A considerable literature exists regard-ing the moral obligation to keep one's promises. Several authors have focused on the exceptional circumstances which may or should excuse this moral duty. Less frequently discussed is the question of how this general moral obligation and its possible exceptions play out in the context of negotiable written promises to pay money, i.e., so-called "commercial paper."This paper focuses on the application of the legal rules governing commercial paper, and on the ethical implications involved in the application (...) of those rules. More specifically, it asks whether the assertion of the technical doctrine known as "holder in due course," and the denial of that status in some cases, promotes ethical behavior in the marketplace. By examining the circumstances of one case, involving a substantial investment and a large bank, I hope to shed some light on how the legal and ethical rules do in fact "intersect.". (shrink)
Some claim that there are no truthmakers for necessary truths. D.H. Mellor says, for example, “Because the identity of a necessary proposition entails its truth, I cannot see why any other entity must exist to make it true.”2 But notice that the reason given here for p’s not needing a truthmaker when p is necessary seems simply to be another way of saying that p is necessary: ‘the identity of p entails the truth of p’ doesn’t seem to say anything (...) more than simply that p is necessary. And so Mellor isn’t really giving us a reason to deny that the necessary truths have truthmakers, he’s merely asserting that this is so. Perhaps he is correct, but one would hope that there is more to say. (shrink)
George P. Bradford, Emerson, and the perennial philosophy of Fénelon -- Emerson, Nietzsche, and man's striving upward : the "via eminentiae" of superior people -- The perennial philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau in England : William Jesse Jupp -- Emerson, Glasgow, and John Page Hopps : the Unitarian struggle with Scottish Calvinism.
Over the last few years, the concept of “wilderness” has come under attack by environmentalists deeply committed to sustaining the natural world. Their criticisms are pointed and undeniably strong; moreover as I will argue, very similar critiques could be made of its putative counter-concept, “the city.” Yet in both cases, we need not simply reject the concepts themselves as incoherent; our challenge is rather to develop resources rich enough to show that and why they must stand in a constructive tension. (...) I will close by outlining the possibility and productivity of this development through hermeneutic reflections inspired by the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. (shrink)
This essay is about experience, and not only about ideas. I have been drawn to write about John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus for a number of reasons: First, I find his work to be part of a new turn in LGBT art and media that take queer lives as a point of departure, and not only as narrative focus, for their work. These areworks that are not just about being queer, but cross the line into being queer works. Of those (...) who can be said to be a part of this recent turn, I find Mitchell’s work to be both especially philosophical and formally interesting. Not only does his work take up philosophical questions over what it means to be human, and the nature of love and sex, but also his works are produced through an organic, cooperative process that re-frames what it could mean to queer representation, political or otherwise. (shrink)
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Art, Metaphysics, & The Paradox of Standards (Christy Mag Uidhir) GENERAL ONTOLOGICAL ISSUES 1. Must Ontological Pragmatism be Self-Defeating? (Guy Rohrbaugh) 2. Indication, Abstraction, & Individuation (Jerrold Levinson) 3. Destroying Artworks (Marcus Rossberg) INFORMATIVE COMPARISONS 4. Artworks & Indefinite Extensibility (Roy T. Cook) 5. Historical Individuals Like Anas platyrhynchos & ‘Classical Gas’ (P.D. Magnus) 6. Repeatable Artworks & Genericity (Shieva Kleinschmidt & Jacob Ross) ARGUMENTS AGAINST & ALTERNATIVES TO 7. Against Repeatable Artworks (Allan Hazlett) 8. How (...) to be a Nominalist & a Fictional Realist (Ross Cameron) 9. Platonism vs. Nominalism in Musical Ontology (Andrew Kania) ABSTRACTA ACROSS THE ARTS 10. Reflections on the Metaphysics of Sculpture (Hud Hudson) 11. Installation Art & Performance: A Shared Ontology (Sherri Irvin) 12. What Type of ‘Type’ is a Film? (David Davies) 13. Musical Works: A Metaphysical Mash-Up (Joseph Moore) . (shrink)
Consider the following true stories: 1. Anne Cameron, a very gifted white Canadian author, writes several first person accounts of the lives of Native Canadian women. At the 1988 International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal, a group of Native Canadian writers ask Cameron to, in their words, "move over" on the grounds that her writings are disempowering for Native authors. She agrees. 2 2. After the 1989 elections in Panama are overturned by Manuel Noriega, U.S. President George (...) Bush declares in a public address that Noriega's actions constitute an "outrageous fraud" and that "the voice of the Panamanian people have spoken." "The Panamanian people," he tells us, "want democracy and not tyranny, and want Noriega out." He proceeds to plan the invasion of Panama. 3. At a recent symposium at my university, a prestigious theorist was invited to give a lecture on the political problems of post-modernism. Those of us in the audience, including many white women and people of oppressed nationalities and races, wait in eager anticipation for what he has to contribute to this important discussion. To our disappointment, he introduces his lecture by explaining that he can not cover the assigned topic, because as a white male he does not feel that he can speak for the feminist and post-colonial perspectives which have launched the critical interrogation of postmodernism's politics. He lectures instead on architecture. These examples demonstrate the range of current practices of speaking for others in our society. While the prerogative of speaking for others remains unquestioned in the citadels of colonial administration, among activists and in the academy it elicits a growing unease and, in some communities of discourse, it is being rejected. There is a strong, albeit contested, current within feminism which holds that speaking for others---even for other women---is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate.. (shrink)
William James and Wisconsin, by G.C. Sellery.--The distinctive philosophy of William James, by M.C. Otto.--William James, man and philosopher, by D.S. Miller.--William James and psychoanalysis, by Norman Cameron.--The William James centenary dinner: Introductory remarks, by C.A. Dykstra. William James and the world today, by John Dewey, read by Carl Boegholt. William James in the American tradition, by B.H. Bode.--The Sunday service: William James as religious thinker, by J.S. Bixler.
The model theoretic `back and forth' construction of isomorphisms and automorphisms is based on the proof by Cantor that the theory of dense linear orderings without endpoints is ℵ 0 -categorical. However, Cantor's method is slightly different and for many other structures it yields an injection which is not surjective. The purpose here is to examine Cantor's method (here called `going forth') and to determine when it works and when it fails. Partial answers to this question are found, extending those (...) earlier given by Cameron. We also give fuller characterisations of when forth suffices for model theoretic classes such as structures containing Jordan sets for the automorphism group, and ℵ 0 -categorical ω-stable structures. The work is based on the author's Ph.D. thesis. (shrink)
