|
2009 - 2010 Fellows
This page is still under
construction
Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Visiting Fellow
 Philosophy
of Culture and Sport
Exertions that Inspire:
José Ortega y Gasset and the Re-Valuation of
Sport.
José Ortega y was Spain’s foremost 20th
Century intellectual and a philosopher for dark times. Writing in a period when
Spain had lost its way, he made it his mission to shine a beacon that would
bring lost minds to safe harbor. Bringing philosophy to the general public by
means of newspapers, magazines, and cultural journals, Ortega presented his
deeply original ideas in a beautiful style without compromising rigor or
effectiveness. Sport was one of his most intellectually and existentially
invigorating ideas: a central, high pillar of human achievement from which to
scan the horizon for promising possibilities.
IPPL Fellows Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza brings sport to the
center of public and intellectual discourse as a privileged vehicle for novel
ideas. Often disregarded as a genuine object of study in philosophical circles,
Jesús argues that sport overflows with stimulating ideas that can infuse a
contagious zest for life and encourage a creative ethos. To fulfill this
educational and intellectual promise, Exertions that Inspire revalues—in
Nietzsche’s fertile sense—the
realm of sport in three ways. First, it presents and examines the notion of the
sportive, where we find Ortega’s most optimistic, richest ideas. For Ortega, the
generous effort of the sportsperson, literally and ironically “superfluous,”
embodies and symbolizes an exertion that inspires an enthusiasm for life that
can spill into creative artistic, scientific and literary enterprises. Second,
it capitalizes on the direct and potentially galvanizing connection sport has
with the common citizen, and its suitability as a vehicle to overcome social,
professional, and national barriers. And third, it explores the underlying
conceptual, formal, and historical structures that sport shares with art,
science and philosophy in order to advance our thinking on values, character,
excellence, and the good life. When coupled with diligent refection, we are sure
to enjoy philosophical fireworks.
Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza hails originally form Pamplona,
Spain (renowned for the annual running of the bulls, something he used to do
when the legs were faster and nowadays engages just academically). He is Allen
and Pat Kelley Scholar and an assistant professor of philosophy at Linfield
College, Oregon. He has previously taught at the University of New Mexico-Los
Alamos, and Truman State University, Missouri. His main specialties are the
philosophy of sport, aesthetics, and metaphysics. However, his teaching and
research interests are wide ranging, and include philosophy of literature, Asian
philosophy, and contemporary philosophical trends among others. He has taught
courses designed to make philosophy more approachable to a wider public, such as
the Philosophy of Humor, or Philosophy and The Lord of the Rings.
Published in academic journals, such as Sports, Ethics, and Philosophy,
he derives great satisfaction when his work is addressed to a general
readership. In this regard, he has co-edited a book on cycling and philosophy
for Wiley & Blackwell’s Philosophy for Everyone series, and has chapters
forthcoming in books on the Olympics, hunting, and soccer. He contributes to a
blog on the philosophy of sport to expose this discipline to a wider
non-academic public.
David Dillard-Wright
, Visiting Fellow.
 Ethics
and Continental Philosophy
Proximity and Sympathy: The Ethical Dimensions of Distance
Both
“old” and “new” media have made it possible for the average American to keep in
touch with events on the other side of the world, to see images of victims of
natural and human-caused catastrophes. The question looms as to whether these
mediated experiences of the suffering of others have the same value as a
face-to-face encounter. Some argue that the profusion of digital information
actually blunts concern for others because of the sheer volume of information
that competes for our attention. While some of the initial fervor over the
internet as a kind of “global village” has cooled, many still see in this
technology a democratizing, leveling force that makes it possible for people to
connect across their differences and geographies. This project asks what space
and time have to do with sympathy and will ask how encounters with others can
lead to caring action in the world. The project will also ask about other forms
of remoteness: can caring about a fictional character or a historical figure
lead me to care about others right in front of me? Does caring for non-existent
others matter?
The
philosophical resources for this project would stem from Continental philosophy,
in particular, the philosophies of relation (Buber, Levinas, and Marcel, in
particular) and Bergson’s theory of duration. These thinkers, in addition to
other resources from feminist theory, media studies, and phenomenology, will
shed light on how artifacts like photos and text can telegraph the agency of the
subject through time and space and also reveal the contributions of previously
maligned faculties like emotions and imagination to the caring relationship.
Understanding why the response of sympathy arises has tremendous implications
for how we organize society, how we educate children, and how we deal with
social and environmental problems. While this topic has obvious philosophical
dimensions, it also concerns everyday life and the world in which we live. The
world of the future will, without a doubt, be interconnected, but if those
connections are to matter, the mediated presence must translate into concerned
action in the world.
David Dillard-Wright studied Religion and Russian as an
undergraduate at Emory University and received a Master of Divinity degree in
Emory's Candler School of Theology. From there he attended Drew University,
where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy.
David's
first book,
Ark of the Possible: The Animal World in Merleau-Ponty (Lexington,
2009), explores the theme of "interanimality" in the work of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. David's other articles focus on aesthetic attention and the
phenomenon of sympathy. In the summer of 2008, he completed a fellowship in
residence sponsored by the Animals and Society Institute at Michigan State
University, where he studied the worldwide trade in human organs and its
relationship to animal-based research.
David currently teaches philosophy and ethics at the University of South
Carolina, Aiken.
Anthony Cunningham, Visiting
Fellow
 Ethics
As Good
As It Gets?
The Romans depicted the
goddess Fortuna (the goddess of fortune or luck) with a cornucopia in one arm
and a rudder in the other. With one hand she might give from her plenty, and
with the other she might dash a life against the rocks. Much of human history
reads as an unending attempt to enjoy Fortuna's gifts and take control of her
rudder. Some schools of thought have held out the hope of insulating lives
against bad luck. The stoics believed that true sages could be happy even on the
rack. Others have looked at the Biblical Job and have preached a hard lesson:
With the right faith, even horrible things might be nothing compared to the joys
of the kingdom of heaven. Secular utopians have sung the praises of a golden
age to come when swords might be beaten into ploughshares, lions might lay with
lambs, and human beings might find true fulfillment.
Anthony Cunningham's
project departs from these sanguine views and assumes that no life is ever safe
from serious harm, the kind that can make a mockery of the idea that life is
good. In this light, what besides the things that luck might give or take do we
need for an honest chance at living well? Most of all, what sorts of people do
we need to be for a chance at a good life? Philosophy in the 21st century often
has little to say about such questions for everyday people leading normal
lives. Sometimes the analyses are so specialized, the targets so arcane, and
the details so tedious that philosophers speak a language that only philosophers
can care about or understand. This project harkens back to an ancient tradition
with a simple goal: to notice and appreciate meaningful things about things that
genuinely matter in a human life.
Anthony
Cunningham is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at
St. John's University in Collegeville, MN. Specializing in ethics with a
particular interest in literature, he is the author of The Heart of What
Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy, and he has published
essays in various journals, including American Philosophical Quarterly,
Journal of Value Inquiry, Mind, Ethics, and Dialogue.
He is completing a manuscript called Modern Honor, and his new project
grows out of his desire to bring moral philosophy out of its ivory tower and
into the everyday world in some meaningful way.
Richard Gilmore, Regional Fellow
 Ethics
and Philosophy of Film
"Moral Sorites in Life and Movies."
Richard Gilmore is fascinated by the sorites
paradox, or the paradox of the heap first invented by Eubulides of Miletus in
the fourth century B. C. E. One grain of sand is not a heap. Two grains of sand
are not a heap. Three grains of sand are not a heap. It seems to be the case
that there is no condition under which the addition of one grain of sand can
convert a non-heap into a heap, yet at some point, if grains of sand are
continually added, at some point, there will be a heap. The moral dimensions of
this problem especially struck me one morning looking at the glass in our
medicine cabinet that we fill with Q-tips. There were three Q-tips in the
glass. I knew that I should never leave the glass completely empty, because
that would force my wife to fill the glass. But, if that is the case, then I
should not leave just one Q-tip in the glass either, since she is a moral
person, and so would still have to fill the glass when she used that last
Q-tip. But if leaving one Q-tip is morally reprehensible, then leaving two
Q-tips is also and almost equally morally reprehensible. And yet, the whole
point of the glass is so one does not have to continually fill it every day. It
suddenly struck me that this was a sorites paradox. It further struck me that
most moral situations were. It is especially true of any situation that
involves a limited resource and multiple users. That is, the moral issues will
not be immediately present but will emerge. Furthermore, they will emerge with
gradually increasing force, so that being morally responsible will be less a
matter of choosing the right over the wrong than anticipating where a situation
is heading and acting in a way that is responsible to that trajectory.
I am very interested in making philosophy and
philosophical issues accessible and available to wide, non-professional
audience. I have worked on that project mostly through writing about philosophy
and movies. When I have taught or presented on the topic of moral sorites, the
situation is always immediately recognized by several people in the audience as
a situation that they have found in their own lives (who feeds the dog,
replacing the toilet paper, cleaning the house, making the bed, etc.). Mostly,
they describe these situations in terms of frustration, that the other people in
their group sharing the resource are not behaving responsibly. By clarifying
the issue and the responsibilities that are entailed, I hope can alleviate some
of the frustrations that people experience.
Richard Gilmore is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy
Department at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN. He is the author of
Philosophical Health: Wittgenstein’s Method in Philosophical Investigations
(Lexington Books, 1999) and Doing Philosophy at the Movies (SUNY, 2005).
Gordon Marino, Regional Fellow
Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy
"Philosopher as Political Interlocutor"
Gordon Marino has a long history of public commentary on
the issues of the day. In particular, he is looking at a range of contemporary
public policy issues including, including the cult of the expert in America,
self deception and ethics education, the use of psychotropic drugs in children
too young to be able to discuss side effects, and problems with Just War Theory
in an era of asymmetric wars. His project is an example of just how philosophers
can be citizens and public commentators.
Gordon Marino took his doctorate from the Committee on
Social Thought, University of Chicago. Curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library
and Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, Marino is the author of
Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Marquette University Press) and co-editor
with Alastair Hannay of the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. He is
editor of the Basic Writings of Existentialism and Ethics: the
Essential Writings (Modern Library/ Random House). Marino’s essays have
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, Slate, Newsweek,
and many other nationally circulating publications. In 2010, Marino will serve
as William J. Clinton Distinguished Lecturer at
the Bill Clinton School of
Public Service and the Clinton Library. A former boxer,
Marino trains amateur boxers in Northfield, Minnesota and covers the sweet
science for the Wall Street Journal. | 
