Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Softening Corners: How A Carefully Considered Hospitality Operation Impacted An Educational Institution, Jennie Moran

Dissertations

Enter quickly, as I am afraid of my happiness!

(Derrida, 2000, p.131)

This research project is an attempt to bridge the gap between the philosophical ideals of hospitality and the hospitality industry, by examining how a carefully considered hospitality operation impacted an educational institution over the course of eight years. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the application of the philosophical ideals to a commercial hospitality setting yielded profoundly positive results. The primary research was compiled by the author conducting a case study of her own food business, Luncheonette which was located in the National College of …

A Social Ontological Account Of Alienation And Its Place In The History Of Alienation Theory, Philip William Bauchan

Dissertations

Alienation is a sociological term that has found itself severely out of favor as an analytical concept due to what are perceived as inextricable theoretical shortcomings despite having once enjoyed a time when it was taken to be essential for a robust and critical analysis of society. This dissertation looks to contribute to a revitalization of alienation theory by offering an understanding of alienation that is grounded in the framework of social ontology as forwarded in the works of John Searle. This social ontological account conceives of alienation as a fallout fact that arises when there is a performative contradiction …

Play On; Give Me Excess Of It: Intercorporeality And Musical Definitions, Abram Basil Soucy Capone

Dissertations

Philosophy of music, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, presides over a relatively narrow range of field-specific ontological and metaphysical questions. I claim that a focus on classical music and a reliance on analogies to the plastic arts constitutes an unhelpful (but pervasive) methodology in philosophy of music, one that stands in tension with its purported aim of accurately accounting for “the ways we talk, think, and act” in relation to music and musical works (Rohrbaugh 2003, 179). While philosophers of music explicitly aim to describe praxis, a significant gap exists between existing theory and ordinary musical experiences. To …

Reaching For The Stars: A Constructivist Investigation Of Astrology As A Tool For Self-Discovery In A New Age Of Leadership, Cameron Martin

Dissertations

To fully understand leadership in today’s world, we need a radical reconceptualization of the developmental process required to lead. Changing paradigms demands new perspectives on leadership; these new paradigms suggest leaders must turn inward and develop knowledge of their inner selves to realize their full potential as leaders.

Astrology is an ancient way of knowing and making sense of the world and one’s place in it that provides benefits to many people in our modern world, despite fervent academic, religious, and scientific criticism. Astrology is more than a divination tool. It is an entire epistemology of self in relation to …

Knowledge And Political Interest: Politico-Epistemic Injustice In The United States Under Capitalist Democracy, Philipa Friedman

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between knowledge and politics in the United States under capitalist democracy. Incorporating political theory, epistemology (the study of knowledge), political science, and economics, it examines ways in which the economic inequality endemic to the United States privileges political knowledge contributions to policy debates by wealthy individuals and depresses knowledge contributions by middle- and lower-income communities. This occurs during public debate, in voting, at the level of mass media, and during official legislative debate. Economically marginalized people are less likely to see their needs and interests reflected in policy debates and in policies themselves because our …

Political Justificationism: A More Realistic Epistemology Of Political Disagreement, Randolph Jay Carlson

Dissertations

Disagreement is probably the most salient feature of our contemporary political environment. This project aims to examine political disagreements from the perspective of the recent discussions of the epistemology of disagreement more generally. Some, known as conciliationists, argue that when confronted with a disagreement with someone who is equally knowledgeable and well-informed as you are on the issue (known as an "epistemic peer"), one should become substantially less confident in that antecedently held belief. While some have tried to straightforwardly apply the conciliationist approach to political disagreements, I argue that such an approach makes us vulnerable to significant cognitive biases …

Environmental Reforestation And Social Justice In Cameroon: A Test Case For Pope Francis' Concept Of 'Integral Ecology' In Laudato Sí, Augustin Vondou

Dissertations

The following quotation from Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Sí is one of the most quoted parts of his well-known encyclical: We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature (139).

