The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the nonprofit governing body of college athletics. They oversee three distinct divisions of competition containing over 430,000 student athletes and over 1,000 member institutions.[1] Their primary task is to ensure all student-athletes and the universities they attend adhere to the extensive rules and regulations outlined in the Associations manual, namely, to abide by principles of amateurism, defined by the Association as agents that do not receive any payment above travel expenses or a grant-in-aid scholarship for competing in sports endeavors. The problem is the NCAA is currently financially and academically exploiting college athletes. The Association possesses an inordinate amount of control over young men and women, and they exercise this power to exploit their unrecognized labor force and generate billions of dollars in revenues, while restricting the amount of compensation the athletes receive to a number well below what the free market will bear. College athletes are not receiving any of the money they produce, and most will not benefit in any real way from the educational product they are provided. The system must be reformed. The first step will be to eliminate financially defined amateurism along with the NCAA’s expansive rulebook. Second, student athletes should be allowed to set their own course load. This includes not taking any classes if they choose, thus ending the charade that athletes are recruited to campus as students first, even when it is clear many have no interest in academics. Third, courses should be tailored to pique the interest of athletes, namely offering majors in sports. Finally, university athletic departments need to be scaled down to truly comply with Title IX requirements and stop wasting exorbitant sums of money. The hypocrisy and deception must end. [1] “About the NCAA,” National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2013, http://www.ncaa.org/.

In a world bombarded with advertisements, it may be difficult for the development of an authentic self. Authenticity is a mode of existence in which there is ownership in the sense of self, while at the same time being able to present this sense of self to others. To be authentic is to act and live in a way that expresses a genuine concern for the self in which projects and goals pursued. The sense of self is the feeling of genuineness of the self and representing this self requires actions that correlate to these feelings. Advertisements act as communication to the public in an attempt to persuade people to purchase products. The tactics that advertising agencies use cause people and society to internalize these messages, in effect, influencing the way people experience the world. Thus, advertising can have a harmful effect on an individual by hindering the development of an authentic self. I will first explain the concept of authenticity, following a discussion of how people organize experience by means of George Mead’s concept of the ‘I’ and the ‘me.’ I will then provide a description of Martin Heidegger’s account on authenticity in juxtaposition with Sartre’s contrasting forms of inauthenticity by means of bad faith. Finally, I will discuss the damaging effects that advertising has to authenticity, and suggest ways to successfully exist in a world full of these advertisements.

In what follows, I highlight negative environmental perspectives and actions based on traditional patterns of Western dualist thought with the ultimate aim of developing an alternative way of relating to the environment and the ‘other’, in general. In pursuit of such an alternative, I utilize embodied artistic practices in order to present the notion that one can engage more holistically with one’s environment, and the other. Through habitual, lifelong ‚Ways‛ cultivating specific practices generally necessary to creating and to viewing art, I argue, one can refine one’s ethical awareness and action. Following the aims of care ethics’ more context and experience-oriented approach to moral concern and to treatment of the other, as well as the philosophies of Japan, and feminist philosopher, Irigaray, I show how these artistic practices form a new awareness and stance that encompasses components of care. Finally, I briefly highlight how art has been used for positive activism.

This piece provides an application of care ethics to the typical American diet. In the first chapter, the problems surrounding the Standard American Diet are discussed at both the individual, familial, global, animal, and environmental levels. The second chapter provides an overview of the theoretical components of care ethics, and lays a framework for analysis. The third and final chapter demonstrates how in applying many of the core principles of care, great strides can be made in remedying the numerous problems that are a direct result of typical consumption habits in the United States.

Although torture is considered universally reprehensible by law, including international law and human convention, it occurs routinely as an acceptable and efficient method for interrogation and intimidation. The questions that follow are: What kind of person engages in/commits acts of torture? If legalized, how would torture affect morality when an individual can be instrumentally utilized as a mere means-to-an-end? How does torture affect the victim, the torturer, and society as a whole? In order to answer these questions, I will use events at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center to argue in favor of the plausibility for the concept of a non fallacious slippery slope against torture by means of theoretical and real world evidence. I will argue that each act of torture that is deemed acceptable in the eyes of any society not only corrupts the societal morality of that nation, but it also produces an increase in direct and indirect participation in such acts.

The inspiration behind this philosophical endeavor is an ethical one: interested in what it means to flourish as a human being – how to live well and authentically. Similar to medicine and how the ability to prescribe the appropriate treatment depends on first making a diagnosis, the focus of this work will to be understand the human condition and the ways in which subjectivity, one’s sense of self, is constituted. Given the general dissatisfaction with the modern metaphysical picture of the world, which analyzes the world in terms of the mutually exclusive and completely separate categories of nature/objects and society/subjects, I proceed from an alternative conceptual perspective, that of non-modernity, offered by Bruno Latour. By focusing on the actual practice of the sciences Latour develops one of his central concepts: mediation. From this understanding of the practices of mediation the world is revealed as an ontological continuum of hybrids – mixtures of human and nonhuman elements – that ranges from quasi-object to quasi-subject. Rather than being separate, nature and society are intimately interwoven and co-constituted, forming a nature-culture collective that is connected and defined by the network of relations between existing hybrids. Given this philosophical landscape of mediation, hybrids and networks, the question that I seek to address is how does this effect what it means to be human? What does it mean to human living in a hybrid world? I answer this question by articulating and developing Latour’s concept of quasi-subject. This will ultimately amount to saying that as humans, our sense of self and agency is co-constituted through our networks of relations with both humans and nonhumans. I conclude the paper by exploring some of the ethical implications that naturally emerge from such an understanding.

This thesis examines some of the different kinds of metaphors employed in our pedagogical practices. By using the Four Pillars of Philosophy for Children, an alternative metaphor for teaching philosophy is put forth as a viable alternative to the traditional options. This is what we can reasonably call the Rhapsode Metaphor.

Gender threat occurs in situations in which one is threatened by the possibility of acting like the opposite gender (Vandello et al., 2008) and is most pervasive for men (e.g., “you throw like a girl”). This study examined the question of whether men, after being told they performed like women, would respond with negative implicit evaluations of women. In addition, competence threat (with no reference to gender) was examined to see if it would affect men in the same way. Women were threatened by being told they performed like men, although it was hypothesized there would be no effect of gender threat for women. Participants completed a line bisection task and received false feedback regarding how they performed. The feedback was manipulated in terms of threat (threat versus not threat) and gender salience (gender was salient or not). Participants then completed two Implicit Association Tests: one to assess implicit prejudice against women and one to assess endorsement of tradition gender roles. Men who were threatened (regardless of gender salience) showed more implicit prejudice against women than men who were not threatened. Women showed an interaction of threat, gender salience, and explicit sexism. When gender was salient, threatened women low in explicit sexism had less favorable attitudes towards other women. Women high in explicit sexism showed no significant difference between threat and no threat. No effects were found for implicit gender stereotypes for men or women. Implications for gender threat theory and future directions are discussed.

In the western culture, historically speaking, there are different ideas of what gives an individual authority or power. There is also historical evidence of an unequal balance between men and women and throughout this thesis I will argue that this is still the case in contemporary society. This unbalance is evident in the ways in which women make use of their bodies in acts such as dieting and pregnancy, how women take on the role of caregivers, and the view of women in leadership positions. I maintain that one of the biggest concerns and contributors to this problem is the subject/object relationship in which women find themselves. In this dichotomy, women find themselves to be a subject and autonomous person while at the same time cognizant of the way they are viewed by others as objects. Within this subject/object dynamic, women become non-subjects and lose their autonomy. A large part of this ongoing relationship is due to the ways in which women use and are expected to use their bodies as well as minds due to social norms that have been passed down through the culture. This can stem from the way women physically maneuver their bodies as well as how others perceive their bodies typically in an inferior or sexualized way. The duality for women as objects is illustrated not only in the way men view women but in how women view other women as well. I will argue that many of the issues surrounding the subject/object dualism can be related back to the ways in which women, throughout their lives, use their bodies. I will illustrate how through the social education of women regarding how to utilize and experience their bodies, women often times lack both in physical ability as well as in leadership roles. I will illustrate how this takes place with young girls and how they maneuver their bodies in regards to physical capabilities. I will then examine the pregnancy process and the ways in which the subject/object relationship manifests due to the female body being seen as a human incubator and a thing that needs medical attention. Finally, I will look at the workplace and the different leadership styles that women are assumed to take as well as the potential resistance that accompanies the challenges to these norms. The types of barriers that are constructed for women to traverse and how those affect the abilities of women to function in a position of power within a university illustrate issues of gender equality for all women. Throughout the thesis, I will explore in detail some of the different barriers that have an impact on women. I argue that barriers have been constructed to hinder women and their perceived abilities within several contexts.

In this paper I attempt to formulate the Christianity-based ecocentric ethics, to answer the ecofeminists' quest to spiritually ground such ethics; I use the living example of the practices of the Catholic ''green sisters''.