Psychology Commons^™

Factlessness & Faultlessness: Individual Differences & Dimensions Of Philosophical Dispute, Geoffrey Scott Holtzman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project addresses the question of why philosophical disputes persist, and tackles the problem of how we might better approach them. I demonstrate empirically several ways in which personality, gender, and other factors are associated with specific philosophical beliefs. Typically, one might assume that these individual difference factors are irrelevant to philosophy, and can only serve to bias philosophical disputants. Against this view, I present four case studies, which collectively highlight the different ways in which individual differences in lived experience may be inseparable from philosophical concepts themselves.

Acting Wide Awake: Attention And The Ethics Of Emotion, Jacob Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In cases where two human cultures disagree over fundamental ethical values, metaethical questions about what could make one or the other position correct arise with great force. Philosophers committed to naturalistically plausible accounts of ethics have offered little hope of adjudicating such conflicts, leading some to embrace moral relativism. In my dissertation, I develop an empirically grounded response to moral relativism by turning away from debates over which action types are right and wrong and focusing instead on shared features of human emotional motivation. On my account, being motivated by ill-will is ethically bad (if it is), just because human …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …