Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Theistic Open Futurism: A Critical Philosophical Investigation, Elijah Hess

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I critically evaluate and develop a model of God I dub “theistic open futurism”—the view that an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being exists but fails to know future contingent statements because such statements are not true. Contrary to what their free will critics have supposed, I argue that theistic open futurists do not subscribe to a metaphysical vision of the future that is logically or religiously incoherent. With respect to the latter, I suggest that while some open theists have overstated their case concerning the amount of providential control God could have given the reality of an …

A Calvinistic Divine Glory Defense, Stephen Thomas Irby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Calvinists, because they embrace the view that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, cannot appeal to libertarian free will while trying to defend theism against the problem of evil. However, they can appeal – and, in fact, some have appealed – to God’s desire to be glorified to account for why He has ordained the evils of our world. This is the divine glory defense, and my dissertation aims to develop a version of it. After spending some time framing my defense in the context of the rest of the literature on the problem of evil, an account is provided …

On Neo-Humean Accounts For Natural Laws, Tori Helen Cotton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Humeanism about laws is a metaphysical doctrine that claims that the complete scope of the world is comprised of the mosaic—a vast collection of particular, localized facts about the world, and everything else supervenes on this arrangement of facts. Reductionism about laws, the claim that laws of nature reduce to, and thereby supervene on, the Humean mosaic, follows from this view. The first part of the thesis explores Humeanism about laws and the evolving landscape of pragmatic approaches within this domain. Building upon the insights gained from this analysis, the second part of the thesis proposes a novel response to …

The Multiverse Argument For The Existence Of God, Michael Dover

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God is one of the most powerful arguments in favor of God’s existence. Perhaps the most common objection to this argument involves the Multiverse Theory, which posits an infinite or very large multiverse, adequately explaining the fine-tuning of the universe without positing an intelligent designer. Thus, the Multiverse Theory is often posited as a way of maintaining Atheism. In this paper, I argue that the Atheistic Multiverse View is untenable: if the multiverse exists, God or gods are highly likely to exist as well. Additionally, this paper explores topics like: the conceivability of …

Disharmony Of The Soul: A Philosophical Analysis Of Psychological Trauma And Flourishing, Adam Blehm

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that psychological trauma hinders human flourishing by disrupting psychic harmony and hindering virtuous relationships. Given the negative symptomology of posttraumatic stress related disorders (i.e., PTSD) this conclusion may seem a bit obvious to some. However, making the case for trauma as a hindrance to human flourishing is more complicated than it may first appear.

First, in the extant literature, trauma as a concept tends to be unclear. In much of the empirical and philosophical literature, trauma can include a certain kind of event, experience, effect, or a combination of all three. Furthermore, because of practical …

The Social Ontology Of Psychiatry: Psychiatric Diagnosis As An Ontogenetic, Interpellative Speech Act, Ashton Sorrels

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Psychiatry is the study, evaluation, and treatment of mental disorders – disorders that affect the behavior and cognition of individuals and which are associated with underlying dysfunctions in the brain and nervous system. Though psychiatry is a medical and scientific discipline, it also takes place within a social context that modifies its effects, particularly in its application of diagnostic categories to individuals. In this thesis, I argue that, because of this context, psychiatric diagnosis can be modeled as an ontogenetic, interpellative speech act. A speech act is an utterance or sign that constitutes an action through its performance, called an …

Cognitive Tribalism: A Social Doxastic Model, Robert Ragsdale

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How are facemasks – seemingly innocuous artifacts of the biomedical industry – currently embroiled in cultural wars? What motivates popular rejections of scientific consensus and messaging about the reality and consequences of anthropogenic climate change or the COVID-19 virus and vaccine? The puzzle is that (a) despite its being in everyone’s rational interests to have a well-informed public and body politic about collective threats, and (b) despite the public availability of accurate and reliable information, scientific messaging and public discourse surrounding climate change, COVID-19, and vaccine hesitancy, nevertheless, tend to be hijacked by political interest. Yet, if belief is essentially …

