Philosophy Commons^™

Sustaining Ireland, Body And Soul: A Woman Leader's Story Of The Cooperative Movement, Elizabeth Summerfield

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This article tells the story of the Cooperative Movement in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the perspective of one of its woman leaders. It does so in order to distil lessons for the contemporary thought leadership of sustainability from a period before the term was coined. It does so with the warrant of Albert Einstein:

The distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Its evidence base is historical literature, but its argument and analysis draw on recent research in leadership studies, neuroscience and theology.

On Powerful Qualities, Dean J. Morales

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present work is a critical examination of the Powerful Qualities Ontology. Categoricalism affirms that intrinsic properties are quiddistic or qualitative in nature, and Pure Powers Theory affirms that they are by nature powerful. The Powerful Qualities Ontology, though, affirms that intrinsic properties are both qualitative and powerful, and that by being a more robust ontology than both Categoricalism and Pure Powers Theory, it promises to account for more phenomena and solve more problems than these rival theories. Despite its advantages, however, I challenge the feasibility of the Powerful Qualities Ontology. In chapter 1, I define important terms and provide …

“Imbedded” Belonging And Black Being: A Critical Analysis Of Blackness In Kendrick Lamar’S 2016 Grammy Awards Performance, Anwar Uhuru

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

This article argues that in a space of artistic performance Black people can fully imbed themselves in the space, despite the temporality of the performance itself. Therefore, in the act of performing, Black people are able to fully be recognized as a human whole. The goal of this article is to think of a Hip Hop beingness that fuses the temporal/body, consciousness/beyond the body, and the ancestral connections of orality and genetic memory. I do so by looking at how black performance disrupts dominant narratives of black bodies as being just flesh. This article brings together, Hip Hop studies, Africana …

Making Emotions Trustworthy, Xiaoyu Ke

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I investigate ways by which agents can make their emotions more trustworthy from a perspective that’s informed by recent psychological research on the nature of emotion regulation. This dissertation is a collection of three articles, each addressing one type of cases of untrustworthy emotions in a particular context. Chapter one (Developing Appropriate Emotions) concerns emotions that are untrustworthy because they are irrelevant to the moral or epistemic judgements at hand. By situating the problem in the context of a situationist challenge to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, I argue that we can address this problem by developing ameliorative abilities such as emotion …

Perceptual Experience, Representation, And The Environment, James Gulledge

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent cognitive science suggests that the system responsible for perceptual experience is flexible, can learn, and is robustly affected by information stored in subjects’ minds. My dissertation is about the account of the mind and subjective awareness that emerges if this picture of perceptual experience is true. Whether perceptual experience is affected by stored information is usually tied to discussions of so-called ‘cognitive penetration’ (what I call cognitive ‘permeation’). I consider the focus on cognitive permeation largely as a red herring, instead holding that we should view the relevant epistemic issue more broadly: as that of whether changing stores of …

The Art Of Surviving: Alchemy Of Healing Trauma In Relation To Identity: A Self Study., Rebecca Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis explores trauma’s physical and psychological aspects concerning identity as an artistic practice. Through exploring materials, subject matter, and media, my approach to trauma is based on personal and socially engaged experiences and my attempt to re-conceptualize that experience through the language of contemporary art. Extensively this work is governed by childhood memories and the critical aspect of being raised as a female in a patriarchal society. Being raised female comes with a certain number of expectations and requirements. This work creates a physical and spiritual connection between trauma and the identity of what is female. Discussing these …

Essays On Privilege And Its Implications For Relational Autonomy And Vaccine Hesitancy, Nicole Fice

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One goal of feminist philosophy is to challenge unjust systems of power like patriarchy, which privilege some social groups while oppressing others. In this three-chapter dissertation, I argue that to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of privilege and its implications.

In chapter one, I raise objections to some existing philosophical accounts of privilege. These accounts are either too broad in defining privilege as always advantageous or they are vague regarding what privilege comprises. I provide an account of privilege which clarifies that privilege is generally advantageous and that privilege includes tangible resources and options to do certain …

Joking With A Heavy Heart: Bo Burnham As The Modern Underground Man, Jasper K. Beck

PURE Insights

What is the meaning of life? How can we make sense of existence, if at all? These are the questions Fyodor Dostoyevsky attempted to answer in his 1864 novella Notes From Underground. Centuries later in 2021, comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham attempts to answer the same questions in his COVID-era comedy special Inside. Though neither of these works are about existential philosophy explicitly, Notes From Underground is revered as such. In this comparative essay I argue that Inside is also a deeply existential work, similar to Notes From Underground in both the themes it contains and the mechanisms used to …

Theorizing, Bounded Rationality, And Expertise: Cognitive Sociology And The Quasi-Realism Of Problem-Solving As A Course Of Activity, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

The question facing sociology is whether it is a field or a discipline. If it is a field, then there is no need for theorizing. However, if sociology is a discipline, then problem-solving cannot be disentangled from theorizing without a loss of intelligibility – the inability to explain the social as the concept of the discipline. Through the quasi-realism of problem-solving as a course of activity, this chapter presents cognitive sociology as a paradigm appropriate to the concept of the social understood as an ongoing course of activity. In doing so, it is shown how bounded rationality and expertise play …

Imposed Food And Its Challenges To Food Security, Zachary Tobias

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) declares that food security exists when all people have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food. This is taken to understand food security in four measures: availability, access, utilization, and stability. The focus of this paper will be on access which concerns the affordability and allocation of the food supply (Ahteensuu & Siipi, 2016). I argue that social pressures on food choice, which I call food impositions, limit one's access to sufficient and safe foods by encouraging undereating in women and unhealthily high volumes of meat consumption in men. People …

Justice And Autonomy In Islamic Bioethics, Sarah Khaleefah

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

Islamic bioethics acts as a normative guide to issues in the medical and scientific fields based on the religious perspective of Islam. In this paper, I will discuss one of the principles of Western biomedical ethics using this perspective. In particular, I will demonstrate how this principle should be reformulated, by Islamic understanding, into the principle of respect for justice. The principle of respect for justice can be viewed in the same way as the principle of respect for autonomy, composed of the negative obligation to refrain from actions that destabilize justice (such as causing harm to others), and the …

A Conversion To A Flourishing-Based Ethical Egoism: Discovering Morality’S Prudential Rationality, Carson Johnston

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

How do we live a moral life while also living a life of value to us? A life filled with passions, interests, and relationships? This paper tackles a possible reconciliation between morality and rational prudence that ensures a moral way of life is valuable for the agent that lives it. The author is motivated to build a moral theory that is “good for” the moral agent—an individual that has a capacity to understand the moral value and impact of their actions in relation to others. It is a theory that recognizes the human tendency to follow partial, self-interested, and typically …

On The Truth Values Of Definite Descriptions: Examining The Russell-Strawson Dialectic, Ibrahim Dagher

Acta Cogitata: An Undergraduate Journal in Philosophy

A well-known critique of Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, offered by P.F. Strawson, is that a central tenet of Russell’s theory, the claim that any particular utterance of a sentence with a non-referring definite description will be either true or false, is mistaken. Strawson provides a similarly well-known argument in support of this claim which at least in part rests on an analysis of such utterances as implying or presupposing, rather than asserting, parts of the logically existential proposition that Russell takes such sentences to be. For Strawson, propositions such as ‘the x is p’ instead presuppose ‘there is an x’ …

The Advancement Of Surrealism: Navigating The Logical Implications Of Surrealism In Poetry Through Time, Brandon Hemsworth

Honors Projects

Surrealism is a complex medium of artistic expression that has persisted through the modern and postmodern time periods and into the contemporary. This project attempts to shine light on the importance of Surrealism by researching the rational implications of its irrational nature. I approached this question in two separate manners: One in a research perspective and one in a creative perspective. This project includes my research on the advancement of Surrealism and 15 poems that I have composed in reflection of Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, the contemporary, and Anti-Realism. The conclusions of this project have important implications that have a common …

The Ins And Outs Of Undergraduate Research And Leadership: A Student's Perspective, Regina F. Hockert

Kinesiology and Public Health

This manuscript is a reflective write-up of Regina Hockert’s experience in completing KINE 462, Honors Kinesiology Senior Project, during the 2022 Fall Quarter. It describes their experience as an undergraduate research leader, including specific milestones and artifacts related to a broader replication study and the daily activities of Dr. Jafrā Thomas’ lab. This essay was designed to be a written reflection around their senior project presentation and the insights shared through that medium about the senior project experience. It is created to showcase lessons learned in relationship with the tasks and responsibilities required of working in-depth on student-led research. …

Content Externalism And Self-Knowledge, Donnie Gene Barnett Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

There appears to be a tension between two widely held philosophical theses: content externalism and what is often called “privileged access”. The first is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of many propositional attitude-types are at least partially determined by properties external to the thinking subject. The second is the epistemological thesis that we have a priori access to the contents of our own propositional attitudes. Those who hold that at least one of these theses must be false are called incompatibilists. My goal is to show that the incompatibilists are wrong, that content externalism and privileged access can both …

The "Therapeutic Relationship:" Emergence, Eclipse, And Transformations Of A Social Technology., Ulrich Koch

Clinical Research and Leadership Faculty Publications

This essay situates the history of "the relationship" as a therapeutic technology within the broader context of changing social relations in the twentieth-century United States. More specifically, it outlines the emergence and subsequent diffusion of practices that aim to cultivate a social bond between therapist and patient that may serve as a psychotherapeutic tool. The article highlights the transformations of this technology as its institutional and epistemic foundations became challenged. Initially conceived as an "artificial" social relation designed to help with "personal adjustment," the therapeutic relationship was soon also deployed by non-experts and became a model for more healthful social …

The Introduction To Being And Time, David Good

Aristos

The clearest summary of Heidegger’s thought in the Introduction to Being and Time is provided by Thomas Sheehan, who says:

Heidegger made the point by pressing his students on what it is they first encounter in their lived experience. Is it things? Objects? Values? No, he insisted, it is:

the meaningful [das Bedeutsame] – that’s what is primary, that’s what is immediately in your face without any detour through a mental grasp of the thing. When you live in the world of first-hand experience, everything comes at you loaded with meaning, all over the place and all the time. Everything …

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Eschatological Teachings In The Prayers Of A Funeral Mass, Carolyn Lewis

Aristos

In light of twenty-first century secularization, and with the liturgical revisions following the Second Vatican Council, some lament that the true eschatological doctrines of the Catholic faith are no longer evident in the Funeral Mass. This would then miscarry the axiom Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, exposing significant shortcomings within these liturgical revisions. This paper analyses the propers of the Funeral Mass, in order to assess which eschatological teachings are evident in those prayers. Examined first are the Christocentric salvific teachings, considering the hopeful Paschal focus of the Funeral Mass. Representations of the nature of the afterlife are then analysed, …

Logos I Major Essay: In Defence Of Alasdair Macintyre On The Importance Of Catholic University Education, Laurel Hooper

Aristos

No abstract provided.