This is a very challenging statement. Not everyone accepts this idea of an ‘integral ecology’; that is, the notion that the condition of human society is directly linked to the …

Refuting The Single Story Of Political Action In Hannah Arendt: Navigating Arendt's Eurocentrism And Anti-Black Racism, Katherine Brichacek

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for a reconceptualization of political action according to Hannah Arendt that relies on more than her text often read text, The Human Condition. I argue that a monolithic understanding of political action which solely relies on The Human Condition allows for a narrow and ineffectual account of the concept. Taking up the analogy of one-dimensional blueprints, I claim that using The Human Condition alone only provides one perspective on and version of political action. I promote, instead, a multi-dimensional perspective of political action much like an architectural rendering software such as AutoCAD provides, or renders, …

Applications Of Land Surface Temperature From Satellite Remote Sensing Over The United Arab Emirates (Uae), Abduldaem Saeed Farea Qasem Alqasemi

Dissertations

In cities worldwide, increasing urbanization causes major land use and land cover changes on the surface of the Earth. It has been identified as being one of the most important anthropogenic effects on the climate. As a result, rapid population growth and the rise in industrialization in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may have created substantial environmental stress and consequence for life quality. Remote sensing-based Land Surface Temperature (LST) is significantly essential for different studies. Satellite images obtained by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) are used to retrieve LST. This research consists of an introduction and five components of …

A Narrative Case Study Of Transfer Students In Instrumental Music Education, Ashley Glenn

Dissertations

Transfer students in music fields face challenges that are different from other fields of study. Research has shown that transfer students in music are expected to acclimate and operate as upperclassmen with minimal onboarding while also potentially having to retake courses they received credit for at the community college level. This study examines the experiences of five transfer students in music education through the lens of Schlossberg’s transition theory and Dewey’s model of transaction. Building on existing transfer student research, it asks: what do transfer students experience in terms of acceptance and self-integration, and how do these experiences affect transfer …

Making Moral Judgment More Responsive Via Constraints On Moral Beliefs, Principles, And Convictions, David Bukenhofer

Dissertations

A moral judgment is the conclusion of a psychological process, and a moral belief is thecognitive content resulting from it. Some experiences constrain the moral beliefs, principles, and convictions from which moral judgments are causally formed. If these experiences are associated with an underlying belief, principle, or conviction, they add context to it. Acquiring new contextual information through experience prompts reflection, which leads to the development of new morally relevant reasons. I hold that moral beliefs, principles, and convictions typically are involved in the formation of moral judgments, and that moral judgments typically are formed on the basis of moral …

Liberal Democratic Civic Education And Rampage School Gun Violence: Why We Need An Alternative Theory Of Democracy To Guide Contemporary Civic Education, Samantha Deane

Dissertations

In this dissertation, which relies on philosophical inquiry, I use the case of rampage school gun violence to explore democratic education. Drawing a distinction between liberal-foundational democratic education, which aims to educate the individual on how to become an autonomous rational agent and pragmatic-antifoundational democratic education, which looks to help individuals to understand agency as shared, I argue antifoundational democratic education teaches individuals how to affect their environment and take responsibility for the renewal of their democratic society. Rather than allocating blame in the singular individual, antifoundational democracy teaches citizens how to share the blame, take responsibility for unacceptable violence, …

Retrieving And Reimagining Sanctuary And Solidarity: Racial Disparities In Infant Mortality, Alyson Capp

Dissertations

In Milwaukee, Black babies die before their first birthday nearly three times as often as White and Hispanic babies. Prematurity is the major cause of infant mortality, and social determinants of health play a large role. Commitments from within Christian bioethical traditions can critique ethical frameworks commonly in use in US bioethics by calling for the incorporation of analysis of social power dynamics that is necessary for addressing this issue. Original ethnographic fieldwork that listens closely to Black mothers and health professionals uncovers key themes related to women's and infant health at the intersection of race, class, and gender. By …

Collective Responsibility By Agreement, David Atenasio

Dissertations

It is often challenging to fairly distribute responsibility for harms that result from collective wrongdoing. Few object to blaming an agent for making a contribution to wrongdoing, but it is far more controversial to attribute fault to one agent for the contributions made by other participants in collective wrongdoing. I argue that we ought to distribute co-responsibility for collective wrongdoing only to those who authorize the offending actions, whether expressly or tacitly. By authorizing another to carry out wrongdoing on one's behalf, one becomes to blame for the unjustified harm caused by one's agent or agents. In this dissertation, I …

The Effect Of Maternal Employment On Family Well-Being, Bezawit Teshome Agiro

Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on the effect of maternal employment on family well-being using data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K: 2011). In general, the findings from this study suggest that the effect of maternal employment on children’s weight status and cognitive development is not significant, but it is significant on mothers’ overall health and psychological well-being.

The first essay re-examines the effect of maternal employment on child obesity by taking a sample of grade 2 children who had at least one younger sibling from the spring 2013 cohort. The study makes use …

Material Realism: A Systems Theory Of International Politics, Paul Burton

Dissertations

Traditionally power has played a dominant role in all realist theories of international politics and little if any room was left for actor agency. Systemic outcomes were a function of system structure. System structure was the result of the positioning of states in the system according to their power. Conflict resulted from system structure. Actor agency was not a relevant consideration because system structure was deterministic. This paper presents a new theorization of realism that it calls material realism. Material realism hypothesizes globalization as a second independent variable alongside power. A longitudinal network model using all conflict events since 1992 …

Simple Goodness And Ethical Theory, Sarah Marie Babbitt

Dissertations

This work is an examination of the concept of simple goodness and its role in ethicaltheory. I argue on pragmatic and epistemic grounds that simple goodness (SG), commonly referred to as "good simpliciter," is problematic for ethical theory and for ethical discourse generally. I begin by defining SG, focusing on the original account developed by G.E. Moore, and I argue that it is an intrinsic value in several senses. I review the arguments of prominent critics of SG, namely Peter Geach, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Richard Kraut, who focus on the logical and metaphysical puzzles inherent to the concept of …

Homonymy And The Comparability Of Goods In Aristotle, Robert Duncan

Dissertations

My dissertation will draw attention to an underexplored problem in Aristotle's theory of the good and advance two alternative proposals about how it can be solved. Aristotle endorses an inconsistent triad of premises concerning homonymy, comparability, and goodness. First, he argues that the good is homonymous: there is no single characteristic, goodness, which is shared by all good things. Rather, he argues that different kinds of good things require different accounts specifying what it is for them to be good. Second, he holds that homonyms are incomparable. If two things are homonymously F, then we are not entitled to claim …

Hannah Arendt's Political Action: A Dialectic Of Expression And Deliberation, Paul Richard Leisen

Dissertations

Commentators disagree about what Hannah Arendt means by political action. One interpretation emphasizes that political action is rational deliberation, another interpretation identifies political action with expressiveness or the performative expression of personal virtuosity and greatness. Both interpretations fall short. The deliberative model captures the aspect of constituting political power through collective agreement based on reason-giving (combining a plurality into a polity). The expressive model captures the aspect of natality, originality, spontaneity, and freedom from conventional ways of reasoning. The deliberative and expressive models of Hannah Arendt's political action can be reconciled contrary to a claim that her theory is incoherent. …

Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta! Three Conceptions Of The Modern Inequality Paradox, Nicoletta Christina Montaner

Dissertations

The modern epoch is characterized by a paradoxical form of social inequality in which poverty expands alongside the unprecedented growth in socially-produced wealth. Any one conception of this dynamic stakes a claim within the classical liberal problematic, in which the central political challenge is the negotiation of individual interests with those of the social whole. Part one of this work analyzes three influential conceptions of the inequality paradox in the history of social thought, those of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, each encompassing a perspective on the nation-state and its relationship to the institutions of economic intercourse. …

The Art Of Morals: A Study Of The Influence Of Musicopoetic Arts On Moral Development In Plato's Laws, Daniele Manni

Dissertations

This dissertation's primary goal is to give a detailed account of the employment of musicopoetic arts in the process of moral development in Plato's Laws. Its secondary objective is to propose an explanation for the different evaluations of musicopoetic arts at the end of the Republic and in the Laws.

To achieve the first goal I analyze the elements of the soul involved in the moral psychology of the Laws, as sketched in the famous image of the marionette; I maintain that the process of habit formation is the pivotal aspect of this moral psychology; I indicate that Plato restricts …

The Concept Of Matter In Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Kyoungnam Park

Dissertations

I argue that in addition to having a constitutive conception of matter which can be determinately represented in terms of our spatiotemporal intuitions, Kant has a regulative conception of matter which cannot be perceived as having a spatiotemporal magnitude. Although Kant restricts the scope of our knowledge to empirical objects which can be determinately represented in terms of spatiotemporal magnitudes, he also implicitly introduces a regulative conception of matter as a metaphysical principle which grounds the material features of the empirical world. I investigate this metaphysical conception of matter which is operating in Kant's transcendental idealism in terms of how …

Narrative Medicine And Health Care Ethics: Religious And Literary Approaches To Patient Identity And Clinical Practice, Tara Flanagan Tracy

Dissertations

This dissertation examines practices of narrative medicine and moral identity for end-of-life patients, with special attention given to Aristotle's Poetics and the work of Paul Ricoeur. While noting the genuine value of narrative medicine for clinicians, I examine the limits of self-narration for patients who are unable to offer a linear, coherent narrative of their lives due to cognitive deficits such as Alzheimer's disease. Nevertheless, the premise of narrative medicine, that being a close reader of texts can develop the ability to attend closely to patients, remains useful. When the sources used in narrative medicine are expanded to include those …

The Master And The Midwife: Levinas And Plato On Teaching, Rebecca Glenn Scott

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the concept of teaching as it appears in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In particular, I show how Levinas's notion of teaching arises out of both a retrieval and a critique of Platonic thought. On the one hand, Levinas embraces the transcendence of Platonism, but at the same time, he is often quite critical of Socratic education. I argue, contrary to Levinas, that Socratic education is, in fact, consonant with Levinas's philosophy, particularly when we recognize that Levinas's notion of a primordial teaching must involve a relation both with "absolute" alterity and with what he …

Character Luck And Moral Responsibility: The Character Of The Ordinary Person In Aristotle's Rhetoric And Politics, Marcella Linn

Dissertations

There are many significant factors, such as one’s natural temperaments and upbringing, that are outside of one’s control and affect one’s character. This calls into question one’s responsibility for one’s character, and if we are not responsible for our characters, then it seems we cannot be held responsible for the many actions that stem from them. I will show how a person can be responsible for her character and actions stemming from it despite the pervasiveness of character luck. To do this, I develop an account of character and responsibility from various passages in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics. …

Aging Well In 21st Century America: Towards A Theological Ethics Of Aging, Chrisitan Cintron

Dissertations

As Third Agers transition into life after work they are faced with a renewed challenge, living the good life. The normative images emanating from the social and cultural landscape allow Third Agers to either envision and live their new life, or adopt a course set out for them. These new lives require a re-discovery and re-defining of the self, a reinterpretation of one's role in society, and relationship to others. As with other phases of life, individuals need guidance when confronted with images of living well that are contradictory or perhaps antithetical to what they imagined for themselves. Various social …

Human Rights And Global Justice: A Normative Critique Of Some Rawlsian Approaches., Ndidi Victoria Nwaneri

Dissertations

HUMAN RIGHTS AND GLOBAL JUSTICE: A NORMATIVE CRITIQUE OF

SOME RAWLSIAN APPROACHES

I hold the position that all forms of social injustice (including global injustice), result

from the intentions and actions of persons. Therefore, irrespective of intervening layers of

causation, such injustice must be understood as intersubjective violations. In this project, I

attempt to develop a global justice theory that takes the level of analysis beyond global

institutions and practices to the level of intersubjective relations between moral agents. My

project opens up the following question: How would a global justice theory look if we took the

expression of human …

Husserl And Community, Sean Stephen Petranovich

Dissertations

This dissertation is on Edmund Husserl's concept of personal community. I argue that Husserl's concept of community is based on his formal theory of parts and wholes. More specifically, it is argued that the terms Husserl uses to describe features of community in his later writings are already established early in his philosophical career. The first three chapters of the dissertation focus on Husserl's unique conception of community in general. The final two chapters turn to political communities from a Husserlian standpoint.

In the first chapter, I investigate how Husserl's account of the ontological structure of community is tied to …

Being Wise Before Wisdom: The Historical Development Of Phronēsis From Homer To Aristotle, And Its Consequences For Hans-Georg Gadamer's Hermeneutic Ethics, Giancarlo Tarantino

Dissertations

Hans-Georg Gadamer claims that the Aristotelian concept of "phronesis" or "practical wisdom" plays a decisive role throughout the process of interpretation and understanding. Scholars have often been divided over just what this means or entails for hermeneutics. This dissertation argues for a strongly ethical reading of Gadamer's claim, based on (1) a Gadamerian view of the nature of concepts and conceptuality, and (2) an historical reconstruction of the development of phronesis from Homer to Aristotle. Recovering forgotten and underappreciated historical features of phronesis allows for a critical revaluation of Gadamer's philosophy as a whole, including the outlines of an "emotionally …

Refreshment For The Soul: A Phenomenological Study Of The Student Experience Of Beauty In School, Paul Reiff

Dissertations

Prompted by the ratio-scientific emphasis in the curriculum, I conducted this study to explore the lifeworlds of students to understand their lived experience of beauty in school. This investigation entailed a phenomenological study, the method of which included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with four high school students. This study aimed to examine the essence of beauty in the lived experience of students in school, to explore the perceptions of students regarding school as a place to appreciate beauty, and to understand the needs of students as a place that develops their aesthetic sensibilities. The findings include the description …