The Foundation Of A Grand Unified Metaphysics, Jason R. Miller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Philosophers from Leibniz to Parfit have tackled the problem of existence and the problem of arbitrarity. I divide the solutions to these two problems into three general categories: (1) infinite regress answers, (2) ex nihilo answers, and (3) self-caused cause answers. I show that the first two (infinite regress and ex nihilo) categories of answers either fail to answer the problem of existence or the problem of arbitrarity or fail to satisfy one or more reasonable assumptions about said problems. Believing it to be useful to a self-caused cause answer to the problem of existence and the problem of arbitrarily, …

La Mutación Del Pensamiento: Las Repercusiones Filosóficas Y Literarias De Friedrich Nietzsche En La Obra De Miguel De Unamuno., Raúl E. Garriga

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first two chapters of the thesis contain a detailed study about the appropriations of two 19th century philosophical concepts that Miguel de Unamuno took from Nietzsche. The first chapter covers the idea of expulsion interna that the Basque philosopher attributes to Nietzsche and how that indication is systematized in a literary theory about writing that eventually will end up altering both of Unamuno’s essays and novels during this period. The second chapter also starts in the final years of the 19th century but is focused entirely on the dynamic concept of the “sobre-hombre” that Unamuno has used since 1896. …

A Focused Evaluation Of Sales Employees' Ethics Training And Its Effect On The Diffusion Of Ethics In A Financial Organization, Justin Luebker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ethical scandals have continued to batter corporate America into the twenty-first century. Companies such as Enron and MCI WorldCom became household names overnight because of ethical issues that shuttered the organizations’ operations and stunned shareholders. Training has served as a primary mechanism for companies to impart ethical values in employees and leadership teams. However, despite the ongoing focus and resources dedicated to education and associate development in this area, historically there appears to be no diffusion of ethical standards within organizations. There is a lack of consensus in current research regarding the effectiveness of organizational ethics training and its ability …

The Role Of Sex: An Analysis Of U.S. Attitudes Toward Climate Change, Chloe Riggs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the intersection of sex, environmental risk perception of climate change, and feminism. More specifically, with a sample size of 8,280 respondents from the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Times Series Study, this research examines the relationship between pro-environmental attitudes and sympathy for feminism, controlling for sex, as well as if a measure of sympathy for feminism influences pro-environmental attitudes, controlling for demographic (age, education, race, sex, and income) and political preference (political ideology and party affiliation) variables. Previous literature strongly supports a sex gap in risk perception, a pattern known as the White Male Effect (WME) …

The Evolution Of Defeaters: A Taxonomy, Erica Nicolas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It has been widely argued that reasons for a belief come in degrees but not much literature has focused on the idea that defeaters for justification toward those beliefs also come in degrees. The aim of this paper is to explore epistemic defeasibility and construct a taxonomy for epistemic defeaters. This paper argues that epistemic defeaters undergo an evolutionary process before becoming what they are commonly labeled, such as rebutting and undercutting. I argue that within some stages of this process, there can be different degrees of defeat. This paper focuses on defeaters for justification, expands on the account of …

The 'I' In First-Person Thought And What Is Meant By Self-Knowledge, Aaron Morris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been a great deal of disagreement over what exactly it is that is being referenced by the first-person pronoun, ‘I.’ Immanuel Kant believed the ‘I’ associated with a thinking subject is just a formal representation of the substantially existing subject. This raises the question about whether or not ‘I’ is actually a referring expression? In this paper I explore two accounts from both sides of the debate which opens up a dialectical space for determining a positive answer for this question. On the one hand, ‘I’ is said to be a referring term for the speaker or utterer …

On Human Rights And Structural Justice, Robert Howard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rights literature is full of accounts of rights, and each captures important aspects of the nature and function of rights. But none of the leading theories offers a comprehensive account of the nature and function of rights that both stands up under the pressure of counterexamples and can buck accusations of internal inconsistency.

In this paper I embrace much of Nicholas Wolterstorff's work on justice and the relation of human rights to worth, and I propose changes to his account in order to strengthen it. I evoke the works of Johan Galtung, Richard Rubenstein, and Elizabeth Anderson in order …

The Application Of Complex Systems Science To Political Philosophy, Benjamin Nicholas House

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although complex systems science is relevant to problems of political philosophy, the intersection of these two disciplines has not been studied in depth. Complex systems are made up of multiple interdependent parts whose interactions create emergent properties. This interdependence makes these systems “fat-tailed”: low-probability events can have a major impact on the system. Complex systems engineers have formulated a series of rules of thumb for approximating an “evolutionary” environment. Contemporary human civilization is a complex system; because of this, governments need to become adaptable and approximate the evolutionary environment by fostering policy innovation while at the same time promoting mechanisms …

Optimistic And A Little Flawed, Christian Schultz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accompanying exhibition to this paper, Optimistic and Flawed is a body of drawings and objects that explores the liminal space between playful and intended actions. Inspired by the landscape of the yard and the actions that take place within, the goalless play of a child and the laborious maintenance of an adult. The value of play exists within labor and labor exists within play. The drawings observe this through the theoretical framework of telic and paratelic motivational states as they relate to drawing. Abstracted yards and landscapes provide a space for the labor of the hand. A history of …

The Interconnectedness Of Jonathan Edwards's Ontology And Trinitarianism, Holly Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jonathan Edwards scholarship has been divided in recent years on the correct interpretation of his work. Scholars like Sang Hyun Lee and Amy Plantinga Pauw maintain that Edwards used a radically new dispositional ontology to understand the fundamental realities of nature. Oliver Crisp, Kyle Strobel, and Steve Studebaker have argued that Edwards used an essentialist ontology. I will defend the latter position and explain how it is tied to Edwards’s Trinitarianism. I argue for an interpretation of Edwards that situates him in his historical and theological context. The early modern philosophy of his day was marked by essentialist ontology. The …

Digital Marketing And The Culture Industry: The Ethics Of Big Data, Jonathan Michael Bowman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Instead of the steady march of the one percent growth in ecommerce as compared to total retail revenues in the last decade (to comprise about nine percent of the industry at the close of 2019), we have witnessed leaps now to over twenty percent in just the last year. Scott Galloway marks the pandemic as an accelerant not just of digital marketing posting a year of growth for each month of quarantine but as an accelerant of each major GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) firm from market dominance to total dominance (Galloway 2020). Viewing these trends from the standpoint …

On The Epistemic Significance Of Expert Conversion, Dax R. Bennington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Much of our knowledge of the world depends on the testimony of experts. Experts sometimes change their minds and disagree with each other. What ought a novice do when an expert changes their mind? This dissertation provides an account of when expert conversion is epistemically significant and how the novice ought to rationally defer to expert conversion. In answering when expert conversion is epistemically significant, I provide a diagnostic tool that emphasizes that epistemically significant expert conversion seems to be evidence-based and that there is an absence of cognitive biases on the part of the converting expert. In answering how …

When Down Looks Like Up: Self-Deceptive Self-Handicapping, Kyle T. Hallam

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I present a novel example of intentional self-deception as embodied in self-handicapping behavior. Self-handicapping is the proactive construction or acquisition of some obstacle to success in some domain, and is employed by individuals primarily as a means of deflecting blame for a failure or negative outcome. I argue that this behavior stands in a mutual, symbiotic relationship to self-deception. On the one hand, self-handicapping is the behavioral instantiation of the biased evidence manipulation which facilitates self-deception; while on the other hand, self-handicapping effectively functions to bias judgments in this way only in case concurrent self-deception sustains the …

An Interpersonal Account Of Heideggerian Ethics: An Analysis Of Being And Time, William Braxton Bragg

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In what follows, I will present an interpersonal account of Being and Time that runs counter to most of the standard literature. There are a few moving parts to this paper that must be addressed before moving forward. Section II addresses both Heidegger’s political affiliations as well as the connection to ethics. By presenting some of the more prominent interpretations in the literature, a picture of how one can read a political ideology into Being and Time becomes possible. This is followed by Section III, where I immediately address and eschew those concerns by presenting an account that does in …

Perceptual Characterization: On Perceptual Learning And Perspectival Sedimentation, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In her analysis of perspectival effects on perception, Susanna Siegel has argued that perceptual experience is directly rationally assessable and can thereby justify perceptual beliefs, save for in cases of epistemic downgrade or perceptual hijacking; I contend that the recalcitrance of known illusions poses an insurmountable problem for Siegel’s thesis. In its place, I argue that a model of perceptual learning informed by the dual-aspect framework of base-level cognitive architecture proposed by Elisabeth Camp successfully answers the questions motivating Siegel’s project in a manner that avoids such issues.

