Epistemology Commons^™

The Morality Of Same Sex Marriage: How Not To Globalize A Cultural Anomie, Chris O. Akpan

Journal of Health Ethics

The question of the morality of same-sex marriage has become quite prevalent in the 21^st century. Some western cultures believe that same-sex marriage is morally defensible and can be legalized. Using the human right fad and political might, they subtly engineer the globalization of this phenomenon. This move has been strongly opposed mostly by ‘developing’ nations and some churches across nations. The argument of such group is that same-sex marriage is immoral, unnatural and ungodly. This paper defends the thesis that same-sex marriage cannot morally be defended successfully. It shows that same-sex marriage is not exclusively a western phenomenon …

Contextualism In Epistemology And Relevance Theory, Mark Jary, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We briefly introduce Contextualism in Epistemology, highlight a linguistic challenge that it seemingly faces, and then describe a Relevance Theoretic response to that challenge. We end by contrasting this view with related ones.

A Post-Critical Science Of Administration: Toward A Society Of Explorers, Craig M. Wickstrom

ETD Archive

What is meant by "science" and whether it is an appropriate model for public administration has been a subject of debate since Woodrow Wilson called for a science of administration in 1887. This dissertation introduces another voice into that debate, the voice of a world-renowned physical chemist named Michael Polanyi. Polanyi's sharp criticism of positivism reinforces the arguments of those questioning the legitimacy of an administrative science, but instead of rejecting it, he constructed an alternative definition of science that recognizes the indeterminacy of reality, the personal nature of knowledge, and the centrality of "the logic of tacit knowing." Because …

Cultivating Our Garden, Daniela Chavez

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Candide by Voltaire promotes social reform in areas dealing with injustice and corrupt power–especially in religious organizations. One biographical book, one master of arts thesis, and two literary criticism essays were read to further expand the reader’s understanding of Candide. The impact religious organizations had on Voltaire and on European societies, their insincerity, and the abuse of their power sparked a fervent desire in Voltaire to criticize such institutions in order to reinvigorate the rights and freedoms of citizens and eliminate the abuses that societies continued to bear. The last phrase in the novel reflects Voltaire’s call to speak …

Hermeneutic Reflections On Descartes’ Introduction To His Meditations On First Philosophy, David B. Allison

Research Resources

In these extracts reflecting on Descartes’ Introduction to Meditations on First Philosophy we undertake to read between the Descartes project, reviewing Descartes’ own account of his own project. By way of a close and critical reading, the key method of any hermeneutic approach to a philosophical text, the essay seeks to explore, in a parallel to Ranke’s ideal of history as it itself actually was [eigentlich gewesen], what Descartes ‘actually’ says. In the end, this articulates Descartes’ epistemological project beyond its usual interpretative scheme.

Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science, Ian Barnard, Jan Osborn

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article raises questions and concerns regarding students from the sciences working with faculty in the humanities in interdisciplinary settings. It explores the experience of two English professors facing the privileging of "facts" and a science-based understanding of the world in their own classrooms. It poses both questions and pedagogical possibilities for addressing conflicts around epistemologies, scholarship, and teaching and learning.

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 …

Novel Passions : Re-Reading English Fiction Through The History Of Emotion, 1689-1751, Joel P. Sodano

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

“The passions” were of paramount importance in the 18th century. Classical contexts established excessive emotions as potentially dangerous forces that could override the will and dictate human action, but they also perceived them as inessential to and even extirpable from human nature. With the advent of empiricism, the theoretical framework of emotion shifted from an external condition to an internal proposition. Thus, in the 18th century a conceptual symbiosis is formed between “the Gales of Passion” and “the Reins of Reason” (Spectator, no. 408, 1712). This seemingly archaic idea is actually being confirmed by contemporary neuroscience. For recently discovered neural …

Anaġoptaŋ Po! (Listen!) What We Can Learn About Our Own Stories By Accepting The Stories Of Others: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Competing Narratives Within The Dakota Access Pipeline Conflict, Scot Zellmer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

There have been over five-hundred years of interactions between European Colonizer-settlers and the Indigenous peoples of North America. Starting with the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery through the present, language embedded in documents, laws, policies and popular culture, have created damaging and misleading stereotypes and identities for these Indigenous Peoples, the American Indians. This study connects historical and contemporary perceptions constructing the dominant narrative that informs many people about American Indians. Narrative Paradigm Theory, Critical Race Theory and Indigenous Theories all serve as a lens to deconstruct the legitimacy of the dominant narrative and promote the salience of counter-narratives constructed by …

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception, Peter A. Antich

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded on perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see …

D Is For The Most Cherished Sense (Whence It Comes And Wither It Goes), Hallie S. Mcneill

Theses and Dissertations

A transcript of the audio that constitutes the work by the same title, along with an introduction and relevant bibliography.

