Unlike Melchionne and Naukkarinen, I advocate an expansive definition of everyday aesthetics that, in addition to the most common and everyday experiences, includes festivals, tourism, and countless activities carried out daily by artists and professionals from various areas. Continuities between aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art and nature are established. For example, the act of looking through a window may involve aspects of all three aesthetics. Although I agree with Melchionne in that everyday aesthetics is closely linked (...) to questions about the search for subjective well-being, I assume a more expansive approach based on recent psychological studies of the experience of “awe” to emphasize the importance of such experiences in subjective search, linking this way, the most outstanding aspects of everyday aesthetics, the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature. (shrink)

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A (...) Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. (shrink)

Locke has been accused of endorsing a theory of kinds that is inconsistent with his theory of individuation. This purported inconsistency comes to the fore in Locke’s treatment of cases involving organisms and the masses of matter that constitute them, for example, the case of a mass constituting an oak tree. In this essay, I argue that this purported problem, known as ‘The Kinds Problem’, can be solved. The Kinds Problem depends on the faulty assumption that nominal essences include only (...) features observable at a time t. Once this assumption is rejected, new candidates open up for the relevant difference in the world that is included in the nominal essence of e.g. mass but not oak tree. And I argue that there is at least one good candidate for the extrinsic feature observable only over time in which the mass differs from the oak it constitutes, namely its persistence conditions. The Kinds Problem can be solved. (shrink)

In this article I intend, on the basis of some previous relevant works on the issue, to further examine a range of conditions for maintaining adequate methodological guiding principles concerning how to look at the relation between distinct methodological perspectives in comparative-engagement exploration in philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to explore how, in the global context, distinct approaches in philosophy can be engaged in order toconstructively talk to each other and make a joint contribution to the development of (...) philosophy and society. (shrink)

Since one of the connotations of maturity is development, the meaning of emotional maturity that we come to is to control and cultivate our ability to emote. Since this conception of emotional maturity is subsumed under a conception of the self, by describing the mechanism of the self as a process of development, we can also account for emotional maturity. The implications of this way of looking at emotional maturity, by looking at one’s self, reveal important problems about what the (...) mind is and how the mind functions in order for us to cope with and thrive in life. (shrink)

This essay is a contrasting of John Searle's biological naturalist view of the mind with Gilbert Ryle's deconstruction of the problem of mind-body interaction. These two positions are most uniquely suited for this purpose since, together they constitute the best positive theory and criticism of the same problem. It will be argued that consciousness - a feature of human experience which proves to be one of the most difficult to account for, from the perspective of the naturalist can be regarded (...) as a dispositional attribute of a complex biological organism. Considered as such, it is what Searle would term a causally-emergent-system-feature. This thesis will focus on a single modification that needs to be made to make John Searle's theory consistent with his own criticism of the traditional mind-body problem and sensitive to the devastating criticism that Ryle formulated in the first half of the twentieth century. The biological naturalist's explanation for the occurrence of conscious states must assume a post-Rylean perspective on the problem of interaction and must be consistent with the notion of "conscious awareness" as a dispositional attribute. (shrink)

Observing that repugnant cultural and religious ideas is used to justify the control of women by men, Susan Moller Okin proposed the following solution to the problem of group rights: In negotiations for group rights with minority cultural groups, whenever the dominant ideas and practices of minority cultural groups contradict the idea that men and women are moral equals, the state should show more concern towards the group members, namely the women, who are subordinated by the group rather than group (...) itself. This thesis argues that this solution is unjust and impractical, ultimately leading to the unequal treatment of members--males and female members alike--of minority cultural groups. (shrink)

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s one of the main foci of aesthetic inquiry was the attempt to develop definitions of art and such related concepts as visual art, music, tragedy, beauty, and metaphor. Clive Bell (1958) famously stated that either all works of visual art have some common quality or when we speak of “work of art” we speak nonsense. DeWitt H. Parker (1939) argued more generally that the assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence (...) of some common nature present in all the arts. This search for a common quality or nature of art was generally taken to be a form of essentialism. (shrink)

Marx W. Wartofsky was born in Brooklyn and received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. He was a professor at Boston University (where he taught for twenty-six years) and then at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was long-time editor of the Philosophical Forum, which he founded in 1970. He also co-founded with Robert Cohen the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science in 1960. He wrote three (...) books: Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968), Feuerbach (1977), and Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (1979), the last of which is the most important for his aesthetic theory. He co-edited Woman and Philosophy (1976) with Carol C. Gould, his wife. Wartofsky was president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology from 1987 to 1989. He was also a longtime member of the American Society for Aesthetics and participated regularly in its programs. He was best known for his “historical epistemology,” which he applied to aesthetics as well as the philosophy of science. Unusual for a philosopher in the United States, Wartofsky’s overall perspective was firmly rooted in Marxism. However, he was also influenced by the work of art historian Ernst Gombrich, analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman, and psychologist J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

Race is a major axis of social injustice in America. Social injustice is due to both maldistribution of material resources and opportunities and non-recognition or mis-recognition of people of color. One form of mis-recognition is the accusation that a person of color is not a real American, creating a conflict of identities : a double-consciousness. This accusation has its origins in faulty ideas about race, identity, and race-group membership. This paper presents a new model of identity that addresses these faulty (...) ideas and provides a conceptual structure within which one can consistently maintain a single-consciousness while maintaining identifications with various domains of identity. Also discussed are the ramifications of such a model, implications for group action, a case study of Muslim-Americans, and the ramifications of President Obama's election. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the topic of the philosophical contributions of Edith Stein to the area of philosophy known as phenomenology. This thesis will examine Edith Stein's life up until the acceptance of her doctoral dissertation, On The Problem of Empathy, in August, 1916. A particular attention will be given to the years 1913-1915 when her doctoral dissertation was being conceived and written. The central question being did Edith Stein make any unique and independent contributions to the philosophy of phenomenology?Because Edith (...) Stein was canonized a Saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1998 a great deal of research material has recently been made available on her life. Using this and other sources as evidence, this thesis will make the argument that Edith Stein did in fact make heretofor unaccredited and important contributions to the area of philosophy known as phenomenology. (shrink)

This thesis examines one type of misunderstanding of a core element of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian moral theory. Specifically, it is sometimes claimed that Bentham believed that self-interest was simply in harmony with the interests of a community such that they could not be in conflict. This thesis argues that Bentham thought they were often in conflict, and that his moral theorizing was meant to seek ways to harmonize them and thereby promote the happiness of societies as much as possible.