In "Rethinking Legal Pragmatism: A Philosophical Approach," I take issue with the position of Judge Richard A. Posner, a contemporary spokesperson for legal pragmatism and the law and economics movement. Posner holds that academic philosophy and philosophical pragmatism in particular has no role to play in legal pragmatism as it manifests itself in the process of adjudication and the process of legal scholarship. By redefining philosophy functionally, as opposed to merely sociologically, I illustrate a threefold function of philosophy corresponding to the roles it plays in legal pragmatism. I show the methodological function of philosophy using C.S. Peirce's logic and epistemology, the critical function of philosophy using the insights of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s legal theory, and the normative function of philosophy, using John Dewey's illustration of continuity among moral, aesthetic, practical, and intellectual inquiries. By illustrating the insights of classical American pragmatism to Judge Posner, I show the normative dimensions of the use of history in adjudication and legal scholarship, which prescribe that we narrow the gap between theory and practice in the way we use history. By undermining the strict dichotomy Posner has erected between philosophy and law and between theory and practice, I cultivate a more productive dialogue between law and philosophy, prescribing a broad vision of normativity, allowing for intelligent social growth, and the reconstruction of ends.

This thesis is a study of the ways in which readers actively and collaboratively co-produce fiction. It focuses on American Sherlockians, a group of devotees of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. At its centre is an analysis of geographical and travel writings these readers produced about Holmes’s life and world, in the later years of the twentieth century. I argue that Sherlockian writings indicate a tendency to practise what I term ‘expansionary literary geography’; that is, a species of encounter with fiction in which readers harness literature’s creative agency in order to consciously add to or expand the literary spaces of the text. My thesis is a work of literary geography. I am indebted to recent work that theorises reading as a dynamic practice which occurs in time and space. My work develops this theoretical lens by considering the fictional event in the light of encounters which are collaborative, collective and ongoing. I present my findings across four substantive chapters, each of which elucidates a different aspect of Sherlockians’ expansionary literary geography: first, mapping, where Sherlockians who set out to definitively map the world as Doyle wrote it keep re-drawing its boundaries outside of his texts; secondly, creative writing, by which readers make Holmes move while ensuring he never wanders too far from the canon; thirdly, debate, a popular pastime among American Sherlockians and a means for readers to build Holmes’s world out of their own memories and experiences; and fourthly, literary tourism, used by three exemplary readers as a means of walking Holmes into the world. I conclude with a call for literary geography as a discipline to continue to broaden its horizons beyond the writers and readers of self-consciously literary fictions. The kinds of reading practices I discuss here can take us closer to demonstrating the role that literature and encounters with fictions play in the wider production of space in everyday life.

Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced some of the most renowned thinkers and scholars whose works are still widely read and admired. This cadre of enlightened philosophers established a framework for critical thinking and reasoning, as well as a foundation for composition studies. One of the literary geniuses whose work drew on this expertise was Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for giving the world Sherlock Holmes in the late 1880s. But Doyle’s contributions are more than mere stories; the Edinburgh native endowed his character with the philosophy he himself gleaned growing up in a culture that prized reasoning, critical thinking, elocution, and elegant composition. This dissertation explores the influences Doyle drew from the great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment and connects them to the character of Sherlock Holmes. In addition, it proposes that Holmes’s philosophy establishes a basis for composition classes, where students are introduced to the concepts of critical thinking, reasoning, and logic, and the key role these concepts play in argumentative writing.

John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 - March 13, 1988) better known as "Johnny Wadd" (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. Though he has passed on, the most famous part of Holmes is still present in the flesh (or thermal plastic elastomer, as it were). "The Original" is one of hundred of thousand mass-produced Holmes homages marketed all around the world and was molded directly from the legendary star. In response to this "toy", I became fascinated and somewhat disturbed by the implication of ownership and agency implied by the mass marketing and commercialization of an individual's actual body part. Further playing upon this co-opting of identity and commodification of the body, I placed an open call for artists to design their own piece for the John Holmes Prick Parade. The nude female form has long dominated as the artists' subject. The John Holmes Prick Parade hopes to give some visibility to the much neglected male apparatus. This is a move towards balancing gender equality within the anatomical object-ification of the art world. Before you is the grand culmination of this process, which began almost 70 years ago with the birth of a most "gifted" individual.

Created at the end of the nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes has remained a regular feature of popular culture for now more than a century. However, versions of the detective that have appeared in recent years are strikingly different from the character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while some characteristics remain similar. This dissertation examines the persistence of Holmes as a function of copyright management that matched shifting literary expectations, following this with an exploration of three categories of discourse in which contemporary Holmes texts participate: feminism, postcolonialism, and neurodiversity. It first locates Holmes's difference from prior detectives in his humanist characteristics and then demonstrates that a restrictive character management strategy shared by Conan Doyle and his sons, the subsequent rights-holders, constructed a base version of the character. When the copyright passed out of their hands, the new owners' more permissive attitudes toward using Holmes matched popular interest in deconstructing characters and ideas, allowing for a variety of new approaches to the detective. The second half of the dissertation explores some of these new approaches, beginning with critiques of Holmes's masculinist, misogynist science that are exposed and repaired through new texts. Following that, a pair of postcolonial texts demonstrates contrasting styles of handling the detective's imperial associations, and a final discussion of Holmes as a neurologically different individual brings him to both neurodiversity and disability studies. Authors' deployment of the detective can contain complex narratives, and while these texts are fascinating the dissertation will conclude with a note of concern regarding their continuing popularity.

The relationship between the development of real life forensics and fiction’s use of it is a close one, and it offers excitement and pleasure to follow investigations and unravel mysteries, clearly, both in real life and fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has famously used advanced deductive methods to solve crimes since his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. The recent explosion of forensic elements within fiction has not passed by unnoticed, raising the question of whether forensic delays are more extendedly used in more recent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories, due to the modern range of methods and techniques available. In this essay I show in a comparison of Doyle’s original works about the character Sherlock Holmes, to one of today’s television series; BBC’s Sherlock, that the recent adaptation is interrupted more frequently by forensic investigations, including modern forensic techniques and helpful equipment, which keeps the story from moving forward for a longer period of time, making it a delay. Furthermore, the comparison deals with adaptation theory and shows that the format in which the story is presented is decisive for the result. I conclude that forensic delays are used more extendedly in the contemporary television series Sherlock, due to a more generous range of methods available, but that measuring the extent of forensic delays generally favors the text format.   Keywords: Delay, Sherlock Holmes, Forensics, Development, Format

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 1999. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 114 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-87).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1955. / Typescript. Vita. Title from PDF title page (viewed Nov. 6, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-288). Online version of the print original.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Calvin Theological Seminary, 1996. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1955. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-288).