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Book Review: Schroeder, Mark. Explaining The Reasons We Share: Explanation And Expression In Ethics, Vol. 1., John Brunero

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This volume is a collection of eleven essays by Mark Schroeder, including one previously unpublished paper, divided into four parts. Schroeder’s substantive introduction to the volume explains the unifying argumentative thread running through these essays and will be useful even to those who have read the essays separately. The essays themselves are superb. Schroeder’s work is unmatched in its clarity, incisiveness, originality, creativity, and depth. And this volume will leave the reader with a new appreciation for various ways in which assumptions about the structure of normative explanations—particularly about what Schroeder calls the Standard Model Theory—are important to central debates …

The Roman Inquisition: Trying Galileo, Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Philosophy Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Skilful Reflection As An Epistemic Virtue, Chienkuo Mi, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper advances the claim that skilful reflection is a master virtue in that skilful reflection shapes and corrects the other epistemic and intellectual virtues. We make the case that skilful reflection does this with both competence-based epistemic virtues and character-based intellectual virtues. In making the case that skilful reflection is a master virtue, we identify the roots of ideas central to our thesis in Confucian philosophy. In particular, we discuss the Confucian conception of reflection, as well as different levels of epistemic virtue. Next we set out the Dual Process Hypothesis of Reflection, which provides an explanation of the …

Why Brilliant People Believe Nonsense: A Practical Text For Critical And Creative Thinking, J. Steve Miller, Cherie K. Miller

2015 Faculty Bookshelf

The information explosion has made us information rich, but wisdom poor. Yet, to succeed in business and in life, we must distinguish accurate from bogus sources, and draw valid conclusions from mounds of data. This book, written for a general adult audience as well as students, takes a new look at critical thinking in the information age, helping readers to not only see through nonsense, but to create a better future with innovative thinking.

Readers should see the practicality of enhancing skills that make them more innovative and employable, especially in a day when companies increasingly seek original thinkers, global …

Review Of Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, And Race By Emily Lee, Michael Monahan

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Why The Struggle Against Coloniality Is Paramount To Latin American Philosophy, Grant J. Silva

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Formal Causes: Definition, Explanation, And Primacy In Socratic And Aristotelian Thought By Michael T. Ferejohn, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Epistemology And The Project Of Mapping Science, Kamili Posey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One area of debate in naturalized epistemology is how to best interpret the relationship between naturalism and traditional analytic epistemology. This is particularly the case for epistemologists who commit to methodological forms of naturalism:

First, I contend that methodological naturalists must commit, at minimum, to the idea that the best methods of knowledge-production in science ought to determine the best methods of knowledge-production full stop. I also contend that the best methods of knowledge-production in science are determined by and performed within scientific communities. Thus a methodological naturalist, to minimally call herself such, ought to consider knowledge-production within 'communities of …

A Critique Of Western Liberalism, Siddhant Issar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I draw attention to the connections between Western liberalism, particularly exemplified by the idea of liberal freedom, and (in)visible modalities of oppression. In chapter 1, I examine how the philosophical basis of liberalism allows it to serve as a mediator of oppression. In chapter 2, through a genealogical analysis, I trace out the link between liberalism and political economy. Here I focus on the imbrication between (neo-)liberalism, capitalism, and the production of subjectivity. My analysis aims at revealing the specific form of subjectivity engendered under the sign of liberal freedom. In chapter 3, I take up post …

Persons As Self-Consciously Concerned Beings, Benjamin Abelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an analysis of the concept of a person. According to this analysis, persons are beings capable of being responsible for their actions, which requires possession of the capacities for self-consciousness, in the sense of critical awareness of one's first-order desires and beliefs and concern, meaning emotional investment in the satisfaction of one's desires and truth of one's beliefs. The persistence of a person over time requires uninterrupted maintenance of those capacities. This view is in conflict with the more popular account of persistence in terms of the continuity of distinctive psychological states. Furthermore, this account of personhood …

Olfaction As The Paradigm For Perceptual Philosophy, Andreas Keller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Plato wrote that smell is of a "half-formed nature" and that not much can be said about it, and Kant identified smell as the "most ungrateful" and "most dispensable" of the senses. Because contemporary philosophers share this distaste for smell perception, olfaction is often dismissed or ignored in philosophical accounts of perception. Instead, contemporary philosophy of perception is based almost exclusively on visual perception. The goal of this dissertation is to show that this focus on a single modality distorts our understanding of what perception is.

I am not the first to realize the potential of opening up perceptual philosophy …

Communication, Labor, And Communicative Labor, Rachel Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the work we do to understand, to be understood, and to act on the basis of such understanding. Communicative labor is an important and under-theorized aspect of communication, and one that significantly impacts our epistemic, social and political lives. In this dissertation I take such labor as my object of analysis, and show how it bears on speakers and contexts.

First I provide an analysis of labor suitable for characterizing unwaged, immaterial and reproductive labor, and argue that such an analysis helps make sense of language systems ' the common pool resource systems that allow speakers …

Civil Unrest In The Untied State Of America: Facing The Threat, Menemsha P.S. Milnor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the purpose and function of the police in a modern state. It draws mainly from the ideas put forth by Walter Benjamin in his 1921 essay, Critique of Violence, and focuses exclusively on the events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. By applying political theory to concrete events, it attempts to expose the mechanics of capitalist state repression as presented in its current form. Central themes are police violence, state repression, popular sovereignty and political resistance. It is the intention of this piece of writing that it be used for practical purposes, to serve as a foundation …

Problems, Puzzles, And Paradoxes For A Moral Psychology Of Fiction, Katherine Tullmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of my dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of our psychological engagements with fiction. While many aestheticians have written on issues concerning art and ethics, only a few have addressed the ways in which works of fiction offer problems for general accounts of morality, let alone how we go about making moral judgments about fictions in the first place. My dissertation fills that gap. I argue that the first challenge in explaining our interactions with fiction arises from functional and inferential arguments that entail that our mental states about fictional entities are non-genuine. This means that our …

On The Coexistence Of Freedom And Necessity, George Younger

Kaleidoscope

No abstract provided.

"Speak 'Em Fair": Discourse And Dissembling In The Jew Of Malta, Andrew Bozio

Kaleidoscope

Barabas, the title character of Marlowe's tragedy, is the embodiment of contradiction. Under persecution, he trangresses Christian norms in order to create his own identity, and yet, in the same instant, his antics make him the very monster of medieval legend. Hence the question arises: is Barabas' rebellion skillful enough to deconstruct Maltese (and English) anti-Semitism, or do his actions merely confirm the Jewish stereotype? In working toward an answer, in this paper I provide an introduction to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, using containment theory to create a theoretical framework for addressing the problems of representation in The Jew …

Wild-But-Not-Too-Wild Animals: Challenging Goldilocks Standards In Rewilding, Erica Von Essen, Michael P. Allen

Between the Species

Rewilding is positioned as ‘post’-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, we argue that the autonomy of nature rhetoric in rewilding is challenged by human interventions. Instead of joining critique toward the ‘managed wilderness’ approach of rewilding, however, we examine the injustices this entails for keystone species. Reintroduction case studies demonstrate how arbitrary standards for wildness are imposed on these animals as they do their assigned duty to rehabilitate ecosystems. These ‘Goldilocks’ standards are predicated on aesthetic values that sanction interventions inconsistent with the premise of animal sovereignty. These include culling, relocations and …

The Exclusion Problem And Counterfactual Theories Of Causation, Yee Hang Sze

Lingnan Theses

Jaegwon Kim famously challenged non-reductive materialism/physicalism (NRM), a popular stance in the philosophy of mind, with the so-called exclusion argument. The argument is alleged to show that if NRM is true, then mental properties cannot be causes. In recent years, there have been many reactions to the exclusion problem based on counterfactual accounts of causation. In particular, List and Menzies gave an interesting response based on a Lewis-style counterfactual theory of causation, with some modifications made to Lewis’s semantics of counterfactuals. In this thesis, I first argue that their central thesis regarding the issue of exclusion can actually be established …

理性思維與行動的統一性 : 兩個模型, I Xuan Chong

Lingnan Theses

本文從對索引性（如「這個」、「那個」、「我」）的研究開始，企圖借兩種迴異的對索引性在與心靈及行動相關之意義上的解釋為支點，來突顯兩個理解「心靈」與「行動」及「理由」甚至「理性」之間內在關係的模型。以一個「整體論式」的研究進路出發，在建立兩個模型時，我企圖找出一個平衝各種考慮的分析途徑，從而避免過於簡陋的化約論。在這樣分析的過程中，諸如「自知」、「真之條件之於解釋心靈的地位」等重要議題亦會在處理心靈與行動之間關係的脈絡中得到討論。最後，如果本文的分析是大致準確的話，那麼，對於如何理解和回應驅動本文之研究的核心問題──即我們應該如何理解這個世界才能讓「規範性」處身其中的這個所謂「規範性之定位問題」──我們便會得出兩個完全不同的思考方式。一方面，是以「命題」為核心來理解的、把規範性定位在認知－行動者就其當下處境作出整體論式的反思後依其理性機能之發揮而作出的判斷上，依此理解「理性」是「製造性」的，即不論是認知抑或行動，有關的規範性理由都是認知－行動者之理性機能運作的結果；另一方面，是以行動者所處身之「心靈狀態」為核心來理解的、把規範性定位在從行動者之思想與行動中皆有所展現出的整全人格上，依此理解「理性」是「調節性」的，即有關認知或行動的理由皆是行動者因應處境權衡而作出的。然而，本文的分析並不以能最終回答規範性之定位問題自居；相反，如果能夠得出兩個自成一系的模型，本文就算已達成其目的。

Book Review: Issa And The Meaning Of Animals: A Buddhist Poet’S Perspective By David G. Lanoue, Lisa Kemmerer

Between the Species

No abstract provided.