Philosophy Commons^™

Solution Of The Disclosure Problem, William F. Cahill, B.A., Ll.B., J.C.D.

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

The Problem Case - Disclosure

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Immigration - A Legal And Moral Problem, Joseph T. Tinnelly, C.M.

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Oh Sinnerman, Where You Gonna Run To?, Semein Washington

Theses & Honors Papers

Semein Washington. OH SINNERMAN, WHERE YOU GONNA RUN TO? (Under the direction of Mary Carroll Hackett, MFA) Department of English and Modern Language, April 2016.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the growth of personal identity via poetry. “Oh Sinnerman,” is a run of thirty-eight poems in which the speaker learns survival through experience, and the underpinning ideas, whether traditional or modern, for which life is preserved. In theme, the poems tend to separate his experience into personal and social humanity. In poems such as “No Good Being,” “Sunday Tennis” and “How One Loves,” personal humanity shows through …

Ghost Stories: Doing Philosophy Through Literature, Paige Foreman

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Ghost Stories is a collection of three short stories that all make philosophical arguments. I define philosophy as an activity of thought that aspires to inquire into the nature of existence. I believe there are many ways to express philosophical thoughts, and I do philosophy in story form. The title story, Ghost Stories, is a Christian theodicy responding to The Book of Job that argues God should be held responsible for evil that happens in the world and that humans have the power to forgive God. The Palaces of Memory illustrates a new theory of personal identity as well as …

It's Always Better With A Good Dm, David Colannino

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

It’s Always Better With A Good DM is about our relationship with objects and maps as a vector for fantasy. Beginning from the premise that humans understand the world via narrative, I am concerned with the loss of imagination in adulthood in lieu of ideology, which is no more real than stories of future and fantastic places.

Fundamental Awareness: A Framework For Integrating Science, Philosophy And Metaphysics, Neil D. Theise, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The ontologic framework of Fundamental Awareness proposed here assumes that non-dual Awareness is foundational to the universe, not arising from the interactions or structures of higher level phenomena. The framework allows comparison and integration of views from the three investigative domains concerned with understanding the nature of consciousness: science, philosophy, and metaphysics. In this framework, Awareness is the underlying reality, not reducible to anything else. Awareness and existence are the same. As such, the universe is non-material, self-organizing throughout, a holarchy of complementary, process driven, recursive interactions. The universe is both its own first observer and subject. Considering the world …

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

A Dickensian Utilitarianism, Zachary Allentuck

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper argues that Charles Dickens' political and world views were in sympathy with Utilitarianism, as defined by Jeremy Bentham. The Utilitarianism Dickens attacked in A Christmas Carol, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit was not real utilitarianism; it was utilitarianism appropriated by England's middle-class.

The Sensorimotor Approach To Color Perception And The Necessity Of Socio-Cultural Considerations For Color Naming, Matthew Watts

Student Research Symposium

In this paper I argue against Kevin O’Regan’s claim that the “biological reflectance function” and its notion of “simple” colors naturally lead to a biologically consistent standard for species wide color naming. Although the simplicity of these colors may allow for easier apprehension, the notion that color simplicity will naturally lead to a consistent standard for the naming of basic color hues across a species is inconsistent with the idea of objective colors in the way that he portrays it. While it fixes many of the traditional explanatory issues surrounding color perception, it opens up new explanatory issues surrounding color. …

Epistemic Problems In Contemporary History, Michael Hollien

Honors Program Theses and Projects

A recent trend in contemporary written history is towards what I term “narrative” history, where the significant events of the past are framed within traditional dramatic structure and told through the personal vignettes of the common people who experienced them. This makes for immersive reading, but the complication in this approach is that history, at least in part, purports to be a true telling of the past. Therein lies the problem. I shall argue that narrative history’s pervasive use of literary technique and witness testimony in order to make truth claims about the past is epistemically unjustified. That does not …

Stop Factory Farming For The Sake Of Humanity!, Alexander V. Dimauro

ENV 434 Environmental Justice

Abstract: The world is being destroyed. We do not care about the mistreatment of animals in factory farms because of our consumeristic taste buds, but this gluttony is even more problematic than we think. It is blinding us from an even larger factor at stake. Our factory farming methods are a leading contributor in the causes of global warming. What this means for us is that our consumption has a direct impact on our destruction. We need to think big, and act. The only way to combat this issue is through taking courses of action that will force people to …

Stimulacra: The Accident And The Identity Crisis, Grant C. Gallo

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

An in-depth analysis and criticism of J.G. Ballards’s 1971 novel, Crash, is conducted. The qualities of the novel that place it within the genre of science fiction are presented and contested. Ballard’s own commentary on his novel is taken into account, as well as that of the French hyperrealist Jean Baudrillard. Both of their positions are then updated and reworked into theory of symbolic exchange for the digital age. Ultimately, the worth of J.G. Ballard’s Crash is weighed against the words of his critics and determined to defy the definitions of the science fiction genre itself.

