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Philosophy
THESIS ELEVEN
A PHILOSOPHICAL NEWSLETTER
© 1994
Volume 1, No. 1
Inside this Issue:
Note from the Editor
David K. Johnson
On the Nature of Science
David Luczyski
Only Words?
Cindy Garnish
Matt Silliman
Kathy Johnson
Constructing Reality
Christine Meltz Green
WHAT'S SEX GOT TO DO WITH IT?
LORRAINE CODE
CLASSIC CONFUSION
SHEILA POST LAURIA
"BURNING TIMES"
SHERRI-LEE MNEIMNEH
ALL TOO HUMAN?
NAN PEDERCINI
VALUELESS PEDAGOGY
DAVID K. JOHNSON
Welcome to the premiere issue of Thesis Eleven
-- a newsletter designed to provide an open and respectful forum for the
discussion of all things philosophical, from news to reviews, from propositions
to poetry to logical puzzles. To philosophize is to engage in disciplined
reflection about ourselves and our valuations, about what we can know and
learn, and about our place in nature as one of its creatures. I warmly
invite friends of the discipline everywhere, from every perspective and
from every corner of our academic community, to participate in and enjoy
these reflexes of the philosophical spirit.
DAVID K. JOHNSON, EDITOR
NASC
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ON THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
When Grampa Brown, in his tidy little kitchen, mixes flour, water, yeast,
wheat, and sugar to bake bread, is he participating in a scientific experiment
or is he merely cooking?
DAVID LUCZYNSKI NASC
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ONLY WORDS?
In her book Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller writes: " Not
simple violation, or rape, but forceful and aggressive seduction leads
to conquest." What should we make of this claim?
CINDY GARNISH
NASC
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In her new book on pornography and free speech,
Only Words, Catherine MacKinnon argues that in the case of violent and
demeaning pornography, the value to the society of the individual right
of free speech should be outweighed by the collective rights of women to
equality under the law. That is, in a world imbued with porn-ographic
images, women are not safe, not respected as equals, and cannot be heard,
and their right to these basic needs should override the abstract right
of pornographic "speech."
Ronald Dworkin, reviewing the book critically, claims that these
rights are not really in competition with one another, because restricting
speech and expression under-mines a political community's ability to determine
col-lectively its moral norms. I'm not sure where I stand on this,
and would appreciate comments and arguments to clarify my thinking.
MATT SILLIMAN
NASC
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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal
for an employer to dis-criminate against a person based on that person's
"race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." In 1978 the Act
was modified to prohibit age discrimination until workers reach age seventy.
Are there other groups that deserve protection from discrimination?
What are the criteria for inclusion (or exclusion)? Should it, for
example, be illegal for an employer to discriminate against a member of
a hate group (such as the KKK)?
KATHLEEN JOHNSON
UMASS-AMHERST
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CONSTRUCTING REALITY
In his essay "Facts and the Self From a Constructivist Point of View,"
E. von Glasersfeld states that "constructivism does not deny reality, nor
does it deny that the living organism interacts with its environment; but
it does deny that the human knower can come to know reality in the ontological
sense." He goes on to say that "constructivism, thus, does not deny
the 'existence' of Others, it merely holds that insofar as we can know
these others, they are models that we ourselves construct."
I take this passage to mean that knowledge is subjective and that what
one knows is limited to her or his experience. How does this view
differ from the Kantian one that we can never know 'things-in-them-selves'?
Isn't von Glasersfeld simply an idealist? I believe there is a difference
between knowing the truth and knowing the facts. Truth, as I see
it, is subjective, full of emotion and bias and is where von Glasersfeld
stops. Facts, on the other hand, are indisputable, objective if you
will, and stand outside of one's experience.
CHRISTINE MELTZ GREEN
NASC
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WHAT'S SEX GOT TO DO WITH IT?
"Philosophers, when they have addressed the issue at all, have tended
to group philosophy with science as the most gender-neutral of disciplines.
But feminist critiques reveal that this alleged neutrality masks a bias
in favor of institutionalizing stereotypical masculine values into the
fabric of the dis-cipline.... Thus, whether by chance or by design,
it creates a hegemonic philosophical practice in which the sex of the knower
is, indeed, epistemologically significant."
LORRAINE CODE
What Can She Know?
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CLASSIC CONFUSION
Twentieth-century scholars describe and label certain American authors
as "classic" because of their reputed alienation and superiority to their
literary culture. Yet the very writers designated as "classic"--
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau -- all shared a
view of literary genius that linked personal insights with cultural influences.
In referring to genius as "the newspaper of the age" (Hawthorne) or in
linking the "times" with an individual genius (Melville) these writers
seem to advocate a very different form-ulation of "classic." How
do we explain the discrepancy?
SHEILA POST LAURIA
UMASS-BOSTON
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"BURNING TIMES"
Just as the witch hunts were profit-able to people in power, I would
argue that the same is true of our current welfare system. It benefits
politicians as they use endless pol-itical rhetoric about how they are
going to change the system to help the "average hard working tax-payer"
that is suffering because of the burden of these programs.
Instead of the middle class focusing on the atrocious income disparities
between themselves and the upper echelon, they waste tremendous amounts
of energy attacking people that are powerless to defend them-selves.
I don't mean to imply that there shouldn't be discourse on the subject
of welfare reform. I do, how-ever, think that most discourse on this
subject consistently reduces to mere name calling based on an unproductive
"us" versus "them" dichotomy.
SHERRI-LEE MNEIMNEH
NASC
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How safe is the NASC environment for diversity?
LOUIE CREW
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
ALL TOO HUMAN?
If we see animals as non-thinking, non-sentient beings placed on earth
merely for our own use, then we may find some justification for consuming
them in various ways. But is this not simply a self-serving and distorted
view of these nonhuman animals?
NAN PEDERCINI
NASC
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VALUELESS PEDAGOGY
[The following is from a recent letter to another newsletter --- Ed.]
Kindly allow me to respond to Jack Lochhead's response to my previous
letter. Jack wonders if my concerns about a mathematical word problem
that involves raising non-human animals for eventual slaughter betray a
commitment on my part to some form of classroom-based censorship.
Quite to the contrary, my intentions were (and are) as follows: (1) to
highlight the anthropocentric bias of the greater part of contemporary
social and moral theory that only arbitrarily limits to human-centered
affairs its critique of exploitative relations...
John Stuart Mill once remarked that every great movement must experience
three stages: ridicule, discussion, and adoption. Since ridicule
has its source in some combination of fear and ignorance, it is an unfortunate
truth that the present discussion, like all those proper to stage one,
must confront habits of the mind that are relatively immune to the pull
of reason...
I propose, finally, that critical educators ought to act to facilitate
these important discoveries. Novel and familiar moral positions share
a common source in human discourse and practice. Some may construe
Jack's words as suggesting a possible conflict between the autonomy of
students and our efforts to identify the defining features of exploitative
actions or concepts. But that cannot be right. There are no
"value-free" alternatives to an explicitly normative pedagogy, but only
valueless ones resting on an uncritical acceptance of existing mores and
assumptions.
DAVID K. JOHNSON
NASC
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