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All At One Point: The New Physics Of Italo Calvino And Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Thomas Rinaldi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work of comparative literary criticism focuses on the presence of mathematical and scientific concepts and imagery in the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, beginning with an historical overview of scientific philosophy and an introduction to the most significant scientific concepts of the last several centuries, before shifting to deep, scientifically-driven analyses of numerous individual fictions, and finally concluding with a meditation on the unexpectedly fictive aspects of science and mathematics. The close readings of these authors' fictions are contextualized with thorough explanations of the potential literary implications of theories from physics, mathematics, neuroscience and chaos theory. …

Enhancing Self-Monitoring And Self-Reflection Through A Self-Regulatory Skills Intervention Embedded In A Middle School Mathematics Curriculum, Gregory Digiacomo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a self-regulatory strategy intervention designed to improve participants' calibration accuracy, self-regulatory skills, and math achievement. Monitoring and self-reflection processes were the main focus of this intervention as they are key processes in many well-validated models of self-regulated learning and have been found to impact academic achievement and overall self-regulatory skill (Bol et al., 2010; Dunlosky & Rawson, 2011; Hacker et al., 2008; Nietfeld et al., 2005). The participants were 30 sixth and seventh grade students who were learning about probability as part of their normal math curriculum during the …

Existence: An Unholy Trinity. An Account Of Indeterminate Existence, Salas Sanchez-Bennasar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What is it for something to exist? This dissertation provides an answer to this question by giving a philosophical theory of existence in which the concept of existence in understood as a complex tri-partite notion. The account of existence defended here is arrived at by taking into consideration past philosophical theories of existence, the everyday and scientific uses of the notion, and also philosophical considerations about the nature of reality.

There are three conditions that are central to existence: spatiotemporality, mind-independence, and being a member of the quantificational domain of a true and complete scientific description about the world. To …