Philosophy Commons^™

Demographics, Activities, And Environmental Factors Impact Burnout In A National Survey Of Emergency Medicine Residents, Nicole Battaglioli, Tim P. Moran, Simiao Li-Sauerwine

Journal of Wellness

Introduction: Burnout in emergency medicine and in residency training has been well-described. The impact of demographic, individual, and programmatic factors on burnout have not previously been determined in a national survey of emergency medicine residents. This study aimed to identify personal and environmental factors impacting resident burnout in a national sample of emergency medicine residents.

Methods: A prospective Emergency Medicine Resident Wellness Survey was administered in 2017. We surveyed respondents on demographic, personal, and environmental factors; each respondent also completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory - Human Services Survey. Linear regressions were used to identify variables associated with the Maslach Burnout …

Beyond Mental And Physical Pain: A Non-Reductive Account Of Suicide, Aya Aly Ragheb

Theses and Dissertations

What is the stigma behind our understanding of suicide? What causes this stigma? Should suicide only be viewed in relation to physical pain, as medicine often views it, or mental pain, as psychiatry views it? Or is it a more complex phenomenon? Can we think of suicide as a rational act that is, on the one hand, independent of pain, without, on the other hand, reducing it to mental illness? I will argue that if we can, we can give a less reductive account of suicide. In this paper, we shall attempt to give an answer to the above questions …

Netting Nemo: A Moral Ontology For The Scaled And Slimy, Zachary Piso

Between the Species

Here I develop an ontology of aquarium fish that articulates the relationships that many fishkeepers hold with their fish and considers how these relationships generate moral responsibilities. The investigation explores the norms already regulating hobbyist discourse and practice, charting the values that are cited to justify recommendations and restrictions and demonstrating how morally responsible fishkeeping participates in a particular moral ontology. Principally I aim to show that the subject of moral consideration in fishkeeping is rarely the individual fish and only sometimes the fish species, but paradigmatically the “community tank.” In getting fish, one has responsibilities to pair compatible species …

Gerry Is Well-Liked, Jimmy Guo '21

Heliotrope: IMSA's Arts & Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Philosophy, Ryan Mcelhaney

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Centering Animality In Law And Liberation: The Zoopolitics Of Reclaiming The Animal In Personhood, Paulina Siemieniec

Between the Species

Although there is widespread agreement that the property status of nonhuman animals is indefensible, the debate about how to remedy their situation is ongoing. This paper explores three possibilities for approaching the issue of legal status: (1) extending the existing concept of personhood beyond the human to other animals; (2) developing an alternative legal subjectivity for nonhuman animals that is neither property nor personhood; (3) redefining personhood in animal terms while retaining the rights-bearing significance of personhood and decentering the human from animal subjectivity in law. I offer a critique of the first two strategies and defend the third on …

Improving Philosophical Dialogue Interventions To Better Resolve Problematic Value Pluralism In Collaborative Environmental Science, Bethany K. Laursen, Chad Gonnerman, Stephen J. Crowley

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might …

Moral Agency, Luke Thompson

Student Research

My paper discusses the philosophical issue of animals and ethics. The question that I explore involves the moral status of humans and if humans should receive a higher moral status than other animals. Peter Singer, a moral philosopher, attacks the views of those who wish to give the interests of animals less weight than the interests of human beings. He advocates for a principle known as the equal consideration of interests. This principle states that one should give equal weight in one’s moral decision-making to the like interests of all those affected by one’s actions. Furthermore, the capacity of suffering/pain …

How Kristo Democratized Langit, Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

This paper is a philosophical exploration on the native appropriation of the Christian rationality for the creation of a discourse of genuine liberation. This appropriation stimulated the native creation of the discourse of Kaharian ng Langit which shaped the millenarian revolts; the Revolution of 1896; and even subsequent reform and liberation movements in the Philippines. Through a hermeneutical reflection on the babaylan cosmology and the transformation of the concept of the ideal society during the Spanish colonization; the author will show how the indigenous rationality created a new vision of a good society from the imposed colonizing rationality which it …

The Emotional Illusion Of Music: Contemporary Western Musical Aesthetics In Dialogue With Ancient Eastern Philosophy, Yin Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To …

Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …

The Linknyc Kiosk: Phone Booths, Urban Culture, And The Neoliberal Dream For New York City, Michael A. Villanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a history of the development policies around the phone booth in New York City as a “dialectical image” to understand the use of urban culture as a means of achieving political ends. First, I lay out a cultural history of public communication devices in their relation to the political and material changes in New York City since the late 19^th century. By doing so, this thesis explains how the cultural significance of the phone booth opens essential points of connection between notions of autonomy, uses of technology in the public sphere, and the relation between politics …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

Prophecy, Emanation, And The Mediterranean Middle Ages, Alberto Gelmi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the notion of prophecy as a semiotic construct in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a chronological span that runs from Late Antiquity to the 14^th century. It argues that theories of prophecy offer useful insights in the domain of rhetoric and not just in epistemology, as scholarship has predominantly contended. The first two chapters survey the trendsetting work of Augustine, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides, arguing that their semiotic angle on prophecy depends on a structural affinity with the metaphysical template of emanationism as formulated by Plotinus and Proclus, whose teachings went often misrepresented or …

Coalition And Creativity On The Bridges And Fringes With Immigrant Student-Contributors In Nonprofit Adult Education, Katherine E. Entigar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The nonprofit education of adult immigrants is an under-researched aspect of U.S. education. Adult immigrants, often perceived as passive and quiescent, bring voices and contributions to learning in powerful yet unheard ways. This research agenda invokes a new critical lens in education scholarship to uplift and center these contributions as a coalitional, dialogical project. Drawing upon critical sociocultural, women of color feminist, and poststructual theories, critical intersectional epistemology, and Bakhtinian dialogical thinking, this research project pursues inductive, recursive meaning making as an innovative exploration. A multiphase, sequential study including surveys and two focus groups foregrounds the complex, fluid ways adult …

Gender-Based And Emotional Appeals: The Effect Of Candidate Gender On Political Rhetoric In Campaign Advertisements, Julia Sifferlen

Student Research

Despite increasing research surrounding emotional appeals in politics, few studies seek to understand how male vs. female candidates use emotional and gendered appeals differently in their own campaign advertisements. With more and more female politicians entering office every year, it’s important to understand their political rhetoric. Studying advertisements directly and analyzing them for emotional appeals and gender-based appeals is necessary to fill this gap. The present study utilizes research from political rhetoric and gender psychology to conduct a content analysis on 36 televised campaign advertisements from the 2020 election cycle. The results demonstrate that male and female candidates don’t meet …

Review: 'Pragmatist Philosophy And Dance: Interdisciplinary Dance Research In The American South', Aili W. Bresnahan

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Eric Mullis’ Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance is a thoroughly multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary book that is centered on and deeply engaged in the experimental and lived experience of Pentecostal dance in the American and Appalachian South. The focal point for Mullis’ research is not observation and critique of dance as embodied religious practice from a critical distance (although he does engage it critically and analytically) but from the inside, embedding his own person and body into the environment with all the resources of the unifying self that he has at his disposal to not just understand the form but feel it …

Fighting Words: Slurs, Semantics, And The Law, Richard Stillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Oppressive slurs like the n-word are fighting words par excellence. Their power to incite conflict and inflict emotional injury is unmatched by that of other, more commonplace insults. But what is it that makes oppressive slurs such potent verbal weapons? A commonplace view among both philosophers and legal theorists is that slurs make such potent insults because their uses convey extremely offensive, bigoted attitudes. This dissertation argues that this view is mistaken, and that its falsity has important implications for hate speech jurisprudence. I argue that, to grasp what makes slurs such potent verbal weapons, we ought conceive …

Rethinking Thinking About Thinking: Against A Pedagogical Imperative To Cultivate Metacognitive Skills, Lauren R. Alpert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In summaries of “best practices” for pedagogy, one typically encounters enthusiastic advocacy for metacognition. Some researchers assert that the body of evidence supplied by decades of education studies indicates a clear pedagogical imperative: that if one wants their students to learn well, one must implement teaching practices that cultivate students’ metacognitive skills.

In this dissertation, I counter that education research does not impose such a mandate upon instructors. We lack sufficient and reliable evidence from studies that use the appropriate research design to validate the efficacy of metacognitive skill-building interventions (not just evaluate their relationship to learning outcomes). I argue …

Vulnerability: Sensation And Subjectivity In The Late Victorian Novel, Michael Shelichach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Vulnerability: Sensation and Subjectivity in the Late Victorian Novel” explores how developments in the science of psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century destabilized the genre of literary realism in Britain. Prominent mid-Victorian psychologists theorized a subject with a highly impressionable brain and nervous system. This new understanding of the mind’s potential vulnerability to external influence impelled contemporary novelists to contemplate the extent to which subjective interiority could be altered by the environment. Through close readings of canonical realist novels like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone …