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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
The Beauty Of Understanding: Aesthetic Methods Of Theory Evaluation, Devon Craig Bryson
The Beauty Of Understanding: Aesthetic Methods Of Theory Evaluation, Devon Craig Bryson
Doctoral Dissertations
Philosophers use a variety of methods to evaluate theories, theories that are sources of greater understanding. My dissertation argues that judgments of beauty are a justified part of how we evaluate theories. That is, I argue that beauty is part of what makes a philosophical theory better. I reach this conclusion by analyzing two powerful and popular methods of theory evaluation: reflective equilibrium and simplicity. The literatures on both reflective equilibrium and simplicity clarify how these methods work and why they are justified methods of theory evaluation. But I argue that the going accounts of reflective equilibrium and simplicity have …
Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …