Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reason And Rationality In The Post-Pandemic Era, Jordan David Schwanke

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper investigates human reason’s proper function and role in the post-pandemic era. Sections 1 and 2 analyze recent literature on Kahneman’s dual processing theory and Hugo Mercier’s and Dan Sperber’s (M&S) interactionalist approach toward human reason. Kahneman’s theory cannot explain how System 2 is still prone to make serious mistakes, and M&S provide a more plausible alternative: reasoning is all intuitive. Humans can intuit reasons for their beliefs and intuitions. But more importantly, reason is the metarepresentational ability to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of reasons and arguments. Reason, through the process of evolution, is fundamentally used for justification …

A Dane's Philosophical Attack And A Monk's Ladder: Comparing Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragment And St. John Climacus' Ladder Of Divine Ascent, Chasen David Robbins

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Soren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript have been extremely impactful in 20th century Western theological and philosophical thought. In a similar manner, St. John Klimakos, from whom Kierkegaard derives the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent, is one of the most "studied, copied, and translated" books in Eastern Christendom. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonym for the two Kierkegaard works above, is a theological/philosophical opponent to Hegelian thought. St. John Klimakos, a real person, is a 6th century monk who hopes to assist monks on their journey to God with a manual about the thirty …

"I Don't Want To Have A Weird Relationship With You, So I'M Trying": Relational Turning Points And Trajectories Of Ex-Lds Children And Their Active Lds Parents, Jared Worwood

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Ex-LDS individuals face a unique and often turbulent time in their relationship with their parent if the individual decides to leave the LDS Church. To explore this phenomena, we investigated the turning points and relational trajectories of ex-LDS children and their interactions with their active LDS parent. Thirty emerging adult children were interviewed using the retrospective interviewing technique (RIT). Through turning point analysis, we identified 14 turning points: (1) Discussions of values and beliefs, (2) decrease in church participation, (3) moving out, (4) physical proximity, (5) critical family events, (6) parent realizations, (7) sibling events, (8) romantic life events, (9) …

Crowdsourcing Consciousness: You Think, Therefore I Am, Justin M. Campbell

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The challenge to understand consciousness is a centuries-old interdisciplinary research program. The search entails fundamental questions about our nature - the desire to understand who we are has been around for nearly as long as experience itself. It is also one of the most important questions we can ask; meaning itself is predicated on having some sort of conscious experiencer for whom something can matter. Given the magnitude and intractability of explaining the paradox of how consciousness can be at once the most obvious thing in the universe, and also the most inaccessible, the endeavor is a tremendous undertaking. Until …

Legal Positivism: An Analysis, Jonathan Brett Chambers

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Having taken some constitution and government courses during my undergraduate studies, I was comfortable with my understanding of justice and morality. An independent research seminar into the philosophy of law with Dr. Huenemann changed that. Taking Brian Leiter's book Naluralizing Jurilprudence as our guide, we dived into the vast question of "what is the law?" This seemingly simple question has shaped western society in too many ways to account. for instance, Legal Realists - one group that believes all rights "are the creations of government and the legal rules it lays down,,1 - dramatically changed labor laws in the early …

Holding Onto Belief, Benny Nyikos

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

It seems that every major book of philosophy is composed of the author's personal views on the world. The philosopher presents his or her views not only to convince readers to take up his or her views but also to send the ideas in the book out for review and debate in order to test the reaction they receive. With this in mind, this paper will present ideas I have encountered in philosophy classes, read in books, and observed in the world at large. The focus will be on the claim that God is dead and what this means to …

Is Pascal A Safe Bet?, Bradley Mumford

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The philosophical writings of Blaise Pascal may have passed completely unnoticed had it not been for the inclusion of his famous "wager". "Pascal's wager", as it has come to be known, has drawn a great deal of commentary and criticism over the years and it has stirred up excitement and speculation over Pascal's intended message. Many critics think his field of possibilities is too narrow. Some critics say that he allows for too few options, while others argue over the validity of his conclusion. In this essay we will discuss a number of the criticisms of Pascal's wager that have …

David Hume On Miracles, Kyle G. Sessions

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Albert Einstein once said, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is." A quick study of David Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding reveals that he believed strongly in the first way. Why is this? First of all, it is in his definition of miracle. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. This is a problematic definition to begin with, as it appears to preclude the possibility of there ever being a miracle. If a miracle is something that violates …

Philosophical Questions About The Ethics Of Intellectual Property, Jason Ellis Anderson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Intellectual Property can be divided into two broad categories, Patents and Copyrights or Trade Secrets. Trade Secrets as it nomenclature suggests are secrets kept for some economic reason. The classic example of a Trade Secret is the Coca-Cola formula. This formula has been the foundation of its empire yet is only protected by its right to secrecy. Trade Secret justifications are fairly clear and based on the right of privacy and personal autonomy. The key difference between Trade Secrets and Patents/Copyrights are that Patents or Copyrights are accessible to the public. Trade Secrets are required to be inaccessible and non-disclosed.

Ecological Thought, Now And Then., Jared Glenn Parkinson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

In recent years a movement has surfaced which has greatly influenced many different aspects of society. This movement, referred to as the environmental movement, is supported by the central idea that humans are internally related to the environment and that humans have the ability to impair natural systems from being able to maintain themselves and evolve. Some activists in this movement believe that the earth is a living organism and that all objects have intrinsic worth. Environmentalists generally accept a more ecocentric view of the wilderness. This environmental movement is referred to by many different names including the ecological, green, …

The Right To Die: A Brief Look At Physician-Assisted Suicide, Brooke Meredith Sanders Purves

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Recently, there has been some discussion in Congress about writing a Constitutional amendment declaring that every American citizen has the "right to die" if he or she so sees fit. Opponents of this amendment believe that it will be abused - that although the amendment would generally apply to terminally ill patients, depressed teenagers and the like will be able to commit suicide if they feel like it, and mothers with deformed infants may act as guardians and exercise the right for their children, with no protection from the state. Their concern is certainly warranted. It is not the goal …

Teaching Thinking And Reasoning Skills More Effectively, Marcus R. Mumford

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Political pundits whine that the world would be a better place if only more people thought like them. A clever engineer once told me that the world needs (his arms come together in a weight lifting pose, hands rounded together) more circles! Me? I want a world full of wise, thinking individuals. This is a world of minds that have an "inner balance wheel"; minds that protect themselves from extremes and under-use. Rudyard Kipling set up the model of a well-trained mind, "If you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you... …

An Analysis Of Isenberg's Aesthetic Theory And Its Application To The Works Of Monet And Smokey, Tracee Elizabeth Gross

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, which attempts to define art using a set of purported characteristics that, when applied to particular pieces, will aid in making discriminations between art and non-art. Aesthetics also traditionally examines the creation, appreciation, and criticism of art. Theories of aesthetics are constructed to assist one in making judgments as to whether or not a piece is art or is beautiful. Ideally, theories serve two primary tasks. The first is to provide an explanation, which will aid in separating out those items not covered in the scope of the theory. Also, theories are used as …

Only Words: An Examination Of Catharine Mackinnon's Challenge To The Supreme Court's First Amendment Conceptual Framework, Gregory Lewis Watts

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The rapidly increasing cry for forms of speech rationing is part of the "culture war" that currently splits the social and political life of the United States. The individual battles of this war can be defined along several lines. There is the struggle of minority groups against dominant whites, and also a bitter struggle between minority groups. ¹ We also face a neo-Marxist economic battle between "the commons" and wealthy corporate America. There is a growing conflagration between traditional religious groups and the supporters of a secular view of morality and society. Finally, there is the complex struggle between men …

"Doctors Should Not Participate In Active Physician Assisted Killing", Todd Jorgenson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

All eyes were on the Oregon ballot this past November 8, as Proposition 16 was introduced to the public. Should the Proposition pass, Oregon would become the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. At first glance, the Death with Dignity Act appears to offer the terminally ill patient additional freedom in deciding his or her destiny, but it in fact gives a free license for physicians to prescribe death with little if any scrutiny, responsibility, prosecution and even conscience.

A Critique Of "The Mormon Concept Of God, A Philosophical Analysis", Kyle Robson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The nature of deity through out the history of philosophy has always been a subject of debate, from some of the earliest writings, philosophers and theologians have given arguments for and against the existence and nature of God. Beckwith and Parrish, in "The Mormon Concept Of God, A Philosophical Analysis," add another page to this on-going debate with their attack of the "Mormon concept of God." In the introduction Beckwith and Parrish explain that it is their aim to show

(1) that the Mormon concept of God differs radically from the classical concept of God,

(2) that the Mormon concept …

On Descartes' Presuppositionless Philosophy, W. Tyler Johnson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The history of human thought seems to be a quest for truth. Each looking for some evidence of a higher law, the biologist looks at living tissue, the chemist looks in the molecule, and the physicist looks inside the atom while the mathematician looks beyond matter and the theist looks toward God. Uncertainty and ignorance have traditionally been despised and rejected in favor of Knowledge and Rigor by all such scientists. Rene Descartes is commonly understood to be the father of this modernism as he was the first to replace the Church and its authoritarianism with a belief in the …

Existentialist Themes In Three Works, Mark D. Morrison

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The goals behind researching and writing this thesis are multifaceted and although many are outside of the scope of this paper, they express basic reasons for my choice. The paper is titled "Existentialist Themes in Three Works", and development and discussion are literary and philosophical in focus.

The first and most important reason for my choice was that, being a biology major, this project has provided the opportunity to pursue one of my minors, French. It has given me the chance to work under the direct tutelage of Dr. Lynne Goodhart, whom I would like to thank wholeheartedly. All three …