Arts and Humanities Commons^™

(2025) Curriculum Vitae Of David Kennedy, David Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

No abstract provided.

The Mythic Seeds Of Human Rights, Joshua Mackenzie Luna

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose a causal relationship between ancient societies’ mythic corpuses and their law codes. I begin by presenting the histories and historiographies of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia to highlight important themes in their development. Then, I place their creation and flood myths side-by-side for comparison, yielding key differences in the way each group conceptualizes human form, value, and purpose. Once these key differences have been established, I compare each group’s set of slave laws to demonstrate how each law code remains philosophically consistent with its respective set of myths and diametrically opposed to the set from the …

The Lotus At Dawn: Rethinking Climate Resilience In An Archipelago, Marie Franchesca M. Borras

English Faculty Publications

Super Typhoon Rai, locally called Odette, hit the Philippines on December 16, 2021, devastating General Luna, a municipality in Surigao del Norte. Due to this natural disaster, this study—originally written as a pre-pandemic autoethnographic account via flâneuserie—endeavors to understand how the mobility of city dwellers contributes to the anthropogenic climate by exploring the ethics of care. Additionally, it seeks to posit inquiries on what it means to be climate-resilient in an archipelagic country such as the Philippines. Beyond economic methodologies, it is pivotal to examine issues of care that deal with our relationship with nature by understanding how, for example, …

Walk In The Woods (2023) By Nikki Grimes, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

An unnamed Black boy walks in the woods near his home a week after his father’s funeral. Because the boy knows how to be mindful in nature—to move slowly, step carefully, and pay close attention—he becomes more connected to the woods and the creatures in it. Rediscovering is his father’s legacy of ecstatic, aesthetic reverence for nature begins to assuage the boy's anger-tinged grief.

Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints (1999) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Coming up with the most reasonable explanation of the available clues is something we all do on a daily basis. This book describes animal tracks as clues from which children can make inferences about what kind of animal left them and what they were doing when they did.

Boy Whose Head Was Filled With Stars: A Life Of Edwin Hubble (2021) By Isabelle Marinov, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Barely a hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble changed the way we understand the universe and our place in it more dramatically than almost anyone else has ever done. As this picture book biography shows, his mind-boggling discoveries can be traced back to childhood questions. The discovery that the world is bigger than we had imagined happens in many ways, and learning that we have some choices in deciding how new facts, new experiences, and new perspectives can matter to us is a necessary part of education.

Possum That Didn't (1950/2016) By Arthur Frank Tashlin, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea

Picture Books

The possum ‘that didn’t’ is a very contented animal who smiles in sunshine and rain, but when a group of human picnickers spot him hanging by his tail, they read his smile as a frown and call him stupid for insisting that he is happy. They decide to take him to the city to find amusement and, because he won’t climb down from the tree, they excavate it and transport tree and hanging possum together. Frank Tashlin's book goes philosophical in two different directions. One is the direction of satire: We laugh at humans taking a possum to a nightclub, …

Aquariam (2018) By Cynthia Alonso, Samantha Piede

Picture Books

When the protagonist of Cynthia Alonso's Aquarium discovers a small, orange fish has splashed onto her neighborhood pier, she delightedly attempts to realize her dream of living amongst marine life. She decides to build a new home for it -- a human-sized aquarium -- in her living room. However, her earnestness is not enough to make this space a true home for the fish. Samantha Piede's Thinking in Stories review highlights several ethical and epistemological questions raised by this wordless narrative. What can we know of the needs and desires of species other than our own? What are the ethical …

I’M In Charge Of Celebrations (1986) By Byrd Baylor, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

The young woman speaking to us from this beautiful book shows us a way of honoring and celebrating singular experiences we have in the natural world, and how doing this could enrich the meaning of our lives. She describes them in a notebook, marks their dates, and gives them names. Think of this as what ancient Greek philosophers called a “spiritual exercise”— something we do to strengthen our ability to pay attention, to heighten our sense of the beauty and dignity of the natural world, and to better understand our place in it. Of course, moments worth celebrating can happen …

How Beautiful (2021) By Antonella Capetti, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

The question of what is and isn’t beautiful occurs to the caterpillar in this elaborate picture book when a giant Unknown Thing (human) lifts him out of his familiar leaf bed world and tells him, “You’re so beautiful.” The caterpillar wonders, “But what does beautiful mean?” The question leads him on a day-long trek through the forest, where other animals offer a variety of perplexing answers.

Depth Of The Lake And The Height Of The Sky (2017) By Kim Jihyun, Megan Jane Laverty

Picture Books

The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky (2017) is KimJihyun’s first picture book; it is composed entirely of pictures. It “tells” the story of a young boy and his dog who spend a day swimming and sunbathing at a lake that is within walking distance from his grandparents' home, whom he is visiting with his parents. At first glance, the story might seem unremarkable, recounting an experience familiar to many. However, Kim’s illustrations challenge this assumption by drawing us into the boy’s encounter with nature. She creates a visual journey that guides us through a perceptual …

I'M Going To Make A Friend (2025) By Darren Chetty, Peter Shea

Picture Books

Philosopher Darren Chetty’s first picture book playfully explores a sort of language-accident: we say we make drawings and machines–and also that we make friends. Chetty shows us a child who tries to construct a robot-friend. As the child thinks about the elements that go into a friendship, we’re reminded of the contradictory desires of childhood companionship: for space and comfort, adventure and familiarity, a private connection and an opening to the wider world. What would one put into an artificial companion? The problem is as old as Pinocchio and Pygmalion. As the construction proceeds, the other kind of “making friends” …

Expression In Spinoza’S Metaphysics Of Attributes, Emilio Esquivel Marquez

Pomona Senior Theses

Spinoza is famous for his insistence on the fundamental unity of all things, but he never explains how diverse metaphysical elements can join up to form a unified substance. I argue that this gap in his argument is not an obstacle for Spinoza's systematic metaphysics: although he does not justify the unity-variety relation in strictly rationalist terms, his system is founded on a basic posit that guarantees their union. I describe this central posit, the concept of “expression,” through a detailed reading of Spinoza’s pivotal argument for the diversity of attributes in Ethics 1P10S. I propose that Spinoza’s theory of …

Let's Talk About Sex: Investigating Radical Feminist Theories On Prostitution In The United States, Anna E. Peterson

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores the feminist debates surrounding prostitution through an analysis of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s abolitionist theories, juxtaposed with critiques from Wendy Brown, Janet Halley, Susie Bright, and Marxist feminist abolitionist Esperanza Fonseca. The text examines the systemic forces of patriarchy and capitalism that commodify women’s bodies and the challenges of legislative approaches to the sex trade. While MacKinnon and Dworkin identify the structural inequalities underpinning prostitution, their legislative proposals often fail to address the stigma and systemic conditions that perpetuate the marginalization of prostituted people. Critics like Brown and Halley highlight the limitations of punitive measures, calling …

An In-Depth Review Of Euthanasia-Related Practices, Arguments For/Against Them, And Proposed Solutions For Their Most Glaring Legal/Ethical Problems, Macon Plecha

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper’s goal is to cover the topic of euthanasia-related practices at great length. Terminology, history, and current programs around the world are discussed first, with the last point covering a wide geographical range: Colombia, Japan, Israel, and Africa, to name a few outside of the Western world standard. Arguments for and against euthanasia-related practices are explored. Within these arguments, several pressing legal and ethical issues arise, and the most severe of these are expanded on through the offering of potential solutions: how to handle stand-alone psychiatric cases, how to improve advanced directives and poor reporting rates, and how to …

Poor In Practical Capacity: How Environmental Alienation Is Really A Deficit Of Political Know-How, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

“Alienation from nature” is a popular notion in Western environmental culture. Influential Anglophone critical theorist Steven Vogel claims that it makes no sense, unlike alienation from our productive capacity to dwell on Earth, called “alienation from the environment.” His criticism is accurate, but his view isn’t. The normative sets appropriate production and consists of social processes of arriving at norms. Politics is foremost among these processes, and it is fundamentally know-how. Given these assumptions, poor practical capacity ends up being the heart of “environmental alienation” – alienation from the built environment. Look at large-scale, anthropogenic, environmental change: a deficit of …

Historicity And Axiology: Temporal Implications For Axiology, Bennett Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

To develop the axiology of moral (or ethical) values, phenomenological analysis must look at temporality in a way that is unfamiliar to it. This way is through knowledge and experience of the actual historical past, from which it has been separated by the Heideggerian conception of historicity and its classical Husserlian analysis of time consciousness. The development of historical studies helps to make this possible. A simple sample model of the diachronesis of the awareness of ethical significance, value, and obligation is presented. It moves the analysis from a presentist focus to the field of experience in which subjects develop …

History’S Movement: The Historical Ontology In Social Ontology, Bennett B. Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social ontology and the philosophy of history both concern themselves with human collectives. Social ontology is supposed to be theoretical, although the social sciences are supposed to be empirical. Philosophy of history is supposed to be theoretical, although historiography is supposed to be empirical. In fact, the a priori and the a posteriori mix in both theoretical and empirical endeavors in similar ways. Since the two endeavors hold part of their objects of inquiry in common, they should be able to speak to another. In what follows I aim to expose some of the ways their dialogue stresses and can …

Spirituality In Place: Assessment Of Spirituality, Place Attachment, And Locus Of Control In College, Chloe Armand

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore how spirituality in place shapes college students’ cognition. While spiritual development is recognized as an important aspect of student affairs, its influence on cognitive factors such as locus of control and place attachment remains underexplored. This study investigates the relationship between spirituality, place attachment, and locus of control, as well as students’ perceptions of spiritual design elements on UCF’s campus. To assess these perceptions, a Quality of Place Questionnaire for Spirituality was developed. This instrument aims to measure humanity, sensuality, and sustainability in the built environment. This research uncovers the connections between …

Vision Or Exemplification? Augustine And Aquinas On Divine Illumination, Matthew Richard Cain

Theses

Many interpreters of Thomas Aquinas since the second half of the twentieth-century emphasise the Platonist dimensions of his thought, particularly his metaphysics. This contrasts with, and is a shift away from, the dominant Aristotelian interpretations of previous generations. Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, however, tends still to be interpreted in Aristotelian terms, according to which Augustine’s Platonist illuminationism is replaced by a Peripatetic emphasis on sensation and abstraction in the soul.

This thesis reexamines the role of illumination in Augustine and Aquinas’ theories of knowledge. It asks whether scholarship today ought to reconceive the relationship between these two major thinkers in …

Sealing The Deal: A Case Study Of A Private, Southeastern, Regional College’S Student Onboarding Practices, Alicia R. Gaston, Kristen Meyer, Tyler Ogden, Jennifer Perkinson, Casey Yocum Michaels

Doctor of Education Capstones

Each year, higher education institutions offer support to new, incoming students through an onboarding process that requires dedication and collaboration across multiple departments. Offering streamlined guidance and clear communication throughout the onboarding process is essential to ensure incoming students understand action steps without becoming overwhelmed with new terminology, processes, and environments. This explanatory case study is set to understand the current communication practices and technology use across onboarding departments at Brightside College – also referred to as Brightside or BC (pseudonym). The research team aimed to understand Brightside's onboarding staff's perspective of current processes and practices. With emphasis on the …

Hegel Meets The Corleones: Critical Racket Theory And The American Crime Family, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This essay interrogates Frankfurt School “racket theory.” While sympathetic to its claim that the most pervasive form of hegemony is the hierarchical and authoritarian group, the paper explores the School’s apparent blind spot in underestimating the crime family’s resurgent significance (e.g., the Trumps or culture industry sagas from The Godfather to Ozark). Early racket theory was limited by Horkheimer’s intensified version of Hegel’s concept of the modern family, its nuclear form and early dissolution. A brief genealogy of the US crime film—from early 1930s individual rogue gangsters to the present—confirms the need to rethink this aspect of racket theory.

The Integration Of Artificial Intelligence And Ontologies: Transformations In Knowledge Representation And Application, Grazia Serratore, Julaine Clunis

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the landscape of knowledge representation. There is an increasingly strong bidirectional relationship, between AI techniques and ontologies. AI techniques revolutionized traditional, manual ontology development and contribute to automated ontology construction, while ontologies enhance the performance of AI systems and their semantic accuracy. Through a comprehensive review of current literature, this paper aims to examine: i) how Machine Learning (ML) techniques contribute to the automated construction, refinement, and validation of ontologies; ii) the most widely used and effective ML approaches for ontology construction; iii) how domain-specific requirements influence the selection and adaptation of AI techniques for …

The Excessive Cost Of Health: An Analysis Of Pharmaceutical Accessibility Issues In The United States, Henry Woodman Curtis

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Compared to the rest of the world, the United States has one of the worst-performing health care systems. While this is influenced by our hospital systems and clinical care in certain contexts, one of the biggest culprits for our poor ratings is the cost and availability of prescription medications. We pay more than any comparable country for the exact same medications and have a harder time actually accessing them. In this dissertation, I aim to analyze how individuals, companies, and governmental agencies have responded to various instances of high-cost or low-availability prescription medications. To begin, I examine pharmaceutical patenting practices …

The Danger Of Deepfakes: Information Pollution And Epistemic Insecurity, Camille Doherty

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the dangers of deepfakes to democratic stability, emphasizing their capacity to pollute our information ecosystem and undermine trust in media. Beyond the immediate political harms from deepfake incidents, deepfakes are troubling for their impact on our collective relationship to media, truth, and one another. As exposure to deepfakes becomes more common, discerning fact from fiction will become increasingly difficult. Over time, this could foster widespread skepticism of all media and, worse, apathy toward truth itself. With eroded trust and shared truths, democracies risk losing epistemic security – the foundation for informed deliberation, decision-making, and accountability in democratic …

Terms, Conditions, And Responsibility: Who Is Responsible?, Dara Schoolcraft

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis I explore the dynamics of responsibility in the context of terms and conditions agreements between corporations and consumers. I begin by highlighting how the burden of understanding terms and conditions has been shifted onto consumers and examine real-world conflicts arising from this shift, such as the wrongful death lawsuit involving Disney and data-sharing practices by General Motors. I argue that consumer responsibility, rooted in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, is not a reasonable solution due to barriers like low literacy levels and information asymmetry. Instead, I advocate for a corporate-centered approach, emphasizing the ethical duty of corporations to ensure …

“Google Is Free:” The Harm In Deferring To Information Technology And The Reimplementation Of Interpersonal Connection As A Solution, Nicole Cepeda

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I confront the phenomenon that is information technology and the epistemological issues that it raises. I address how we should engage with the online resources allotted to us by media conglomerates, given both the variety of epistemic perspectives that they relay back to the user, from disenfranchised affinity to fake news, and the respective biases of the user. I propose that by reintroducing an interpersonal communicative framework, we are able to create a system that allows users to work deconstruct their biases and learn new information more effectively, all while users are able to flag information as …

The Rationality Of Cooperation In One-Shot Prisoner's Dilemmas: A Defense Of David Gauthier's Constrained Maximization, Carlos Hernandez

CMC Senior Theses

For moral skeptics and self-interested individuals, it is difficult for them to recognize the need and benefit for cooperation. That is, there is an intrinsic conflict in claiming that constraining one’s self-interest when cooperating with others serves to promote an individual’s self-interest. Even so, David Gauthier provides constrained maximization as a rational choice theory that addresses this conflict and balances the concepts of rationality and morality. Constrained maximization demonstrates to the moral skeptics and self-interested individuals that cooperation is in their self-interest when using the situation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Yet, as Holly Smith highlights, constrained maximization does not provide …

Should Students Pull The Plug?: How Ai Redefines Creativity In The Classroom, Labiba Hassan

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines how artificial intelligence (AI) tools, specifically ChatGPT as a tutor for students (ChatGPTt), reshapes creativity in the classroom. Does AI undermine or enrich creativity by altering its relational and self-disclosive dimensions? Engaging with Lindsay Brainard’s critique that AI erodes creativity by disrupting human connection and self-expression, I argue for a redefinition of creativity as a dynamic process sustained by emotion, intention, novelty, risk, and spontaneity — conditions adaptable to AI-mediated contexts. The paper challenges the premise that creativity depends on interpersonal connection, showing that self-disclosure can emerge through meaningful engagement with external systems, such as ChatGPTt. By …

The Black Spectacle And Oppressive Double Binds: What Rap On Trial Reveals About Race, Exploitation, And Criminalization In The Music Industry, Giovanni Pierre

CMC Senior Theses

In this paper, I investigate the paradox revealed by the Young Thug trial where certain portrayals of Blackness in rap music are simultaneously praised and punished by white institutions. I propose that the theatrics of the Young Thug trial and other instances of rap lyrics used in criminal trials are emblematic of what I call the Black Spectacle. The Black Spectacle is the role Blackness plays in American entertainment. It has three elements: (1) It entertains white audiences because of Black people’s perceived otherness, (2) it provides white people, particularly white men, with a vehicle through which they can …