosophically interesting features to be meaningfully called a virtue friendship, but with some intriguing differences, and that a close examination of this earlier account of Plato's has insights to offer us about both the moral (...) significance of friendships of this kind, and, potentially, Plato's own philosophy. It then argues that another, perhaps even more overlooked, account of virtue friendship can be found in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, offering us a picture of the moral significance that this kind of friendship can have across very different ethical systems, and also, perhaps, an illuminating perspective from which to approach Kant's own conception of virtue. (shrink)

A general objective of this paper is to investigate the original juncture of photography and the graphic arts. By questioning the facile ellipsis that has continually been drawn between the reproductive roles of the artist and the camera, the problematic nature of transferring the production of 'exactly repeatable visual images' from the one to the other will be exposed. Even though such an exchange has long been absorbed into the dialectic of painting versus photography, this paper will demonstrate that the (...) ongoing contestations between expression and illusion were in fact already manifest in the graphic reproduction of the daguerreotype. By unraveling the threads of touch and illusion through historical discourse, I will attempt to place them in relation to photography's seemingly inherent connection to a predetermined 'reality,' and to the various ideological ends to which that reality has been put. And finally, I will suggest a way for understanding this 'ideology' as both inherent, and misunderstood. (shrink)

This work contains an essay written by Bernard Rapoport, as well as quotations and excerpts from various books on topics like history, politics, religion, philosophy, economics, and capitalism. Titles include The Metaphysical Club, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, The Jewish Political Tradition, and Why Americans Hate Politics. The filenames are original and usually contain the book title and author. The items are not dated, but were created between 2001 and (...) 2004. (shrink)

Many epistemologists are attracted to the idea that knowledge is valuable in a way that stands out when compared to the value of other doxastic attitudes. Some philosophers, including Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, Richard Swinburne, and Duncan Pritchard have objected to contemporary theories of knowledge on the grounds that the analyses these theories offer fail to sufficiently distinguish knowledge from mere true belief. One particularly clear instance of this is the Swamping Problem for Process Reliabilism. Goldman and Olsson try to (...) respond to the Swamping Problem on behalf of Reliabilism. In what follows, I first try to motivate and defend an approach to epistemic value. Then I review the Swamping Problem and evaluate Goldman and Olsson’s response to it. Finding their response unsatisfying, I suggest that we try to satisfy Zagzebski et al. by introducing a theory of understanding which answers to the intuitions many endorse about epistemic value. (shrink)