Conceptual Engineering & Contextualism,
2023
Western University
Conceptual Engineering & Contextualism, Madhavi Mohan
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between conceptual engineering and contextualism in philosophy. Conceptual engineering evaluates philosophical theories about concepts against whether they meet normative and political objectives, while contextualism highlights the influence of context on meaning and truth. I argue that conceptual engineering is subject to contextualism, rendering theories about concepts applicable only in specific contexts.
The first chapter examines essentially contested concepts: concepts inevitably subject to contestation, owing to different, equally legitimate reasons philosophers may have for valuing them. Nevertheless, within specific contexts, these concepts serve particular purposes, and conceptions aligned with those purposes better capture their …
Moving At The Speed Of Trust,
2023
Rhode Island School of Design
Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee
Masters Theses
Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.
These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …
Moretheless,
2023
Rhode Island School of Design
Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi
Masters Theses
material investigations becoming questions with interjections
How To Talk About God: Origen And Gregory Of Nazianzus On Divine Transcendence And Theological Language,
2023
College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University
How To Talk About God: Origen And Gregory Of Nazianzus On Divine Transcendence And Theological Language, Coleman S. Kimbrough
Obsculta
This article discusses the doctrine of God of the early Church Fathers Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus. According to these two theologians, the tension between God's transcendence and God's immanence conditions the language we use to name and describe God. Such "God-talk" is necessarily limited by the ontological divide between the human and the divine. Using Origen and Gregory as reference points, I examine how the precise and careful use of apophatic, cataphatic, and analogical language is necessary to properly account for both God's eternal nature and God's work in the material world.
On The Possibility Of Single Correct Answers In Legal Interpretation,
2023
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
On The Possibility Of Single Correct Answers In Legal Interpretation, Francis Kwame Nyamekeh Jr
Masters Theses
My thesis examines Dworkin’s claim that there are objectively correct answers to controversial legal questions, and hence moral questions. A given moral statement is objectively true if it is true independently of what anyone believes or thinks about it. Dworkin asserts that the truth or objectivity of any moral claim depends solely on moral arguments. On the contrary, Leiter claims that any moral argument in favour of moral objectivity is empty and entails counterintuitive conclusions. Thus, moral arguments are neither necessary nor sufficient to support claims about moral objectivity.
Leiter nevertheless proposes that any forceful argument in favour of moral …
Intentional Passing And Closeted Agency,
2023
University of Missouri-St. Louis
Intentional Passing And Closeted Agency, Logan Bohlinger
Theses
It is characteristic of closeted queer agents that they behave so as to pass as heterosexual, cisgender, or otherwise as non-queer. Thus, I take it that an action-theoretic account of the phenomenon of straight-passing is essential to developing an action-theoretic account of the practical disposition of being “in the closet.” To progress towards a broader account of closeted queer agency, I endeavor in this thesis to clarify the patterns of practical reasoning involved in straight-passing with an aim to demonstrate that straight-passing, in all its forms, is something that a queer agent can intentionally do. However, a queer agent often …
Primitive Mythology (The Masks Of God, Volume 1) By Joseph Campbell,
2023
Southwestern Oklahoma State University
Primitive Mythology (The Masks Of God, Volume 1) By Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons
Faculty Articles & Research
Book review of Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume 1) by Joseph Campbell, reviewed by Phillip Fitzsimmons.
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening And Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, And The Work Of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward,
2023
Binghamton University--SUNY
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening And Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, And The Work Of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward, Christopher Southward
Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening and Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, and the Work of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward
Speakers And Addressees As Creative Interpreters,
2023
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Speakers And Addressees As Creative Interpreters, Svitlana Novikova
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Philosophers in the past have argued that the way the word “interpret” is used within creative fields unhelpfully conflates the notions of deriving and creating content. Arguing against this, I propose that the blurring of these two notions accurately describes how addressees interpret speakers, performers interpret scores, and audiences interpret art and music. Even speakers can be described as creative interpreters in this sense, as articulating a thought into an utterance requires an interpretive effort. I develop the idea that interpreting straddles the divide between deriving and creating content within the framework of the ostensive-inferential communication proposed by Sperber and …
Ineffability, Emptiness And The Aesthetics Of Logic,
2023
San Jose State University
Ineffability, Emptiness And The Aesthetics Of Logic, Andreas Kapsner
Comparative Philosophy
In this essay, I explore the nature of the logical analysis of Buddhist thought that Graham Priest has offered in his book The Fifth Corner of Four (5of4). The paper traces the development of a logical value in- troduced in 5of4, which Priest has called e. The paper points out that certain criticisms I have made earlier still stand, but focuses on a recon- ceptualization of 5of4 in which these arguments carry less weight. This new perspective on the book, inspired by a response to my arguments by Priest himself, sees the logical analysis of Buddhism …
Selfish,
2023
Bard College
Selfish, Jacopo Mavica
Senior Projects Spring 2023
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.
Generic Interpretations Of Possessive Recursion In English-Speaking Children,
2023
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Generic Interpretations Of Possessive Recursion In English-Speaking Children, Tyler Poisson, Jill De Villiers, Hirsto Kyuchukov, Bea Weinand, Lilly Young, Sofia Morales, Laisha Aniceto
Philosophy: Faculty Publications
Two-part s-possessives such as the dad’s kid’s bike admit at least two distinct interpretations: the dad has a kid who has a bike, or the dad has a bike that is made for kids. We propose that the former interpretation derives from recursively embedding DP-possessives, whereas the latter derives from representing kid’s bike asa generic NP-possessive. Accordingly, in the right context, two-part s-possessives are fully ambiguous for adults between ‘recursive’ and ‘generic’ readings. These readings can be disambiguated syntactically. Consider the difference in meaning when we insert a relative clause and extract the constituent kid’s bike—the kid’s bike that is …
Redefining Paternalistic Practices In Women’S Health: How Dysfunctional Trust Relationships Impact Medical Autonomy Of Female Patients In The Contemporary Clinical Setting,
2023
University of Kentucky
Redefining Paternalistic Practices In Women’S Health: How Dysfunctional Trust Relationships Impact Medical Autonomy Of Female Patients In The Contemporary Clinical Setting, Lauren K. O'Dell
Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy
Utilizing Trudy Govier’s (1997) conception of social trust, this dissertation will provide a framework for understanding trust in healthcare relationships and highlight some of the ways that unequal power distribution and dependency, poorly defined roles, and institutions complicate trust between women and their providers. This framework will also explain how distrust, especially prejudicial distrust, leads to paternalistic attitudes on the part of providers. Paternalism limits patient autonomy because medical autonomy is constitutively relational. This means that insofar as distrust causes paternalism, it also damages autonomy. Through negative outcomes, this lack of autonomy can cause patients to distrust healthcare, which can …
Cutting The Puppet Strings: Confronting The Singularity,
2023
Bard College
Cutting The Puppet Strings: Confronting The Singularity, Gabriel Joesph Weiss
Senior Projects Spring 2023
Modern technology has excelled at an unprecedented rate. The rise of artificial intelligence raises many ethical questions and concerns for humanity, as it has incited many pressing debates between philosophers, computer scientists, and social critics who share concerns for the future of humanity but conflict with one another regarding whether or not we should rely on technology to govern human affairs and control society's infrastructures. Drawing from Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Hubert Dreyfus, and others, this project weighs out the probabilities and problems of the technological singularity posited by Ray Kurzweil, confronting our habits of addressing technology and the way …
Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, And Expertise: Cognitive Sociology And The Quasi-Realism Of Problem-Solving As A Course Of Activity,
2022
CUNY Graduate Center
Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, And Expertise: Cognitive Sociology And The Quasi-Realism Of Problem-Solving As A Course Of Activity, Michael W. Raphael
Publications and Research
The question facing sociology is whether it is a field or a discipline. If it is a field, then there is no need for theorizing. However, if sociology is a discipline, then problem-solving cannot be disentangled from theorizing without a loss of intelligibility – the inability to explain the social as the concept of the discipline. Through the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity, this chapter presents cognitive sociology as a paradigm appropriate to the concept of the social understood as an ongoing course of activity. In doing so, it is shown how bounded rationality and expertise play …
Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity,
2022
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …
Epistemic Priors, Social Justice, And The Ethics Of Humor,
2022
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Epistemic Priors, Social Justice, And The Ethics Of Humor, Paul Butterfield
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation I set out a theory of humor ethics and, in particular, I establish what difference humorousness makes to an instance of speech’s moral value. I set out by making the case for this approach to the topic, demonstrating that focusing on how humorous speech differs, morally, from non-humorous speech allows us to avoid getting caught up in prior ethical debates that are not strictly about humor itself – a shortcoming that is common to many treatments of humor ethics in the existing literature. I show that, in cases of humorous speech, we typically do not assert the …
Pervasive Nonarbitrariness: Meaning From Form In Natural Language,
2022
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Pervasive Nonarbitrariness: Meaning From Form In Natural Language, David J. Neely
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
It is generally assumed that the expressions of a natural language are largely arbitrary. That is, any expressions that display a nonarbitrary connection between what their utterances sound like and what they mean are small in number and of no real theoretical importance.
This thesis challenges such a position. I argue that nonarbitrariness is a pervasive feature of natural language and that understanding the sound/meaning connections that exist in language is necessary if to appreciate how languages work.
I begin, in Chapter 1, by showing that many theorists are committed to the idea that nonarbitrary sound/meaning connections are of little …
How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems In Theology And Church Posed By Modern Philosophy,
2022
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis
How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems In Theology And Church Posed By Modern Philosophy, Charles W. Westby
Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
Westby, Charles W. “How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems in Theology and Church Posed by Modern Philosophy.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2022. 347 pp.
This dissertation analyzes modern idealism as developed by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant to show how modern philosophy has impacted conservative theology, focusing on the theology of Carl F. H. Henry. The relationship between theology and philosophy is analyzed in terms of foundationalism, using postliberal theological analysis propounded by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Speech Act Theory as propounded by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle is used to critique modern idealism in …
Strong Linguistic Relativity: A Continental Sense Of Language And Being,
2022
Loyola Marymount University
Strong Linguistic Relativity: A Continental Sense Of Language And Being, Ava Totah, Brian Treanor
Honors Thesis
The theory of linguistic relativity can be divided into two hypotheses: the strong argument and the weak argument. The strong argument, often called linguistic determinism, posits that one’s native language determines one’s thought in an inescapable manner. The so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” demonstrates this, though many modern linguists now believe this principle – and linguistic determinism in general – to be implausible. The weak argument for linguistic relativity states that one’s native language merely influences their worldview, such that it struggles to maintain a connection that is more than trivial. In this work, I seek a “third option” that is both …