Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Exploring The Space Of Resistance: Art As A Site Of Re-Orientation, Lauren Emily Stansbury

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

How are we oriented toward things outside our bodies? More specifically, how are our bodies tethered by the hooks of ideology, lurched forward in the inertia of consumer capitalism, or led tacitly by state and social apparatuses? This orienting of our bodies toward prescribed action relies on the conscious recognition these (abstract) objects exterior to our selves—we must face them, to complete the orienting process. But what happens when we turn away? And what kind of objects could so capture our attention, as to divert the normative gaze from the ushers of hegemonic power? Art that exists outside of commodity …

An Argument For Moral Nihilism, Tommy Fung

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This project outlines what free will and moral responsibility would require in the truest sense, and will argue that we, as agents, do not truly exercise free will, and are thus not morally responsible for our choices. The project dismisses the Principle of Alternate Possibilities as the judge of moral responsibility, while establishing that being the source of one’s action is required for true moral responsibility. It discusses what causal determinism is, why its existence would threaten moral responsibility. The project then attacks the stance that holds that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible, even though they have a different …

Teaching The Bill Of Rights In China, Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recently, I was asked if I was interested in teaching a relatively short course on a topic of my choosing at Nanjing University in Nanjing, People's Republic of China. I agreed, and designed a course called "American Political Theory" to be taught three days a week for five weeks. Each class session would meet for two hours. China has changed a great deal over the last few decades, of course. That change continues, and the pace of that change continues to accelerate. While I was in Nanjing, the government announced China's seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit GDP growth; soon after, …

The Ontology Of Pure Dispositions, William A. Bauer

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation defends and develops the thesis that some instances, or tokens, of dispositional properties are pure. A pure disposition has no causal basis in any further properties beyond the disposition. A causal basis typically consists of some set of properties underlying a disposition that enables the disposition to manifest when stimulated in the appropriate circumstances. For example, a vase is fragile because it is disposed to break when a hammer or other suitable object strikes it, where the causal basis for fragility is the underlying micro-structure of the vase. Moreover, micro-structural properties of the vase seem to anchor the …

Students' Perceptions Of Coercion In Research, Azure L. Midzinski

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to examine how students perceive the most common methods of recruitment for research participation, and whether these recruitment strategies are perceived by the participants to be coercive. Ethical research guidelines prohibit the use of coercion in recruiting participants. Previous studies in this area have either focused on the perceptions of the researchers, or have approached the concept of coercion in a limited way. This study treated coercion as a multidimensional construct and examined student perceptions. Additionally, participant responses indicated which recruitment practices resulted in a decision to participate in the research. Findings indicate that …

Impact Of Forest Management Techniques On Bats With A Focus On The Endangered Indiana Myotis (Myotis Sodalis), Jermey J. Sheets

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how forest management practices impact bats is important for maintaining a diverse bat community; rare species, especially the federally endangered Indiana myotis (Myotis sodalis) need special consideration. Bats play an important role in the environment because they prey on insects, especially pest species, and conservation of viable foraging and roosting habitats is critical. Positive and negative aspects of the implementation of forest management techniques are discussed for each bat species. Bats were sampled using mist nets at four locations in Morgan-Monroe and five locations in Yellowwood State Forests twice during each summer 2006-2008. Netting locations were adjacent to or …

Extracellular Matrix Proteins: Implications For Angiogenesis, Kent Edward Williams

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is an essential requirement for maintaining permanent shape and rigidity in multicellular organisms. The ECM serves two main functions: scaffolding and signaling. Insoluble collagen and soluble proteoglycans, glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), and glycoproteins allow for water retention and flexibility. The signaling role of the ECM is essential for a multitude of events including vascular development and angiogenesis. Via interactions with vascular endothelial cells, proteins of the ECM can induce or repress angiogenesis.

