Research

Context collapse occurs when the contents of distinct conversations mix, either by the flattening of multiple contexts together (fusion) or the leaking of one set’s contents into another (fission). After critically surveying the nascent literature, this essay proposes a unified model of context collapse incorporating details from its origin in communications and media studies to more recent developments in philosophy of language and social epistemology. In this two-dimensional taxonomy, one axis measures the collapse's motivation (either intentional or not) while the other marks the direction of its motion (exhibiting either fusion or fission).

Silence can be a communicative act. Tanesini (2018) demonstrates how 'eloquent' silences can virtuously indicate resistance and dissent; in this paper, I outline one way silence can also be used viciously to cause discursive harm, specifically by slurring victims. By distinguishing between eloquent and 'signaling' silences (two kinds of what I call 'performative' silences), I show how 'slurring' silences — fully quiet discursive moves that signal one’s commitment to a slurring perspective — function in a manner that illuminates the pragmatic topography of conversational silence in general.

Through the lens of feminist speech act theory, this paper argues that artificial intelligence romance systems objectify and subordinate nonvirtual women. AI romance systems treat their users as consumers, offering them relational invulnerability and control over their (usually feminized) digital romantic partner. This paper argues that, though the output of AI chatbots may not generally constitute speech, the framework offered by an AI romance system communicates an unjust perspective on intimate relationships. Through normalizing controlling one’s intimate partner, these systems operate as speakers that rank women as non-player characters and license their oppression, which is unjust even in the absence of empirical harms. Understanding AI romance systems as speakers has implications for policymakers. First, this account helps close the so-called responsibility gap in the operation of an AI system. Second, it places these systems under the purview of institutions’ policies regarding hate speech, suggesting one avenue for arguing that these systems may violate extant policies. Finally, it provides support for the pursuit of empirical research into AI romance systems’ effects on users.

In this paper, I bring together the work of Cora Diamond and Christine Korsgaard to describe two distinctions about what “eating animals” entails which are often confused in conversations or arguments against meat-based diets and try to show how both distinctions, on their own lights, ultimately support a concern for all fellow creatures, regardless of species or other biological categories. The distinctions in question are: the distinction between moral and nonmoral actions, presumptions about which serve to define whether or not particular topics (like meat consumption) deserve moral consideration whatsoever, and the distinction between moral and immoral actions, about which suppositions bear on both reflexive and considered moral judgments to inform agents in making meaningful normative decisions.

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or "the changing of past events") while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film 'Arrival', which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position.

According to Thomas Aquinas, what distinguishes the theological from the cardinal virtues is the nature of their object: the latter aim at the natural excellence of humans, while the former direct us beyond ourselves to focus on the Divine. This paper considers the cinematic work of Drew Goddard — in particular, his 2018 film 'Bad Times at the El Royale' — as a post-religious response to Aquinas, insofar as it retains and re-presents Faith, Hope, and Love as valuable elements of the human experience itself, even in the absence of a supernatural vector of their application. After the fashion of Caputo’s Derrida, I offer a religionless interpretation of each of the three theological virtues and show how Bad Times itself deconstructs the roles of 'god' and 'human,' interchanging them in a way that manifests a "religionless religion" wherein the theological virtues can remain vibrant, even without the theological structure that might be expected to undergird them. In short: 'Bad Times at the El Royale' demonstrates how even if God is dead, Faith, Hope, and Love are not.

Although Disney films are sometimes denigrated as popular or "low" art forms, this article argues that they often engage deeply with, and thereby communicate, significant moral truths. The capitalistic enterprise of contemporary modern cinema demands that cinematic moral pedagogy be sublimated into non-partisan forms, often by substituting secular proxies for otherwise divine or spiritual components. By adapting Søren Kierkegaard’s tripartite existential anthropology of the self, I analyze the subjective experiences of the protagonists in three recent animated fairy tales — Disney’s Frozen, Moana, and Tangled — to demonstrate how these princess movies bridge the imaginative gap between the mundane and the divine.

The concept of service found in Christian theism and related religious perspectives offers robust support for a political defense of nonhuman animal rights, both in the eschaton and in the present state. By adapting the political theory defended by Donaldson and Kymlicka to contemporary theological models of the afterlife and of human agency, I defend a picture of heaven as a harmoniously structured society where humans are the functional leaders of a multifaceted, interspecies citizenry. Consequently, orthodox religious believers (concerned with promoting God’s will "on Earth as it is in Heaven") have a duty to promote and protect the interests of nonhuman creatures in the present, premortem state.

This chapter focuses on the surge of interest in characters that span the gap between the two ethical poles of good and evil, filling the role of the anti-hero or anti-villain, and outlines a brief taxonomy for hermeneutical moral identity. By filtering an Aristotelian conception of morality through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology (with some assistance from J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn along the way), I argue that the external actions of a character must be considered in tandem with their internal self-conception in order to properly categorize their moral identity.

