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Articles 9811 - 9840 of 22126

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Models Of Time Travel And Their Consequences, Antonio M. Mantica Jun 2015

Models Of Time Travel And Their Consequences, Antonio M. Mantica

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

How do we travel through time? We know that we can move forward in it (we have no choice), but can we jump forward in time? Can we go backward in time? It also gives rise to other troubling questions: is time measurable in distinct increments, or does it flow continuously? In "Models of Time Travel and their Consequences," Antonio Mantica walks the reader through current understandings of how time functions in Einstein's universe and proposes three distinct models to explain it. Following that, he provides a list of experiments to credit or discredit the models. Appropriate for audiences of …

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Mathematical Models Of Games Of Chance: Epistemological Taxonomy And Potential In Problem-Gambling Research, Catalin Barboianu Jun 2015

Mathematical Models Of Games Of Chance: Epistemological Taxonomy And Potential In Problem-Gambling Research, Catalin Barboianu

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Games of chance are developed in their physical consumer-ready form on the basis of mathematical models, which stand as the premises of their existence and represent their physical processes. There is a prevalence of statistical and probabilistic models in the interest of all parties involved in the study of gambling – researchers, game producers and operators, and players – while functional models are of interest more to math-inclined players than problem-gambling researchers. In this paper I present a structural analysis of the knowledge attached to mathematical models of games of chance and the act of mathematical modeling, arguing that such …

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Newton On Indivisibles, Antoni Malet, Marco Panza Jun 2015

Newton On Indivisibles, Antoni Malet, Marco Panza

MPP Published Research

Though Wallis’s Arithmetica infinitorum was one of Newton’s major sources of inspiration during the first years of his mathematical education, indivisibles were not a central feature of his mathematical production.

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Wallis On Indivisibles, Antoni Malet, Marco Panza Jun 2015

Wallis On Indivisibles, Antoni Malet, Marco Panza

MPP Published Research

The present chapter is devoted, first, to discuss in detail the structure and results of Wallis’s major and most influential mathematical work, the Arithmetica Infinitorum (Wallis 1656). Next we will revise Wallis’s views on indivisibles as articulated in his answer to Hobbes’s criticism in the early 1670s. Finally, we will turn to his discussion of the proper way to understand the angle of contingence in the first half of the 1680s. As we shall see, there are marked differences in the status that indivisibles seem to enjoy in Wallis’s thought along his mathematical career. These differences correlate with the changing …

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Why Ontologize?, Melvin Woody Jun 2015

Why Ontologize?, Melvin Woody

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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A Teleological Exploration Of The Plausibility Of Moral Knowledge, Kevin Lebel King Jr. Jun 2015

A Teleological Exploration Of The Plausibility Of Moral Knowledge, Kevin Lebel King Jr.

Masters Theses

Natural selection seems to offer a compelling case for the development of evaluative judgments independent of evaluative facts. If such a case can be made, then how do moral judgments correlate to moral facts? It seems that there would be no tight connection from judgments to truth and moral judgments would be unwarranted. Gilbert Harman realized the implications of a probable non-moral genealogy. Richard Joyce goes on to provide a probable non-moral genealogy that would epistemically undermine moral judgments as Harman thought. Joyce argues that in a naturalistic world natural selection can account for moral judgments, but that the truth …

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Aquinas The Pacifist? A Comparative Study, Lloyd George Pemberton Jun 2015

Aquinas The Pacifist? A Comparative Study, Lloyd George Pemberton

Masters Theses

It is claimed by some scholars that when recent analytical tools of interpretation are placed upon the Summa Theologica, a presumption against harm emerges from the mind of Thomas Aquinas as he formulated his just war theory. This presumption against harm is thereby construed as Aquinas having an affinity toward pacifism. The present thesis offers a comparative study between two scholars, Richard Miller and Gregory Reichberg. Miller supports this claim while Reichberg finds it unjustifiable. The thesis lays out the arguments put forth by both, ultimately siding with Reichberg as making the better case. In addition, I offer my own …

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Engaging The History Of Religion - From An Islamic Studies Perspective, Leif Stenberg, Susanne Olsson Jun 2015

Engaging The History Of Religion - From An Islamic Studies Perspective, Leif Stenberg, Susanne Olsson

Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

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'Listen To What You Say': Rwanda’S Postgenocide Language Policies, Lynne Tirrell Jun 2015

