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Articles 1 - 30 of 110
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Race As A Symptom Of Injustice, Henry Kelley Weiss
Race As A Symptom Of Injustice, Henry Kelley Weiss
Theses and Dissertations
It is often assumed that racial distinction – the existence of racially distinct populations within the same society – will persist after the elimination of racial injustice. This paper disputes that assumption. I adopt a framework under which racial distinction may persist due to three broad causes: racial segregation, pressure from social institutions to practice racial endogamy, and personal preferences for racial endogamy. I examine the conditions under which each of these causes is likely to obtain and argue that each is characterized by injustice. I conclude that racial distinction is a symptom of injustice, and is unlikely to persist …
Equally Subordinated? The Threat Of A Self-Subordinating Way Of Life On One's Moral Powers, Kendall Bowers
Equally Subordinated? The Threat Of A Self-Subordinating Way Of Life On One's Moral Powers, Kendall Bowers
Theses and Dissertations
Even in a politically just liberal state where citizens are ensured equality and certain basic liberties, citizens may still act in self-undermining ways that cause them to fail to exercise their liberties. I argue in this paper that because most conceptions of political liberalism only secure full freedom and equality within the basic structure, the background culture is left ripe with opportunities for identity-based self-subordination in associations and relationships. Freedom of association allows for citizens to adopt ways of life that may result in their own subordination (e.g., a woman adopting a sexist religion). I argue that when citizens adopt …
Love And Personal Style, Shu Wang
Love And Personal Style, Shu Wang
Theses and Dissertations
To love someone is partly to have a positive valuation of her. According to what I call the Vellemanian View, in loving valuation the lover (1) values the beloved for her character and (2) values her features of embodiment merely as expressions of her character. I challenge this view by arguing that in loving valuation the lover regards the beloved’s character and embodiment as much more intimately connected. I then develop the Stylistic View, which holds that in loving valuation the lover values the beloved for her personal style, understood as her unified way of finding herself in the world. …
A Typology Of Bad Characters: Understanding Moral Badness As Mental Illness, Aidyn Cooper
A Typology Of Bad Characters: Understanding Moral Badness As Mental Illness, Aidyn Cooper
Theses and Dissertations
This paper presents Susan Wolf’s theories on freedom and responsibility. It places special emphasis on her Reason View as presented in her book, Freedom Within Reason. I analyze three types of bad characters, where a “bad character” is defined as someone with a stable and pervasive pattern of acting badly. I argue that Wolf’s Reason View entails that bad characters are psychologically incapable of doing the right thing for the right reasons. Therefore, according to the demands of Wolf’s Reason View, we cannot hold them responsible for their actions. This spells trouble: aren’t bad characters precisely the type of people …
Rethinking The Role Of Cultural Empowerment In African Identity, Madina Tall
Rethinking The Role Of Cultural Empowerment In African Identity, Madina Tall
Theses and Dissertations
Narratives pertaining to the cultural inferiority of Africans have plagued the mindsets and consequently, the actions of millions around the world. The undermining beliefs of societies globally towards the African continent and its people has historically created opportunities for colonialism, imperialism and various other forms of exploitation. Various educational, political and socio-cultural gaps have manifested themselves in disguise of fundamentally/intrinsically poor African management. Examples range from more educational and socio-cultural issues such as cultural rejection/dissociation to everyday manifestations of identity displacement which can be understood as western cultural mimicry. Throughout this thesis, I shall argue that the core of the …
To Be Or Not To Be: The Problem Of Indeterminate Existence, Bethany Kim
To Be Or Not To Be: The Problem Of Indeterminate Existence, Bethany Kim
Theses and Dissertations
Sider argues that existence cannot be indeterminate, since the existential quantifier cannot be precisified in terms of domain variation. Barnes counterargues that domain variation is indeterminate in the case of indeterminate existence, which allows precisification. I argue that indeterminate domain variation among precisifications is only possible if domain variation is understood in a "strong" sense wherein some object in the domain of one precisification satisfies a given predicate, whereas no object in the domain of the other precisification satisfies this predicate. In presuming that something determinately exists, both Barnes and Sider end up imagining the precisifications as associated with weakly …