By considering the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study, I bring Tolkien’s explication of mythopoesis in "On Fairy Stories" to bear on the current popularity of superhero films to argue that such works qualify as cinematic examples of Tolkienesque fantasy tales. After summarizing Tolkien’s criteria for the genre in Nietzschean aesthetic terms, I both demonstrate how the builders of the MCU have crafted a subcreated fictional world and defend the existence of fairy stories in visual media from Tolkien’s own criticism of such a possibility.

I argue that a comprehensive ontological assessment of the beatific vision suggests that an individual’s experience of God’s face is not merely dependent on a revelation of the divine energies, but that it requires a particular mode of reception on the part of the blessed individual grounded in the reality of their faith; lacking faith, what would otherwise be experienced as the blessed vision of God is instead received as a torturous punishment. Therefore, I contend that the beatific vision is one of two possible phenomena resultant from seeing God’s face; the other is more commonly labeled "hellfire." Consequently, the often–assumed bifurcated landscape of the Afterlife (into a Heaven suffused with God’s presence and a Hell deprived of it) must be reassessed.

Much recent academic literature on the afterlife has been focused on the justice of eternity and whether a good God could allow a person to experience eternal suffering in Hell. Two primary escapes are typically suggested to justify never-ending punishment for sinners: the traditional view focuses the blame for an individual’s condemnation away from God onto the sinner’s freely chosen actions; the universalist position denies the eternality of the punishment on the grounds that God’s inescapable love and eventual victory over evil will bring all souls into His presence. I propose a third option that hinges on the possibility of Heaven itself being experienced as eternal punishment to demonstrate that if God’s presence is both the blessedness of Heaven for some and the agony of Hell for others, then the biblical affirmation of the universal restoration of all with the eternal punishment of some need not remain paradoxical.

In 1906, Henry Stephens Salt published a short collection of essays that presented several rhetorically powerful, if formally deficient arguments for the vegetarian position. By interpreting Salt as a moral sentimentalist with ties to Aristotelian virtue ethics, I propose that his aesthetic argument deserves contemporary consideration. First, I connect ethics and aesthetics with the Greek concepts of kalon and kalokagathia that depend equally on beauty and morality before presenting Salt’s assertion: slaughterhouses are disgusting, therefore they should not be promoted. I suggest three areas of development since Salt’s death that could be fruitfully plumbed to rebuild this assertion into a contemporary argument: (1) an updated analysis of factory farm conditions, (2) insights from moral psychologists on the adaptive socio-biological benefits of disgust as a source of cognitive information, and (3) hermeneutical considerations about the role of the audience that allow blameworthiness for slaughterhouse atrocities to be laid upon the meat-eater.

The paper proposes an anthropocentric argument for veganism based on a speciesistic premise that most carnists likely affirm: human flourishing should be promoted. I highlight four areas of human suffering promoted by a carnistic diet: (1) health dangers to workers (both physical and psychological), (2) economic dangers to workers, (3) physical dangers to communities around slaughterhouses, and (4) environmental dangers to communities-at-large. Consequently, one could ignore the well-being of non-human animals and nevertheless recognize significant moral failings in the current standard system of meat production.

This paper assesses the aesthetic components of the experience of forgiveness to develop a procedural model of the phenomenological process that negotiates cognitive judgments and understanding with emotional affective states. By bringing the Greek concepts of kalokagathia and eudaimonia into conversation with Ricoeur’s "solicitude," I suggest that the impetus for engaging in the process of forgiveness is best understood narratively as the pursuit of a life well lived (in terms of beauty). Consequently, forgiveness is revealed as a technique for developing both an optimal personal and public character (in both moral and aesthetic terms).

In the spirit of the issue’s special focus, this paper seeks to "mash-up" the apologetic approaches of two disparate thinkers: the analytic theologian William Lane Craig and the continental philosopher John Caputo. By marrying Craig’s logical evidentialism with Caputo’s poetic phenomenology, the result offers the ability to focus on God as something reliably powerful and nameable, but who is simultaneously provocative and almost unbearably free to surprise us with (what would otherwise seem to be) the impossible. Altogether, the joining of Craig’s modernism with Caputo’s postmodernism produces an apologetic method startlingly similar to the premodern approach of C.S. Lewis.

This chapter summarizes Augustine’s often-neglected aesthetic theodicy that balances his metaphysical definitions of evil and human agency against the ultimately beautiful story Augustine sees God, as the author of all Creation, writing. First, Augustine’s neo-Platonic conception of evil as the "privation of goodness" is explained which effectively eliminates much of the apparent evil in the world under the guise of a preeminent God’s loving care of the Creation which He fashions as good, but is later corrupted. Secondly, Augustine’s conception of the nature of this corruption at the hands of free agents is laid out with a particular sensitivity to the apparent shifts in Augustine’s thought as he aged. Finally, Augustine’s foundational aesthetic themes of contrast and universal harmony (in Greek, pankalia) are explained to demonstrate precisely why, in Augustine’s words, God might "judge it better to bring good out of evil than to allow nothing evil to exist."