Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sartre And The Nothingness Of Consciousness, Matthew Dale Massey

Doctoral Dissertations

Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that consciousness is nothingness is typically understood as meaning either that consciousness is not itself, that it is not its objects, that it is not its past, or that it is some sort of state of affairs. Although these interpretations of Sartre are often presented independently of each other, I argue that one can combine several of them in order to arrive at the best understanding of Sartre’s treatment of consciousness. Such an understanding treats consciousness as the state of affairs that is its facticity transcending itself toward its objects. One could also combine …

Pluralism And Practical Reason: The Problem Of Decisiveness, James Michael Okapal

Doctoral Dissertations

Some have criticized pluralistic theories as failing to be decisive, in other words, pluralistic theories fail to produce judgments that are rational and justified. The argument starts by claiming that if a theory has neither the ability to justify actions through comparison nor the ability to guarantee a single answer about what one ought to do, then the theory is not decisive. The argument identifies the source of these failings in the pluralists commitment to incomparability and non-reductionism. I argue that pluralistic theories can be comparativist and that the demand for a single right answer is too stringent. Thus, it …

The Epistemic Availability Of Transcendental Self-Experience: Husserl And The Paradox Of The Pure Ego, Shiloh Whitley

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Foundationalism And The Search For Certainty In Mathematics, Natalia Baeza

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Searching For America: The Development Of The Immigrant Narrative Across Jewish, African, Cuban, And Korean American Literature, Amanda Maree Lawrence

Doctoral Dissertations

Searching for America: The Development of the Immigrant Narrative across Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American Literature is a longitudinal study that traces and accounts for the development of immigrant literature within specific ethnic groups, focusing on how different generations rewrite the immigrant narrative of their own cultures. Considering multiple texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American authors, I examine the changing relationship between language or literary form and identity politics for each group. In addition to exploring individual patterns of development, I suggest ways in which these very different ethnic texts speak …

Biomechanical And Temporal Measurement Of Pharyngeal Swallowing For Stroke Patients With Aspiration, Youngsun Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This study compared three pharyngeal swallowing measurements: Pharyngeal Delay Time (PDT), Stage Transition Duration (STD), and Delayed Pharyngeal Swallow (DPS) on the correct classification of three groups of subjects. These groups were: 15 stroke patients who aspirated (aspirators), 15 stroke patients who did not aspirate (non-aspirators) and 15 normal subjects.

Overall, the STD had highest mean classification among the three pharyngeal swallowing measurements. All three measures has a significant difference between aspirators and normal subjects. None of the measurements showed a difference between non-aspirators and normal subjects. The aspirators and the normal subjects were classified correctly most often; whereas the …

Catholic Health Care In The Public Square: Resolving Moral Conflict With Integrity, Jennifer Heyl

Doctoral Dissertations

Catholic health care faces a difficult challenge in today’s secular society. Because they are directed by the teachings of the Catholic Church, certain services, such as abortion, sterilization and contraception, cannot be provided at Catholic health care facilities. This limitation on services has placed Catholic health care providers at odds with many in the communities which they serve. This conflict was exacerbated in the 1990s during the active period of mergers and acquisitions which left some communities with only one hospital, which was now Catholic. These moral conflicts often seem intractable.

This dissertation examines the nature of moral conflict and …

Philisophical Study Of Responsibility, William Doug Bolden

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Creative Redemption And Complete Affirmation In Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Matthew Homan

Honors Theses

Creative Redemption and Complete Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra Any reader engaged with Nietzsche's thought, as we are (or about to be), must consider his or her life in relation to one thought, Nietzsche's most abysmal thought, the greatest weight:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all …

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …

Socratic Pedagogy, Critical Thinking, Moral Reasoning And Inmate Education: An Exploratory Study, Peter Boghossian

Dissertations and Theses

This exploratory study examines the hypothesis that Socratic pedagogy is a useful tool for imparting critical thinking and moral reasoning skills to inmates. The study explores the effectiveness of a new curriculum, Introducing Socrates, which relies on Socratic pedagogy to achieve its objectives. The curriculum draws from the effective criminal justice research on cognitive education to determine its objectives, and then looks to the Platonic dialogues to find broad philosophical questions that tie into those objectives. The program also evaluates salient criticisms of Socratic pedagogy that are found in the educational and philosophical literature, and then isolates and evaluates constructs …

Hegel's Defense Of The Ontological Argument For The Existence Of God, Kevin Joseph Harrelson

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The following dissertation is a study of the "ontological proof' for God's existence, specifically of the controversy concerning this proof from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. As the title indicates, the primary theme is Hegel's defense and reformulation of the proof. I argue for a metaphysical interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, by showing that one of Hegel's chief goals in the Logic is to provide a demonstration for the thesis that "necessary existence belongs to God's nature." I conclude that while Hegel offers a coherent and informative account of this thesis, his analysis does not overcome one of …

Panpsychism As Personal Experience: Resolving A Paradox, Jonathan Cotton

Theses : Honours

The thesis of panpsychism is that throughout the natural universe there is mentality, although I prefer the term "mind". We human beings experience this mentality in everyday consciousness and by analogy we are able to assert that mentality is not confined to the human experience alone. The extent to which this mentality penetrates, or is imbued by, our natural world has been a subject for discussion in western schools of philosophy since the ancient Greeks and in the even more ancient eastern schools of theosophy, such as Buddhism and the Hinduism of the Upanishads. I use the term "theosophy" here …