• The Nature, Function, and Acquisition of Concepts
    Dissertation, Duke University. 1965.
  •  45
    “Imposing Values on Others”
    Teaching Philosophy 23 (2): 157-167. 2000.
    Students often suffer from what might be called “ethics anxiety,” a kind of alienation from moral discourse due to a fear that another’s values will be imposed upon them. A consequence of this anxiety is that students detach themselves from participating in moral deliberation. This paper proposes a way of thinking about moral judgments aimed at assuaging the fears of students who are skeptical about any moral claim that is not wholly personal or cultural. Rather than viewing moral judgments as i…Read more
  •  18
    Rena J. Ratte 1928-1970
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 44. 1970.
  •  15
    John B. Harrington 1910-1994
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (5). 1995.
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    Do we freely choose to do what we do? Or are we determined by what nature and history have made us? If we are so determined, then can we ever really be responsible for our actions? It is only by bad logic that metaphysics can deprive us of our freedom and our responsibility. But the contingencies of life are another matter. This paper argues that so many accidents of life create who we are and how we act that the responsibility for what we do must be dispersed. There is no place where the buck s…Read more
  •  67
    Teaching Marx with Plato's Cave
    Teaching Philosophy 11 (3): 209-216. 1988.
    beginning with Plato, and moving through Descartes, Marx, and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature. [1] This sequence of writers displays a developing critique of idealism, the assumption that reality is determined by pure thought. Conversely, we also see in them a growing appreciation of the material world and the human body.
  •  205
    Althusser contrasts the Repressive State Apparatus (or RSA) with the Ideological State Apparatus (or ISA). His favored example of the ISA is the school, because it trains citizens in the virtues of work and patriotism as well as inculcating, by precept and discipline, the necessary attitudes and skills for fulfilling the roles assigned to them by their social class in the capitalist..
  •  180
    Most contemporary philosophers of mind assume that consciousness is a natural phenomenon that ought to be subject to scientific explanation. Some think that some further advances in science and/or the philosophy of science will finally reveal to us the nature of consciousness. Others suggest that consciousness may lie beyond the reach of the human intellect, that it will always be a mystery. I argue that the mysteriousness of consciousness results from assuming it to be a natural phenomenon. T…Read more