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The Only Labourer Left: Resituating The Nonhuman Animal In The Language Of Labour And The History Of Philosophy, Mina Rosefield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an investigation of the ontological position of the nonhuman animal within the Marxist tradition and as it concerns both the language of value production and the slaughterhouse. The premise of my study is an engagement with Marx’s oeuvre and influences, as well those who respond to his work. Within this context, I propose that the nonhuman animal’s ontological position—as it concerns labour, language, and intellect—is subject to a gesture of erasure which marks their being as performing the action of interest in the absence of the possibility to claim either determination, or fluency of capability. This paradoxical …

What Do We Owe The Other Animals In Health-Related Research?, Jessica A. Du Toit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I provide an account of the protections to which most captive non-human animals are morally entitled when they participate in health-related research. At least in the animal ethics literature, it is uncontroversial that the protections currently afforded to captive research animals are inadequate. This has much to do with the fact that most animals who serve as research participants are 1) sentient and, thus, have important morally considerable interests; 2) unable to provide informed consent to their research participation; and 3) seriously harmed as a result of their participation.

Unsurprisingly, then, a number of authors have proposed …

Lighting The Way Of The Learner: Towards A Social Virtue Epistemology In Aḥmad Al-Ṣaghīr’S The Faqīh’S Lantern, Amani Khelifa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis offers an original translation and analysis of a West African didactic poem in Islamic ethics and law, by the Mālikī-Ashʿarī Mauritanian scholar Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr (d. 1272 AH/1856 CE) called The Faqīh’s Lantern (Miṣbāḥ al-Faqīh). In addition to the critical translation, I examine the poem thematically through the lens of social virtue epistemology. Chapter 1 sketches the background of the text and author, positioning the author historically as a product of a rich scholarly and pedagogical tradition while noting Mauritania’s contemporary place in the North American Muslim imagination. Chapter 2 is the translation of the text, making …

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 …

The Phenomenology And Intentionality Of Normative-Evaluative Experience, Shawn K. Bartlett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the first paper of this dissertation, I argue that bodily experiences, such as pain and itch experiences, emotional experiences, and mood experiences have intentional content that supervenes on their phenomenal character. I call these kinds of experiences normative-evaluative experiences. I argue that these experiences have intentional content that is determined, at least in part, by their positive and negative phenomenal characters.

In the second paper of this dissertation, I examine the tracking representationalist theory of pain experience defended by Brian Cutter and Michael Tye. On their view, the phenomenal character of pain experience supervenes on its intentional content, which …

Grounds For A "Third Place": The "Starbucks Experience," Sirens, And Space, Michael A. Bodkin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My goal in this dissertation is to help demystify or “filter” the “Starbucks Experience” for a post-pandemic world, taking stock of how a multi-national company has long outgrown its humble beginnings as a wholesale coffee bean supplier to become a digitally-integrated and hypermodern café. I look at the role Starbucks plays within the larger cultural history of the coffee house and also consider how Starbucks has been idyllically described in corporate discourse as a comfortable and discursive “third place” for informal gathering, a term that also prescribes its own radical ethos as a globally recognized customer service platform. Attempting to …

Human Extinction In The Pessimist Tradition, Ignacio L. Moya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Faced with countless threats that pose a danger to the continued existence of the human species, there has emerged a new field in philosophy known as Existential Risk Management. This discipline proposes to understand, quantify, classify and ultimately defeat the risks that exist and that threaten our continued existence. These philosophers accept that human life is good and that it should be promoted. And because of the tremendous value that is found in human life, they argue we should do whatever we can to avert our disappearance.

Philosophical pessimists hold that life is always filled with suffering and that …

Using Formal Epistemology To Model Epistemic Injustice Against Neurodivergent People, Mackenzie Marcotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Neurodivergent people experience epistemic injustice, injustices that harm them in their capacity as knowers, but so far the epistemic injustice literature has mostly ignored this. This dissertation addresses this gap in knowledge in a novel way, using tools of formal epistemology. Bayesian network learning models that include modeled bias, communication style gaps, exclusion, and difference between people, are used to investigate testimonial injustice. Novel simultaneous Lewis-Skyrms signal games that include modeled bias, focus on success, gaps in way of thinking, exclusion, and difference in material interests are used to investigate hermeneutical injustice, the subset of epistemic injustice that involves concepts …

Essays On Privilege And Its Implications For Relational Autonomy And Vaccine Hesitancy, Nicole Fice

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One goal of feminist philosophy is to challenge unjust systems of power like patriarchy, which privilege some social groups while oppressing others. In this three-chapter dissertation, I argue that to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of privilege and its implications.

In chapter one, I raise objections to some existing philosophical accounts of privilege. These accounts are either too broad in defining privilege as always advantageous or they are vague regarding what privilege comprises. I provide an account of privilege which clarifies that privilege is generally advantageous and that privilege includes tangible resources and options to do certain …

The Moral And Political Status Of Microaggressions, Heather Stewart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a robust philosophical examination of a phenomenon that is morally, socially, and politically significant – microaggressions. Microaggressions are understood to be brief and routine verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that, whether intentional or unintentional, convey hostility toward or bias against members of marginalized groups. Microaggressions are rooted in stereotypes and/or bias (whether implicit or explicit) and are connected to broader systems of oppression.

Microaggressions are philosophically interesting, since they involve significant ambiguity, questions about speech and communication, and the ability for our speech to encode and transmit bits of meaning. Microaggressions prompt reflection about the nature of …

Are Near-Death Experiences Veridical? A Philosophical Inquiry, Monika J. Mandoki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project is a philosophical investigation into near-death experiences (NDEs). It attempts to answer the central question: Are near-death experiences veridical? The aim of my work is to defend the veridicality of near-death experiences within the framework of idealism. However, this aim is not achieved simply by adopting an idealist standpoint. Instead, I present arguments for the reason this idealist standpoint is necessary. First, I argue that the traditional way of assessing near-death experiences is often oversimplified and carries an unnecessary bias in favour of a materialist interpretation, which eventually sets it up for a failure to demonstrate that an …

Autonomy, Paternalism, And The Moral Foundations Of The Fiduciary Relationship, Austin Horn

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The fiduciary relationship is a legal relationship that describes those interactions in which one party is entrusted to exercise discretionary power on behalf of another’s interests. In recent years, the fiduciary relationship proven to be a powerful tool for providing clarity to complex bioethical issues. But the exciting promise of the fiduciary relationship for bioethical analysis is threatened by at least two conceptual problems: moral-legal equivocation and paternalism. Legal-moral equivocation refers to the problem of assuming that the normative demands of a legal relationship are also morally normative. The cogent use of the fiduciary relationship in bioethical analysis requires …

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

Nietzschean Problematics, Jacob Vangeest

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a commentary and exegesis on François Laruelle’s 1977 text Nietzsche contre Heidegger with a focus on the concept of the ‘Nietzschean problematic.’ It explores Laruelle’s use of Nietzsche by comparing his reading with that of Gilles Deleuze. This relation is explored in Deleuze and Laruelle’s reading of the Nietzschean problematic through the distinction between complementarity and supplementarity to enable a reading of Laruelle’s text as an extension of Deleuze’s project. This extension is one that simultaneously overturns what it extends. Laruelle’s aim is presented as a ‘machinic materialism’ infused with Derridean différance. Over the course of the …

Foucault, Affect, History: On The Art Of Feeling, Austin Chisholm

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While the work of Michel Foucault has not generally been thought to engage in questions of affect, I argue that his work entails a meaningful engagement with such questions but in a way that challenges how we tend to think about affect. Drawing from Foucault’s oeuvre, I enter a series of dialogues with thinkers of affect, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, in order to understand to what extent the turn to affect—especially for Sedgwick and Massumi—represents an attempt to work through a number of difficulties and tensions in Foucault’s thought and writing. I argue …

