Ion: Plato’s Defense of Poetry

This reading of Plato's Ion shows that the philosophic action mimed and engendered by the dialogue thoroughly reverses its (and Plato's) often supposed philosophical point, revealing that poetry is just as defensible as philosophy, and only in the same way. It is by Plato's indirections we find true directions out: the war between philosophy and poetry is a hoax on Plato's part, and a mistake on the part of his literalist readers. The dilemma around which the dialogue moves is false, and would have been recognized as such by Plato's contemporaries. Further, it is intrinsically related to a false, but popular, view of language. So the way out of the false dilemma of the dialogue is the way out of the war between philosophy and poetry, and also makes one see what is false about the view of language which makes such war plausible

Is the God Hypothesis Improbable? A Response to Dawkins

In this chapter, Logan Paul Gage examines the only real attempt to disprove God’s existence by a New Atheist: Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747 Gambit.” Central to Dawkins’s argument is the claim that God is more complex than what he is invoked to explain. Gage evaluates this claim using the main extant notions of simplicity in the literature. Gage concludes that on no reading does this claim survive scrutiny. Along the way, Dawkins claims that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence. Gage attempts to show that Dawkins’s argument depends upon distinctively philosophical assumptions that do not appear to withstand scrutiny

Against Minimalist Responses to Moral Debunking Arguments

Moral debunking arguments are meant to show that, by realist lights, moral beliefs are not explained by moral facts, which in turn is meant to show that they lack some significant counterfactual connection to the moral facts (e.g., safety, sensitivity, reliability). The dominant, “minimalist” response to the arguments—sometimes defended under the heading of “third-factors” or “pre-established harmonies”—involves affirming that moral beliefs enjoy the relevant counterfactual connection while granting that these beliefs are not explained by the moral facts. We show that the minimalist gambit rests on a controversial thesis about epistemic priority: that explanatory concessions derive their epistemic import from what they reveal about counterfactual connections. We then challenge this epistemic priority thesis, which undermines the minimalist response to debunking arguments (in ethics and elsewhere)

SPEECH PLANNINGS IN THE STUDENTS’ CONVERSATION (A CASE STUDY OF FOURTH SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, DIAN NUSWANTORO UNIVERSITY)

This study is aimed at describing the speech plannings employed by the fourth semester students of English Department, Dian Nuswantoro University in making conversation with their friends. The data was collected by recording the students’ conversation. The conversation lasted for about 30 minutes. The data, then, was transcribed into the written form. In analyzing the data, the writer used the framework proposed by Faerch and Kasper (1983:214). The result showed that the speech plannings the students usually attempted in making conversation are: temporal variables such as pause (filled), drawls ; hesitation phenomena such as filled pause, repetition, and correction; and other phenomena like slip, switch, uptake signal, and interjection. From the kinds of speech plannings mentioned above it can be said that pauses (filled) were the most attempted by the students so they could gain time for execution. In general, the speech plannings attempted by the students indicate that the students’ speaking readiness is low. In other words, they often find problems in their conversation

The suit maketh the man: Masculinity and social class in Kingsman: The Secret Service (Vaughn, 2014)

This article outlines the ways in which suits are synonymous with masculinity examining the, sometimes paradoxical, nature of suits worn by men of all social classes, and for different reasons. For example, hegemonic men wear suits in a bid to convey power, arguably, by rendering the wearers uniform in appearance so that the focus is on what hegemonic men might say and do, rather than how they might look. Moreover, the uniformity of suits is a means by which men of a lower social class demonstrate aspiration to a higher social class and might affect hegemonic power through wearing them. While much has been written about masculinity and suits, with many authors agreeing that the bespoke suit is at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of men’s clothing, yet there is a little attention paid to the way in which the bespoke suit is represented in media or popular culture. This article examines the role of clothing of the main characters in the film Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) with a particular focus on the contribution that the bespoke suit makes to the masculinity of the bodies of the individuals within the film. Principally, the bespoke suit elevates the body of the wearer from quotidian to tailored, the fitting of which allows for better representation of a man’s body

A note on Marx

Throughout all his life Karl Marx wrote angrily about capitalism. By use of a dialectic approach he was convinced that the working class had to unite and make a social revolution and thereby free them selves from exploitation. Marx himself was in many ways a dialectic person as we try to show in the note. So in some sense he became one with his scientific methodology.

The Cowl - v.34 - n.1 - Apr 8, 1981

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 34 - April 8, 1981. 12 pages