Philosophy Commons^™

Scandinavian Dream: A Region’S Common Philosophical Principles Resulting In Equality, Prosperity, And Social Justice, Remy Christopher Ansiello

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Common philosophical principles formed by the three Scandinavian nations of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden developed through a shared past. Over the centuries this region’s historical, social, economic, and religious ties paved the way for a belief-system based on egalitarian ideals. By the beginning of the 20th century these egalitarian ideals formed the unique social welfare system Scandinavia has in place, benefiting citizens from the day they are born throughout their entire lives. This welfare system centers on the principle that both men and women are fully equal; furthermore society has a moral and legal obligation to remove all barriers preventing …

Towards A Philosophy Of Woodworking: Re-Embracing Community And Quality Craftsmanship In Contemporary America, Patrick J. Szymanski

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Since the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth-century, humanity has appropriated the natural world for its uses, and only recently have we begun to understand the consequences of our actions. This misuse of the natural world has manifested itself thoroughly in all industries, including the woodworking field. To counteract this problem, I investigate its Cartesian philosophical underpinnings and propose a solution based upon the interconnected philosophy of the German Existentialist Martin Heidegger. Equipped with both the philosophy of Heidegger and concepts from the Deep Ecology movement (which insists upon the intrinsic value of all life on earth), I work to reformulate …

Legal Positivism: An Analysis, Jonathan Brett Chambers

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Having taken some constitution and government courses during my undergraduate studies, I was comfortable with my understanding of justice and morality. An independent research seminar into the philosophy of law with Dr. Huenemann changed that. Taking Brian Leiter's book Naluralizing Jurilprudence as our guide, we dived into the vast question of "what is the law?" This seemingly simple question has shaped western society in too many ways to account. for instance, Legal Realists - one group that believes all rights "are the creations of government and the legal rules it lays down,,1 - dramatically changed labor laws in the early …

Un/Composing (Visual) Rhetorics: A (Strange) Comic(S) View Of Writing In The Age Of New Media, Sergio Figueiredo

All Dissertations

This dissertation finds its exigency in 'The 9/11 Commission Report,' and specifically its claim that 'a failure of imagination' that dismisses possibilities relates to the work currently in focus within rhetoric and composition studies as it relates to writing (with) new media. My argument relies on the underdeveloped concept of `imagination' in composition as a way to argue for an alternate theoretical framework for addressing what writing (with) new media entails as a growing form of art. As such, I take up Geoff Sirc's invitation to `remake' his English Composition as a Happening with all of its references to avant-garde …

Aristotle On Mind, Rachel R. Adams

HIM 1990-2015

The mind as it is found in Aristotle's great work De Anima is a special capacity of the soul. It has both active and passive properties that work together to allow discursive thinking and moral ethical behavior to emerge. This work will look at Aristotle's philosophy of mind, and I will forward a new interpretation of the mind as he understood it: what I call the active and passive mind property dualism. Aristotle's four causes allow for a unique application of a form of dualism that accounts for the ontological status of the mind and the emergence of rational thinking. …

Solving The Helmholtz Equation For The Neumann Boundary Condition For The Pseudosphere By The Galerkin Method, Jane Pleskunas

Mathematics Theses

In this paper, the Helmholtz equation for the exterior Neumann boundary condition for the pseudosphere in three dimensions using the global Galerkin method is studied. The Galerkin method will be used to solve Jones’ modified integral equation approach (modified as a series of radiating waves will be added to the fundamental solution) for the Neumann problem for the Helmholtz equation, which uses a series of double sums to approximate the integral. A Fortran 77 program is used and some required subroutines from the Naval Warfare Center are called to help increase ouraccuracy since these boundary integrals are difficult to solve. …

Physician-Assisted Suicide Within A Kantian Framework, Daksha Bhatia

Philosophy

The highly polarized debate over the practice of physician-assisted suicide is relatively new to the realm of ethical issues. Physician-assisted suicide was first explicitly legalized in the United States in 1994, when Oregon passed its Death with Dignity Act. Although the Act stipulates that a doctor “may prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill people under certain conditions,” the term physician-assisted suicide also encompasses giving a patient information on how to commit suicide, or giving them the means to do so in a form other than a prescription. Physician-assisted suicide is different from euthanasia in that the patient, …

Elements Of A Self-Deconstructive Ethic, Cameron R. Waldman

Philosophy

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Existence Monism, Peter Finocchiaro

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The objective of this paper is a defense of a particular answer to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question: when is it the case that some objects together compose some additional object? The answer is the conjunction of two claims. The first claim, compositional nihilism says that, necessarily, there is never an instance of material composition, and therefore all material objects that do exist are simple, or without proper parts. The second claim, existence monism, says that there exists a material object, and that all other material objects are identical with this object. In other words, there is just one …

Grassroots Poverty And Grassroots Human Rights: Grounding Theory In Practice, Scott Collison

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Philosophical discourse on human rights is broad and contested, and not all of it agrees with human rights practice. None of the common philosophical problems, such as the reconciliation between theory and human rights law, the debate between civil-political and socio-economic rights, or even what sort of thing human rights are, has been answered definitively. What is uncontested, however, is the fact that human rights are far from fulfilled in the world today, as world poverty and inequality persist into the 21^st century.

A recent trend across the board—from philosophy to development studies to human rights practice—is to view …

A Critical Phenomenology Of Civilization, J. C. Brinson

HIM 1990-2015

Civilized culture is killing the planet. At present, we are facing the largest extinction event in 65 million years and the cause, according to most scholars, is "patently" human. My question, however, is not whether the mass destruction of the biosphere is the result of an unfortunate and misguided particularity within civilization (e.g., over consumption, driving too much, etc.), but rather: Is it the case that civilization, by its very nature, entails the destruction of the natural world and of both human and non-human communities? In the vein of a fairly recent movement in scholarship, my answer is a resounding …

Critical White Feminism Interrogating Privilege, Whiteness, And Antiracism In Feminist Theory, Caroline Mcfadden

HIM 1990-2015

It is vital that feminist theory and critical white studies be combined in order to form what I call critical white feminism. Both critical white studies and feminist studies are often limited in their ability to adequately address the complex interconnectivity of racial and gender privilege and oppression. In general, feminist scholarship produced by white feminists excludes and oppresses women of color and is therefore inadequate. I refer to this problem as white feminist racism and argue that white feminists are ignorant of the ways in which whiteness and privilege facilitate problematic theorizing. Unlike white feminist theories, the emerging field …

Commentary On Ward’S Interpretation Of 'De Anima' Iii 3, Myrna Gabbe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Any interpretation of Aristotle’s phantasia should aim to account for the unusual

presentation he gives of it in De Anima III 3. The procedure of this chapter is not typical to his investigations into the soul’s faculties. His accounts usually proceed from an examination of its objects, since they determine the nature and character of its activities. But Aristotle does not clearly state what the objects of fantasiva are, leading some scholars to conclude that it has no objects of its own and, hence, is not a genuine or full faculty. Instead of detailing its objects, he begins the chapter …

What Is A Human Person? An Exploration & Critique Of Contemporary Perspectives, Emmanuel Cumplido

Senior Honors Projects

What is a Human Person? An Exploration and Critique of Physicalist Perspectives

Emmanuel Cumplido

Faculty Sponsor: Donald Zeyl, Philosophy

Answers to the question “What is a human person?” that have garnered the allegiance of people throughout millennia fall under two broad categories: “physicalism” and “dualism”. One of the earliest renditions of physicalism was the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists. In their view, all of reality could be explained through two principles: atoms and empty space. As a consequence, people were thought to be nothing but assemblages of atoms in space. Plato’s Phaedo presents one of the earliest philosophical endorsements …

The Perpetual Creation And Provocation Of The Self, Krista Damico

Senior Honors Projects

The Perpetual Creation and Provocation of the Self

Krista D’Amico

Faculty Sponsor: Stephen Barber, English

This project consists of four related parts. The first part is a critical and creative work of prose in which I converse with the thought of two philosophers, namely Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. This conversation enables me to present my own thought and subjectivity in relationship to a very important aspect of my life: music-making. The second part of my project is a critical essay in which I contemplate the work of another artist, Virginia Woolf, and the way that her credo Three Guineas (1938) …

The Implications Of Merleau-Ponty For The Human Sciences, Ryan Marcotte

Senior Honors Projects

The Implications of Merleau-Ponty for the Human Sciences Ryan Marcotte Cobb Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy The American Anthropology Association (AAA) made headlines in November 2010 due to a controversial change in their 'Long-Range Plan.' The revised AAA mission statement omits all mention of the word 'science' and this omission has sparked a fierce debate within the anthropology community. The debate reveals that the study of social phenomena can be approached from two competing points of view – a scientific and a non-scientific perspective.  This project is concerned with the historical and intellectual developments that led to this competition between …

Wrench Yourself, Luca W. Cintolo

Senior Honors Projects

Wrench Yourself

Luca Cintolo

Faculty Sponsor: Cheryl Foster, Philosophy

Wrench Yourself was originally conceived as a three part project. Part one, learning about the writing life, came to fruition through reading books on the craft. Part two involved producing a body of original, creative, non-fiction. Part three culminated in binding the polished pieces of writing in limited production, hand made, leather bound books.

At the completion of this project I have created a hand-made book containing two essays. The first essay, Driven to Distraction, focuses on inattention behind the wheel and the pervasiveness of multi-tasking as a societal norm. …

Marcuse On The Two Dimensions Of Advanced Industrial Society And The Significance Of His Thought Today, Michael C. Hartley Mr.

Senior Honors Projects

Herbert Marcuse was a philosopher and social theorist who wrote extensively about the dynamics of social change in the technologically advanced societies of the Western world. Motivated by the desire to see humanity develop societies that would allow for individuals to live a free and happy existence, Marcuse critiqued the existing societies of his time. Although Marcuse’s main work, One-Dimensional Man, is over forty years old, it can continue to offer us new insights today. I believe that Marcuse’s thought offers a powerful framework for analyzing our contemporary society. In this project I distill this framework, what could be …

Care Of The Self And The Will To Freedom: Michel Foucault, Critique And Ethics, Stephanie M. Batters

Senior Honors Projects

Care of the Self and the Will to Freedom

Stephanie Batters

Faculty Sponsor:  Stephen Barber, English

What do subjectivity, power and ethics have in common?  For French philosopher Michel Foucault, each of these concepts inherently resides within the others.  His works, spanning from the mid-1950s to his death in 1984, offer a profound theoretical approach to the complex questions that obtain between the individual and society.  Foucault’s works present careful and intricate theories about the relationships of the past with the present, the individual with society, and power with truth.  Many of his writings explore how the individual is made …

The Mind In Motion, Shayan A. Gates

Senior Honors Projects

The Mind in Motion

Shayan Gates

Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy

The origin of most scientific disciplines can be traced back to a few philosophical insights posed by a few curious thinkers throughout time, and cognitive science is no exception.While intrigue has nearly always surrounded the human mind and its relation to the brain, validation of this relationship has not been so easy to come by, and there are still areas of contention during this time of advancement in neurological sciences and related technologies.

This topic is very broad (to say the least) so I decided to confine this paper …