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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Identifying The Limits Of Sexual Liberation As A Feminist Value, Nichole Hungerford
Identifying The Limits Of Sexual Liberation As A Feminist Value, Nichole Hungerford
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis explores feminist responses to the sexual revolution and the extent to which sexual liberation, from the perspective of heterosexual relations, has served women’s interests as an oppressed social group under patriarchy. In particular, this thesis examines the divide between libertarian and radical feminists’ interpretation of sexual liberation, considering both the radical feminist criticisms of the sexist nature of heterosexual sex and the libertarian feminist view of free sexuality as a revolutionary act that ameliorates the condition of women. This thesis offers a middle ground approach to sexual liberation as a feminist value by suggesting two conditions on heterosexual …
What Monsters May They Be : The Moral Status Of Macabre Fascination And The Paradox Of Horror, Marius Abraham Pascale
What Monsters May They Be : The Moral Status Of Macabre Fascination And The Paradox Of Horror, Marius Abraham Pascale
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The paradox of horror poses the question, how is it possible for us to find fear pleasurable? Emotions of fear are traditionally seen as unpleasant, and viewed as that which ought to be avoided when possible. Yet individuals seek out and derive pleasure from works of horror, a genre with the explicit goal of producing fear. How is this possible, and ought we to find such works a source of pleasure? The goals of the project are twofold. First, to present a unique solution to the horror paradox. Second, to address the moral status of macabre fascination. The first section …
Preserving The Autographic/Allographic Distinction, P.D. Magnus, Jason R. D'Cruz
Preserving The Autographic/Allographic Distinction, P.D. Magnus, Jason R. D'Cruz
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
In his study of forms of representation, Nel- son Goodman sought to explain why some representations, like words or musical scores, are considered replicable while others, such as paintings, are not. He named the replicable rep- resentations allographic and the ones we consider nonreplicable autographic (Goodman 1976, 113). His explanation of what grounds this distinction is in his theory of notations (chaps. IV–V). That theory essentially seeks to secure the possibility of identity for representations, as well as the possibility of knowing such identity, by setting out a number of requirements. Unless a repre- sentational practice satisfies the requirements (is …
Promising To Try, Jason R. D'Cruz, Justin Kalef
Promising To Try, Jason R. D'Cruz, Justin Kalef
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
We maintain that in many contexts promising to try is expressive of responsibility as a promiser. This morally significant application of promising to try speaks in favor of the view that responsible promisers favor evidentialism about promises. Contra Berislav Marusˇic´, we contend that responsible promisers typically withdraw from promising to act and instead promise to try, in circumstances in which they recognize that there is a significant chance that they will not succeed.
Trust, Trustworthiness, And The Moral Consequence Of Consistency, Jason R. D'Cruz
Trust, Trustworthiness, And The Moral Consequence Of Consistency, Jason R. D'Cruz
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include …
Epistemic Categories And Causal Kinds, P.D. Magnus
Epistemic Categories And Causal Kinds, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Within philosophy of science, debates about realism often turn on whether posited entities exist or whether scientific claims are true. Natural kinds tend to be investigated by philosophers of language or metaphysicians, for whom semantic or ontological considerations can overshadow scientific ones. Since science crucially involves dividing the world up into categories of things, however, issues concerning classification ought to be central for philosophy of science. Muhammad Ali Khalidi's book fills that gap, and I commend it to readers with an interest in scientific taxonomy and natural kinds. He works through general issues to craft a useful philosophical conception and …
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
A successful scientific community might require different scientists to form different beliefs even when faced with the same evidence. The standard line is that this would create a conflict between the demands of collective rationality which scientists face as members of the community and the demands of individual rationality which they face as epistemic agents. This is expressed both by philosophers of science (working on the distribution of cognitive labor) and by epistemologists (working on the epistemology of disagreement). The standard line fails to take into account the relation between rational belief and various epistemic risks, values of which are …
Are Digital Pictures Allographic?, Jason R. D'Cruz, P.D. Magnus
Are Digital Pictures Allographic?, Jason R. D'Cruz, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Nelson Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument that alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: it seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all artworks are historical. We note in reply that some artworks can be considered both as historical products and as formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two conceptions. This allows us to recover Goodman's distinction: …
