Metaphysics Commons^™

The Refutation Of Existing Proofs For The Existence Of God And The Continued Search For A Valid Proof Of The Existence Of God: A Defense And Interpretation Of Kant, Emma Houston

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I use Kant's Transcendental Ideal and Fourth Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason as a bedrock to understand mistakes in popular spatio-temporal and transcendental proofs for the existence of God and develop a discussion of the necessity of the continued search for, and potential foundation of, an alternative proof of the existence of God. I will first attempt to instill the thought of the necessity of a commitment to the idea of the existence of God. I will then explain and clarify a) the three transcendental proofs for the existence of God and b) what I …

Pursuing Natural Unity, Consciousness Included, Rowen Cox-Rubien

Scripps Senior Theses

An ontological exploration of consciousness and how it is related to the body and other aspects of physical reality. Framed by David Chalmers' conception of "The Hard Problem", we begin from a physicalist perspective to discuss the problem of mental causation, which is the inquiry of how the mind communicates and interacts with the body. From here we examine the employment of identity reduction to functionalize and therefore physically explain mentality. We find that reductionist methods, the backbone of scientific investigation, do not work to explain conscious experience, because conscious experience is not quantifiable--it is qualitative. Thus we are left …

Lifetime, Emily E. Kuchenbecker

Theses and Dissertations

Time is my bully. Time marks the start of something, as well as the end. We are all carrying out the inexorable passing of time as it relates to our impending mortalities.

I do not fear death.

The awareness of my body’s impermanence employs me to feel that much more connected to the vessel containing that of which I am.

But what am I? Am I my body- or is it much deeper?

Through the work executed during my graduate research, I have attempted to quantify my existence through the archiving my time and body. This document ushers you through …

Foucault And The Recommencement Of Philosophy, Javier De La Higuera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Javier de la Higuera discusses in his “Foucault and the Recommencement of Philosophy” the idea of a recommencement of philosophy that Michel Foucault has posited on several occasions, although with different meaning and intentions. This article reconstructs how he approached this in the 1960s and shows the fundamental changes that this idea of recommencement underwent in the later Foucault. In his last three years at the Collège de France, Foucault appeared to reinterpret the very idea of philosophy based on his analysis of ancient spirituality and of parrhesiastic philosophical practice. The interpretation that Gilles Deleuze gave of late Foucault, devoted …

How To Be A Realist About Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Although some authors hold that natural kinds are necessarily relative to disciplinary domains, many authors presume that natural kinds must be absolute, categorical features of the reality— often assuming that without even mentioning the alternative. Recognizing both possibilities, one may ask whether the difference especially matters. I argue that it does. Looking at recent arguments about natural kind realism, I argue that we can best make sense of the realism question by thinking of natural kindness as a relation that holds between a category and a domain.

Did Hollywood Take Theatre "By Hook Or By Crook?", Catherine S. Wright

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Hollywood and Theatre have been partners in producing entertainment for over 100 years. The relationship was fruitful for both parties, but Hollywood moguls and playwrights battled over ownership of the work and crafting of its creative nucleus, story and character. Theatre was the dominant entertainment right before the rise of motion pictures. Once Hollywood’s talkies closed the curtain on silent films, playwrights had a high creative worth to movie makers. In the cinema, story and dialogue were essential for its survival and growth. Playwrights were courted by the Hollywood studio heads but were not offered equal partnership as they were …

On Affect: Function And Phenomenology, Andreas Elpidorou

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper explores the nature of emotions by considering what appear to be two differing, perhaps even conflicting, approaches to affectivity—an evolutionary functional account, on the one hand, and a phenomenological view, on the other. The paper argues for the centrality of the notion of function in both approaches, articulates key differences between them, and attempts to understand how such differences can be overcome.

"Not A Simple Matter: Rejecting Materialism As A Solution To The Mind-Body Problem", Andrew Coyle, Steve Parchment Dr., Minh Nguyen Dr.

Posters-at-the-Capitol

"Not a Simple Matter: Rejecting Materialism as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem"

By Andrew Coyle

Mentored by Dr. Steve Parchment and Dr. Minh Nguyen

Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies Many scholars accept materialism as an adequate solution to the mind-body problem. However, acceptance of materialism creates more problems than it purports to solve. This poster provides a background to the mind-body problem. This poster explores materialism as a potential solution to the mind-body problem. After reviewing materialism, it is rejected as an adequate solution to the mind-body problem. The poster concludes by positing property dualism as an …

Cautious Realism And Middle Range Ontology, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology is centrally about how metaphysics is embrangled with epistemology. I begin by discussing the broader literature in science and values, where arguments akin to Chakravartty's have been much-discussed. Then I talk about my own preferred approach, middle range ontology, which does not fit neatly into any of the three stances Chakravartty discusses. Finally, I use these considerations to pose a dilemma.

Call Thee Ishmael, Mark Backus

Sophia and Philosophia

“Moby-Dick is a strangely compelling book.”[1] Scholarship and commentary help the reader understand why Ishmael’s tale is so compelling, but not always why it is strangely so. The perennial search for a master key to unlock the strangeness of Moby-Dick beneath its infinite layers has added more mesmerizing layers, but if many of the proposed keys fit into the lock of Moby-Dick, why is there yet a sense that none have completely opened “the great flood-gates?” (Moby-Dick 22, hereafter “MD”). Is it because none of them are right, or that they are only partly right, or that …

The Poststructuralist Broom Of Wallace’S System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein And Derrida, Vernon W. Cisney

Philosophy Faculty Publications

David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. …

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

Essence, Explanation, And Modal Knowledge, Antonella Mallozzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary aim of this project is to put forward a novel account of knowledge of metaphysical modality. I call this the “Essentialist Superexplanatory” account of modal knowledge, because it relies on the following two main theses: (a) knowledge of metaphysical necessity is grounded in knowledge of essence; and (b) essences are properties, sets of properties, or mechanisms, having distinctive explanatory powers for how things are. While thesis (a) is quite popular in the current debates, mostly thanks to Kit Fine’s recent work in modal metaphysics, thesis (b) introduces an original brand of essentialism. As I show by means of …

Dialetheism, Paradox, And Nāgārjuna’S Way Of Thinking, Richard H. Jones

Comparative Philosophy

Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness, his ideas on “two truths” and language, and his general method of arguing are presented clearly by him and can be stated without paradox. That the dialetheists today can restate his beliefs in paradoxical ways does not mean that Nāgārjuna argued that way; in fact, their restatements misrepresent and undercut his arguments.

Time, Tense, And Ontology: Prolegomena To The Metaphysics Of Tense, The Phenomenology Of Temporality, And The Ontology Of Time, Justin Brandt Wisniewski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

What does it mean to say that something is “temporal” or that something “exists” in time? What is time? And how should we interpret the “ontology” of time? One important strand in twentieth century thought and the philosophy of time has given these fundamental questions a neat and tidy set of influential answers—according to this view, time itself is understood to be a kind of series, and the basic ontology of time is taken to consist of events, together with either the tenses, which get interpreted as special sorts of second order properties known as “A properties” (i.e. the properties …

Pitong Sulyap Sa Pilosopiya Ng Wika Ni Padre Ferriols, Wilhelm Patrick Joseph S. Strebel

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

The Jesuit priest, Roque J. Ferriols is well known in Ateneo de Manila University as the first philosophy professor to teach philosophy in Filipino. Since 1969 until he retired in 2014, he taught all of his philosophy classes, both in the undergraduate and graduate levels, in Filipino. His example was followed by many Ateneo philosophy faculty. Since around the 1990s the number of philosophy classes taught in English and in Filipino had a 50/50 percentage ratio. This ratio continued on to the present time. As the tradition of teaching philosophy in Filipino nears its 50th anniversary in 2019, Ferriols continues …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Plato's Parmenides: On Being And Non-Being, Syed Husain

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I will discuss the Eight Hypotheses in Plato's Parmenides and draw out my own conclusion from them without any external help or secondary literature. I will then use this conclusion to address problems concerning the Parmenides in the Platonic Scholarship. The main conclusion I have drawn is that the Hypotheses are closing the gulf between Being and Non-Being via the concepts of Sameness, Difference, Becoming, Time and the Instant. In addition, the confluence of Being and Non-Being illuminates a subsidiary conclusion of this text possessing grounds for a new metaphysical presupposition of Being-Non-Being. I propose in this …

Thinking With Images, Ed Sarkis

Philosophy ETDs

This thesis argues that images are necessary for thinking. If this is true then the nature of images needs to be understood. The problem with many accounts of perception is assuming that representing what we see is a matter of accurate depiction. The problem is solved by attending to the skills of visual discernment rather than judgments about those perceptions. My approach is both historical and analytic. Aristotle, Hume, and Wittgenstein give accounts of perception which are critically discussed. The notion that an image is a copy is rejected by showing how complicated and indeterminate that relation is. Images have …

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.