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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Thomas Reid On Language And Mind, Alastair L.V. Crosby
Thomas Reid On Language And Mind, Alastair L.V. Crosby
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The dissertation concerns Thomas Reid’s philosophy of language. In the first three chapters, I discuss his philosophy of language in relation to his developmental psychology. More specifically, I discuss his answers to two questions: (i) what does the ability to understand artificial linguistic signs make possible? and (ii) what makes the ability to understand artificial linguistic signs possible? The focus is on Reid’s claim that the mind’s ability to understand artificial linguistic signs makes it possible for it to acquire a number of distinct mental abilities, such as to conceive universals, to judge, and to reason. I argue this claim …
Living Perception In Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Mclevey
Living Perception In Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Mclevey
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis examines the philosophical underpinnings of the possibility to perceive in different ways, with a particular attention to Merleau-Ponty's account of perception as inseparable from the wider arc of a person's embodied existence. Chapter 1 reflects on the relationship between Merleau-Ponty's description of the co-existence of the senses, and concrete ways that individual perceivers co-exist. Chapter 2 brings Merleau-Ponty's account of perception as a field of lived relationships, into conversation with the contingency of perceptual limits. Chapter 3 examines the significance of Merleau-Ponty's attention to experiences of synaesthesia and proposes concrete ways that a perceiver might move to shift …
Representationalism About Sensory Phenomenology, Matthew Ivanowich
Representationalism About Sensory Phenomenology, Matthew Ivanowich
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines representationalism about sensory phenomenology—the claim that for a sensory experience to have a particular phenomenal character is a matter of it having a particular representational content. I focus on a particular issue that is central to representationalism: whether reductive versions of the theory should be internalist or externalist. My primary goals are (i) to demonstrate that externalist representationalism fails to provide a reductive explanation for phenomenal qualities, and (ii) to present a reductive internalist version of representationalism that utilizes the empirical framework of psychophysics and neuroscience to develop a philosophical theory of content. The bulk …
Epistemology Of The Cartesian Image, Mikhail Pozdniakov
Epistemology Of The Cartesian Image, Mikhail Pozdniakov
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This study is an examination of the epistemological history of the image. Its first strands are to be found in the Christian concept of profanity, in the difference of the world to the divine. The highest form of intelligibility profanity could have, second only to theology, was mathematics. Derived from the problems surrounding this concept are the techniques of inquiry that eventually resulted in the development of analytic geometry by Descartes. The latter marked a new sensibility regarding the physical universe and its constitution, one that is coterminous with the development of exact procedures in science. Being that exactitude regards …
Aristotle’S Naïve Somatism, Alain E. Ducharme
Aristotle’S Naïve Somatism, Alain E. Ducharme
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner …