Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Making < Cinnabar > : Kant On Made A Posteriori Concepts, Sophie Cote

Theses and Dissertations

The topic of this paper is Kant’s distinction between given and made concepts. A made concept is ‘created by us arbitrarily’, while a given concept is ‘produced either through the nature of our understanding or through experience’ (24:131). Kant’s most frequent examples of made concepts are mathematical concepts, such as. But mathematical concepts exemplify just one kind of made concepts, namely made a priori concepts. Concepts can also be made a posteriori. The question ‘What is a made a posteriori concept?’ has received little attention. The purpose of this paper is to address this question. I argue that made a …

Grounding Physicalism, Zachary Kofi

Theses and Dissertations

Grounding physicalism is the thesis that fundamental physical truths ground every other truth. Ted Sider and Shamik Dasgupta have recently put forward a serious challenge to grounding physicalism. The challenge is an instance of a more general challenge concerning what grounds grounding facts, which has been powerfully presented by Karen Bennett. If A is some fundamental fact about physics that grounds some fact B about mental states, then what grounds the fact that A grounds B? The grounding physicalist who says that such facts are either grounded or ungrounded seems to face a dilemma: Either grounding facts are grounded and …

Is It Rational To Care About The Natural Environment?, Joshua Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This paper helps address the question of how people who currently care about the natural environment, or nature, might rationally persuade those who do not currently have such concern. Philosophers have largely ignored this question, but it is important outside philosophy. For instance, many environmental advocates seem to believe that others should care about nature. At least much writing that falls under the broad category of environmentalism intends to persuade us to care about nature in one way or another.

In this paper, I argue that people should care about nature to the extent that they have three other, rationally …

Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence As Untimeliness, Ana Cristina De Souza Pedroso

Theses and Dissertations

The idea of the eternal recurrence is central to Nietzsche’s later teachings. In this paper, I argue that the life-transformative effects Nietzsche is aiming at with the eternal recurrence parallel the life-transformative effects he has already construed with the notion of “untimeliness” in his earlier writings. My interpretive thesis is mainly supported by the following claim: in both modes one repeatedly experiences the time of her life as a whole. That is, one lives her life in such a way that there is nothing to look forward or nothing to look backwards outside of the present life simply because life, …

Routine Maintenance, Joshua Waugh

Theses and Dissertations

Routines are a large part of our daily lives. They are the skills that we utilize to get through our day effortlessly. From tying our shoes to operating a vehicle, routines are repeated skilled behaviors often initiated and produced with little attention or conscious focus. While routines are an important part of our lives, they are neglected by much of the literature on intentional action. This has led to some criticism that the intention literature is over-intellectualized, and only focuses on behavior that has a concurrent conscious component. Further, some authors have even suggested that skilled behaviors like routines are …

Just Say No: Authority, Disobedience, And Individuation In Some Of Sam Peckinpah’S Minor Films, Ron Felten

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Peckinpah is best known for his films The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and quite a bit of the existing scholarly work on Peckinpah focuses on these two films; what’s more, much of the work that does exist on his other films tends to be subjective and celebratory. The aim of this project is to critically and soberly examine Peckinpah’s relatively minor works and from particular perspectives. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on one of the major thematic threads that runs through all of the director’s films, both major and minor: how ordinary people …

Hegel Between Criticism And Romanticism: Love & Self-Consciousness In The Phenomenology, Scott Jonathan Cowan

Theses and Dissertations

Hegel’s formulation of self-consciousness has decisively influenced modern philosophy’s notion of selfhood. His famous discussion of it appears in Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and emphasizes that self-consciousness is a dynamic process involving social activity. However, philosophers have struggled to understand some of the central claims Hegel makes: that self-consciousness is (a) “desire itself” which (b) is “only satisfied in another self-consciousness”; and that (c) self-consciousness is “the concept of Spirit.” In this paper, I argue that Hegel’s early writings on love help make sense of the motivation behind these claims, and thereby aids in understanding their meaning. …

Reading Others Well And Being Well Read, Nathan Louis Engel-Hawbecker

Theses and Dissertations

The conceptual problem of other minds is over how we can so much as form thoughts or beliefs about (let alone know) mental lives other than our own. What I call the conceptual problem of other conscious minds restricts this question to others’ phenomenally conscious experiences. Past appeals to an individual’s inferential, imaginative, or perceptual faculties all more plausibly presuppose than provide a solution to this problem: such faculties allow us to form thoughts about others’ experiences only if we already have some prior means of doing so (§§2-5). This is not the case with testimony, which I introduce and …

Self-Colocation, Justin Mooney

Theses and Dissertations

Some accounts of location leave conceptual space for a variety of unusual relations between objects and the regions they occupy, including the relations of multilocation and interpenetration. In this paper I show that countenancing both of these possibilities leads to a puzzle about whether an object can be colocated with itself. After teasing out the puzzle, I consider candidate solutions, and draw out some implications.