Technological Fair Play: An Ethical Framework For Olympic Sports, Marwan Hellal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research strived to address age-old concerns clouding the governance of sport technologies, specifically in sports under the Olympic umbrella. Anti-doping has long been a mandatory clause in the Olympic Charter. Yet, other forms of technological incursions have long been left unaddressed or prohibited via premature reactive judgments. Utilizing a multidimensional philosophical lens encompassing scholarship in the fields of philosophy of sport, applied ethics and the philosophy of technology - this thesis is aimed at creating an accessible, structured, and principled ethical framework to guide the integration of emerging technologies within Olympic sports. Taking an analytical look into WADA’s underlying …

Conceptual Engineering & Contextualism, Madhavi Mohan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between conceptual engineering and contextualism in philosophy. Conceptual engineering evaluates philosophical theories about concepts against whether they meet normative and political objectives, while contextualism highlights the influence of context on meaning and truth. I argue that conceptual engineering is subject to contextualism, rendering theories about concepts applicable only in specific contexts.

The first chapter examines essentially contested concepts: concepts inevitably subject to contestation, owing to different, equally legitimate reasons philosophers may have for valuing them. Nevertheless, within specific contexts, these concepts serve particular purposes, and conceptions aligned with those purposes better capture their …

The Cave And The Stars: On The People And Democracy Of Non-Philosophy, Jeremy R. Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This monograph dissertation explores the work of François Laruelle and the democratic nature of his non-philosophy. In four separate chapters, this dissertation argues for identifying non-philosophy as the introduction of democracy into thought and seeks to instantiate a necessary theoretical delimitation for its programme, which explores the relationships between people, thought, and power. Chapter One analyzes previous philosophical frameworks from thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Horkheimer, and Louis Althusser on their respective stances toward philosophy’s role for people. Chapter Two investigates the work of François Laruelle for the past fifty years as the development of non-philosophy or “human philosophy.” …

Essays On Privilege And Its Implications For Relational Autonomy And Vaccine Hesitancy, Nicole Fice

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One goal of feminist philosophy is to challenge unjust systems of power like patriarchy, which privilege some social groups while oppressing others. In this three-chapter dissertation, I argue that to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of privilege and its implications.

In chapter one, I raise objections to some existing philosophical accounts of privilege. These accounts are either too broad in defining privilege as always advantageous or they are vague regarding what privilege comprises. I provide an account of privilege which clarifies that privilege is generally advantageous and that privilege includes tangible resources and options to do certain …

Civil War And Power: A Theoretical Inquiry, Can Guven

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a theoretical project that explores the conceptual nexus between civil war and power. It maps out a lineage of thought which posits civil war as a framework for explicating politics, not as a pre-political stage of savagery or a deteriorated condition of the socio-political order. Starting with Michel Foucault’s radical yet short-lived civil war thesis, which situates civil war as the matrix of relations of power, this investigation traverses the work of several theorists and philosophers who have drawn on, or departed from, this line of thought. It critically evaluates Giorgio Agamben’s use of the concept …

The Moral And Political Status Of Microaggressions, Heather Stewart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a robust philosophical examination of a phenomenon that is morally, socially, and politically significant – microaggressions. Microaggressions are understood to be brief and routine verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that, whether intentional or unintentional, convey hostility toward or bias against members of marginalized groups. Microaggressions are rooted in stereotypes and/or bias (whether implicit or explicit) and are connected to broader systems of oppression.

Microaggressions are philosophically interesting, since they involve significant ambiguity, questions about speech and communication, and the ability for our speech to encode and transmit bits of meaning. Microaggressions prompt reflection about the nature of …

Apology And Reconciliation In Settler States, Nicholas B. Murphy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a normative account of how we should conceive of reconciliation between Indigenous people(s), states qua states, and their non-Indigenous citizens. It mines pre-theoretic understandings of reconciliation to determine appropriate governing norms for reconciled relationships, the normative expectations that attend these, and what processes or initiatives might be necessary to achieve them. In liberal democratic settler states like Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand the desirability of reconciliation is acknowledged by all parties. However, considerable ambiguity surrounds the concept ‘reconciliation.’ This is problematic because concepts influence social discourse, and the rhetoric of reconciliation not only guides …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

Imaginaire De La Fin, Icônes, Esthétique. (Ir)Représenter La Post-Apocalypse Dans La Bande Dessinée Et Le Cinéma Du Génocide Tutsi., Alain Agnessan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette étude sur la bande dessinée et le cinéma du génocide tutsi s’écarte de l’analyse désormais canonique des politiques mémorielles et pratiques testimoniales pour en investir le parti pris post-apocalyptique . Elle s’agence en deux volets, ou, plutôt, en deux lieux de regard. Envisageant l’imaginaire de la fin qui s’est constitué autour du génocide tutsi, le premier volet de l’étude s’attelle à décrire une scène « cross-traumatic » ou transtraumatique, appelée génoscape, sur laquelle la pensée, les images et les discours critiques lient le destin éthique, esthétique et épistémique du génocide tutsi à celui de la Shoah. Cette démarche …

