Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in?

I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should …

Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unity is enchanting. That is, it is an enchanting idea that although reality seems to be fragmented in various ways, this apparent fragmentation belies a fundamental unity. This dissertation is an attempt at theoretically capturing such unity via the theoretical unification of causation and grounding. And this unification supports another: the unification of reality’s causal structure and reality’s hierarchical structure.

To propose a unification of causation and grounding, I employ a common conception of grounding on which grounding is understood as a dependence relation. On this conception, if the Xs ground the Ys, then the existence of …

Public Artifacts, Empirical Vulnerability And Descriptive Metaphysics, Blake Davenport

Theses

Herein I argue that Amie Thomasson’s account of public artifacts is empirically vulnerable. I first identify the descriptive claims that feature in Thomasson’s argument and then outline an experimental framework in which the accuracy of those claims can be evaluated. I conclude with some brief remarks on the possible implications of my approach for Thomasson’s account, and some thoughts on whether an experimental approach to evaluating projects in descriptive metaphysics might be valuable more broadly.

Playing-With The World: Toy Story's Aesthetics And Metaphysics Of Play, Jonathan Hendricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pixar’s Toy Story (John Lassiter, 1995) is not just a story about toys and the children that play with them, but a demonstration of how we interact with the world. This thesis looks at the way in which both main children, Andy and Sid, interact with their toys and how this interaction is one that is structured by way of what Martin Heidegger calls “Enframing.” In this modality of playing, toys and other things and entities in the world, and the world itself, appear to the children as on-hand resources for use at any time and can be molded, as …

How To Understand The Debate Over Presentism And Eternalism, Travis Matthew Figg

Wayne State University Dissertations

Presentism is the view that, with the possible exception of things outside of time, everything that exists, exists at the present time. It is contrasted with eternalism, the view that everything which ever did exist or ever will exist, exists. Some philosophers argue that presentism and eternalism are not really substantive, opposed metaphysical theses. I consider some attempts in the literature to rebut this skeptical position, and argue that they are unsatisfactory. Then I make my own case for the conclusion that presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses by drawing a distinction between two ways of talking about what …

Schelling's Ages Of The World: The Beginning Of The Beginning, Andrew Jussaume

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the development of Schelling's philosophy of time as it appears in the Ages of the World, a work which Schelling himself never completed but which he clearly intended as his magnum opus. My project focuses on Schelling's claim that time is the absolute, a claim which grew out of his Naturphilosophie and which later served as the basis for his fruitful interactions with Kierkegaard in Berlin. In the dissertation, I defend the thesis that Schelling's concept of "beginnings" paves the way for an "organic" understanding of time which articulates the latter as a living, breathing entity. In …

Nihilist Perdurantism: A New Ontology Of Material Objects, Brian Matthew Carlson

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Ordinary material objects, such as guitars and houses, do not seem to pose any serious philosophical problems. However, the nature of the material objects and their part-whole relation raises serious questions about fundamental ontologies. Furthermore, part-whole relations are not necessarily spatial; they can be temporal as well.

My dissertation investigates the problems posed by ordinary material objects, and the different ontological views that attempt to provide answers to these problems. I then present a new and radical view, which I call Nihilist Perdurantism (NP). NP claims that objects have temporal parts, but not spatial parts. I arrive at this view …