Philosophy Commons^™

The Impact Of Thoreau's Racial Privilege On His Complicated Views Of Slavery And Abolition, Cassandra Carpenter

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Throughout Henry David Thoreau’s life and writing, he pioneers the Nineteenth Century Transcendental movement as a defender of political morality and individual refinement, while simultaneously stressing the importance of maintaining intimacy with nature. The presumed static nature of Thoreau’s movement, however, does not fully encompass the tumultuous time in American history with which Thoreau exists. Living after the Revolutionary war, during the Mexican war, and before the height of the Civil-War, his thought inhabits a period of changes, sometimes positive and yet mostly negative.

No Sinking Violet, Anne-Taylor Cahill

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Logical Instrumentalism And Concatenation, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Logical pluralism is the theory that there is more than one right logic. Logical instrumentalism is the view that a logic is a correct logic if it can be used to fruitfully pursue some deductive inquiry. Logical instrumentalism is a version of logical pluralism, since more than one logic can be used fruitfully. In this paper, I will show that a logical instrumentalist must accept linear logic as a correct logic, since linear logic is useful for studying natural language syntax. I further show that this means that the logical instrumentalist must accept a wide range of connectives, in particular …

Scandals And Sculpture, Anne-Taylor Cahill

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Susan Stebbing, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Susan Stebbing (1885-1943) was a founder of Analysis and had a large influence on philosophy during the early 20th century. Recently, the work of Michael Beaney (2000), Siobhan Chapman (2013) and Frederique Janssen- Lauret (2017), amongst others, has begun a resurgence of interest in Stebbing. This paper serves as a brief introduction to some of the major features of her philosophical work.

From Fallibility To Fragility: How The Theory Of Narrative Transformed The Notion Of Character Of Fallible Man, Pol Vandevelde

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Forty-Third Midwest Philosophy Colloquium, 2018-2019, Philosophy Discipline

Midwest Philosophy Colloquium

Posters for the forty-third Midwest Philosophy Colloquium at the University of Minnesota Morris in 2018-2019.

Public Health And Personal Choice: The Ethics Of Vaccine Mandates And Parental Refusal In The United States, Rebecca Horan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Philosophy Of Religion, Ryan Baker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Global Consciousness: A Functionalist Neurophilosophical Perspective, Connor C. Bowen

CMC Senior Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to explore a thought-provoking consequence of the functionalist theory of mind. Given the current organizational structure of Earth and field theories of consciousness in neuroscience, Earth is probably conscious. The argument is explored through an examination of the current organizational structure of Earth and field theories of consciousness in neuroscience, which leads to the conclusion that Earth is conscious. Various theories of mind have been proposed by neuroscientists and philosophers alike in an attempt to qualify what consciousness is and what provides the basis for consciousness to occur. Support, in the form of data …

Believing Fictions: A Philosophical Analysis Of Fictional Engagement, Jack Rhein Gleiberman

CMC Senior Theses

Works of fiction do things to us, and we do things because of works of fiction. When reading Hamlet, I mentally represent certain propositions about its characters and events, I want the story and its characters to go a certain way, and I emotionally respond to its goings-on. I might deem Hamlet a coward, I might wish that Hamlet stabbed Claudius when he had the chance, and I might feel sorrow at Ophelia’s senseless suicide. These fiction-directed mental states seem to resemble the propositional attitudes of belief, desire, and emotion, respectively — the everyday attitudes that represent and orient us …

The Importance Of Cultural Identity To Liberal Democracy, Rebecca Ilana Shane

CMC Senior Theses

The challenge facing liberal theories of democracy is to describe an organization of state that both legitimates state power and protects individual liberty. In Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government, Corey Brettschneider develops the value theory of democracy that resolves this tension. By locating the democratic ideal in a set of core values with both procedural and substantive implications, the value theory legitimates state coercion only when it protects citizens’ rights. While the value theory guarantees both substantive and procedural rights, this thesis will show that Brettschneider fails to account for the necessity of a secure cultural context, without which …

On Reading, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

What is reading?  Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself.  Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille.  It is sometimes claimed that one engages in reading when one listens to an audiobook.  So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W?  Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled.  Can other sensory modalities be used to read?  What more …

Fictionalist Truth Conditions For An Expressivist Semantics Of Slurs, Celine J. Geday

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There are broadly two kinds of accounts of slurs: ones that place the derogation in the content of what is said or some concept associated with the words themselves or those that argue derogation takes places in the expression of some state of the slur-user – that derogation is part of the use of the slurring words. In this paper I argue that an expressivist account of slurs can be combined with a semantic account in which the truth conditions of the semantic account are fictional.

“Alexa, Are You Conscious?”: Exploring The Possibility Of Machine Consciousness, Emma Cornwell

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to answer the following question: “could a machine be capable of consciousness?” I begin to tackle this question by providing a presumed definition of consciousness, employing Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Theory. Next, I look to various discussions of machine intelligence and whether or not this would be sufficient for categorizing a machine as conscious. And lastly, I explore the notion that the human brain may be a sort of computational system itself and the implications this notion has for the potential that non-human systems may achieve consciousness.

Through these sections, I ultimately conclude that a machine could …

A Phenomenology Of Flesh: Heidegger, The Body, And The Work Of Art, Trisha Famisaran

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation begins by asking, what is the body, and how does one develop an understanding of the body? In this study, I aim to rework the notions of discursive practices and material phenomena, seeking to examine the relationship between the two in light of the work of art, so conceived within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in an attempt to deal with the question: “what is the body?” This dissertation avoids reifying certain normative descriptions of the body or constraining the matter of the body as strictly the effect of discursive power. I attempt a phenomenological observation about subjectivity …

Louis De La Forge On Mind-Body Interaction And The Case Against Occasionalism, Melissa Kalaee Gholamnejad

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Fidelity to the Cartesian philosophy requires a defense of dualism as well as mind-body union and interaction, all the while keeping to some form of the causal likeness principle. Each of these positions are ones that Descartes maintained throughout his writings. Yet, successors and scholars alike have noted the inconsistencies that arise from defending these views conjointly and have argued that one or more of them should be abandoned. Even the first generation of Cartesian successors whose fidelity to the Cartesian principles was especially steadfast, such as Louis de la Forge, have been interpreted and characterized as giving up causal …

Towards A Critical Understanding Of Deepfakes: Developing A Teaching Module And More, Wentao Guo

Pomona Senior Theses

Recently, computer-generated and computer-altered videos known as deepfakes have raised widespread concerns about the harms they may cause to democratic elections, national security, people’s reputation, and people’s autonomy over their words and actions as represented in videos and other media. How can we build towards a critical understanding of not only deepfakes, but also photos, videos, and the role of many other media objects surrounding us that inform us about the world? In this thesis, wanting to take a historical approach and noting the newness of deepfakes, I first investigate a historical case study regarding a manipulated photo from a …

Course Syllabus (W19 Online) Coli 331t--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …