Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Alexa, Should I Trust You? A Theory Of Trustworthiness For Artificial Intelligence, Elizabeth K. Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

As people turn to AI driven technologies for help with everything from meal planning to choosing a mate, it is increasingly important for individuals to gauge the trustworthiness of available technologies. However, most philosophical theories of trustworthiness focus on interpersonal trust and are inappropriate for non-agents. What, then, does it mean for non-agents such as AI driven technologies to be trustworthy? I distinguish two different forms of trustworthiness: naive trustworthiness and robust trustworthiness. An agent is naively trustworthy to the extent that it would be likely to meet the truster’s expectations with respect to a given domain. An agent is …

The Cynics' Understanding Of And Contribution To Philosophy, Yossra Hamouda

Theses and Dissertations

The Cynics are an understudied school in the history of philosophy especially, if we compare the amount of literature written on the Cynics to the amount of literature written on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek schools like the Epicureans, the Neo-Platonists and even the Stoics. The lack of research interest in the Cynics, both from the side of philosophers and historians, is possibly grounded in a lack of interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy. Unless we take a serious interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy, we risk reducing the Cynics to the historical clowns of …

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Rhetoric Of Collaboration: Using Ethics Of Social Justice And Activism Through Writing Communities, Tina M. Iemma

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines emerging writing community collectives that seek to challenge the normative hierarchy of higher education in both composition and curricula. I conduct empirical research to explore the ways activist writers, those with exposure to social justice literacies from across and outside academic communities, influence an ethics of collaboration and overall expansion of more public-facing, engaged and inclusive research pedagogy and scholarship. The act of writing in collectives is needed if a move toward advocacy and opportunity for equity is to be upheld within and beyond academia. By examining social justice literacies occurring both in and out of the …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

The L1-Norm Regularized L1-Norm Best-Fit Line Problem And Applications, Xiao Ling

Theses and Dissertations

The best-fit subspace or low-rank approximation of a data matrix revolves
around the norm approximation technique. l²-norm criterion is probably the most
widely used norm for fitting subspaces. As the computational power increases, the
l¹-norm analogue has recently gained attention from the academic community. It is
widely agreed that the l¹ norm is insensitive to outliers, compared to its l² variant.
Because of the polyhedral structure interrelated with linear programming (LP),
the l⁰ norm is commonly relaxed into the l¹-norm problem to induce sparsity in
models. In this work, we examine …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

From The Corner Of One's Soul: The Methods Of Negotiating Tension In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, Julian Pena

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a practical and meaningful reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, one that is rooted in the claim that both Judge Holden and the Kid reflect two different methods for negotiating a tension impinged upon them by their external circumstances. Using a theoretical framework that is inspired by the social psychological Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, this thesis provides an extensive analysis of the novel’s fictional universe, Judge Holden, and the Kid. Such an analysis elucidates the violent nature of Blood Meridian’s universe and further reveals the character of Judge Holden …

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 …

Models In Scientific Inquiry, Justin Price

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies how models become useful for scientific inquiry. Towards this study, I develop a theory on the cross-discipline transfer of mathematical models. The first part of this theory characterizes the way in which scientists must respond to the constraints in making a transferable model useable in their discipline. I invent the notion of a landing zone to identify the aspects of their domain that scientists prepare for the use of a transferrable model. The second part connects this response-to-constraints to cases of conceptual progress resulting from model transfer in biology and chemistry. The last part of this dissertation …

Beyond Mental And Physical Pain: A Non-Reductive Account Of Suicide, Aya Aly Ragheb

Theses and Dissertations

What is the stigma behind our understanding of suicide? What causes this stigma? Should suicide only be viewed in relation to physical pain, as medicine often views it, or mental pain, as psychiatry views it? Or is it a more complex phenomenon? Can we think of suicide as a rational act that is, on the one hand, independent of pain, without, on the other hand, reducing it to mental illness? I will argue that if we can, we can give a less reductive account of suicide. In this paper, we shall attempt to give an answer to the above questions …

Translation In And Of Philosophy, Hussein Barrada

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Ricoeur in his essay The Paradigm of Translation, presents an understanding of translation that is found between two positions that are irreconcilable. These two positions represent on the one hand, the difference that exists between languages and on the other hand, the common ground that languages must have for them to be translatable into one another. Following Ricoeur’s paradigm, the thesis will aim to unpack an understanding of translation as a tension that occurs between its theoretical impossibility and the reality of its everyday practice. The theoretical impossibility of translation lies in the fact that for one language …

An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

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 …

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.

Mathematical Realism From Reflectance Physicalism, Nicholas Matthew Danne

Theses and Dissertations

Do mirrors remain “reflective” objects in the dark, or does light shining onto a mirror instead give the mirror its reflective ability in the moment? More than an idle barstool question (like whether a tree falling in an abandoned forest makes a sound) the intrinsicality or light-independence of reflectance carries considerable philosophical import, since some philosophers reduce the human-visible colors to intrinsic surface reflectance. My dissertation, while remaining neutral on the best definition of color, argues that the received view of reflectance leaves it conceptually regressive and thus non-ascribable to surfaces. Rendering reflectance intrinsic to surfaces, I argue, requires a …

Husserl And Merleau-Ponty: A Feminist Critique Of The Phenomenological Body, Jasmin M. Makhlouf

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the phenomenological notion of embodiment, to explain the objectification and coercion that women and their bodies experience on a daily basis. I build the philosophical foundation of this thesis on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, as well as, their work’s receptions in feminist philosophy of the early 20th century, mainly Simone de Beauvoir, as well as, more contemporary thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Moreover, the thesis argues for a return to the traditional phenomenological notion of embodiment while incorporating elements of sexuality and sexual difference.

Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.