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Salvation or Damnation, and where Ethics Fits in to all That
Get PDFIgnazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine explores the complex nature of ethical decision-making in the context of Fascist Italy, a world in which lofty concerns of moral conduct seem the fodder of fools and idealists. Silone uses his central character, firebrand and part-time philosopher Pietro Spina, to plunge his readers into one man’s quest for goodness within the debauchery and despair of war-torn Italy. Pietro’s moral development through the context of his adventures illustrates the challenge of crafting any sound ethical code, and the ease with which one might be lost to cynicism or indifference. The road marks of Pietro’s philosophical evolution are explored through comparisons with Iris Murdoch’s work on moral vision, Elizabeth Anderson’s non-ideal theory, and the three crusaders of Samantha Vice, Ryan Preston-Roedder, and Vanessa Carbonell in their campaign for faith in humanity over cynicism
Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self
Get PDFIn this paper I examine the relationship between emotions and practical rationality, arguing that emotions are incredibly useful in assisting us in making practical choices. However, this enthusiasm needs to be met with some caution as it not the case that every one of our emotions give us reasons we should be considering in order to make a rational choice, and there are times where if we did follow our hearts we would end up feeling ashamed or displeased with ourselves afterward. At the same time, we can feel guilty about a decision we made while purposefully ignoring our emotions when they tell us otherwise. It is ultimately those instances of reflexive shame or displeasure that tell us something about our agency. Our reflexive emotions show us what we should really care about and when we are failing to do so. And, since the purpose of making rational decisions is to properly attend to our goals and aspirations, part of being rational is to purse what we care about. Our reflexive emotions act as a guide to how well or how poorly we are doing just that
Them’s Flyting Words: The Boundaries of Acceptable Affronts in Medieval Poetry
Get PDFThe boundaries between verbal arguments and physical retribution are complicated and difficult to directly identify. This paper examines the points at which verbal sparring, conventionally dubbed “flyting,” turns to physical altercations. In identifying these points in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, I find that rhetoric turns to violence after affronts to particular morality-based identities. In my reading of Sir Gawain, I posit that the eponyms’ flyte and subsequent fight in the fourth fitt represent an attack on both the institution of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and on Sir Gawain’s personhood. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath,” I suggest a reading wherein the violence between Allison and Janekin represents a fight against the rhetoric of oppression. Throughout the essay, I show how physical retribution is, in these texts, an excusable method of defense against language, particularly when personal and political senses of honor are verbally attacked.Faculty Sponsor: Elizabeth E. Tavare
CWU Faculty Senate Minutes 11/01/23
Get PDFThese are the official Central Washington University Faculty Senate minutes for the November 1, 2023, regular meeting
CECWA_002_Interview
No full textCECWA interview 002https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/cecwa/1001/thumbnail.jp
Slalom Racing is Introduced in Washington in 1933
Get PDFhttps://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/local_authors/1022/thumbnail.jp
Seattle\u27s Indoor Ski Tournents of 1939 & 1940
Get PDFhttps://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/local_authors/1023/thumbnail.jp
National Downhill & Slalom championships & Olympic Tryouts
Get PDFhttps://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/local_authors/1027/thumbnail.jp
Estimating Evapotranspiration and Analyzing Soil Moisture and Heat Flux Parameters at Taneum Creek, Central Washington
Get PDFIn the past two decades, stream restoration work, primarily in the form of wood emplacement, has been undertaken in the Taneum Creek watershed, resulting in increased channel-floodplain connectivity. One of the goals of stream restoration was to boost dry season groundwater storage in the shallow floodplain aquifer. However, any gains in groundwater due to increased connectivity may be nullified by increased evapotranspiration (ET) losses because of denser floodplain vegetation. Within the floodplain aquifer budget, ET is a major flow of water out of the system and is not well quantified.
In order to quantify ET, a monitoring site was established to measure relevant hydrological and environmental parameters along lower Taneum Creek in a meadow which contains a new side channel and a series of beaver dams. The monitoring site includes an evaporation station, and two soil monitoring locations, “riparian” and “meadow”, representing relatively wet and relatively dry areas within the Taneum floodplain respectively. This monitoring equipment provided ground-truthing estimates of ET that were compared to satellite-based estimates generated by OpenET.
Estimates of ET and evaporation using different methods were generated for a six week period in May to July, 2023. Two ET estimates were calculated using the Penman-Monteith FAO-56 method, using soil heat flux data collected in the field and local weather data. These two estimates, (1-7 mm/day at the riparian location and 0-6 mm/day in the meadow location), overlap significantly. These soil heat flux estimates increased as the season progressed, but were consistently lower than the satellite-based estimates, which range from 4-7 mm/day. This difference between estimates from different methods may be because the remote-sensing based estimates include transpiration from large trees that were not captured in the localized soil heat flux measurements. Evaporation calculated from pan evaporation, which excludes transpiration, displayed the lowest rate of water loss, at an average of 2 mm/day across the study period. Magnitude of ET fluxes suggests that any increase in inputs to groundwater storage [as a result of increased channel-floodplain connectivity] may well be negated by increased vegetation growth and associated evapotranspiration