Perianesthesia Discourses On Directives Limiting Care: A Foucauldian Case Study, Joshua Brian Hardin
Perianesthesia Discourses On Directives Limiting Care: A Foucauldian Case Study, Joshua Brian Hardin
Theses and Dissertations
Current practice recommendations suggest mandatory reconsideration of pre-existing Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders and other directives limiting care when adults undergo surgery with anesthesia. However, many perianesthesia clinicians believe that these policies are inappropriate and difficult to implement, and patients may have unclear expectations about anesthesia, creating discord between patients and clinicians. Research about what discourses dominate how patients and clinicians talk about advanced directives in the perianesthesia setting, and how those discourses relate to power-knowledge is limited. This inquiry, guided by the emancipatory theory of compassion, used Foucauldian poststructural case study design and contextualizing analysis to explore this problem. …
Against Identity: A Positionalist Approach To Resisting Identity-Based Violence, Barbara Walkowiak
Against Identity: A Positionalist Approach To Resisting Identity-Based Violence, Barbara Walkowiak
Theses and Dissertations
I develop and defend a positionalist theory of identity as a basis from which to resist identity-based violence. On this account, identities are the social positions that individuals occupy due to belief that operate upon them. This contrasts with and is intended to replace the dominant intrinsicist model, which conceives of identity as something about individuals in and of themselves. Taking gender as a focal point, I develop three overarching positionalist kinds: monogyne, polygyne, and androgyne. I propose that additional sub-kinds (e.g. monogyne woman) be developed in order to more exactly track gender positionalities and the operational beliefs that produce …
A Challenge To Psychological And Biological Theories Of Personal Identity, Felix Alberto Benzant
A Challenge To Psychological And Biological Theories Of Personal Identity, Felix Alberto Benzant
Theses and Dissertations
Traditionally, reductive accounts of personal identity within a three-dimensionalist framework face notorious problems. I focus mainly on the problem of graduality. This problem arises out of the apparent tension that exists between the nature of identity as a degreeless relation and standard accounts that seem to admit of degrees. An assessment concerning the nature of these relations is given in order to make the apparent tension explicit. It is then argued that the philosophical implications of such a problem entail a rejection of reductive theories that admit of degrees; paradigmatically, those that analyze personal identity either as psychological continuity or …
New Thinking About Models, Aaron Alexander Kruk
New Thinking About Models, Aaron Alexander Kruk
Theses and Dissertations
Contemporary philosophers of science have been wholly concerned with understand- ing models through their ability to represent their target systems. According to these ‘representationalists’ understanding how models represent will answer the foremost philosophical questions pertaining to scientific models. I propose a new way to think about models. I argue that two of the functions that models preform, explanation and exploration of their target systems, are codependent on one another. That is, a model is capable of explanation if, only if, and because it is capable of exploration (and vice versa). From this codependency, it follows that we need not (and …
Moral Problems For Schechtman's Narrative Self-Constitution View Of Personal Identity, Yasmin Aydemir
Moral Problems For Schechtman's Narrative Self-Constitution View Of Personal Identity, Yasmin Aydemir
Theses and Dissertations
Marya Schechtman explicates her account of personal identity, the narrative self-constitution view, from the point of the view of a question about defining characteristics. Ultimately, she argues that personal identity is self-authored, narrative in form, and thus linear, articulable, and realistic. In this paper I argue that two big problems with the narrative self-constitution view demonstrate its incoherence and tension with the actual experience of personal existence: its morally suspect implications for moral desert and moral responsibility through its narrowness in conditions for self-narrative. By running into these issues, Schechtman’s view of personal identity faces difficulties of ableism, disempowerment of …
Vivacity And Hume's Impression-Idea Distinction, Prescott Christensen Jackson
Vivacity And Hume's Impression-Idea Distinction, Prescott Christensen Jackson
Theses and Dissertations
Hume famously grounds his foundational distinction between impressions and ideas on “force and vivacity.” However, he acknowledges that vivacity is sometimes imprecise for distinguishing impressions from ideas, in, for example, the phenomena madness. Therefore, interpreters question how impressions and ideas are really differentiated. Interpretations of the impression-idea distinction traditionally take one of two forms—either attempts to better-defined vivacity in other terms, or arguments that already better-defined distinctions, like the Copy Principle, suffice to distinguish impressions from ideas. However, both approaches create unpalatable problems for interpreting Hume. This paper gives a phenomenological account of vivacity and suggests that we should read …
A Mind Of One's Own: Hegel On Becoming Rational, Lucas Johnston
A Mind Of One's Own: Hegel On Becoming Rational, Lucas Johnston
Theses and Dissertations
The `Self-Consciousness' chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Traditional readings, however, often do not emphasize Hegel's proclamation that the servile consciousness ``acquires a mind of its own'' and becomes ``thinking consciousness'' in the transition from `Self-Consciousness' A to B. Here, I show how to understand the end of part A and its transition to part B. In this transition, Hegel argues that the servant `comes to have a mind of their own' and becomes `thinking consciousness' or `stoic consciousness' in virtue of beginning to become rational. To this end, I argue that …
What It Means To Believe, Jazlyn Cartaya
What It Means To Believe, Jazlyn Cartaya
Theses and Dissertations
This paper argues that there are two kinds of cognitive belief, and the word ‘believe’ is polysemous because it semantically expresses both kinds. To have a cognitive belief φ only requires you to take φ to be true. To have a cognitive-affective belief φ requires you to take φ to be true, and to have a trust, confidence, or faith-like attitude toward φ. I provide and analyze linguistic data about how ‘believe’ is used. I then apply my distinction to the recent debate on the strength of belief. I conclude that cognitive-affective belief is stronger than its corresponding cognitive belief …
From Orthodoxy To Enlightenment: Discourse, Territory, And Settler Colonialism In Siberia, 1670-1740, Jonathan Noah Adsit
From Orthodoxy To Enlightenment: Discourse, Territory, And Settler Colonialism In Siberia, 1670-1740, Jonathan Noah Adsit
Theses and Dissertations
Though many scholars argue that settler colonialism did not firmly come into practice until the late 18th century in Russia, through an analysis of both 17th century historical chronicle narratives and 18th century explorer accounts, I argue that settler colonial discourses and knowledges are already present, laying the groundwork for later settler practices. In the 17th century, chronicle narratives portrayed Siberian territory as a darkened wasteland turned radiant paradise by the presence of Russian Christians and the expulsion of indigenous non-Christians. In the 18th century, discourse changed to produce the increasing view of Siberia as an object of knowledge, great …
Imperatives As Fragment Answers, Jingyi Chen
Imperatives As Fragment Answers, Jingyi Chen
Theses and Dissertations
Imperatives can be answers to questions. That creates a dilemma. It seems to force us to choose between the predominant semantics of imperatives on which imperatives are non-propositional, and the standard semantics of questions on which answers are propositions and questions are sets of them. This paper presents the dilemma and offers a solution. To preserve the non-propositional semantics of imperatives, I argue that imperatival answers are fragment answers. To retain the propositional nature of answers, I proffer a discourse function-oriented mechanism for constructing propositions from imperatives pragmatically. Specifically, I show that the pragmatically constructed contents of imperatival answers are …
Slurs Are Verdicts, Jacob Sapir
Slurs Are Verdicts, Jacob Sapir
Theses and Dissertations
Speaker-orientation views (Hom 2008; Neufeld 2019; Camp 2013; Anderson and Lepore 2013; Williamson 2009; Jeshion 2013; Bolinger 2017) explain why slurs are offensive in terms of what slurs reveal about the general point of view of their speakers. Directive theories (Kirk-Giannini 2019) explain slurs are offensive by predicting that slurs issue directives that direct others to adopt their speaker’s point of view. As Kirk-Giannini (2019) notes, speaker-orientation views face the problem of old news. Slurs can communicate novel offensive content even after a speaker’s general point of view is known. Directive theories, meanwhile, face a novel problem I dub the …
School's Out Forever: Making Room For Unschoolers In Political Liberalism, Brita Ager-Hart
School's Out Forever: Making Room For Unschoolers In Political Liberalism, Brita Ager-Hart
Theses and Dissertations
If citizens in a politically liberal society are truly to be free to order their lives as they desire, it is important that the society contain as many acceptable methods of education as possible. I examine a method of education that I am almost certain has never been considered by political liberals: a type of homeschooling known as “unschooling.” Unschoolers believe that children should largely be in charge of their own education. I contend that this makes unschooling well-suited to promote the development of political autonomy. Unschooling’s self-directed approach to education gives children a sense of their own agency and …
Blame-Liability, Inviting Trust, & Beginning A New Account Of Promising, Austin Fraser
Blame-Liability, Inviting Trust, & Beginning A New Account Of Promising, Austin Fraser
Theses and Dissertations
In this paper, I argue the two examples present a problem for two accounts of promising, and in light of these problems, I create the beginning of an alternative account of promising. The first example shows a problem with Jack Woods’ account of promising, while the second shows a problem for a trust view developed by Daniel Friedrich and Nicholas Southwood. In light of these criticisms, I start to develop my own view where promising gives the promisor a claim-based reason for keeping their promise, and though not strictly promising, an invitation to trust plays an important explanatory role, particularly …
Beyond Depraved: Villainy And Self-Deception In Kant's Taxonomy Of Evil, Kevin Alexander Korczyk
Beyond Depraved: Villainy And Self-Deception In Kant's Taxonomy Of Evil, Kevin Alexander Korczyk
Theses and Dissertations
Kant’s account of evil has often been criticized for being overly restrictive in that it seems unable to account for profoundly immoral acts such as those committed by the Nazis. In response, most defenders of Kant have attempted to gerrymander his original categories of evil such that they become expansive enough to account for these cases. In this paper, I argue that such defenses fail because they rule out the possibility of immoral acts committed intentionally and in full knowledge of their immorality. However, I also show that there is room in Kant’s ethics for an additional category of evil …
A Puzzle About Information, Probability And Surprise, Selorm Ohene
A Puzzle About Information, Probability And Surprise, Selorm Ohene
Theses and Dissertations
Suppose 92 coins, flipped in succession, all come up heads. If we were previously confident that the process was fair, we would be surprised at this outcome. What, if anything, explains our surprise? And is it warranted? In what follows I do two things. First, I propose and defend an explanation of our surprise: we are surprised at the 92-head sequence, and various other sequences, because they are patterned. Second, Martin Smith (2017) has argued that, on an initial assumption that the coin-flipping process is fair, an observation of 92 heads does not warrant surprise. Against Smith, I argue that …
'The Mediator' And 'Reason's Forgetting': Two Questions On The Transition Of Self-Consciousness To Reason In Hegel's Phenomenology Of Spirit, Abhiraj Singh
Theses and Dissertations
This paper is an attempt to provide a response to two questions that occur in the transition of the shape of Self-Consciousness to Reason in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: What justifies the sudden appearance of the ‘mediator’ and Why does the shape of Reason, in its initial appearance, “forget” the path through which it came to be. I deploy an original interpretive framework upon Hegel’s dialectic, which I call the ‘tracking’ approach, that tracks ‘movement’ and ‘emergence’ of the subject consciousness so that one may know its corresponding ‘cognitive level’ that develops for it. I argue that the mediator’s appearance …
An Instrumental Theory Of Speech Acts, Zachary Ferguson
An Instrumental Theory Of Speech Acts, Zachary Ferguson
Theses and Dissertations
In this paper I present a theory of speech acts with two parts: an account of the normativity of speech acts and a method for individuating them. The first part holds that instrumental rationality gives speech acts normative force. I have in mind a simple kind of means-end normativity—given that a speaker has a desire to φ, she has an instrumental reason to adopt the appropriate means to φ. When we perform speech acts, we take part in linguistic conventions. In doing so, our desires interact with those conventions in ways that generate speech-act-specific instrumental reasons for us. For example, …
Bivalence: Open Future Or Logical Fatalism?, Jie Bao
Bivalence: Open Future Or Logical Fatalism?, Jie Bao
Theses and Dissertations
It is highly intuitive that the future is open in the sense that there are multiple possibilities for the future to obtain and we can determine how tomorrow is. For instance, it is possible that I will eat salad for lunch tomorrow, but it is also possible that I will eat food other than salad for lunch tomorrow. Suppose I eat salad finally. However, an argument of fatalism shows that the future is closed in the sense of being determined to be a certain way, and that whatever I do now, my eating salad tomorrow is inevitable. Fatalism calls into …
Sara Rahbar And The Art Of Loving Otherwise, Michael Scott Lahti
Sara Rahbar And The Art Of Loving Otherwise, Michael Scott Lahti
Theses and Dissertations
Born in Iran and currently working in New York City, Sara Rahbar is a contemporary multimedia artist who gained some acclaim with her Flag series (2006-present), which was inspired by her experiences in the aftermath of 9/11. Many of these works merge Persian fabrics onto the American flag thus expressing her lived history and political views. To shed light on the political nature of Rahbar’s works writ large, I examine a textile from her War series (2009-2013), titled I Want to Shelter You (2013). Against a flat canvas bag, Rahbar attaches large-caliber bullet casings into a heart-shape to point out …
Examining The Notion Of The Boundary Object In Information Systems: The Transdisciplinary Oeuvre Of Cognitive Science, Laura Elien Ridenour
Examining The Notion Of The Boundary Object In Information Systems: The Transdisciplinary Oeuvre Of Cognitive Science, Laura Elien Ridenour
Theses and Dissertations
This study examined the transdisciplinary area of cognitive science, and was framed around the sociological notion of the boundary object. Harmonizing theoretical and technical approaches, methods introduced in this work moved beyond qualitative study practices traditional to boundary object theory work to a mixed-methods data-driven approach. Bibliometric Web of Science data, enriched with National Science Foundation (NSF) journal classifications, formed the foundation from which a seed-and-expand dataset were created from journals containing the string cogni* and their cited articles for the years 2006-2016. This two-tiered dataset allowed for the analysis of boundary-spanning interdisciplinary concepts, as identified by noun phrases, and …
No Sympathy For The Devil: The Guise Of The Good Defended, Katie Bridget Wright
No Sympathy For The Devil: The Guise Of The Good Defended, Katie Bridget Wright
Theses and Dissertations
At the intersection of action theory and value theory is a provocative thesis: the Guise of
the Good. The Guise of the Good (GG) states that whenever an agent acts intentionally, she sees
some good in her action. Thus, according to GG, positive evaluation is essential to the nature of
intentional action. Kieran Setiya (2010), however, argues that it is possible to act intentionally
without believing that there is any reason to count in favor of one’s action: if intentional action is
action for a reason, says Setiya, then the Guise of the Good is false. But I argue that …
Manifest Ideality: A Response To Lucy Allais' Account Of Kantian Appearances., Risha Kuthoore
Manifest Ideality: A Response To Lucy Allais' Account Of Kantian Appearances., Risha Kuthoore
Theses and Dissertations
In Manifest Reality, Lucy Allais aims to explain the mind-dependence of Kantian appearances without regarding them as constructions out of what exists merely in the mind. To this end, Allais develops an account where cognizing an appearance involves direct consciousness of a thing in itself, though only as it is in relation to us, i.e. as appearance. She thus reads Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances as a distinction between the mind-independent and essentially mind-dependent relational properties of one and the same objects. In this paper, I articulate two important challenges for Allais’ account of appearances. First, I …
Reason And Regret, Thomas Ladendorf
Reason And Regret, Thomas Ladendorf
Theses and Dissertations
I defend a realist, Aristotelian theory of moral normativity on which moral virtue is the natural conclusion of the successful exercise of practical reason. More specifically, I argue that the avoidance of regret is a constitutive feature of practical rationality, and that because we are social beings, moral virtue serves as a general strategy for the minimization of regrets, and especially of serious regrets. Because I draw on aspects of John McDowell's Aristotelian moral realism, I begin with an examination of his view, and a discussion of why he thinks that virtuous conclusions require the prior possession of virtuous dispositions. …
A Simple Defence Of Monism, Erich Matthew Jones
A Simple Defence Of Monism, Erich Matthew Jones
Theses and Dissertations
Monists about well-being often appeal to the simplicity of their theories as justification for preferring their theories over rival pluralist theories. Pluralists acknowledge the simplicity of monist theories, but argue that monist theories fail to capture many of the well-being facts, and that pluralist theories are to be preferred on the ground of their greater explanatory power. I present a new argument in this paper defending the simplicity argument given by monists. I first present a sophisticated monism, Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism, and argue for it’s initial plausibility. I then present considerations from statistical inference, and show that the pluralist’s appeal …