Philosophy Commons^™

Metaphor And The Struggle Between Populism And Liberal Democracy, Daniel Cole

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Populist movements have emerged the world over, appearing even in countries in which it had long been assumed that liberal democracy was unassailable. Scholars have been grappling with the concept of populism for decades, but as populists have won victories close to home, the research has taken on a heightened sense of urgency. Two of the common theses that have appeared in the recent literature are, (a) populism is opposed to liberal democracy, and (b) populism is linked to a democratic tradition of thought that originates with Rousseau. While I am willing to grant (a), I argue in this dissertation …

The Effect Of Moral Development On Voters’ Trust In Politicians, Aquilus Ricks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The impact of voters’ moral development on trust in politicians is a rarely explored phenomenon among scholars studying why voters trust politicians. It is unknown whether voters’ moral development plays an influential role in their decisions to trust those they elect to public office, or if they simply respond to the best political show. The purpose of this study was to examine this phenomenon and determine whether voters’ moral development impacted their trust in politicians regardless of age, gender, education, income, and religion. The study surveyed 110 eligible voters in a midwestern city in the United States using two survey …

Situationism, Capacities And Culpability, Adam Piovarchy

IES Papers and Journal Articles

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people’s behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects’ responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded …

Immortality Through Mind Uploading And Resurrection, Adam M. Leis

Masters Theses

Technology in the last century has flourished exponentially. Previous fantasies are becoming cutting-edge discoveries like global communications, encyclopedic knowledge at the average person’s fingertips, and even medical advances used to improve and extend one’s quality of life and life expectancy. As technology pushes the boundaries of what is possible, ambitious visionaries look to solve the arguably greatest problem known to humanity: death. Transhumanists aiming to use technology to overcome this great human limitation, mortality, present the newest proposed solutions to life’s oldest challenge. One of these solutions, mind uploading, is perhaps the most ambitious, but it is not without its …

Murderer At The Switch: Thomson, Kant, And The Trolley Problem, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

In this book chapter I argue that contrary to what is said by Paul Guyer in Kant (Routledge, 2006) Kant's moral philosophy prohibits the bystander from throwing the switch to divert the runaway trolley to a side track with an innocent person on it in order to save more people who are in the path of the trolley in the "Trolley Problem" case made famous by Judith Jarvis Thomson (1976; 1985). Furthermore, Thomson herself (2008) came to agree that it would be wrong to throw the switch, just as it is wrong to push the person off the bridge to …

Dentistry And The Principle Of Justice: How Ethics Informs Oral Health Policy, Michael G. Maihofer Dds

Journal of the American College of Dentists

The article defines the dental professional’s ethical principle of Justice and discusses the obligations that come with adherence to this principle with an emphasis on that portion of the ADA Code’s definition which states “that the dental profession should actively seek allies throughout society on specific activities that will help improve access to care for all.

It examines this principle to better understand its relevance and importance to both clinical practice, dental education and emerging oral health policy. Also discussed is how dentistry’s ethical code intersects the realm of social justice making a persuasive argument for adopting strong policies on …

Teaching, Learning, And Everyday Folk Psychology, Natalia Anderson

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Rule-Following, Enculturation, And Normative Identity, Nicholas Odom

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Rule-following has been a controversial issue in professional philosophical literature since Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Many authors have developed accounts of rule-following along different lines, including those that naturalistically reduce rule-following to non-normative phenomena and those that take rule-following to be an irreducible aspect of cognition and agency. Hannah Ginsborg, a prominent contributor to rule-following literature, has developed a partially reductive account of rule-following, combining features of both reductionist and nonreductionist accounts. But naturalizing or internalistic theories of rule-following, or even Ginsborg's partial reduction of rule-following, ignore important facets of what it is to follow a rule, particularly its social …

The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain: On The Contributions Of Phenomenology In Understanding Chronic Pain Disorders, Riley C. Smith

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Chronic pain disorders are estimated to affect a significant proportion of the global population. These disorders are often debilitating and pose a substantial challenge to the everyday life of those affected. Modern medicine has made great strides in understanding the physiological processes involved in chronic pain. However, chronic pain is more than merely a physiological process. Chronic pain is an embodied mode of being-in-the-world that manifests in multiple aspects of lived experience, from the ability to perform day-to-day tasks to the relationship between body and self. Consequently, it is essential to cultivate a rich appreciation of chronic pain as a …

(2025) Curriculum Vitae Of Leonard Harris, Leonard Harris

Collected Papers of Leonard Harris

No abstract provided.

A Touchy Subject: Optimality And Coreference, Jill De Villiers, Jacqueline Cahillane, Emily Altreuter

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Four studies are reported that compare production and comprehension of structures involving Principle A and B with 68 English speaking children. The stimuli included simple and complex sentences combined with simple and quantified NPs, each with reflexives and pronouns. A novel technique using a laptop proved successful for eliciting stimulus descriptions as well as truth value judgment. The results test a recent Optimality account of binding by Hendriks and Spenader (2004), but it is argued that more constraints are needed. Although the data can be fit well by the constraints, questions remain about whether it is theoretically satisfactory.

Machine Ethics, Ethics For Machines: Context-Based Modeling For Machines Making Ethical Decisions, Jaysa Ramirez

Honors Program Theses

Machine ethics is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that focuses on if – and if so, how – machines can make ethical decisions autonomously. Through a close study of two positions on whether or not machines can be moral agents, this project sheds light on a clash of assumptions that is keeping the field of machine ethics in limbo. After making this clash of assumptions clear, I raise two questions which get at the scope of machine ethics itself: 1) What makes ethical decision-making different from other kinds of decision-making? 2) To what extent can machines engage with ethics and make …

Disciplining Skepticism Through Kant’S Critique, Fichte’S Idealism, And Hegel’S Negations, Meghant Sudan

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual …

Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, Rob Tench

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

The article reviews the Web site Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, located at bloomsburyphilosophylibrary.com, from publisher Bloomsbury.

Children's Sensitivity To Prosody And Ostension In Answers To Wh-Questions, Bethany Stoddard, Jill De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This paper examines the effects of two often overlooked factors in children’s answers to wh-questions: the prosodic contour of the question and the complexity of the visual stimuli. There are two potential effects on the interpretation of a question in English: whether it is moved, and what kind of prosody it has.

A Process Conception Of Nature: A Comparative Study Of Hua-Yen Buddhism And Whiteheadian Thought, Kia Shahideh

West Chester University Master’s Theses

The primary motivation for this study will be to propose a nature ethic inspired by a belief of deep ecology, and nestled within an a metaphysical representation of the world as presented by process metaphysics and Mahayana Buddhist doctrine. This research will be exploring various applications of Whiteheadian process metaphysics, as well as Mahayana Buddhist ontology to establish a solidified metaphysical platform to further expand to include humans and the natural world on the same plane of being. Upon this platform, Hua-yen Buddhist thought, existing as a subset of Mahayana Buddhism, will be brought into dialogue with its interconnected cosmology …

Beside| |Between, Brooke J. Armstrong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Beauty and the grotesque both induce physical sensations in the body. Pleasure and displeasure are two points on the same line. They are not mutually exclusive. Like the body and the vessel, like the self and the other all things exist in reciprocity. The capability of holding brings agency, breaking down perceptions of of subject-object relationships. The works presented in this paper represent a merging and a transformation of perceived separate entities. Craft history and processes inform the work present in the thesis exhibition, Beside| |Between.

The Birthplace Of Saint Wulfthryth: An Unexamined Reference In Cambridge University Library Additional 2604, Jessica C. Brown

Quidditas

Cambridge University Library Additional 2604 is a fifteenth-century miscellany that is largely comprised of East Anglian and Kentish saints’ lives. It also includes a vita of Saint Edith-the patron saint of the convent at Wilton in Wessex. This vita names the birthplace of Edith’s mother, St. Wulfthryth, as ‘Lesing’ in Kent. I suggest that this unique reference may come from a desire to firmly connect Edith’s mother as well as Edith herself to a Kentish heritage.

Delno C. West Award Winner

Quidditas

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the West Award for 2021

Catherine Loomis

Rochester Institute of Technology

Socrates And The Divine Mission Of Political Friendship, Ronahn I. Clarke

Honors Theses

Plato is widely regarded as an authoritarian political thinker on account of Socrates’ endorsement of rule by philosopher kings in the Republic. Yet the Republic should not be mistaken for a political treatise or the entirety of Socrates’ political theorizing. Each of the Socratic dialogues is concerned with the political endeavour of reorienting souls within communities of souls toward virtue via philosophical discussion. This project examines the Lysis, the Gorgias, the Symposium, the Republic, and other dialogues in the context of the philosophical mission Socrates establishes in the Apology. Socrates’ philosophical work expresses a …