University Ink - A Showcase of UofL Authorship: Philosophy

Our thoughts depend on knowledge about objects, people, properties, and events. To think about where we left our keys, what we are going to make for dinner, when we last fed the dogs, and how we are going to survive our next visit with our family, we need to know something about locations, keys, cooking, dogs, survival, families, and so on. As researchers have sought to explain how our brains can store and access such general knowledge, a growing body of evidence suggests that many of our concepts are grounded in action, emotion, and perception systems. We appear to think about the world by means of the same mechanisms that we use to experience it. Yet, abstract concepts like 'democracy,' 'fermion,' 'piety,' 'truth,' and 'zero' represent a clear challenge to this idea. Given that they represent a uniquely human cognitive achievement, answering the question of how we acquire and use them is central to our ability to understand ourselves. In Abstract Concepts and the Embodied Mind, Guy Dove contends that abstract concepts are heterogeneous and pose three important challenges to embodied cognition. They force us to ask: How do we generalize beyond the specifics of our experience? How do we think about things that we do not experience directly? How do we adapt our thoughts to specific contexts and tasks? He further argues that a successful theory of grounding must embrace multimodal representations, hierarchical architecture, and linguistic scaffolding. Focusing on a topic that has generated a lot of recent interest, this book shows that abstract concepts are the product of an elastic mind.

At first glance, Theodor W. Adorno's critical social theory and Gershom Scholem's scholarship of Jewish mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. But their first conversations in 1938 New York were the impetus for a profound intellectual friendship that lasted thirty years and produced more than 220 letters. These letters discuss the broadest range of topics in philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts - as well as the life and the work of Adorno and Scholem's mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Unfolding with the dramatic tension of a historic novel, the correspondence tells the story of these two intellectuals who faced tragedy, destruction, and loss.

This is the first book to offer a philosophical engagement with microaggressions. It aims to provide an intersectional analysis of microaggressions that cuts across multiple dimensions of oppression and marginalization, and to engage a variety of perspectives that have been sidelined within the discipline of philosophy. The volume gathers a diverse group of contributors: philosophers of color, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers of various nationalities and ethnicities, and philosophers of several gender identities.

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel formulation of physicalism.

The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the fieldwill have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analyticaesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

While narrative has been one of the liveliest and most productive areas of research in literary theory, discussions of the nature of emotional responses to art and of the cognitive value of art tend to concentrate almost exclusively on the problem of fiction: How can we emote over or learn from fictions? Narrative, Emotion, and Insight explores what would happen if aestheticians framed the matter differently, having narratives--rather than fictional characters and events--as the object of emotional and cognitive attention.

Territorial disputes have defined modern politics, but political theorists and philosophers have said little about how to resolve such disputes fairly. Is it even possible to do so? If historical attachments or divine promises are decisive, it may not be. More significant than these largely subjective claims are the ways in which people interact with land over time. Building from this insight, Avery Kolers evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents a novel link between political legitimacy and environmental stewardship, and applies these ideas in an extended and balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

In Propelled, Andreas Elpidorou makes a lively case for the value of discontent and illustrates how boredom, frustration, and anticipation are good for us.Weaving together stories from sources as wide-ranging as classical literature, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, art, and video games, Elpidorou shows that these psychological states aren't unpleasant accidents of our lives. Rather, they illuminate our desires and expectations, inform uswhen we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value.

Using case studies and historical analysis, this book traces changes in ways that journalists understood their ethical responsibilities during the pre-internet twentieth century. Each chapter in this book explores a historical development in the evolution of journalists' perceptions of their role as professionals.

Accounts of solidarity typically defend it in teleological or loyalty terms, justifying it by invoking its goal of promoting justice or its expression of support for a shared community. Such solidarity seems to be a moral option rather than an obligation. In contrast, A Moral Theory ofSolidarity develops a deontological theory grounded in equity. With extended reflection on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the US Civil Rights movement, Kolers defines solidarity as political action on others' terms. Unlike mere alliances and coalitions, solidarity involves a disposition todefer to others' judgment about the best course of action.

This book, intended as a core text for a basic course on Media Ethics, takes a distinctive approach to the study of ethics. Focusing on one historic episode per chapter, the book is divided into three parts that represent the three major functions of the media within democratic societies:news, persuasion, and entertainment. Blending classic and contemporary cases, these authors discuss media ethics with a thorough grounding in theory, particularly communitarian theory, an antidote to the more widely discussed libertarian theory.

Revisiting African philosophy's classic questions, D. A. Masolo advances understandings of what it means to be human--whether of African or other origin. Masolo reframes indigenous knowledge as diversity: How are we to understand the place and structure of consciousness? How does the everyday color the world we know? Where are the boundaries between self and other, universal and particular, and individual and community? Masolo offers solutions for containing socially destructive conduct and antisocial tendencies by engaging com-munity. His unique thinking about community and the role of the individual extends African philosophy in new, global directions.

Process and Analysis brings together an unprecedented collection of the world s leading contemporary process and analytic philosophers to explore philosophical topics of common interest. The contributors examine a wide variety of explicit and implicit commonalities and differences of approach to such central philosophical issues as the nature and status of events, time, space, relations, particulars, and God. This col-lection demonstrates that both traditions have important things to say to one another. In fact, a largely ignored conversation between the two traditions has been carried on since at least the days of Whitehead s influence on early Cambridge analytic philosophy.

David Owen explores Hume's account of reason and its role in human understanding, seen in the context of other notable accounts by philosophers of the early modern period. Owen offers new interpretations of many of Hume's most famous arguments, about demonstration and the relation of ideas, induction, belief, and scepticism. Hume's Reason will be illuminating not just to historians of modern philosophy but to all philosophers who are concerned with the workings of human cognition.