Philosophy Commons^™

The Good, The Bad, And The In-Between: A Study Of Moral Agency, Nicholas Schuster

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Beginning from the plain thought that some instances of good moral agency are better than others while some bad ones are worse, not just in degree but in kind, this dissertation adopts Aristotle’s taxonomy of agent states: virtue, continence, incontinence, and vice. Noting, however, that certain puzzles arise from the standard Aristotelian conceptions of these states, this project develops alternative psychological accounts of them, and the key differences between them, which together provide a framework for a comprehensive alternative theory of moral agency. Chapter Two notes that the psychological difference between virtue and continence is commonly understood, in the Aristotelian …

Material Matters, Mary Bittner Wiseman

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Agreeing To Disagree: Diversity, Political Contractualism, And The Open Society, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Political contractualism is important in societies characterized by substantial moral and political disagreement and diversity. The very disagreement that makes the social contract necessary, however, also makes agreement difficult. Call this the paradox of diversity, which is the result of a tension between two necessary conditions of political contractualism: existence and stability. The first involves showing the possibility of some agreement, while the second involves showing that the agreement can persist. To solve both of these problems, I develop a multilevel contract theory that I call the “open society” model of political contractualism that incorporates diversity into the contractual model …

Child Soldiers: Differences And Similarities Of Their Use In African Nations Compared To The United States, Isabelle Marciniak

Honors Projects

International law states that it is unlawful to recruit or use anyone under the age of 15 in armed forces or armed groups. (Armed forces meaning official state militaries and armed groups being comprised of non-state entities.) However, as this international law has no tangible army at its disposal in order to enforce its demands, there is no true power to ensure that this law is upheld.

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

The Existential Philosophy Of David Foster Wallace, Shoshana Primak

Honors Program Theses and Projects

It is no secret that philosophy and literature are often closely intertwined: beginning with works as old as Plato’s dialogues, philosophers have always seen the merit in utilizing fiction to share philosophy with both their contemporaries and with the general public. The most prominent existentialists are perhaps the most famous for using literature as a vehicle for their philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre all published some kind of fiction, through parables, novels, plays, and so forth. Likewise, I will argue in this thesis that renowned writer David Foster Wallace was not …

Real Possibility: Modality And Responsibility, Julia Gaul

Honors Scholar Theses

Imagine: someone is backing out of a parking space and does not look in their rear view mirror. They subsequently hit a car that was passing by. One could argue that they simply could have avoided the accident had they looked in their mirror. This non-actual possibility, that they could have looked in the mirror, seems legally and morally relevant. One could also argue that they could have avoided the accident had they stuck their feet out of their window and sung La Marseillaise.

My leading questions is: how do we distinguish possibilities that are legally and morally relevant from …

Trust, Political Participation, And Poverty: The Effects Of Poverty On Political Behavior, Melanie Cain

Honors Projects

With the upcoming 2020 election, the right to vote and otherwise participate in politics is as important as ever. In this research, I have examine the relationship between trust in government, political efficacy, participation in politics, and poverty to study why those in low-income households have lower rates of political participation and offer solutions to raise the rate of participation.

A Nonanthropocentric Response To The Cosmic Perspective Problem, Eveanne Eason

Honors Theses

This paper responds to issues that have been raised for environmental philosophy in light of developments in astrobiology and exoplanet science. In recent years, we have moved much closer to confronting evidence of life beyond Earth. Pairing such a discovery with a certain theoretical understanding of the universe, we might be motivated to address a question: with knowledge of abundant, potentially infinite alien life on Earth-like planets, why must we save our planet? In anticipation of this discovery, we can use this scenario, the Cosmic Perspective Problem, to refine a widely-held position with substantial implications for our environmental ethics. The …

Education In Liberal Political Theories, Amy Cain

Honors Theses

This paper examines two sources of conflict within the literature on education in liberal political theories: the proper justifications for a state-mandated education and the necessary standard for education in a liberal state. After arguing that a liberal state must offer a child-centered justification for the universal mandate and uphold an equality standard of education, this paper proceeds to examine two common objections to such a system of compulsory education in a liberal state. This paper concludes that the perennial objections based upon concerns for familial rights and pluralism do not present a significant obstacle for incorporating a system of …

World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review Of Pheng Cheah's What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature, Chris Hall

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Presents an overview of Cheah's argument regarding normativity and temporality in worlds and worlding, a summary of chapters, and an assessment of the book's contribution to philosophy, world literature, and postcolonial studies.

A Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Gifts, Mary Eberhardinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project synthesizes a selected scope of rhetorical and philosophical perspectives of the gift. The research question is what the relationship between gifts and rhetoric might be. In order to approach this question, this project offers a review of related literature on the topic of gifts. It then provides analysis and discussion that contextualize the question. The project finally concludes by offering implications. The implications address why the question concerning the relationship between gifts and rhetoric matters for the larger landscape of international relations.

Relations And Folds In Leibniz: Monadological Intimacy, Jeff Lambert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My goal is to provide a clear explanation of Leibniz’s notoriously difficult system of relations. Relations among ‘windowless’ substances that exert no causal power over one another seems like a pipe dream that should be abandoned. However, I demonstrate that each substance expresses its relations only through the unique representation of all other substances. That is, any relation a substance expresses is due to this unique, perspectival, non-causal, representation of others. Because this is the case for all substances, this means that this relation of representation is an ongoing process of interconnection for all substances. This representation is not merely …

The Appearance Of The Other Ego In Edmund Husserl’S Phenomenology, Paul Zipfel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work I investigate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the appearance of the other ego in order to elucidate the essential components of the sense of the other ego: co-constitution, inaccessibility, and a unique process of verification. I open with an example illustrating the way in which other egos appear to me as different from ordinary objects in the world. When one looks outside in a storm and sees a branch rapping on the window, it is not an alarming experience. However, were another person to be rapping at the window, the experience would be quite different. This is …

The In/Authentic Subject: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, And Selfhood, Joseph Tighe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation represents an attempt to understand the self, what it is, what it means, and how it provides subjective identity. These concerns are situated within a personal narrative that describes the loss of self and its rediscovery subsequent to that loss. In critically examining the work of both Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger on the concept of authenticity, I have attempted to come to terms with my experience of the loss of selfhood as well as the conditions of possibility for its return. I argue that Kierkegaard’s construction of the self, while problematically religious, convincingly describes the experience of …

The Problem Of Nature In The Phenomenology Of Merleau-Ponty, Alessio Rotundo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of nature yields a double meaning: nature as ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in experience (phenomenal nature) and nature as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature). My thesis is that the two meanings of nature, when taken together, offer a guide to Merleau-Ponty’s final philosophical formulations about “flesh” and the “visible” and the “invisible.” The aim of the dissertation is to trace the salient conceptual and methodological complications entailed by this conception. I argue that the bivalence of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty receives a methodological …

Pierre Hadot's Holistic Philosophy Of Communication, Jonathan Crist

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pierre Hadot’s holistic philosophy of communication attends to the health of the self and community through practice of spiritual exercises for the transformation of one’s entire being, working at the nexus of mind, body, soul, and cosmos. The task is ever-incomplete, works in an understanding of “human being as essentially an exposure that lacks a closed identity” and “keep[s] sight of the opening, wound, or lack that remains at the heart of any community and all communication” (Butchart 136). This is responsive to the present moment experiencing disjointed experience of time and space, increased anxiety, underdeveloped capacity for attention, and …

The Spiritual Nature Of The Italian Renaissance, Kaitlyn Kenney

Senior Honors Theses

This study seeks to investigate the influence of faith in the emergence and development of the Italian Renaissance, in both the artwork and writing of the major artists and thinkers of the day, and the impact that new expressions of faith had on the viewing public. While the Renaissance is often labeled as a secular movement by modern scholars, this interpretation is largely due to the political motives of the Medici family who dominated Florence as the center of this artistic rebirth, on and off again throughout the period. On close examination, the philosophical and creative undercurrents of the movement …

Tracing The Past, Drawing The Present, Sixue Yang

Graduate School of Art Theses

The group of work, Rising Water, Floating Islands is inspired by traditional Chinese scroll landscape paintings. Such landscape paintings combine meticulous technique, compositional complexity, and tension between representation and abstraction to reveal an alternative universe that waits discovery amid our mundane existence. In “Rising Water, Floating Islands,” I explore the political and social ramifications of the ongoing cultural conflict between traditional and emergent contemporary values. By combining traditional Chinese elements and techniques with my own markings and gestural adaptation in my painting, I give the audience the opportunity to contemplate the implications of our present digital condition through traditional esthetic …

Towards An Understanding Of Nietzsche’S Will To Power, Jeffrey Beery

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Given his aphoristic writing style, his poetical and metaphorical depictions of philosophical ideas, and his presentations of seemingly logically contradictory or inconsistent views, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy lends itself to a variety of competing interpretations among scholars and a plethora of misconceptions among everyday readers. These misconceptions have invited many negative connotations to be attributed to his philosophy, including Nazism, misogyny, and egoism. Amongst his most misconstrued concepts is the Will to Power, a concept Nietzsche himself never explicitly defines, but discusses in a variety of ways throughout his texts.