Composition and Coincidence

[First Paragraph] Suppose we take a pound of gold and mold it into the shape of Hermes. Then, it would seem, we shall have a golden statue of Hermes, beautiful to behold. We shall also have a lump of gold. And we have the makings of a well-known philosophical puzzle. Many people find it obvious that if we crushed the statue or melted it down, we should destroy the statue but not the lump of gold. The lump can be deformed and still continue to exist, but the statue cannot; that is the nature of lumps and statues. So the lump can outlive the statue. Since nothing can outlive itself, it is natural to conclude that the one-pound gold statue and the one-pound lump of gold in our example are numerically different. And as statues are to lumps, they say, so are brick houses to heaps of bricks, living organisms to masses of matter, and people to their bodies. More generally, certain atoms (or elementary particles or what have you) often compose two numerically different material objects at once. To put it another way, two different material objects may have all the same proper parts (the same parts except themselves) at once. Because of its many defenders and its intuitive attraction, I will call this the Popular View about lumps and statues and other familiar material objects

Was Jekyll Hyde?

Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split-personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals

Association of Christian Librarians

Have you known of an organization that has survived for 25 years without a salaried personnel, where no one has gone on strike for higher wages or overtime pay, or where no one has asked about retirement benefits or federal aid? Yet this organization has grown constantly, is regularly putting out two publications, never lacks for a place for an annual conference and has plenty of volunteer help from year to year. This is the CHRISTIAN LIBRARIANS’ FELLOWSHIP now known as the ASSOCIATION OF CHRISTIAN LIBRARIANS

A Taste of Hong Kong

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Jake Olson describes his observations during his study abroad program at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong

Rethinking Our Work With Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of Language Teaching in the Writing Center

'Just shy of 9 AM on one of the last days of the semester, I raced into the writing center. Waiting for my first writer, I hastily checked my email where the subject line “SOS from June1” jumped out at me. June was a writer I knew well, and she was one of my former students in a writing center studio course for multilingual writers. Reading June’s email, her panic was apparent; she was extremely concerned with how a professor was grading her writing in a particular course. Though she had tried to discuss her concerns with her instructor, her account to me indicated this had been futile: “he said that this class is difficult and he cannot help me any more."'University Writing Cente

The Ontology of Material Objects

[First paragraph] For a long time philosophers thought material objects were unproblematic. Or nearly so. There may have been a problem about what a material object is: a substance, a bundle of tropes, a compound of substratum and universals, a collection of sense-data, or what have you. But once that was settled there were supposed to be no further metaphysical problems about material objects. This illusion has now largely been dispelled. No one can get a Ph.D. in philosophy nowadays without encountering the puzzles of the ship of Theseus, the statue and the lump, the cat and its tail complement', amoebic fission, and others. These problems are especially pressing on the assumption that we ourselves are material objects

Promoting Awareness of the Opioid Epidemic in Rural Vermont

Vermont is in the middle of an opioid epidemic. Heroin use fatalities are on the rise and the number of people in treatment for opioid use disorder in Rutland County has tripled in recent years. Despite this widespread problem, community members of Rutland County feel that there is reluctance to talk about opioid misuse and lack of awareness. This project aims to bring awareness, provide resources, and encourage people struggling with opioid use disorder to seek treatment.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1258/thumbnail.jp