'Listen To What You Say': Rwanda’S Postgenocide Language Policies, Lynne Tirrell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Freedom of expression is considered a basic human right, and yet most countries have restrictions on speech they deem harmful. Following the genocide of the Tutsi, Rwanda passed a constitution (2003) and laws against hate speech and other forms of divisionist language (2008, 2013). Understanding how language shaped “recognition harms” that both constitute and fuel genocide also helps account for political decisions to limit “divisionist” discourse. When we speak, we make expressive commitments, which are commitments to the viability and value of ways of speaking. This article explores reasons a society would decide to say, “We don’t talk that way …

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Remembering The Philosopher Ted Cohen (1939-2014), Curtis L. Carter Jun 2015

Remembering The Philosopher Ted Cohen (1939-2014), Curtis L. Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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The Pythagorean Table Of Opposites, Symbolic Classification, And Aristotle, Owen Goldin Jun 2015

The Pythagorean Table Of Opposites, Symbolic Classification, And Aristotle, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

At Metaphysics A 5 986a22-b2, Aristotle refers to a Pythagorean table, with two columns of paired opposites. I argue that 1) although Burkert and Zhmud have argued otherwise, there is sufficient textual evidence to indicate that the table, or one much like it, is indeed of Pythagorean origin; 2) research in structural anthropology indicates that the tables are a formalization of arrays of “symbolic classification” which express a pre-scientific world view with social and ethical implications, according to which the presence of a principle on one column of the table will carry with it another principle within the same column; …

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The Problem Of Nomological Impossibility For Epistemic Structural Realism, Patrick Manzanares May 2015

The Problem Of Nomological Impossibility For Epistemic Structural Realism, Patrick Manzanares

The Hilltop Review

The philosophical view known as Epistemic Structural Realism appeals to the concept of ‘structure’ in order to defend a version of Scientific Realism that nevertheless respects historical considerations of ontological discontinuity between successive scientific theories. It seems that the structures of some scientific theories are only continuous with the structures of successor theories when the former are characterized as nomologically impossible idealizations of the latter, since this continuity involves allowing some quantity in the formal structure of the successor theory to tend towards some physically unrealizable limit. But if this is the case, then the earlier theory cannot be physically …

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Technology And The Glass Imagination: Isolation And Closeness From The Window To The Screen, Sarah Elizabeth Welsh May 2015

Technology And The Glass Imagination: Isolation And Closeness From The Window To The Screen, Sarah Elizabeth Welsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In computer and cell phone screens, as in 19th-century architecture, glass employs a frame to show a specific picture, and keeps us at a distance from what lies behind it. Glass' dichotomies in technology (transparency and reflection, isolation and closeness) have become stronger metaphors for our experience with technology. This paper will look at the similarities between the language and metaphors created by glass in 19th-century architecture and 21st century technology, and glass' role in connecting us to and alienating us from the world 'outside.' In so doing, the role of glass in the imagination and its impact on modernity …

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Three Faces Of Human Exceptionalism: Genius, Saint, Monster, Mary Clare Feldmann Mckinley May 2015

Three Faces Of Human Exceptionalism: Genius, Saint, Monster, Mary Clare Feldmann Mckinley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An exposition of the artistic genius invokes the perennial challenge to determine intersections between ethics (or morality) and aesthetics. As the human figure of the aesthetic realm, the genius meets its match in two counterparts of the ethical realm: the saint and the monster. Indeed, the genius shares traits with both figures, drawing closer to the saint in its communicative capacity while also revealing a prodigious nature more akin to the monster. This dissertation poses the following question: between the saint and the monster, does the genius resonate more with one than with the other? As one strategy to find …

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Nepantla And Ubuntu Ethics Para Nosotros: Beyond Scrupulous Adherence Toward Threshold Perspectives Of Participatory/Collaborative Research Ethics, Monique Antoinette Guishard May 2015

Nepantla And Ubuntu Ethics Para Nosotros: Beyond Scrupulous Adherence Toward Threshold Perspectives Of Participatory/Collaborative Research Ethics, Monique Antoinette Guishard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Participatory Action Research (PAR) refers less to a method and more to a continuum of approaches to collaborative inquiry. Within PAR, ideally, some phenomenon has been identified as a mutual area of concern to researchers and community members; working together they design, conduct, analyze, and disseminate the findings of a shared piece of research and coordinate action(s) aimed at using research to redress injustice. If PAR is embraced holistically boundaries inevitably blur as research team members become enmeshed in each other's lives. This blurring while momentous can give rise to ethical quandaries that IRB centered research ethics are inadequate to …

