Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Doing Without Desiring, Steven E. Swartzer

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation defends a cognitivist alternative to the Humean belief-desire theory of motivation against standard philosophical arguments.

Moral judgments influence our action. For instance, someone might donate to charity because she believes she has a duty to give back to her community. According to the Humean orthodoxy, some additional state—some passion or desire—is needed to explain her action. She may want to donate the money, to give back to her community, or to fulfill her duty. Yet there must be something she wants, the Humean insists, because only desires are capable of moving us. Even moral judgment is no more …

The Status Of Students With Special Needs In The Instrumental Musical Ensemble And The Effect Of Selected Educator And Institutional Variables On Rates Of Inclusion, Edward C. Hoffman Iii

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

The purpose of this study was to describe the current status of students with special needs in the instrumental musical ensemble and to examine the effect of selected educator and institutional variables on rates of inclusion. An online survey was designed by the researcher and distributed electronically to 600 practicing K-12 instrumental music educators in the states of Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Rhode Island. While 13.6% of the total school-aged population nationwide received special education services, demographic data provided by respondents revealed that students with special needs accounted for 6.8% of all students participating in bands, orchestras, …

Epistemic Contextualism: A Defense And Analysis, Sruthi R. Rothenfluch

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Epistemic contextualists maintain that the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions and denials change according to the context of utterance. In this dissertation, I defend this view against one of its main rivals, classic invariantism, which holds that the contents of such statements remain fixed across contexts. While epistemic contextualists provide a straightforward semantic account of the variability in our knowledge-ascribing behavior, classic invariantists cannot, and therefore must offer some explanation as to why it seems as though the standards for ‘knowing that p’ shift from one context to the next. To this end, classic invariantists draw a distinction between what …

Kant On Animal Consciousness, Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Consider two different ways of characterizing the cognitive requirements necessary for perceptual awareness of an objective physical world.¹ On the one hand, objective perceptual awareness may only require the sensory capacity for awareness of particular physical individuals and their features, perhaps along with the minimal kinds of cognitive processing needed to integrate received sensory information with behavior. On the other hand, objective perceptual awareness may require not only these low-level cognitive capacities but also conceptual capacities, or perhaps even specific concepts.² Call these two lines of thought regarding objective perpetual awareness non-conceptualism and conceptualism respectively.

Strategies For Defusing The Demandingness Objection, Justin J. Moss

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bernard Williams’s formulation of the Demandingness Objection holds that living a moral life, as the consequentialist understands it, is incompatible with living a life that is good for human beings. This is because the demands of consequentialist morality threaten to overwhelm the life of the person who cares about being moral, thus leaving no time for their own projects and interests. Several prominent consequentialists have responded to the Demandingness Objection by seeking a more moderate and indirect form of consequentialism that does not require as strong a duty of beneficence as classical utilitarianism. I review and criticize three prominent moderate …