The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah, Michelle Jude Gibeault

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, …

Normative Pragmatic Selfhood: A Pragmatist Conception Of Value For Marginal Cases, Sam Noel Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I develop a theory of personal ontology called normative pragmatic selfhood (NPS) to explain what persons are and how they are morally valuable. I also demonstrate the applicability of NPS theory by using it to assess the moral status of marginal cases in bioethical dilemmas. I begin by discussing the concept of intrinsic value and why it is problematic when it comes to persons. I then draw upon John Dewey’s theory of value, specifically the concept of growth, and Kant’s concept of humanity to show that persons are objectively yet extrinsically valuable. Next, I discuss and argue how the psychological …

Implicit Bias And The Boundaries Of Belief: A Single-Representational Dual-Attitude Account Of Implicit Attitudes, Austin Dakota Synoground

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, implicit attitudes have been defined as associative mental states, separate from beliefs, which are considered to be propositional in nature. Recently, several philosophers have challenged this distinction, arguing that implicit attitudes are actually unconscious beliefs. In turn, I argue that the attitudes detected by current experimental paradigms are blind to distinctions between implicit attitudes, which I define as the products of an associative learning mechanism, and unconscious beliefs, which are the products of a propositional learning mechanism. Specifically, I argue for a single-representational dual-attitude account of implicit bias.

Potentials, Actuals, And The Logical Problem Of Evil, Stephen Thomas Irby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

J.L. Schellenberg has recently formulated a new logical problem of evil that is claimed to avoid Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defence. I begin my argument against this new formulation by analyzing the grounding for some of God’s maximal perfections. God’s maximal moral perfection, for example, is grounded in virtuous potentialities that are disposed to the actualization of virtuous actions. From this account, I argue that Schellenberg’s logical problem of evil fails due to one of the following two reasons. First, some good actualizations of good potentialities require evil but compose the best worlds. Second, both (1) good actualizations that require …

On The Variations Of 'Occupatio' In "Richard Ii", William Kelly Reeder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholarship of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been interested in or preoccupied with its historical relations. Particularly the plays association with the Essex Rising of 1601, and the censorship of the deposition scene, both of which seem to resonate for history with Elizabeth’s enigmatic comment expressing her identification with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

This paper proposes to resolve the question of the play’s censorship by interpreting the deposition scene as a dramatization of transubstantiation, perhaps triggering Elizabethan censors.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine by which the Catholic Church interprets the Eucharist using the distinction between substance and accidens (eternal and …

Will-Independent Mereological Trinity Monotheism: A Defense Of The Logical Coherence Of, A Priori Motivation For, And A Particular Model Concerning The Doctrine Of The Trinity, Andrew Kirschner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The doctrine posits that God is one being, but three persons. The orthodox parameters for affirming the Trinity are found in the early Ecumenical Creeds of Christendom, especially the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Four primary affirmations emerge as a summary of the essential content of the doctrine: (ONE): There is one God; (THREE): The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct divine persons; (FATHERSOURCE): The Father is the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit (perhaps with the Son, perhaps not); and (EQUALITY): The three persons in the Trinity are ontologically equal; none is greater than any of the …

Abandoning The Dream Of Omnipotence: On Autonomy And Self-Binding, Charlie Coil

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophical study of a uniquely human activity—the self-binding act. This philosophical interest directly connects with the Enlightenment project of centralizing personal autonomy and individual freedom as primary values of personhood. Self-binding represents an easily referenced action that introduces a possible clash between autonomy and freedom on the one hand seen as in conflict with other ancient basic human values like self-control and avoiding akrasia. This dissertation investigates the inverted manner whereby an act of self-binding, which voluntarily and effectively limits a person’s options, can end up augmenting rather than interfering with personal autonomy. I …

I, Myself, And Me, The Human Being, David Manuel Cajias

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this project are advanced two ways of seeing the ordinary human being with the aim of understanding who he is: namely, from the perspective of his personal identity and from the point of view of his self-conception. The chapters included in the first part are meant to treat the issue of personal identity from a practical perspective, whereas the ones included in the second part intend to assess the utility of self-conception from a phenomenological standpoint. Ultimately, I bring together these two perspectives into a unitary understanding of the human being in the context of his everyday life.