Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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

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

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 …

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

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

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

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

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

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 …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 …

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

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

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 …

'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 …

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

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

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

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

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 …

Cognitive Creatures And Conceptuality, William J. Gamrat

Theses and Dissertations

What does it take for thought to be conceptual? And which creatures get to count as having conceptual thoughts? This paper explores these questions. The discussion follows Elisabeth Camp by contrasting two families of views. One family of views endorses that conceptual thought is the ability to represent the world in a way that brings about action. The other family wants more of conceptual thought: namely, that it exhibit objectivity and, in particular, that it come with the ability to speak a language. This discussion also follows Camp in looking for a better way to tie activeness to conceptual thought …

Lewis And The Poisoned Pawn, Josiah Lopez-Wild

Theses and Dissertations

Lewisian modal realism is infamous for explaining the objectivity of modal discourse in terms

of concrete possible worlds. Many have developed alternative theories which seek to explain

the objectivity of modal discourse without concrete possible worlds. One such alternative,

due to Fabrizio Mondadori and Adam Morton, attempts to ground modal discourse in actual,

physical fact. Shockingly, Lewis seems to have claimed that their view is consistent with his

own. I argue that the two views are consistent, from Lewis’s perspective. The result of the

project is twofold. First, we see that in Lewisian realism intrinsic features of the actual world …

How Code Words Work, Farhad Taraz

Theses and Dissertations

This paper aims at giving a novel theory of code words. I start with an explanation of what code words are by introducing four primary features of them. Then, I turn to three major theories of code words: those offered by Stanley, Khoo, and Saul. I show how each of these theories falls short of giving a thorough account of all features of code words. Finally, drawing on these lessons, I will formulate a new theory which suggests that code words are polysemous.

Liberal Feminism And Cultural Critique, Joshua Vonderhaar

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I consider an objection that liberal feminism is unable to sufficiently accommodate feminist cultural critique. I begin by introducing the practice of feminist cultural critique and how this practice presents a challenge to liberal feminism’s ability to be simultaneously liberal and feminist. I then discuss one account which attempts to draw a distinction between “legitimacy” and “ethos” justice, which can accommodate feminist cultural critique as a persuasive tool to advance ethos justice. I find that this account, however, is not equipped to explain cases where feminist cultural critique aims to produce coercive government intervention. After doing this, …

Hume's Conception Of Geometry And The Role Of Contradiction, Sofia Remedios Paz

Theses and Dissertations

David Hume’s account of geometry can seem puzzling as he claims that geometry is inexact and demonstrable. Graciela de Pierris argues for an interpretation that explains why Hume sees geometry as inexact and, yet, demonstrable. However, she doesn’t consider Hume’s description of relations of ideas found in the Enquiry. Hume distinguishes between matters of fact and relations of idea by checking to see if there is a contradiction with the denial of a proposition. Geometry is categorized as relations of idea, so the denials of geometric propositions cannot be conceivable and must imply a contradiction. I will argue that De …