John Riser, Florida Gulf Coast University Introduction While this essay recapitulates various well-known events and works in the development of Andrei Platonov’s views from utopian communism through disillusioned cynicism to what I will characterize as humanistic communalism, my primary objective is to present a positive assessment of Platonov’s resultant philosophy of life as accessible, relevant […]

Jae Jerkins, The Florida State University Introduction When we talk about “Mars,” we must think critically about what we mean. Does the word “Mars” merely signify the “fourth planet from the Sun,” or does it mean something more? Does “Mars” invoke twentieth century science-fiction narratives of unfathomable alien civilizations? Does the word “Mars” summon images […]

Farhang Erfani, Villanova University   It seems strange to me that most of our contemporaries have no sense of how much philosophy owes to the democratic experience, that they do not explore its matrix or take it as a theme for their reflections, that they fail to recognize it as the matrix of their investigations […]

James Roper, Michigan State University Introduction I begin by sketching a situation I call “the reluctant gambler problem.” I maintain that my intuitions, and those of many apparently rational individuals with whom I have discussed this matter, appear to conflict with well-known normative principles of rational choice. My analysis of this puzzling situation suggests that […]

Ronald L. Hall, Stetson University Introduction By all, or by almost all, of the (American) accounts, the events of September 11th were tragic. This is evidenced by the fact that immediately following these events virtually everyone in America began to refer to the terrorist hijackings and subsequent attacks on The World Trade Center and the […]

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Volition Hoyt Edge, Philosophy Department, Rollins College Luh Ketut Suryani, Department of Psychiatry, Udayana University   Introduction The concept of volition, or will, has been central in Western philosophy, particularly in the Modern era. However, most non-Western (non-Euro-American) cultures have been described as collectivist, in which the individual is subsumed within […]

Graduate Essay Prize Winning Paper of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association Jason Turner, Florida State University The Consequence Argument has long been a staple in the defense of libertarianism, the view that free will is incompatible with causal determinism and that humans have free will. It is generally (but not universally) […]

Steve Wall, University of South Florida Since its inception, philosophy has been characterized by the quest for and the critique of a measure or standard that transcends, informs, and judges human experience. Another perennial problem that has occupied philosophers from the Greeks to the present is the attempt to define literature’s role in conveying transcendental […]

Brian Hood, University of Florida Answering Some Objections to Scientific Realism[1], Preliminaries This paper is a defense of Putnam’s explanationist argument for scientific realism. Some have claimed that the explanationist defense has dubious hidden premises, e.g., science has always been “aiming for the truth”. After pointing out problems for metaphysical realism, I consider internal realism […]

Kevin Aho, University of South Florida Introduction It is common to find Heidegger’s Being and Time located under the genre of 20th century existentialism with the works of Sartre, Camus, and Jaspers, along with his 19th century counterparts, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This is due in large part to Heidegger’s conception of “authenticity,” a way of […]