Philosophy Commons^™

Adorno And Reconciliation, Jonathan Hollingsworth

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this thesis I examine the concept of reconciliation between human beings and nature in the philosophy of Theodor Adorno. I argue that for Adorno, reconciliation would neither be a return to a state prior to our species opposing itself to nature, nor would it be a continuation of our current, destructive relationship to nature. Instead, Adorno conceives of reconciliation as a state in which human beings and nature would be free to communicate their differences without each dominating the other. In response to Jürgen Habermas, who claims that Adorno makes the impossible demand that human beings enter into a …

A Smithian Perspective On Aristotle's Virtuous Friend, Meagan Fraser

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations, Lynda Bostrom

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations is a written document accompanying the culmination of my three years painting at a graduate level. The result of which is an autobiographical body of work navigating the tension of being a human with an invisible disease, while straining to understand Western societal constructs of women. I simultaneously reject these fairy tales as a standard recipe for happiness, yet identify with its visual language that is rooted in the vernacular of my generation. Redefining the elements I reject or embrace helps me to look beyond the boundaries of these constructs, and adopt an attitude of curiosity …

The Presbyterian Enlightenment: The Confluence Of Evangelical And Enlightenment Thought In British America, Brandon S. Durbin

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Eighteenth-Century British American Presbyterian ministers incorporated covenantal theology, ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, and resistance theory in their sermons. The sermons of Presbyterian ministers strongly indicate the intermixing of enlightenment and evangelical ideas. Congregants heard and read these sermons, spreading these ideas to the average colonist. This combination helps explain why American Presbyterians were so apt to resist British rule during the American Revolution. Protestant covenantal theology, derived from Protestant reformers like John Calvin and John Knox, emphasized virtue and duty. This covenant affected both the people and their rulers. When rulers failed to uphold their covenant with God, the …

Animals, Machines, And Moral Responsibility In A Built Environment, Logan Stapleton

Philosophy Honors Projects

Nature has ended. Acid rain and global warming leave no place untouched by human hands. We can no longer think of 'the environment' as synonymous with 'nature'. Instead, Steven Vogel argues that the environment is more like a mall: it is built. And because we build the environment, we are responsible for it. Yet, other things build, too. Animals build and use tools. Machines and algorithms build everything from skyscrapers to cell phones. Are they responsible for what they build? While animals and robots are normally considered in distinct philosophical fields, Vogel’s rejection of the natural-artificial split prompts us to …

Saving Nature: Rethinking The Human/Nature Relationship, Katharine Barry

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In the year 2018, the race to “save” nature seems more urgent than ever, and yet the continuous foot-dragging on the implementation of sustainable policy and practices seems to continue. There is a quite a bit of time and energy invested in sustainable efforts with, in some cases, little show for it. With the amount of effort put into finding a solution to the earth’s rapidly changing conditions, one must wonder, 1) what is holding us back from fighting against climate change? And 2) are our current attempts all worth it? The best way to move forward in our societal …

Qohelet And Camus: Answering The Absurd, Christian A. Sanchez

Global Tides

Albert Camus contributed greatly to the realm of philosophy with the promotion of absurdism—the school of thought hinging on the belief in the “absurd.” Essentially the divorce between man’s desire for meaning and the universe devoid of meaning, the absurd is the dominating theme of his works. Three millennia beforehand in the Hebrew Bible, the rich discourse of Qohelet was recorded as the book of Ecclesiastes. Qohelet, a word simply meaning teacher, concludes that all is “vanity,” or in Hebrew, “hebel.” This central notion of hebel permeates his discourse on the essence of life here on earth. This article …

Pragmatic Faith: An Epistemic Link Between Religion, Science, Mathematics, And Philosophy, John Benjamin Willis

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

There exists a conflict between the fields of religion on science. This conflict exists, according to Gregory Dawes, on the grounds that these disciplines share no common epistemic norms, and therefore this conflict is "ineradicable." An epistemic norm describes the way that someone goes about the pursuit of knowledge. I disagree with Dawes' assertion that this conflict is, in fact, "ineradicable." Pragmatic faith, first posited as "sub-doxastic faith" by F. R. Tennant, expresses values found in both religion and science, as well as in other "reason-based" disciplines like mathematics and philosophy. This work uses examples from each discipline to demonstrate …

A Space For Women In The Law, Megan Murphy

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In our society, gender plays an immeasurable role in shaping individual lives, experiences, and opportunities; thus, it is my contention that justice requires the law to utilize a gender-specific, reasonable woman, or reasonable abused-women, standard in cases dealing with workplace sexual harassment and in cases in which women who have been abused by their spouses for extended periods attack or kill their abusers in non-confrontational settings.

A Martin Luther King Jr. Amendment To The U.S. Constitution: Toward The Abolition Of Poverty, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed that we add an economic bill of rights to the U.S. Constitution. A King-Inspired bill of rights should include a constitutional amendment that enumerates a natural human right to be free from economic poverty, and appropriate enforcement legislation.

For the sake of abolishing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment says:

(Section 1) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

(Section 2) Congress shall have power to enforce this article by …

The Ethical Principle Of Vulnerability And The Case Against Human Organ Trafficking, Peter A. Depergola Ii

Journal of Health Ethics

An increasingly blurred understanding of the ethical significance of global "transplant transactions" - a curious combination of altruism and commerce, consent and coercion, gifts and theft, science and sorcery, care and human sacrifice - suggest a critical need to revisit the fundamental moral normlessness of the trafficking enterprise. This essay grounds its arguments in two, straightforward premises: (i) the ethical principle of respect for human vulnerability is an indispensable measure of the licitness of most, if not all, moral actions; and (ii) human organ trafficking violates the ethical principle of respect for human vulnerability. Drawing from this syllogism, the aim …

Some Ethical Issues In Treating And Caring For People With Dementia, Robert Scott Stewart Ba, Ma, Ph.D.

Journal of Health Ethics

This paper explores several issues regarding the treatment and care for patients suffering from dementia, including a discussion of the relatively low time and money spent on dementia research compared to research on cancer and cardio-vascular disease. It will also discuss the special relationship between the person suffering from dementia and their carer, who is often a loved one. The paper employs principlism and so examines these issues from a consideration of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice.

Medieval Japanese Zen: Catalyst For Symbol System Formation, Kendall Ann Roper

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Post-modernism asserts that the world as we know it does not exist independently from the symbolic interpretations we formulate about it. This symbolic and ever unfolding interpretation of reality applies to our understanding of science as well as philosophy, to religion as well as art. In striving to describe religious experiences, various cultures have developed complex symbolic languages whose purpose is to reference a culturally understood version of sacred reality as presented through religion. Religions contribute to shaping these cultural perceptions of reality by utilizing symbolic acts, objects, events, qualities, or concepts to express otherwise inexpressible elements of a culture’s …

On A And B Theories Of Time, Edward Freeman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Our metaphysical notion of temporality is exhausted by the concepts of fluid and static time. Following James Ellis McTaggart, philosophers refer to these times as the A-series and B-series respectively. To have a metaphysical argument against the reality of time as such, therefore, separate arguments against the reality of both temporal series are required. In the dissertation, I shall offer a number of both types of arguments. In the first chapter, McTaggart’s program is assessed. It is concluded that McTaggart has an argument against the reality of the A-series, but does not have one against the reality of the B-series. …

Introducing Godzilla To Marianne Moore's Octopus Of Ice At The Intersection Of Global Warming, Environmental Philosophy, And Poetry, David Seter

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This paper explores the question: how can a poet write an ecologically aware poem about global warming? Global warming impacts everything on earth, most visibly the glaciers melting away before our eyes. Adopting Aldo Leopold’s environmental philosophy of thinking like a mountain, the poet may describe the impact of global warming upon the mountain, glacier, flora and fauna, that form an interconnected web of life. A poem that thinks like a mountain already exists: Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” (published in 1924), which takes its title from the system of glaciers (or octopus of ice) on Mt. Rainier. For a contemporary …

A Change Of Heart: Internal Narratives, Forgiveness & Health, Keiko Ehret

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

In this thesis I investigate the interconnectedness of forgiveness as a narrative, as a philosophical, religious and cultural phenomenon, and the ways in which forgiveness is increasingly being used as a vehicle for improving health and psychological well-being. By threading together how scholars in a variety of fields have approached these areas of study, we can better understand the way the interdisciplinary nature of forgiveness grants access to heal not merely relationships with others, but also our bodies, our minds, and our relationship with ourselves.

Important to my investigation is understanding that the life circumstances that prompt forgiveness consist of …

Theater As A Civic Practice, Charlie Santos

Senior Honors Projects

Contemporary artists are working within a cultural moment saturated with political fervor. The ideologies of social and political movements such as Black Lives Matter, Queer Rights, and Gun Control weigh heavily on the minds of young artists. More and more, I see actors, writers, and creators struggling to reconcile their identities as artists and identities as political beings. How do artists resolve the internal dissonance between their artistic and political spheres? Is activist art an opportunity to synthesize these two spheres? Or might creating art for political ends pose ethical and/or aesthetic hazards? On the one hand, creating political art …

Oral History Conversation With Mark Berger, Jack Turner

Philosophy 332: Business Ethics

No abstract provided.

Being In Performance: A Philosophical Account Of The Embodied Actor, Brad M. Krumholz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I present and analyze three distinct actor-training exercises primarily through the lens of the Embodied Cognition (EC) branch of contemporary philosophy, which attempts to frame human understanding as a fully embodied interaction with the environment. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and other branches of philosophy, EC provides both an excellent set of tools and a strong theoretical framework to help explain how people encounter meaning in life. I apply its unique perspectives to this philosophical account of the embodied actor as I analyze the various elements at play in actor training praxis, which allows me to shed …

Frankenstem? Technology Ethics In Silicon Valley: Student Poster Session Program, San Jose State University, Department Of English And Comparative Literature

Frankenstein @ 200: Student Posters

Program of student posters presented as part of “Deep Humanities,” One-Day Symposium: FrankenSTEM? Technology Ethics in Silicon Valley, organized by Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy & Dr. Katherine D. Harris, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University on May 1, 2018, 10-4pm, Room 225, King Library, San Jose State University.