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Traumatic Familiarity: Fictions And Theories Of Community In The Eighteenth Century, Andrew Scott Dicus May 2015

Traumatic Familiarity: Fictions And Theories Of Community In The Eighteenth Century, Andrew Scott Dicus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation addresses a crisis of modern collective identity by employing a dialectic of philosophical and literary "realisms." While both philosophical and novelistic discourses are premised on twin gestures (aspiration for correspondence between representation and reality), they arrive at radically different claims about how rational, self-governing individuals constitute - and are constituted by - "legitimate" social bodies. By foregrounding the internal complexity and empirical immersion of "real" individuals negotiating "realistic" social encounters, eighteenth-century novelists engage in a sustained critique of emerging concepts of "legitimate" community. Penetrating even the most basic foundations of social knowledge, such as the capacity to distinguish …

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Leveraging Capacity: Technical Solutions To Hunger In The Era Of Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Perry Bullock May 2015

Leveraging Capacity: Technical Solutions To Hunger In The Era Of Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Perry Bullock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leveraging Capacity: Technical Solutions to Hunger in the Era of Neoliberalism takes the Global Seed Vault and the value of "global crop diversity" as a point of departure for raising questions about the influence of digital technology on the seed and about the solution to hunger known as "global food security." Discussions about food security among food studies scholars highlight either the failures of global public health advocates to regulate the food and beverage industry or they view food security, like earlier campaigns against global hunger, as an instrument for U.S. foreign policy. On either side of this debate, the …

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Saving Moral Realism: Against Blackburn's Projectivism, Paul James Cummins May 2015

Saving Moral Realism: Against Blackburn's Projectivism, Paul James Cummins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the argumentative dialectic between moral realists and non-cognitivist moral antirealists each side in the debate is typically thought to enjoy a different prima facie advantage over its rival. Moral realism gains plausibility from its truth-conditional semantics because it can explain the meaning of moral judgments on the same basis as ordinary propositions. However, many moral philosophers doubt moral realism because the theory is committed to the existence of moral properties, which are, in J. L. Mackie's term, "queer." Moral antirealism denies that these moral properties exist, and this is a principal reason why many moral philosophers endorse the theory. …

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Representation Without Thought: Confusion, Reference, And Communication, Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson May 2015

Representation Without Thought: Confusion, Reference, And Communication, Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Philosophy of mind has been dominated, since Frege, by a puzzle-driven methodology. This tradition aims to provide a coherent system for describing specific semantic features of all conceivable cases where the speaker is confused about the identity of an object. The first chapter develops a theory on which confused identity is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a = b or believes falsely that a ≠ b. Many influential arguments in philosophy are puzzle-driven; Kripke on semantic and speaker reference, Reimer and Kaplan on demonstratives. I show in detail how these and other arguments …

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Dramatic Form And Embodiment: Robert Browning And The Epistemology Of Romantic Drama, Laura Helen Wallace May 2015

Dramatic Form And Embodiment: Robert Browning And The Epistemology Of Romantic Drama, Laura Helen Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Browning's famous distinction between the subjective and the objective poet, Shelley and Shakespeare, as well as his own abandonment of the lyric in favour of dramatic poetry, has been commonly interpreted as an epistemological demarcation that separates Browning, as a Victorian poet, from his Romantic predecessors. Defining Shelley as the subjective poet who looks through the individual soul toward "not what man sees, but what God sees--the Ideas of Plato" (283), and Shakespeare as the objective poet who looks, not to his own soul, but upon the material world, choosing "to produce things external" and to "deal with the doings …

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The Problem Of Infinity In Meditation Iii, Peter B. Creech May 2015

The Problem Of Infinity In Meditation Iii, Peter B. Creech

Global Tides

In Meditation III, Rene Descartes’ main argument for the existence of God hinges on our perception of infinity. All ideas or beings must have as much formal reality, according to Descartes, as those that they in turn create or produce. Because we as human beings can perceive of infinity, yet we do not observe anything that is actually infinite, this perception must come from a God who has at least as much formal reality as we. In this paper I argue that the human mind is incapable of perceiving anything that is actually infinite. We hold a concept of infinity, …

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A Comparative Analysis Of The Civilizations Of Fukuzawa Yukichi And Sun Yat-Sen, Matthew Jones May 2015

A Comparative Analysis Of The Civilizations Of Fukuzawa Yukichi And Sun Yat-Sen, Matthew Jones

Global Tides

This essay will explore the different theories of civilization for two major Asian political philosophers Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Sun Yat-sen. Both men wrote during the late 19th and early 20th century just as their respective countries, Japan and China, were facing immense pressure to subordinate themselves to the West which threatened the collapse of their historical structures of civilization. The two men’s theories reflect the transitory nature of the times by drawing heavily from both Eastern and Western traditions to create a unique blend of the two which would have an immense impact on the modern course of …

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"I Know You!": The Implications Of Knowing In Joyce Carol Oates's Marya: A Life, Josephene T.M. Kealey May 2015

"I Know You!": The Implications Of Knowing In Joyce Carol Oates's Marya: A Life, Josephene T.M. Kealey

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Joyce Carol Oates’s Preface to the Franklin Library 1st Edition of her 1986 novel Marya: A Life is a theoretical reading guide. In her explanations for the possible autobiographical components discernible in her book, Oates challenges readers to question their ability to know a character, to know an author’s intentions, even to know the self. Oates’s ideas about the fluidity of identity and the dangers of claiming “to know” an other or the self are explored in this story.

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Pest Control, Josephine Donovan May 2015

Pest Control, Josephine Donovan

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

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Off The Cuff With Monica Obniski, Curtis L. Carter May 2015

Off The Cuff With Monica Obniski, Curtis L. Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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1. What Is The Relationship Of The Finite Subject To The Infinite Ground? 2. How Do We Use Where We Segregate The Subject From The Ground To Construct Reality? 3. In What Ways Can We Destabilize This Constructed Reality To Highlight Its Inherent Instability?, Calvin M. Miceli-Nelson May 2015

1. What Is The Relationship Of The Finite Subject To The Infinite Ground? 2. How Do We Use Where We Segregate The Subject From The Ground To Construct Reality? 3. In What Ways Can We Destabilize This Constructed Reality To Highlight Its Inherent Instability?, Calvin M. Miceli-Nelson

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

This essay catalogs interests within my works and traces connections between these works and particular structuralist, post-modern, and post-structuralist themes. Artists influential to or congruent with the aims of my work are also discussed within this three-part essay around these discussions present in my work: 1. What is the relationship of the finite subject to the infinite ground? 2. How do we use where we segregate the subject from the ground to construct reality? 3. In what ways can we destabilize this constructed reality to highlight its inherent instability?

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Letter From The Editor May 2015

Letter From The Editor

Liberty Theological Review

Letter From the Editor

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Truth, Knowledge, And The Value Of False Belief In Plato, Nicholas Ryan Baima May 2015

Truth, Knowledge, And The Value Of False Belief In Plato, Nicholas Ryan Baima

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I challenge common readings of Plato according to which epistemic vice is either always bad, or is merely beneficial for non-philosophers. On my reading, false beliefs and defective forms of reasoning can benefit everyone in two ways. First, there are commitments--to care for the health of your soul, to care for the well-being of other human beings--that a person needs to have in order to live well, and a reliably good life requires that these commitments be entrenched and unwavering. For those people and soul-parts that lack philosophical understanding, some falsehoods can help sustain these crucial normative …

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Ghosts In The Garden: Cultural Critique Through The Lens Of The Absurd, Andrew T. Catanese May 2015

Ghosts In The Garden: Cultural Critique Through The Lens Of The Absurd, Andrew T. Catanese

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The primary lens by which I deconstruct my work is the absurd and “lucidity” of the absurd as developed by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus’ absurd grows out of the tension between human desire for establishing order with the impossibility of doing so in a universe that continually resists our abstractions. The absurd then becomes a means to understanding the criticisms in my work of consumerism, behavior, and spaces which attempt to control or constrict people. I approach my art as an “other” or “outsider” from the system of Protestant moral dichotomy in which I grew up. …

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Paradigmatic Self-Deception, David Stephen Winchell May 2015

Paradigmatic Self-Deception, David Stephen Winchell

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I present a theory of what I call "paradigmatic self-deception," the most serious and vivid cases of self-deception. While there has been much philosophical discussion of self-deception in recent decades, existing work does not explain how and why some cases of self-deception are more severe than others, when self-deception is intentional, and when an individual may justifiably be held morally responsible for being self-deceived. This dissertation answers all three of these important questions. The first chapter reviews the existing literature and motivates the need for a theory of paradigmatic cases. In the second chapter, I introduce three characteristic features of …

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