Spiritual Journeys: A Study Of Ifá /Òrìṣà Practitioners In The United States Initiated In Nigeria, Tony Van Der Meer

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand the culture of one of the newest branches of traditional Yorùbá Ifá/Òrìṣà practice in the United States from practitioners born in the United States that were initiated in Nigeria, West Africa.The epistemology of the Ifá/Òrìṣà belief system in the United States has been based on the history and influence of Regla de Ocha or Santeria that developed out of Cuban innovation and practice.This is an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic study that pulls from participant observation, field notes, interviews, and photos as data.The central question of this dissertation is what are the challenges and …

Refreshment For The Soul: A Phenomenological Study Of The Student Experience Of Beauty In School, Paul Reiff

Dissertations

Prompted by the ratio-scientific emphasis in the curriculum, I conducted this study to explore the lifeworlds of students to understand their lived experience of beauty in school. This investigation entailed a phenomenological study, the method of which included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with four high school students. This study aimed to examine the essence of beauty in the lived experience of students in school, to explore the perceptions of students regarding school as a place to appreciate beauty, and to understand the needs of students as a place that develops their aesthetic sensibilities. The findings include the description …

The Consequences Of Narrative, Kylie Mosbacher

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

The Discursive Functioning Of Knowledge Claims In Research Studies On Children’S Conceptual Knowledge Of Number, Patrick D. Byers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Researchers interested in the development of conceptual knowledge of number have studied children’s behavior in various tasks or other contexts in order to draw conclusions about what they know. The guiding assumption of this work is that the presence or absence of a given form of knowledge is typically reflected in the ability/inability to perform certain types of behavior. Researchers complicate this assumption when they claim that (1) the ability to perform a given behavior may also reflect simple imitation or rote learning in the absence of understanding, and/or (2) that the inability to perform a certain behavior may reflect …

Three Essays In Intuitionistic Epistemology, Tudor Protopopescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We present three papers studying knowledge and its logic from an intuitionistic viewpoint.

An Arithmetic Interpretation of Intuitionistic Verification

Intuitionistic epistemic logic introduces an epistemic operator to intuitionistic logic which reflects the intended BHK semantics of intuitionism. The fundamental assumption concerning intuitionistic knowledge and belief is that it is the product of verification. The BHK interpretation of intuitionistic logic has a precise formulation in the Logic of Proofs and its arithmetical semantics. We show here that this interpretation can be extended to the notion of verification upon which intuitionistic knowledge is based. This provides the systems of intuitionistic epistemic logic …

There’S Nothing To Beat A Backward Clock: A Rejoinder To Adams, Barker And Clarke, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Neil Sinhababu and I presented Backward Clock, anoriginal counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis ofpropositional knowledge. Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke argue that Backward Clock is no such counterexample. Theirargument fails to nullify Backward Clock whichalso shows that other tracking analyses, such as Dretske’s and one that Adams et al may well have in mind, are inadequate.

Wisdom: Understanding And The Good Life, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I argue that a necessary condition for being wise is: understanding how to live well. The condition, by requiring understanding rather than a wide variety of justified beliefs or knowledge, as Ryan and Whitcomb respectively require, yields the desirable result that being wise is compatible with having some false beliefs but not just any false beliefs about how to live well-regardless of whether those beliefs are justified or not. In arguing for understanding how to live well as a necessary condition for wisdom, I reject the view, proposed by both Ryan and Whitcomb, that subjects such as chemistry lies within …

Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand at least one prevalent religious epistemology in the Churches of Christ by exploring the work of Thomas B. Warren. To accomplish this goal, I first offer a descriptive analysis of Warren’s theory of knowledge followed by an assessment of its strong and weak points. Ultimately finding his epistemology unsatisfying, I conclude the thesis by highlighting recent developments in religious epistemology that might point the way forward in accounting for knowledge of God in a theologically and philosophically robust way.

Nāgārjuna’S Pañcakoṭi, Agrippa’S Trilemma, And The Uses Of Skepticism, Ethan A. Mills

Comparative Philosophy

While the contemporary problem of the criterion raises similar epistemological issues as Agrippa’s Trilemma in ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, the consideration of such epistemological questions has served two different purposes. On one hand, there is the purely practical purpose of Pyrrhonism, in which such questions are a means to reach suspension of judgment, and on the other hand, there is the theoretical purpose of contemporary epistemologists, in which these issues raise theoretical problems that drive the search for theoretical resolution. In classical India, similar issues arise in Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī, but it is not entirely clear what Nāgārjuna’s purpose is. Contrary …