Philosophical Concerns: Implications For Art Therapy, Anzhela Akbarova

EVMS School of Health Professions Theses & Dissertations

Throughout centuries, philosophers have asked and attempted to answer questions that address human concerns: identity establishment, search for purpose in life, fear of nonexistence, spirituality, and relationships with other people in the world. Some psychologists and arts therapists have also acknowledged the existence of these concerns. This thesis is a comparative analysis of philosophical literature and concludes that art therapists should acknowledge human concerns in their theory and practice.

Physiological Responses To Temperature In The Lizard, Sceloporus Undulatus, Joseph C. Ehrenberger

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Temperature affects all organisms differently. Physiological processes, such as metabolism, interact with temperature to determine a minimal rate of energy loss. Physiological limits, such as heat and cold tolerances, likely constrain the activity and survival of organisms. Ultimately, these physiological processes and limits determine a species‘ geographical distribution. Through experiments, I sought to understand specifically how temperature affects the physiology of the lizard Sceloporus undulatus. This species is a model organism to answer such questions, as it is geographically widespread species and well-described phylogenetically. In the first experiment, I compared standard metabolic rates of lizards from three locales and interpreted …

Terrorizing The ‗Fortress Of London‘? German Bombings, Public Pressure, And The Creation Of The British Home Defense System In World War I, Brandon Platt

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aeronautical warfare played a greater role in the First World War than initially given credit, forcing the British government over time to develop a competent ‗Home Defence‘ system to ward off German bombings and satisfy the British public‘s pressure for protection. By juxtaposing early aerial history with the British public‘s perceptions and the government‘s response, this study reveals a vital transition in the nature and perceptions of warfare during the First World War, providing a socio-military perspective rarely seen in pure military or social histories. Debunking the misconception of the reliance of aerial warfare for just scouting and reconnaissance, this …

Glacial/Interglacial Export Production In The Subantarctic South Pacific, Jessica Adamic

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric CO2 varied considerably in the past; however, the mechanisms that drive this variability are poorly understood. CO2 is linked to marine primary productivity through the biological carbon pump (BCP), leading to hypotheses that past increases in BCP efficiency in areas such as the Southern Ocean may have contributed to glacial CO2 drawdown (Sarmiento & Toggweiler, 1984). Productivity has varied considerably in the past, but the extent, timing, and impacts remain poorly understood. The Subantarctic South Pacific is an area of the ocean that is crucial to the understanding of both glacial climate and paleo-export productivity. Unfortunately, few studies have …

Significant Ethical Breaches In Modern U.S. Government Contracting And Their Impact On The Federal Acquisition Environment, Amanda Rose Long

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Deserts Of Development: How God Shapes Leaders In The Wilderness, Jeffrey R. Dickson

Senior Honors Theses

A wilderness experience in the life of a believer is often a tool used by God to shape him for some leadership position or specific calling. While the desert one is thrust into may be physical in nature or purely psychological, wilderness experiences share common characteristics and yet yield an array of differentiating results for those who travel through them. In order to examine how God shapes leaders in the wilderness, three case studies reveal how the individuals in each case grew in the leadership skills necessary for them to carry out their calling.

Woolf, Narrative Space And Female Writers: The Different Implications On Female Passion Described Between The Brontes' And Jane Austen's Use Of Gendered And Class-Divided Narrative Spaces, Mary Howard '10

Honor Scholar Theses

Virginia Woolf explored, through various essays, what it means to be a female writer: the history, challenges, and societal implications. Recently, many of Woolf's ideas have been attacked by current literary figures such as Adrienne Rich. In particular, Woolf's assertions about passion and the female writer stir debate and controversy. In Virginia Woolf's essays on women and writing, she explores female passion and specifically contrasts Austen with the Brontës. Woolf suggests that Austen's restrained expression of passion is more meaningful than the overstated passion in the Brontë novels. However, while Woolf focuses on the novels' passion, closer analysis reveals that …

Unamuno's Concept Of The Tragic, Ernesto O. Hernandez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses in presenting Miguel de Unamuno’s concept of the tragic. Historically this concept has suffered various changes of meaning and application. If successful the project shall provide the distinct connotation, features, and characteristics that Unamuno attributes to the tragic. His special treatment of the tragic harnesses a way for the will to become aware of its existential condition. This awakening of consciousness evokes an arousal of dichotomies that the will must confront. Faith against reason, religion against science, heart against intellect, are amongst these conflicting predicaments. The will’s constant struggle between these opposing forces constitutes for Unamuno the …

Descartes' Bête Machine, The Leibnizian Correction And Religious Influence, John Voelpel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

René Descartes’ 1637 “bête machine” characterization of nonhuman animals has assisted in the strengthening of the Genesis 1:26 and 1: 28 disparate categorization of nonhuman animals and human animals. That characterization appeared in Descartes’ first important published writing, the Discourse on the Method, and can be summarized as including the ideas that nonhuman animals are like machines; do not have thoughts, reason or souls like human animals; and thus, cannot be categorized with humans; and, as a result, do not experience pain or certain other feelings. This characterization has impeded the primary objective of environmental ethics - the extension of …

Ex Aliquo Nihil: Nietzsche On Science And Modern Nihilism. Acpq, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256., Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialism as Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well as both free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilism in the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary …

Teaching Western Philosophy: An Anti-Authoritarian Approach, James Magrini

Philosophy Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Time And Temporality: A Heiddegerian Perspective On Mctaggart's A-Series, Zachary Dotray

Philosophy Honors Projects

J.M.E. McTaggart first employed the now-standard distinction between the A- an B-series in an attempt to prove the unreality of time. I argue that McTaggart's analysis of time requires that a subject exist within the A-series, and as such lends itself to a Heideggerian conception of time, viewed both through Being and Time and Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle's theory, that necessitates a 'personal' temporality in order to make 'world-time' intelligible. I also suggest that Heidegger's temporaility, formulated as a non-successive unity grounded in Dasein's existential constitution as being-in-the-world, circumvents McTaggart's preemptive charge of circularity and therefore also avoids the conclusion …

Intelligible Matter In Aristotle, John Thorp

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The oxymoronic phrase ‘intelligible matter’ occurs three times in Aristotle. In two passages it has the same meaning; in the third the meaning seems radically different. This gives the impression that the Aristotelian language of metaphysics is distressingly slack. This paper argues, against the nearly unanimous voice of two millennia of commentaries, that ‘intelligible matter’ has the same meaning in all three loci. In doing so it develops a capital distinction that tightens up the apparatus of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Aristotle On Learning In De Anima Ii.5, John F. Bowin

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Just as the coming to be of a substance may be described as either an extended process or the completion of an extended process depending on whether it is described as the coming to be of the composite or of the individual form, so the process of learning may be described as either an extended process or the completion of an extended process depending on whether it is described as the oscillation between states of truth and error or as the ‘settling down’ or cessation of this oscillation at the stage where knowledge has become a stable disposition (hexis). And …

Causation, Agency, And Law In Antiphon: On Some Subtleties In The Second Tetralogy, Joel Mann

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

That no one can or should be convicted in a law court on pollution charges is, I suggest, the implicit message of Antiphon’s second Tetralogy. More than a mere rhetorical exercise, Antiphon offers us a rational and compelling critique of religious law and of legal responsibility generally. In so doing, he anticipates modern puzzles in the philosophy of law as well as some of their more sophisticated solutions. A work not only of ingenious skepticism but also of considerable subtlety, the second Tetralogy should be considered the product of a philosopher who made perhaps the most substantial extant contribution to …

Worthy Lives, Lisa Rivera

Philosophy Faculty Publication Series

Susan Wolf's paper "Meaning and Morality" draws our attention to the fact that Williams's objection to Kantian morality is primarily a concern about a possible conflict between morality and that which gives our lives meaning. I argue that the force of Williams's objection requires a more precise understanding of meaning as dependent on our intention to make our lives themselves worthwhile. It is not meaning simpliciter that makes Williams's objective persuasive but rather meaning as arising out of our positive evaluation of the value of our lives as a whole. This type of meaning has a normative element: it involves …

Towards A Latin American Political Philosophy Of/For The United States: From The Discovery Of America To Immigrant Encounters, Grant J. Silva

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Cracks In The Inexorable: Bourne And Addams On Pacifists During Wartime, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There is general consensus that Randolph Bourne was right in his criticism of Dewey's support for U.S. participation in World War One. Bourne's central argument against Dewey was that war is inexorable. War cannot be controlled; pragmatist method becomes inoperable. Jane Addams largely agreed with Bourne, but would question his claim that war's inexorability is absolute. I will use Addams's participation with the U.S. Food Administration to show cracks in the inexorability of war and also to raise questions about the pragmatist grounding of Bourne's attack on Dewey. I argue that although Addams's participation with the Food Administration was in …

The Biopolitical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political, Ross G. Shields

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

It is a tenet of post-structuralist theory that discursive series fail in their attempts to constitute themselves as totalities. A system can fail in two distinct ways—from Kant’s dynamic and mathematic failures of reason, to Jacques Lacan’s equation of the two failures of language with the two failures (male and female) of sex. Biopolitical theory offers the most recent account of failure and collapse, now on the geopolitical scale. Given that the biopolitical subject too is sexed, this thesis asks the question: How does biopolitics fail? Franz Kafka’s aborted novels offer a premonition to a possible answer.

Background Environmental Justice: An Extension Of Rawls's Political Liberalism, Edward Abplanalp

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation extends John Rawls’s mature theory of justice out to address the environmental challenges that citizens of liberal democracies now face. Specifically, using Rawls’s framework of political liberalism, I piece together a theory of procedural justice to be applied to a constitutional democracy. I show how citizens of pluralistic democracies should apply this theory to environmental matters in a four stage contracting procedure. I argue that, if implemented, this extension to Rawls’s theory would secure background environmental justice. I explain why the theory can be viewed as a partially specified political conception of environmental pragmatism, and how it relates …

Attending To Presence: A Study Of John Duns Scotus' Account Of Sense Cognition, Amy F. Whitworth

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project is guided and motivated by the question concerning the nature of the phantasm as that which mediates between sensation and intellection in John Duns Scotus' account of cognition. Scotus embraces Aristotle's claim that the intellect cannot think without the phantasm. The phantasm is in a corporeal organ, yet the immaterial intellect must act with it to produce an intelligible species. In this project I examine the critical elements of Scotus' cognitive theory in order to understand the nature of the phantasm.

In the first chapter I discuss key elements of Aristotle's metaphysics and give a close, textual reading …

The Attestation Of The Self As A Bridge Between Hermeneutics And Ontology In The Philosophy Of Paul Ricoeur, Sebastian Kaufmann

Dissertations (1934 -)

Ricoeur defines attestation as the "assurance of being oneself acting and suffering" or as the "assurance - the credence and the trust - of existing in the mode of selfhood." In this dissertation I discuss the concept of attestation in Ricoeur's philosophy in relation to the main dimensions of the self: Capacities, personal identity, memory and otherness. I state that attestation is the key to the three dialectics of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self: The dialectic between reflection and analysis, the dialectic between idem-identity and ipse-identity and the dialectic between oneself and other. In these three dialectics, attestation, as the …

Arabic Influences In Aquinas's Doctrine Of Intelligible Species, Max Herrera

Dissertations (1934 -)

In contemporary literature, one can find much information concerning Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of intelligible species. However, none of the literature takes into account how and why Aquinas developed his doctrine of intelligible species. Often, it is purported that Aquinas is just following Aristotle. However, this is not the case. There are aporiae in the Aristotelian corpus, and those who followed Aristotle tried to resolve the intellection and hylomorphism aporia, an aporia that arose as a result of denying Platonic forms and affirming hylomorphism. Among those who attempted to resolve this aporia were Avicenna and Averroes from whom Aquinas drew and …