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Several recent commentators argue that Thomas Hobbes’s account of the nature of science is conventionalist. Engaging in scientific practice on a conventionalist account is more a matter of making sure one connects one term to another properly rather than checking one’s claims, e.g., by experiment. In this paper, I argue that the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbesian science accords neither with Hobbes’s theoretical account in De corpore and Leviathan nor with Hobbes’s scientific practice in De homine and elsewhere. Closely tied to the conventionalist interpretation is the deductivist interpretation, on which it is claimed that Hobbes believed sciences such as optics …
State Of The Field: Why Novel Prediction Matters, P.D. Magnus, Heather Douglas
State Of The Field: Why Novel Prediction Matters, P.D. Magnus, Heather Douglas
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
It has become commonplace to say that novel predictive success is not epistemically special. Its value over accommodation, if it has any, is taken to be superficial or derivative. We argue that the value of predictive success is indeed instrumental. Nevertheless, it is a powerful instrument that provides significant epistemic assurances at many different levels. Even though these assurances are in principle dispensable, real science is rarely (if ever) in the position to confidently obtain them in other ways. So we argue for a pluralist instrumental predictivism: novel predictive success is important for inferences from data to phenomena, from phenomena …
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
There are two senses of ‘what scientists know’: An individual sense (the separate opinions of individual scientists) and a collective sense (the state of the discipline). The latter is what matters for policy and planning, but it is not something that can be directly observed or reported. A function can be defined to map individual judgments onto an aggregate judgment. I argue that such a function cannot effectively capture community opinion, especially in cases that matter to us.
The Role Of Adaptation To Disability And Disease In Public Health, Meghan Mary Connors
The Role Of Adaptation To Disability And Disease In Public Health, Meghan Mary Connors
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Some patients with chronic disabilities and diseases are able to adapt to their health states and, as a result, rate their quality of life higher than hypothetical patients imagining themselves to be in such states. Due to this phenomenon of adaptation, there is much controversy surrounding the effect of adaptation on patient preferences and the role that these adapted preferences ought to play in health care resource allocation decisions. The process of adaptation affects public health debates about whether we ought to give priority to the worst off in allocation decisions because within traditional public health frameworks, it is unclear …
Physician-Assisted Suicide Within A Kantian Framework, Daksha Bhatia
Physician-Assisted Suicide Within A Kantian Framework, Daksha Bhatia
Philosophy
The highly polarized debate over the practice of physician-assisted suicide is relatively new to the realm of ethical issues. Physician-assisted suicide was first explicitly legalized in the United States in 1994, when Oregon passed its Death with Dignity Act. Although the Act stipulates that a doctor “may prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill people under certain conditions,” the term physician-assisted suicide also encompasses giving a patient information on how to commit suicide, or giving them the means to do so in a form other than a prescription. Physician-assisted suicide is different from euthanasia in that the patient, …
Art Concept Pluralism, P.D. Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir
Art Concept Pluralism, P.D. Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
There is a long tradition of trying to analyze art either by providing a definition (essentialism) or by tracing its contours as an indefinable, open concept (antiessentialism). Both art essentialists and art anti-essentialists share an implicit assumption of art concept monism. We argue that this is a mistake. Species concept pluralism, a well-explored position in philosophy of biology, provides a model for art concept pluralism. We explore the conditions under which concept pluralism is appropriate, and we argue that they obtain for art. Art concept pluralism allows us to recognize that different art concepts are useful for different purposes, and …
The Archaeology And Translation Of Greek Tragedy : Tragedy And The Emotions, Daniel Edward Gremmler
The Archaeology And Translation Of Greek Tragedy : Tragedy And The Emotions, Daniel Edward Gremmler
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The history of interpreting Greek tragedy and the emotions is a history of logos. Tragedy, however, is poiēsis and speaks the language of muthos. This project approaches popular interpretations of tragedy and the emotions as problems of translation between various discourses: between Greek and English, past and present, historical and transhistorical, logos and muthos. After identifying the ways in which logos clashes with logos from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and modern classicists, we suggest a new framework through which the emotional effect of tragedy, the tragic pleasure, can be understood: the thaumon and the deinon (wondrous and terrible).
