An annotated bibliography of the choral works of Robert A. Hobby

The purpose of this dissertation is to organize, summarize, and present the choral works of Robert A. Hobby in an annotated bibliography. These annotations, along with seven appendices, serve as a reference tool with church musicians and other choir directors in mind. Robert A. Hobby is a native Indiana composer who now resides in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and has over seventy choral works in publication. A biographical chapter about Robert A. Hobby, including his musical education and influences; and a chapter about his style characteristics, including analyses of selected choral works, precedes the annotations. Much of the information obtained for this study came directly through interviews and meetings with Mr. Hobby. The annotations themselves are detailed entries that address a variety of criteria including, but not limited to, year of composition, voicing, instrumentation, meter, key, difficulty, and a general description of the work. Much of this information is included concisely in six of the appendices, in a variety of quick reference formats.School of MusicThesis (D.A.

The problem of future contingents: scoping out a solution

Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future. However, open futurists have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle. For consider the following two claims: Trump will be impeached tomorrow; Trump will not be impeached tomorrow. According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of these claims may well fail to be true. According to many, however, the disjunction of these claims can be represented as p ∨ ~p—that is, as an instance of LEM. In this essay, however, I wish to defend the view that the disjunction these claims cannot be represented as an instance of p ∨ ~p. And this is for the following reason: the latter claim is not, in fact, the strict negation of the former. More particularly, there is an important semantic distinction between the strict negation of the first claim [~] and the latter claim. However, the viability of this approach has been denied by Thomason, and more recently by MacFarlane and Cariani and Santorio, the latter of whom call the denial of the given semantic distinction “scopelessness”. According to these authors, that is, will is “scopeless” with respect to negation; whereas there is perhaps a syntactic distinction between ‘~Will p’ and ‘Will ~p’, there is no corresponding semantic distinction. And if this is so, the approach in question fails. In this paper, then, I criticize the claim that will is “scopeless” with respect to negation. I argue that will is a so-called “neg-raising” predicate—and that, in this light, we can see that the requisite scope distinctions aren’t missing, but are simply being masked. The result: a under-appreciated solution to the problem of future contingents that sees and as contraries, not contradictories

Thomas Reid's Common Sense Philosophy of Mind

Thomas Reid’s philosophy is a philosophy of mind—a Pneumatology in the idiom of 18th century Scotland. His overarching philosophical project is to construct an account of the nature and operations of the human mind, focusing on the two-way correspondence, in perception and action, between the thinking principle within and the material world without. Like his contemporaries, Reid’s treatment of these topics aimed to incorporate the lessons of the scientific revolution. What sets Reid’s philosophy of mind apart is his commitment to a set of intuitive contingent truths he called the principles of common sense. This difference, as this chapter will show, enables Reid to construct an account of mind that resists the temptation to which so many philosophers in his day and ours succumb, i.e., the temptation, in his words, to materialize minds or spiritualize bodies

Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value

This paper addresses two recent debates in aesthetics: the ‘moralist debate’, concerning the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic evaluations of artworks, and the ‘cognitivist debate’, concerning the relationship between the cognitive and aesthetic evaluations of artworks. Although the two debates appear to concern quite different issues, I argue that the various positions in each are marked by the same types of confusions and ambiguities. In particular, they demonstrate a persistent and unjustified conflation of aesthetic and artistic value, which in turn is based on a more general failure to explicitly tackle the demarcation of aesthetic value. As such, the claims of each side are rendered ambiguous in respect of the relation that is supposed to hold between all these types of value and artistic value. These issues are discussed in light of a recent argument proposed by Matthew Kieran, to undermine, to some extent, the conceptual distinction between aesthetic, cognitive-ethical, and artistic values in our appraisal of art works. In rejecting his argument, I defend the conceptual distinction and a pluralistic conception of artistic value that allows for cognitive and ethical values to count as artistic, but not aesthetic, values

Automatic Closure of Low-Performing Public Charter Schools

The National Alliance advocates for the growth and expansion of high-quality charter schools. While we believe it is important to foster the growth of charter schools achieving great academic results for students, it is equally important to close charter schools that are not improving student outcomes.We are pleased to see that over the past several years, state lawmakers have increasingly enacted legislation, often based on our model law, to better support the growth of high-quality public charter schools -- including strengthening accountability provisions for these innovative public school options. At the same time, a growing number of states have passed laws that require charter schools to close if they do not meet certain performance benchmarks.This week we released a state policy snapshot that provides an overview of automatic closure policies in the 15 states that have such laws, which is an increase of four states since we last released this snapshot in 2014.As state lawmakers consider these policies, they should give serious thought to several issues, including authorizers' track records in closing low-performing public charter schools, the sophistication of their states' accountability systems, and how to handle public charter schools that serve high percentages of at-risk students.We commend policymakers who have acted to enforce the quality of their state's charter school landscape through strong accountability measures. We also strongly encourage lawmakers to work closely with the local public charter school stakeholders who are committed to quality as they investigate this policy issue