Scatter 1: The Politics Of Politics In Foucault, Heidegger, And Derrida [Table Of Contents], Geoffrey Bennington

Philosophy & Theory

“Bennington’s Scatter 1 is a sophisticated, detailed, and strikingly original demonstration of the political efficacy of deconstruction. As always with Bennington, to read him is to undergo an education in reading.” —Robert Bernasconi, Pennsylvania State University

The Matter Of Voice: Sensual Soundings [Table Of Contents], Karmen Mackendrick

Philosophy & Theory

“The Matter of Voice is a work of philosophical theology in a multidisciplinary and poetic key. Its central organizing insight is that voice and voicing are productive of corporeality and rhythm in language. As MacKendrick shows, at the heart of the voice is ‘an irreducible and carnal strangeness’ that refuses closure and invites passion back into thinking. The book is a sterling exemplar of the richness that results from attending to the somatic quality of words, yielding a layering of ideas that forms a virtual chorus of multiperspectival thinking.” —Patricia Cox Miller, Syracuse University

I Want To Believe: Kant, The X Files, And Cosmopolitical Unity, Jeremy Knickerbocker

Cinesthesia

Kant’s final chapter of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, puts forth certain observations concerning the characteristics of human beings. In order for these observations to have rational validity as a proposed ‘human nature,’ however, Kant admits that it is necessary to compare between humans and another species of rational animal. Thus in an effort not to succumb to a naively anthropocentric thesis of nature, Kant still falls victim to his own anthropocentric privileging of rationality as a strictly human capacity—at least terrestrially speaking. While Kant fails to recognize any other earthly species as a rational animal, he nevertheless …

Humanity’S Capability Of Transcendence Through Artificial Intelligence, Zena Mccartney

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

In the 21st century artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as robots, mind uploading and cyborgs have probed at these questions:

Who is in control the machine or human?

What is the purpose of autonomous robots to humanity?

If a machine can pass the Turing Test then is it appropriate to be in society acting on free will?

How would a robot understand how to make someone feel loved?

Do their deep expressions of understanding the human condition make them like us?

Once a human has a cyborg technology are they then human or machine?

How and why would we want …

Contract Ethics And The Problem Of Collective Action, Tyler W. Stolt

Philosophy Undergraduate Honors Theses

Collective action problems are a unique family of puzzles in ethics about what people do together. These puzzles pervade our modern and globalized world. In collective harms, individual actions lead to a serious moral wrong; yet, the individual actions themselves do not seem to be moral wrongs. In collective benefits, individuals fail to bring about serious moral good; yet, individual actions do not seem to be morally wrong. In this paper, I will explore three different ways of grounding reasons why we ought not participate in the production of collective harms (or, refrain from producing a collective benefit). I argue …

Physical Aggression And Mindfulness Among College Students: Evidence From China And The United States, Yu Gao, Lu Shi, Kelly C. Smith, Jeffrey B. Kingree, Martie Thompson

Publications

The link between trait mindfulness and several dimensions of aggression (verbal, anger and hostility) has been documented, while the link between physical aggression and trait mindfulness remains less clear. Method: We used two datasets: one United States sample from 300 freshmen males from Clemson University, South Carolina and a Chinese sample of 1516 freshmen students from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Multiple regressions were conducted to examine the association between mindfulness (measured by Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale (MAAS)) and each of the four subscales of aggression. Results: Among the Clemson sample (N = 286), the …

Veritas Fax Ardens – Truth Is A Flaming Torch, Meret A. Luthi

Senior Theses

Based on the vast amount of truth theories that have been suggested by a myriad of thinkers from various disciplines, it can be inferred that the question of truth has occupied humankind since the beginning of its existence. Even though some of these theories appear more promising than others, it also seems that every suggested answer poses yet further questions about what truth really is. This seemingly endless stream of debates and contradictory theories further indicates that the nature of truth remains an enigma and subject to interpretation. Reflecting on Dominican University’s Latin motto “Veritas Fax Ardens” (Truth Is a …