Philosophy Commons^™

Privileged Logics: Interrogating Foundations And Practices In Research Ethics, Sandra Borden, David Hartmann, Susan R. Stapleton

Privileged Logics: Interrogating Foundations and Practices in Research Ethics

This one-day conference was held on February 25, 2024, at the end of the APPE Annual Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. The conference consisted of a keynote presentation, three workshop sessions, a working lunch focused on discussion of barriers to change, and a concluding session prompting participants to identify one action drawing on the day’s conversations that they could try at their own institutions or organizations.

The three co-investigators wrote a descriptive summary of the day’s events, and this report is an effort to combine those into a single synthetic account. Two main principles were operative: 1) description rather than interpretation …

Criticisms Of Evidentialism:A Critique Of Jonathan Way’S Solutions To The Issues Of Evidentialism, Kailey Echeverria

Global Tides

This paper will begin with a brief introduction of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee’s definitions and examples ascribed to their original argument for Evidentialism in order to provide context for the remainder of the paper. The paper will turn to Jonathan Way’s concerns surrounding the original argument for Evidentialism, and break down his revamped definitions of Evidentialism and what Way calls “incentives”. Then, the paper will turn to Way’s solutions to the concerns he addressed, where he introduces the “argument from good reasoning” and the Link principal, a modified and refreshed version of Feldman and Conee’s “argument from reasoning”. Further …

The Ethical Motive As Counter To Benatar’S Anti-Natalism, Eliot Cox

Global Tides

In multiple works, David Benatar defends the view that it is immoral for parents to have children under any circumstance due to the suffering inherent in human life. This essay argues that Benatar’s anti-natalist argument is not successful because of its misidentification of the proper motive humans should have if they are to exist. Instead, I argue, the benefits of an ethical motive, if such a motive is properly instilled within a child by their parents or guardians, can surmount the suffering caused by existence. An ethical motive is characterized by the goal of alleviating suffering for others before oneself. …

A New Nature Is Coming. We Will Be Repossessed, And The Spectres Of The Post-Natural Will Take The World. Predictions Of A New Symbiotic Earth In "Fafner" (2018) By Daniel Perez Navarro, Miguel Angel Albújar-Escuredo

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

This paper engages in the debates about decentralizing the role of men in the world we live in. Byproducts of this new mindset are concepts such as the “Posthuman” (Braidotti 2012); the status of “Holobiont” (Haraway 2016), and the experiencing of a new “Coexistence” with the non-human (Morton 2018). I suggest the novel Fafner (2018) as a perfect sample of this intellectual debate from an artistic and fictional view. Using concepts from diverse fields of thinking and applying them to literary analysis, this paper will review the in-depth transformation of nature portrayed by Fafner’s narration. Additionally, it will accomplish …

On Learning Your Gender: A Comprehensive View, Audra M. Hazelwood

Theses

This essay provides a metaphysical and epistemological account of gender. The metaphysics involves a ‘non-reductionist view of gender’, which is to say that gender cannot be reduced to a single factor. On this view gender begins with one’s innate gender inclinations (in the vein of Julia Serano). These inclinations pick out a specific range of gender possibilities from the gender spectrum that apply to a person. At the same time we live in communities and cultures with certain gender norms. This is where epistemology comes into play since our gender inclinations are filtered through gender norms and some people are …

Deconstructive Analysis Of "Six Characters In Search Of An Author ", Nathan L. Dahlberg

FUSION

This analysis applies deconstruction theory to Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, exploring diverse perspectives, fragmented reality, and language ambiguity. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of meaning and offers a fresh perspective on the play's complexity through visual representations and engaging discussions. It contributes to the discourse on deconstruction in World Literature.

This project was created in response to an assignment prompt that asked students to apply a literary theory to Pirandello's play. Students explored their chosen theory through visualizations of its major concepts using text and images. They then connected examples from the play to …

Towards Erasing The Distinction Between The Computational And Syntactic Accounts Of Scientific Theories, Timothy Luft

Theses

One of the main goals of philosophy of science is to give a proper account of scientific theories and their structure. One way that accounts of the structure of scientific theories can be distinguished is by the mathematical or logical structures that they involve. For instance, syntactic accounts of scientific theories hold that theories are axioms in a logical framework, whereas semantic accounts are more liberal in the range of mathematical and logical structures they take as pertinent to the structure of scientific theories. Paul Thagard (1988) offers a computational account of scientific theories, which holds that theories are complex …

Between Fodor And Sellars -- A Middle Ground For Language-Like Neural Representations, Hanzhe Dong

Theses

The recent resurgence of the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis has drawn much attention. The history of philosophy and cognitive science has provided us with various versions of LOT. From Sellars to Fodor, theorists have offered us considerations on the vehicles, content, and functions of such a representation format. However, it’s been more than 50 years since Fodor’s publication on LOT (1975), and the resurgence suggests that we need a modern iteration of LOT to fit with recent developments in the study on cognition. Therefore, in this paper, I argue that we need a middle ground between Fodor and Sellars’s …

Gaza War: Too Many Citizens Being Killed, Sheraz Yaqub, Bjørn Edwin, Zane Hammoud, Gabriel Herrera-Almario, Buthaina Jabir, Kristoffer Lassen, Pål Dag Line, Miguel Angel Lopez-Gonzalez, Michael Puttick, Mohammed Ahmed Idrees Saadelnour, José Sampaio-Neto, Raghuram Sampath, Konstantin V. Sementsov, Ajith K. Siriwardena, Ernesto Sparrelid, Alberto Büge Stein, Robert Sutcliffe, Helena Taflin, Hany Takla, Silvio Valdec, Cherisse N. Vinoya, Waleed Zaid, Stephen J. Wigmore

School of Dentistry Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Platonic Intelligence And The United States Constitution, Elizabeth M. Iglesias

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates the Platonic logic that informs the order of value and design elements of the U.S. Constitution as defended in the Federalist Papers. The dissertation has four movements that reveal the Platonic logic of the U.S. Constitution. The first takes up the repudiation of tyranny in defense of a way of being called ordered liberty in both Plato and the Federalist. The second takes up the commitment to the supremacy of intelligence over power, an order of value that is distinctly Platonic and permeates the design logic of the U.S. Constitution. Intelligence in this context is understood as …

A Critique Of Free Market Epistemology, Preston Winn

Student Research Symposium

Why care about economic systems?

We mostly take these for granted, but they impact:

• Resource Allocation
• Distribution of Wealth
• Individual Freedom
• Innovation
• Social/Environmental Impact

Stream Fungal Biodiversity And Leaf Decomposition, Vale Miller

Undergraduate Research Conference at Missouri S&T

CURRENTLY ONGOING PROJECT We are investigating the possible impact of aquatic fungi biodiversity on leaf litter decomposition and respiration. Four different species of aquatic fungi were placed into flasks with leaf cores (A, B, C, and D), one with no fungi as a control, and one with all four species in equal amounts (ABCD). So far, there seems to be little to no effect on respiration between the species and similar results in the flasks with all four species. Based on this information, biodiversity has yet to show a significant impact in leaf respiration and little to no effect on …

Uncomplicating The Complicated: The Definition Of Life, Jennifer S. Primatic

Honors College Theses

The issue of defining life has long been debated by biologists and philosophers alike, but the issue surrounding it has been that the definition is overcomplicated and attempts to include so many definitions from previous scientific discussions. The proposed definition is– a living thing consists of an organic entity which, taken out of the ideal condition, will work toward sustaining itself without outside influence. This definition addresses many issues present in the previous definition, while also including organic entities which should be considered alive.

A Phenomenological Approach To Legal Epistemic Injustice, Christopher Thomas Phillippe-Rodriguez

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Injustices in legal contexts are widespread, yet we usually tend to think of them through a social lens. The study of epistemic injustices increases the resolution of this lens; it identifies how we wrong others as "knowers." In this paper, I propose that the tradition of phenomenology may be invoked to describe and identify instances of epistemic injustice in legal contexts. In order to justify this claim, I establish a phenomenological methodology predicated on the synthesis of two ideas: (1) the phenomenological recognition of the Other, and (2) society's duty to endow its members with an epistemic sphere of action.

How Do We Craft Autoethnography? A Modest Review, Niroj Dahal

The Qualitative Report

I am writing this review as an essential reading for readers and writers of the book—Crafting Autoethnography: Processes and Practices of Making Self and Culture, edited by Jackie Goode, Karen Lumsden, and Jan Bradford, which explores the art of crafting autoethnography (Goode et al., 2023). As a novice autoethnographer, I have grappled with challenges and explored borders while shaping my narrative as a self-narrator of autoethnographic writing. So, in this review, I have attempted to engage readers by offering the invitation, encouraging initial reading as entry to the book, subsequent re-entry, and eventual exit as my evaluation of the …

Does Ai Ask Good Questions? A Discussion Activity, Katherine Tilghman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students will prompt ChatGPT to generate discussion questions about a course text or artistic work, then evaluate the questions and modify them to make them more engaging and thought-provoking.

Spiritual Cinema: Agel, Merleau-Ponty And The Cinematic Real, Patrick O'Connor Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

This article seeks to retrieve the work of Henri Agel, and his collaborator Amédée Ayfre, for our theoretical understanding of film-philosophy. I explore their distinctive contribution to thinking philosophically about film and assess the relative merits of their work for the phenomenology of film. While exceptionally valuable for religious and theological interpretations of film I proceed to argue that Agel and Ayfre’s work needs to be supplemented with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s film-phenomenology to adequately express the temporal and motional nature of film. Merleau-Ponty’s work I contend while exceptionally valuable is brief and underdeveloped, and therefore does not fully …

Development Under Erasure: Deconstruction In Development Discourse, Micah Gill

Honors Theses

Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction has been historically underappreciated in development. Yet Derrida’s critical theory realizes development as an inherently deconstructive field, one which advocates for the Other when disciplines such as economics and international relations overlook them. By examining the history of development through a Derridean lens, we can see how deconstruction was working within some of the development discourse’s prominent shifts leading up to its “impasse” in the 1980s. Heightened critical attention around this time catalyzed a flurry of deconstructive processes in the following years which have reshaped the landscape of development scholarship and practice. The story of …

The Actions Of A Lonely Woman And The Effects Of Online Incel Communities On Society, Antara Dabral

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

In recent years, the resistance to women’s rights movements has started to shift from only being based on gender roles and has started to take root in insecurity and anxiety surrounding a dating life. This phenomenon has been further exacerbated with the advent and growth of the internet, where ideas are allowed to spread across the world rapidly which has created online forums where people known as incels gather.

In this paper, I ascertain that these online forums have a broad incel culture and community founded on victimhood and frustration and how they were formed as a consequence of a …

Kantian Reason & Epistemic Humility, Elias Seeman

Philosophy Senior Capstone

Immanuel Kant continues to be one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. His thought shapes much of contemporary culture and has dramatically influenced Christian philosophy and theology. While some of this influence is beneficial, there are components of Kantian thought – especially as it pertains to the capabilities of human reason to arrive at true knowledge of God – that are decidedly problematic. In this paper, two different readings on Kant’s work on this subject are presented, followed by a brief overview of key insights and shortcomings. The final section charts a positive way forward for …