Variety in Mass Communication Research: An Introduction AN ANTHOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES VOLUME 4 Editor Patricia Hanna University of Utah USA Editorial Board Gerald Doppelt University of California, SanDiego USA Carol Nicholson Rider University USA Donald Poochigian University of North Dakota USA T. Ann Scholl United Arab Emirates University UAE 1 An Anthology of Philosophical Studies Board of Reviewers Chrysoula Gitsoulis CUNY USA Jonas S. Green Brikbeck College UK Keith Green East Tennessee State University USA Jan-Christoph Heilinger Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities Germany Mark McEvoy Hofstra University USA Chris Onof Birkbeck College UK Elizabeth Schiltz College of Wooster USA Andrew Ward University of York UK 2 Variety in Mass Communication Research: An Introduction Athens Institute for Education and Research 2010 AN ANTHOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES VOLUME 4 Edited by Patricia Hanna 3 An Anthology of Philosophical Studies First Published in Athens, Greece by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. ISBN: 978-960-6672-65-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, retrieved system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover. Printed and bound in Athens, Greece by ATINER SA. 8 Valaoritou Street Kolonaki, 10671 Athens, Greece www.atiner.gr ©Copyright 2009 by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. The individual essays remain the intellectual properties of the contributors. 4 Variety in Mass Communication Research: An Introduction Table of Contents List of Contributors 1. Introduction 1 Patricia Hanna Part 1: History of Philosophy Ancient and Medieval 2. Aristotle versus Plato on Tragedy with Respect to Civic 7 Education Jaroslav Danes 3. The Practice of Dialogue: Socrates in the Meno 19 J. Gregory Keller 4. Lugones, Agency under Oppression, and the Aristotelian 27 Practical Syllogism Crista Lebens 5. The Examined Life: Outline of a Neo-Socratic Argument 37 Joe Mintoff 6. The Milindapanha (‘Questions of King Milinda’): 47 An Early Encounter between Greek and Buddhist Philosophy Jere O’Neil Surber 7. Plato on Truth and Falsehood in the Polis 59 Anne M. Wiles Modern 8. Locke on Personal Identity: The Form of the Self 69 Siyaves Azeri 9. How Cartesian is Cartesian Linguistics? 79 Christina Behme 10. The Conceputalist Analysis of Descartes’s Creation Doctrine 89 Daniel Considine 11. Hegel and Foucault Re-visited 99 Evangelia Sembou Part 2: Metaphysics, Logic and Philosophy of Language 12. The Individual Variability Problem 113 Dimitra Electra Gatzia 13. How to Avoid Relativism: 129 What Forms the “Bedrock” that turns our Spade? Patricia Hanna 14. Two Dimensions of Logical Theory: Commitment and Truth 141 John Kearns 5 An Anthology of Philosophical Studies 15. In what Sense is Tarski’s Semantic Conception of Truth 153 Semantic? Ladislav Koren and Jana Pavlikova 16. Being as the Set of All Things 167 Donald V. Poochigian 17. The Self’s Survival and its Freedom 177 Andrew Ward 18. Ramsey and Laconicism 187 Kiriake Xerohemona Part 3: Ethics and Political Philosophy 19. Sartre and Judith Butler: 201 A Problem of Agency That Existentialism Can’t Solve Katherine Cooklin 20. The Social Foundations of the Ethical in Kierkegaard’s Idea of 211 Existence Michael J. Matthis 21. Responsibility in an Age of Global Climate Change: 221 Lessons from the Phenomenology of Thomas Langan Ingrid Leman Stefanovic 22. From Rationality to Morality: The Challenge of Egoism 229 James P. Sterba 6 Variety in Mass Communication Research: An Introduction List of Contributors Siyaves Azeri is a Lecturer at Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, ON, Canada. His areas of interest and research include Modern Philosophy, philosophy of science, consciousness, subjectivity, and philosophical psychology. He has written articles in English, Turkish, and Persian; his papers have appeared in book volumes and several journals including Filozofia and Science and Society. Christina Behme is PhD Candidate at the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She also has a degree in marine biology (Diplombiologe) from the University of Rostock, Germany. Her main research interests are in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science and Evolutionary Theory. She coordinates the multidisciplinary Evolution Study Group at Dalhousie and has recently organized a module on language evolution. She has published on language acquisition and language evolution and is currently completing her PhD thesis on Cartesian linguistics and language acquisition. Daniel Considine is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan State College in Denver, Colorado, USA. He teaches history of modern philosophy, philosophy of science, and logic. His main research interests lie in early modern European philosophy, especially Descartes, Hume, and Kant, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Katherine Cooklin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, USA; she teaches Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law and Justice, and Phenomenology and Existentialism. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, and she specializes in Social and Political Philosophy from a Contintental perspective. She has published papers on Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault, and her current research interests include Continental and feminist models of subjectivity within the field of Philosophy of Law. Jaroslav Danes is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. He teaches the History of Ancient and Modern Political Thought. He works on the history of political thought and science (especially medicine). He has published several articles in Czech and English: his latest authored work is Is the conception of the origins of medicine in De prisca medicina original? (In: Listy filologické 1-2/2008), and his most recent published book is John Philoponus versus Aristotle on the Eternity of the World (Prague, Czech Academy of Science Publishing 2006). He is currently working in the field of Political Thought in Ancient Greek Tragedy. Dimitria Electra Gatzia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Akron, Wayne College, USA. Her research interests include the metaphysics of color, color perception, and how cognitive psychology and neuroscience can inform our philosophical theories of the relation between perception and 7 An Anthology of Philosophical Studies cognition. She has published on color fictionalism, the individuation of the senses, and the role of the ethics of care and economic theory. Patricia Hanna is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA. She has published on philosophy of language, ethics, children's rights, philosophy of mind, belief and reference, ontology, the realism/relativism debate, and Wittgenstein. She is the co-author, with Bernard Harrison, of Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language. Her current work focuses on Chomskyan theoretical linguistics from a Wittgensteinian perspective. John Kearns is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department of the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, USA. He has published a number of books and articles on logic and philosophy of language. These include Using Language: The Structures of Speech Acts and Reconceiving Experience: A Solution to a Problem Inherited from Descartes, both published by SUNY Press. Some of his articles have appeared in the Journal of Symbolic Logic, the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, History and Philosophy of Logic, Logique et Analyse, and Linguistics and Philosophy. His current research is focused on speech act theory and the logic of speech acts. J. Gregory Keller is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, and Research Fellow, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. He teaches Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Ethics, and Philosophy of Culture. His research interests include dialogue as life practice, philosophy of literature, cosmopolitanism, philosophy of religion, the relationship between morality and thought, and concepts and practices of utopia. His papers have appeared in such journals as Philosophy and Literature, ProtoSociology: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, and Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics. Ladislav Koren is Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Faculty of the University Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, where he teaches philosophy of language, logic, epistemology and political philosophy. He has written a number of articles and reviews in Slovak and English. He is a member of LMS centre (an interdisciplinary research centre for Language, Mind and Society). His research interests lie mainly in philosophy of language, logic and epistemology. Crista Lebens is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy & Religious Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA. Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Race and Gender, and Classical Philosophy number among the classes she teaches. Her work centers primarily on the social ontology of gender and race and has appeared in International Studies in Philosophy and in the anthology, The Center Must