A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik
A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …
Demonstrative Induction And The Skeleton Of Inference, P.D. Magnus
Demonstrative Induction And The Skeleton Of Inference, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
It has been common wisdom for centuries that scientific inference cannot be deductive; if it is inference at all, it must be a distinctive kind of inductive inference. According to demonstrative theories of induction, however, important scientific inferences are not inductive in the sense of requiring ampliative inference rules at all. Rather, they are deductive inferences with sufficiently strong premises. General considerations about inferences suffice to show that there is no difference in justification between an inference construed demonstratively or ampliatively. The inductive risk may be shouldered by premises or rules, but it cannot be shirked. Demonstrative theories of induction …
Reid's Defense Of Common Sense, P.D. Magnus
Reid's Defense Of Common Sense, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Thomas Reid is often misread as defending common sense, if at all, only by relying on illicit premises about God or our natural faculties. On these theological or reliabilist misreadings, Reid makes common sense assertions where he cannot give arguments. This paper attempts to untangle Reid's defense of common sense by distinguishing four arguments: (a) the argument from madness, (b) the argument from natural faculties, (c) the argument from impotence, and (d) the argument from practical commitment. Of these, (a) and (c) do rely on problematic premises that are no more secure than claims of common sense itself. Yet (b) …
Fibs In The Wikipedia (Supplemental Data), P.D. Magnus
Fibs In The Wikipedia (Supplemental Data), P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
These are details of research conducted in November and December 2007. The file is meant as a supplement to publication, and I have not attempted here to provide any analysis of the results
Distributed Cognition And The Task Of Science, P.D. Magnus
Distributed Cognition And The Task Of Science, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
This paper gives a characterization of distributed cognition (d-cog) and explores ways that the framework might be applied in studies of science. I argue that a system can only be given a d-cog description if it is thought of as performing a task. Turning our attention to science, we can try to give a global d-cog account of science or local d-cog accounts of particular scientific projects. Several accounts of science can be seen as global d-cog accounts: Robert Merton's sociology of scientific norms, Philip Kitcher's 20th-century account of cognitive labor, and Kitcher's 21st-century notion of well-ordered science. Problems that …
What’S New About The New Induction?, P.D. Magnus
What’S New About The New Induction?, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The problem of underdetermination is thought to hold important lessons for philosophy of science. Yet, as Kyle Stanford has recently argued, typical treatments of the offer only restatements of familiar philosophical problems. Following suggestions in Duhem and Sklar, Stanford calls for a New Induction from the history of science. It will provide proof, he thinks, of “the kind of underdetermination that the history of science reveals to be a distinctive and genuine threat to even our best scientific theories” [Sta01, p. S12]. This paper examines Stanford’s New Induction and argues that it— like the other forms of underdetermination that he …
Peirce: Underdetermination, Agnosticism, And Related Mistakes, P.D. Magnus
Peirce: Underdetermination, Agnosticism, And Related Mistakes, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
There are two ways that we might respond to the underdetermination of theory by data. One response, which we can call the agnostic response, is to suspend judgment: “Where scientific standards cannot guide us, we should believe nothing”. Another response, which we can call the fideist response, is to believe whatever we would like to believe: “If science cannot speak to the question, then we may believe anything without science ever contradicting us”. C.S. Peirce recognized these options and suggested evading the dilemma. It is a Logical Maxim, he suggests, that there could be no genuine underdetermination. This is no …
Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender
Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The no‐miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much‐discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for why the two most prominent ‘wholesale’ arguments in the literature seem irresolvable. Framed probabilistically, we can see very clearly why realists and anti‐realists have been talking past one another. We then formulate a dilemma for advocates of either argument, answer …
Underdetermination And The Problem Of Identical Rivals, P.D. Magnus
Underdetermination And The Problem Of Identical Rivals, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
If two theory formulations are merely different expressions of the same theory, then any problem of choosing between them cannot be due to the underdetermination of theories by data. So one might suspect that we need to be able to tell distinct theories from mere alternate formulations before we can say anything substantive about underdetermination, that we need to solve the problem of identical rivals before addressing the problem of underdetermination. Here I consider two possible solutions: Quine proposes that we call two theories identical if they are equivalent under a reconstrual of predicates, but this would mishandle important cases. …
Williamson On Knowledge And Psychological Explanation, P.D. Magnus, Jonathan Cohen
Williamson On Knowledge And Psychological Explanation, P.D. Magnus, Jonathan Cohen
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
According to many philosophers, psychological explanation canlegitimately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in termsof knowledge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essential role in ordinary psychological explanation.Williamson's argument works on two fronts.First, he argues against the claim that, unlike knowledge, belief is``composite'' (representable as a conjunction of a narrow and a broadcondition). Belief's failure to be composite, Williamson thinks, …