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, And Computational Study, Jiangtian Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched …

Dancing Across Difference: Transforming Habitual Modes Of Being In The World Through Movement, Kimberly Dority

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although some important scholarly work has been done on race, and whiteness, in relation to habit, my account addresses the role of movement in habit through dance. Dance is well-suited for exploring habit since dancers cultivate an intimate knowledge of their bodies as habitual dancing bodies. I argue that dancing can offer critical insight into how habitual modes of being in the world may be shifted and changed. Dancers’ mastery of movement not only consists in sedimenting habits within the body, but also involves actively exploring how one’s own bodily movement can be altered (Ravn 2017; Damkjaer, 2015; Ingerslev, 2013; …

Resonance, A Step Towards A Fluency For Complexity: The Science, Language, And Epistemology Of Gregory Bateson, Won Jeon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis confronts the urgency with which new language and vocabulary is required to move beyond linear assumptions in mainstream science and humanities, as well as global policy making. I examine Gregory Bateson’s body of work in history and philosophy of science, psychiatry and psychotherapy, anthropology, biology and ecology designed to communicate the necessarily interdisciplinary consideration for a nonlinear and recursive investigation of the self, other, and environment. Such intellectual forays cannot be dismissed as non-scientific. I offer definitions and contextualizations of key terms derived from cybernetics, new materialisms, and posthumanism (such as emergence, process, paradox, metaphor, fractality) to speak …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

The General Artificial Intellect, Ramon S. Diab

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In passages of Marx’s Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines, Marx suggested that advanced capitalist development leads to the production of autonomous machines that replace labour-power in the direct production process. Autonomist Marxist interpretations of this text have emphasized that the proliferation of immaterial labour is the historical condition that is leading to a crisis in the measure of value based on labour-time and that will lead to a future communist mode of production. Further, Mario Tronti posited that as capitalist development unfolds, it subsumes both the state and society, a concept known as the ‘social factory thesis’. …

Modes Of Argumentation In Aristotle's Natural Science, Adam W. Woodcox

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Through a detailed analysis of the various modes of argumentation employed by Aristotle throughout his natural scientific works, I aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on the relation between Aristotle’s theory of science and his actual scientific practice. I challenge the standard reading of Aristotle as a methodological empiricist and show that he permits a variety of non-empirical arguments to support controversial theses in properly scientific contexts. Specifically, I examine his use of logical (logikôs) argumentation in the discussion of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8, rational (kata ton logon) argumentation in his discussion of cardiocentrism throughout …

Imaginaire De La Fin, Icônes, Esthétique. (Ir)Représenter La Post-Apocalypse Dans La Bande Dessinée Et Le Cinéma Du Génocide Tutsi., Alain Agnessan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette étude sur la bande dessinée et le cinéma du génocide tutsi s’écarte de l’analyse désormais canonique des politiques mémorielles et pratiques testimoniales pour en investir le parti pris post-apocalyptique . Elle s’agence en deux volets, ou, plutôt, en deux lieux de regard. Envisageant l’imaginaire de la fin qui s’est constitué autour du génocide tutsi, le premier volet de l’étude s’attelle à décrire une scène « cross-traumatic » ou transtraumatique, appelée génoscape, sur laquelle la pensée, les images et les discours critiques lient le destin éthique, esthétique et épistémique du génocide tutsi à celui de la Shoah. Cette démarche …

Death Of The Clinic: Trans-Informing The Clinical Gaze To Counter Epistemic Violence, Diana E. Kuhl

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This case study research (Patton, 2002, 2014; Flyvberg, 2006) has grown out of an awareness of deep resistance from the psy disciplines to trans-informed epistemologies as a source of legitimate knowledge (Tosh, 2015, 2016; Winters, 2008). It focuses on examining how the closure of The Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) for Children and Youth at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, signaled a paradigm shift from the ‘treatment model’ to the ‘affirmative model’ with respect to clinical approaches for supporting trans and gender diverse children and youth. As such the case study involved tracing the …

No Coward Plays Hockey, Rachael Bishop

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examined the landscape of women’s hockey in Canada, and focused on the national women’s hockey team, and how the treatment of female hockey players in the Canadian media, and in the eyes of the Canadian public, differs from the treatment of male hockey players. This thesis drew on three different research methods: an ethical/philosophical analysis, a media analysis and a narrative analysis.

The ethical analysis took a philosophical approach and discussed the different rules in men’s and women’s hockey. The ethical analysis also discussed other issues in hockey such as paternalism versus free will, and gender segregation in …

Critical Interventions In The Medical Humanities, Maryam Golafshani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis makes three novel critical theoretical interventions in the medical humanities. The first uses Benjamin’s critical theory of art in the age of its technological reproducibility to reveal that the evidence-based biomedical model’s primary function is not to cure patients, but to prescribe politics. The technological reproducibility of evidence-based biomedicine transforms medicine so it can no longer perceive—or encounter—patients as unique, whole, and above all situated beings. The second intervention uses Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology to theorize ethical encounters between medicine and its “others”—patients and literature—in such a way that particularizes the encounter, not the other itself. …

Frontiers Of Care, Thomas E. Randall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Care ethics is a feminist normative theory that emphasizes the moral significance of our relational interdependency in the provision and receipt of care. On this view, ethical action is situated and evaluated as it emerges through caring relations. However, an oft-cited criticism of care ethics is that its normative frontiers cannot be extended to the wider concerns of justice that lie beyond our relational limits. In this dissertation, I outline and defend an interpretation of care ethics that shows how the values of care identified within our personal relations can be abstracted to show that we do have certain obligations …

True North Strong Canada 150: Canadian Identity And Its Contribution To Doping Free Sport, Helena A. Hlas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis, a reflective piece inspired by “Canada 150” events, explores the psychosocial and sociocultural factors surrounding the ongoing evolution of the clean sport movement in Canada. A literature review recounts the critical events in the history of doping, viz. the Ben Johnson scandal, which resulted in a call to overhaul sport culture and realign it with fair play values. Theories in sports philosophy and psychology provide a further understanding of the meaning of sport, and psychosocial factors that are inextricably linked to doping behavior, respectively. The autoethnographic method provides insight into current Canadian values to compare with those in …

Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents the theory of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book and thereby seeks to fill an existing gap in English-language Benjamin literature. On the one hand, it performs its task by closely reading this thinker’s early, epistemo-linguistic writings up to and including the “Prologue”: most prominently, “On Language as Such,” “The Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Concept of Criticism,” and the theoretically inclined sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” On the other, it does so by positioning Benjamin’s theory of language within existentialist philosophy and by applying his theory of …

The Event Of Blues Music And The Effects Of Technology On The Artistic Event, Adam Rejak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of this dissertation is to find out whether or not blues music is an event. I explore what constitutes a musical or artistic event in modern times and to see how this has changed in relation to earlier periods. I also identify its essential formal elements. I divide blues music into two categories, namely, its technical playing qualities (the micro) and its historical changes (the macro). This division frames the entire project and illustrates that in order to discuss an artistic event, we must account for both its technical and historical aspects. I examine several theories of the …

Kant And Tetens On Transcendental Philosophy, Richard D. Creek

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the significance of Johann Nikolas Tetens, a German empiricist philosopher working in the 1770's, to the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I begin by examining Tetens' discussion of philosophical methodology in his 1775 essay \textit{Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie}. I make the case that Tetens' criticism of the methodology of the Scottish common sense philosophers and his subsequent attempt to incorporate what he takes to be their valuable insights into the approach of the broadly Wolffian philosophical tradition provides important context for interpreting Kant's methodology in the \textit{Critique of Pure Reason}. I then examine two different cases …