Philosophy Commons^™

The Transcendental Foundation Of Kant's Cosmopolitanism, Daniel J. Ellison

Honors Theses

Scholarship on Kant’s philosophy of history has insufficiently considered its place in the larger system of transcendental idealism. In this project, I argue that Kant’s guarantee of progress in history is grounded in his universal characterizations of human nature, which he makes both explicitly, as with the notion of “unsociable sociability” put forth in “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” and implicitly, as with what I term a responsiveness to reasons. These characterizations are grounded, I claim, in an attribution of reason which is always already achieved to the constitution of human beings, which emerges out of …

The Tetralemma Of Nothingness, Samuel O. Sessions

Honors Theses

Grammatically, the question is rather simple. It is when we set out to answer the question that it suddenly becomes complex. What is nothing? Its very asking seems almost impossible because the ‘is’ within it brushes up against its meaning, producing paradox. How do we even begin to get at a something that is not a something? Immediately, you remark how similar this task is to a child chasing fairies in the forest or hunting for ghosts in the attic. Will we be doomed from the outset? If so, then what is the point? Our many predecessors have had varying …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

An Existential Philosophy Of History, Bennett Gilbert, Natan Elgabsi

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of life.

Existing Competencies In The Teaching Of Ethics In Computer Science Faculties, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

This report is one of the deliverables for the Ethics4EU project. It presents results obtained from a survey conducted in early 2020 that polled faculty from Computer Science and related disciplines on teaching practices in Computer Ethics in Computer Science across Europe. The survey was completed by respondents from 61 universities across 23 European countries. Participants were surveyed on whether or not Computer Ethics is taught to Computer Science students at each institution, the reasons why Computer Ethics is or is not taught, how Computer Ethics is taught (for example, as a standalone course or embedded within other courses), the …

European Values For Ethics In Digital Technology, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

Digital Ethics deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. It covers a wide spectrum of societal and ethical impacts including issues such as data governance, privacy and personal data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithmic decision-making and pervasive technologies. Importantly, it is not only about hardware and software, but it also concerns systems, how people and organizations and society and technology interact. In addition, with Digital Ethics comes the added variable of assessing the ethical implications of artefacts which may not yet exist, or artefacts which may have impacts we …

Understanding Realism, Collin Rice

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

Catherine Elgin has recently argued that a nonfactive conception of understanding is required to accommodate the epistemic successes of science that make essential use of idealizations and models. In this paper, I argue that the fact that our best scientific models and theories are pervasively inaccurate representations can be made compatible with a more nuanced form of scientific realism that I call Understanding Realism. According to this view, science aims at (and often achieves) factive scientific understanding of natural phenomena. I contend that this factive scientific understanding is provided by grasping a set of true modal information about the …

Ecological And Holistic Analysis Of The Epistemic Value Of Law Libraries, Paul D. Callister, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

We examine the libraries' roles within the "epistemic foundation of society.” Our analysis is in response to the omission of Yale Law Dean Gerken of the role of libraries in her recent article about legal education's new focus and to remarks by AALS President Vicki Jackson that suggest an uncertain role for libraries. We have adapted holistic ecological media theory, as developed by Ronald Deibert, to reject a technologically deterministic view of libraries as having no future. We have considered the role of law libraries in the social epistemology or cognitive authority of the legal community, the role of law …

Collective Autobiographical Reflexivity On Active And Compassionate Citizenship In The Covid-19 Crisis, Stella Mi-Cheong Cheong, Rowena A. Azada-Palacios, Yaobin Tong, Kamille Beye, Nar Bahadur Saud, Adam Peter Lang

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-economic inequalities have become exacerbated and COVID-19 related hate crimes have increased. This paper explores how citizenship education might be reimagined in response to this context, with the vision of rebuilding a more equitable and compassionate society. By using a collective autobiographical writing approach, this study documented six different autobiographical reflexivities of citizenship education scholars who were from different parts of the world: China, South Korea, the Philippines, the United States, Nepal and the United Kingdom. It also observed the way the pandemic played out in the location where they were situated during …

Hybridity And National Identity In Post-Colonial Schools, Rowena A. Azada-Palacios

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national …

Releasement And Seduction: Heidegger And Baudrillard On The Preservation Of Illusion In The Epoch Of Obscenity, Marc Oliver D. Pasco

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

This work interfaces the philosophies of Jean Baudrillard and Martin Heidegger. It hopes to contribute to both Heideggerian and Baudrillardian scholarship by employing Baudrillardian ideas in more effectively describing the historical happening of the so-called withdrawal of Being from man, which preoccupied much of Heidegger’s body of work. The work argues that by re-visiting an earlier idea of Baudrillard, which he termed as seduction, one finds a possible way of navigating the obscenity of the current epoch of Being. Akin to Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit or releasement, Baudrillard’s concept of seduction invites one to allow the real to once again …

The Role Of Empathy In Moral Inquiry, William Gray Kidder

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this dissertation, I defend the view that, despite empathy’s susceptibility to problematic biases, we can and should cultivate empathy to aid our understanding of our own values and the values of others. I argue that empathy allows us to critically examine and potentially revise our values by considering concrete moral problems and our own moral views from the perspective of another person. Appropriately calibrated empathy helps us achieve a critical distance from our own moral perspective and is thus tied to impartiality in moral inquiry. In defending this role for empathy in moral inquiry, I draw on empirical work …

Change And Continuity In Biology, Gunnar O'Neill Babcock

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation considers various examples of change and continuity in biology. In particular, it focuses on the conceptual possibilities during the fission of microorganisms and genes when they multiply or replicate. Among the kinds of conceptual revision that are outlined in the first two chapters, the three chapter argues that certain concepts such as death, reproduction and organism have limited applicability in certain domains of biology. The fourth chapter investigates whether synthetic genomes should be considered parts of genetic lineages. It concludes that synthetic genomes are parts of the lineages upon which they were modeled. The final chapter aims to …

The Story Circle As A Practice Of Democratic, Critical Inquiry, Natalie M. Fletcher, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea, Ariel Sykes

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

The authors of this essay have been committed practitioners and teachers of Philosophy for Children in a variety of educational settings, from pre-schools through university doctoral programs and in adult community and religious education programs. The promotion of critical thinking has always been a primary goal of this movement. But communal practices of critical thinking need to include other kinds of democratic conversation that prompt us to see others as full-fledged persons and to be curious about how our being in community with them makes growth and self-correction possible. As we continue to experiment and innovate in new contexts we …

Scientific Practice And Democratic Virtues, Gregory R. Peterson

School of American and Global Studies Faculty Publications with a Focus on History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion

Chapter 21: Scientific Practice and Democratic Values

Democracy and science, it might be thought, go hand in hand. As we commonly think of it, science has its roots in the heritage of Greek thought, and the same is true of democracy. And while Athenian democracy developed at best a complicated relationship with its intellectual luminaries, Athens was nevertheless home to both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Nearly two centuries later, the scientific revolution most quickly took root in those nations that had come to have some semblance of democratic rule. While the Republic of Florence had passed under Medici control …

Nietzsche: Metaphysician, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Perhaps the most fundamental disagreement concerning Nietzsche’s view of metaphysics is that some commentators believe Nietzsche has a positive, systematic metaphysical project, and others deny this. Those who deny it hold that Nietzsche believes metaphysics has a special problem, that is, a distinctively problematic feature which distinguishes metaphysics from other areas of philosophy. In this paper, I investigate important features of Nietzsche’s metametaphysics in order to argue that Nietzsche does not, in fact, think metaphysics has a special problem. The result is that, against a longstanding view held in the literature, we should be reading Nietzsche as a metaphysician.

Medieval Sensibilities: A History Of Emotions In The Middle Ages, Chad Wiener

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Thinking Reasonably About Indeterministic Choice Beliefs, Andrew Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recent research suggests that, regardless of the truth of libertarianism about free will, there appears to be a widespread belief among nonphilosopher laypersons that the choices of free agents are not causally necessitated by prior states of affairs. In this paper, I propose a new class of debunking explanation for this belief which I call ‘reasons-based accounts’ (RBAs). I start the paper by briefly recounting the failures of extant approaches to debunking explanations, and then use this as a jumping off point to articulate several alternatives, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The Aesthetics Of Repair: The Way Of Zen And Appreciation, Tyler Ellis Dobbs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nature objects and how beings interact with them has long been a debate in the philosophic tradition. One aspect of this I have taken a look at is the aesthetic qualities entailed in this with particular attention paid to repair. In particular I explore the blurring of the subject-object distinction and the role of narrative in human engagement. I based my research and arguments primarily from Buddhist and Japanese Zen theories and ideas. Special attention was paid to the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and the Kyoto School philosophy tradition and ideas from Mahayana Buddhism.

Diagnostic Justice: Testing For Covid-19, Ashley Graham Kennedy, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of …