Derogatory Words And Speech Acts: An Illocutionary Force Indicator Theory Of Slurs, Chang Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? Many theories of slurs answer these questions by assuming that slurs communicate derogatory messages. However, little attention has been paid to the speech …

Frontiers Of Care, Thomas E. Randall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Care ethics is a feminist normative theory that emphasizes the moral significance of our relational interdependency in the provision and receipt of care. On this view, ethical action is situated and evaluated as it emerges through caring relations. However, an oft-cited criticism of care ethics is that its normative frontiers cannot be extended to the wider concerns of justice that lie beyond our relational limits. In this dissertation, I outline and defend an interpretation of care ethics that shows how the values of care identified within our personal relations can be abstracted to show that we do have certain obligations …

A Study Of Six Nations Public Library: Rights And Access To Information, Alison Frayne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary Indigenous public libraries play a critical role in providing access to information in Indigenous communities. My research focuses on the relationship between rights and access to information for individuals and communities within the context of Indigenous public libraries. I use a qualitative case study methodology of the Six Nations Public Library (SNPL) in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada. Interviews were conducted with SNPL patrons and library management and with off-reserve participants from government and library associations.

I analyse four themes, library governance, rights, library value and access to information, which are outcomes of the SNPL case study findings. This analysis reveals …

Monuments Of The Present: The Document And Monument In Michel Foucault's Archaeology, Alexander Walker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates Michel Foucault’s distinction between the monument and the document in his key methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), originally released in French as L’Archéologie du Savior in 1969. Foucault attempts to formulate a new form of history based on the examination of the monument, where previous methodologies had examined the document.

The thesis first examines Foucault’s theorization of this distinction and then questions the stability of these two categories through the comments of art critic Erwin Panofsky. I propose that the monument and document distinction implicates the historian in the power-relations that Foucault articulates later in …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

A Duty To Adopt? On The Ethics And Politics Of Adoption, Veromi Arsiradam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Around the world, millions of children are in need of parental care. In response to this global crisis, some philosophers defend a moral duty for prospective parents to adopt children rather than procreate. Challenges to the duty focus almost exclusively on parents’ desires to have biological children. However, reasons deriving primarily from one’s membership in a social group that favour procreation over adoption or oppose transracial adoptions are largely overlooked. In this dissertation, I examine whether group-based reasons could justifiably override a duty to adopt for prospective parents who are members of racially oppressed groups. I ultimately argue that group-based …

A Complete Special Goods Theory Of Filial Obligations, Cameron Fenton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Until recently little philosophical attention has been paid to ethical issues arising within the family. This has changed in the past few decades, and a growing body of literature has developed on the obligations that exist within families. However, one area of family ethics that remains under-theorized is the nature of children’s obligations to their parents. What, if anything, do children owe their parents? And, on what parts of the filial relationship are obligations based?

My argument runs along three major lines that correspond to the chapters of this dissertation. In the first chapter, I claim that the two dominant …

Virtue Ethics For Relational Beings, Mathieu Roy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In On Virtue Ethics, Rosalind Husthouse outlines an account of virtue ethics and human flourishing grounded in an understanding of human beings as emotionally complex, social, and rational animals. These attributes give rise to a set of ends against which the goodness of our behavioural, affective, and intellectual dispositions are measured, namely, 1) survival of the individual, 2) continuance of the species, 3) characteristic enjoyment of pleasures (and avoidance of pain), and 4) the good functioning of the social group.

I contend, however, that this picture is incomplete. More specifically, I outline the psychological effects of prolonged solitary confinement to …

Varieties Of Objectivity: What's Worth Keeping?, Lori Kantymir

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation addresses the problem of whether or not morality can be objective. Objectivity seems built into our everyday moral discourse and practice, yet it can be difficult to say just what moral objectivity consists in. There is significant disagreement in the philosophical literature on this topic. I examine three influential contemporary accounts of objectivity: Derek Parfit’s non-naturalist realism, Sharon Street’s anti-realist constructivism, and Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’ cognitivist expressivism. Despite their differences, these authors share a common aim: to defend the idea that the truth of moral claims are at least in some sense invariant with respect to …

The Primacy Of Resistance: Anarchism, Foucault, And The Art Of Not Being Governed, Derek C. Barnett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning with a critical inquiry into the reasons why the field of the political is traditionally elaborated in the archic nexus between government and state sovereignty, this study examines the possibilities of elaborating an alternative theory of the political in the intersections between Michel Foucault’s theory of resistance and anarchist political theory. Taking Foucault’s fifth thesis on power from The History of Sexuality as an alternative paradigm from which to reread the history of the political, the aim of this study is to demonstrate that the hallmark of Foucault’s work emerges in the ways in which his analytic of power …

The Moral Status And Welfare Of Patients Diagnosed As Vegetative With Covert Awareness, Mackenzie S. Graham

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Several neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that a minority of patients diagnosed as being in the vegetative state are able to modulate their brain activity in response to the commands of researchers, thus demonstrating that they are ‘covertly aware.’ I examine the moral significance of this discovery, with a specific focus on the implications for patient welfare. I argue that the presence of awareness in these patients is important because it allows for the presence of sentience—the capacity for suffering and enjoyment—which I argue is a sufficient condition for moral status. Insofar as these patients have moral status, their interests matter …

Tesitmony As Significance Negotiation, Jennifer F. Epp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation addresses the following questions: How should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? What do people use testimony to do? And why does ‘what people do’ with testimony matter epistemically? In response to these questions I both define and characterize testimony.

While doing so I argue for the following answers, given here very briefly: What do people do when they testify? They tell each other things and avow that those things are true, offering their statements to others as reasons to believe. More importantly, they interact with each other in order to negotiate about significance. Why do these activities matter epistemically? Because …

Contesting Gender Concepts, Language And Norms: Three Critical Articles On Ethical And Political Aspects Of Gender Non-Conformity, Stephanie Julia Kapusta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions.

In chapter two, I …

Conduits Of Communion: Monstrous Affections In Algonquin Traditional Territory, Ian S.G. Puppe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012).

Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations Peoples, local …

Civil Interests, The Social Contract, And The Conditions Of Political Legitimacy, Michael S. Borgida

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the idea of civil interests, and considers how civil interests constrain the legitimate exercise of political authority. John Locke presents the concept of civil interests in A Letter Concerning Toleration as the legitimate object of political authority’s concern. First, I identify the idea of civil interests and its relationship with the social contract in Locke’s Letter. I argue for the prominence of Locke’s contractarian line of argument in his case for toleration. Second, I trace the idea of civil interests through the historical social contract arguments of Locke’s Second Treatise, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, …

The Modern Secularization Of Just War Theory And Its Lessons For Contemporary Thought, Aviva Shiller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Just war theory is a family of views that has undergone many important changes throughout its development in the Western philosophical tradition. The following is an historical analysis of the transition from a religious to a secular conception of just war theory in the Early Modern period. My main argument is that the secularization of the theory led to the separation of jus ad bellum from jus in bello, a major change that had positive consequences on the theory and its application. One important consequence of this change was to place combatants on both sides of a conflict on …

De Heidegger À Henry, Critique De La Transcendance Et Phénoménologie Du Corps Vivant, Vincent Marzano-Poitras

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis evaluates Michel Henry’s phenomenology of the lived body: A thorough reconsideration of the role of the lived body in the transcendental constitution of our world has important ethical consequences. We begin with Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology, which rests on his understanding of time as the horizon of being. We then turn to Henry’s criticism of transcendental monism and its phenomenological derealization. Henry subsequently argues for a new thinking of immanence, which requires a redefinition of phenomenology through the immediate experience of the embodied self. This immediate immanence manifests itself, through our perception of transcendence, as the affective tonality …

Gamete Provision And Moral Responsibility, Reuven A. Brandt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

The use of third-party gametes in reproductive procedures has raised ethical questions about what responsibilities, if any, the providers of these gametes have towards the children they help to create. Much of this debate has focused on the conditions under which individuals acquire parental responsibilities, and the manner in which these responsibilities can be ethically discharged. Rather than taking parenthood as a starting point, however I focus on the conditions under which care-taking responsibilities arise more generally. I defend the thesis that gamete providers acquire substantial inalienable care-taking responsibilities towards their biological offspring, but that these responsibilities do not …

Love And Ethics In The Works Of J. M. E. Mctaggart, Trevor J. Bieber

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation attempts to make contributions to normative ethics and to the history of philosophy. First, it contributes to the defense of consequentialist ethics against objections grounded upon the value of loving relationships. Secondly, it provides the first systematic account of John M. E. McTaggart’s (1866-1925) ethical theory and its relation to his philosophy of love.

According to (maximizing) consequentialist ethics, it is always morally wrong to knowingly do what will make the world worse-off than it could have been (i.e., had one chosen one of the other courses of action available to one at the time). Many consequentialists also …

Crossing The Law: Trans Activism, Aleatory Materialism, And The Analyst's Discourse, Christopher M. Bomba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines contingency to elucidate transgender activism’s leadership in radical politics. I take up Louis Althusser’s theory of aleatory materialism to politicize everyday encounters. Trans activists gain a parallax view through gendered (mis)recognition that reveals the structure of ideology’s vanishing points. By contrast, I criticize a cisgendered viewpoint and demonstrate the logical errors that result in transphobic behavior through Jacques Lacan’s version of the prisoner’s dilemma. I conclude to theorize trans activism’s engagement with the state through Lacanian analytic technique. This technique does not result in traditional “treatment,” but instead fuels activism with knowledge of the structures that must …

A Feminist Defense Of Moderate Moral Intuitionism, Bill Jc Cameron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The three integrated articles of this dissertation are concerned with the epistemic status of moral intuitions. The first article argues in favour of moderate moral intuitionism, the view that while any successful moral epistemology must be intuitionist to at least some extent, it must also take intuitions to be fallible. This is accomplished by synthesizing work by Robert Audi and George Bealer into a view of moral intuitions which is capable of overcoming some major contemporary objections against intuitionism, particularly from Sharon Street and Peter Singer.

The next article raises a more powerful objection to intuitionism, applying feminist ethics and …