Browsing by Author "Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-"

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    The Ends of Literary Narrative
    (Swarthmore College, 2006-01-25) Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-
    Serious literary fictional narratives seem important; they have a significant place in university curricula. But why are they important? And what makes them serious and literary, as opposed to or in addition to just fictional and fun? They seem not to embody accredited knowledge in anything like the ways in which it is embodied in scientific treatises, well-documented histories, or mathematical proofs. These questions are investigated by taking up the topic of how literary narratives reach their endings. Understanding poetic closure is, it is suggested, central to understanding the cognitive work that literary narratives do.
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    Historical Understanding and Political Ideals: Kant and Benj
    (Swarthmore College, 2011-02-03) Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-
    Professor of Philosophy Richard Eldridge takes up the following questions in this talk: 1) How do historical narratives explain events and provide understanding? 2) What is the role of political ideals in the framing of historical narratives? 3) How, for both Kant and Benjamin, does historical narrative play an essential role in furthering the task of (critical) philosophy? 4) What are the specific, opposed conceptions of historical understanding and ideal political life held by Kant and Benjamin?
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    Individual vs. State Level Predicates and the Thetic and Categorical Judgements
    (1996) Heider, Dan; Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-
    In the study of the relation between syntax and semantics, an important tradition of research has developed on the nature of the individual level and stage level distinction among predicates, first noted by Milsark (1977) and subsequently elaborated by Carlson (1977), Kratzer (1989), and Diesing (1990). This line of study has attempted to explain how the difference between the two types of predicates, generally construed as a semantic difference, manifests itself in different syntactic constructions which are allowed with the predicate (there-existential sentences and perceptual report sentences, to take two examples). The relationship between syntax and semantics has also been studied in depth by Kuroda (1972, 1992), in his examination of wa/ga sentences in Japanese. He has proposed that the different syntactic sentence constructions correspond with the two different types of logical judgment originally proposed by Brentano and Marty, the thetic and categorical judgments. Ladusaw (1994) attempts to bring these lines of study together in order to explain certain characteristics of the ILP/SLP distinction with Kuroda's distinction between judgment types. In this paper, I attempt to build upon Ladusaw's account, by providing a syntactic representation of the ILP/SLP and thetic/categorical distinctions. To do this I will examine the syntactic accounts of Kratzer and Diesing of the ILP/SLP distinction, and the account of Kuroda of the thetic/categorical distinction, in order to suggest how the distinctions interact on a syntactic level. I then hope to show how the semantic relations Ladusaw draws between the predicate distinction and judgment distinction are mirrored in the syntax. Finally, I hope to use Kuroda's logical notation (1992) to characterize these distinctions at the level of logical form, in order to explore some of the ramifications of the two distinctions.