Philosophy Commons^™

Further Reflection On True Successors And Traditions, John N. Williams

John N. WILLIAMS

No abstract provided.

David-Hillel Ruben’S 'Traditions And True Successors': A Critical Reply, John N. Williams

John N. WILLIAMS

No abstract provided.

State Of The Field: Why Novel Prediction Matters, P.D. Magnus, Heather Douglas

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

It has become commonplace to say that novel predictive success is not epistemically special. Its value over accommodation, if it has any, is taken to be superficial or derivative. We argue that the value of predictive success is indeed instrumental. Nevertheless, it is a powerful instrument that provides significant epistemic assurances at many different levels. Even though these assurances are in principle dispensable, real science is rarely (if ever) in the position to confidently obtain them in other ways. So we argue for a pluralist instrumental predictivism: novel predictive success is important for inferences from data to phenomena, from phenomena …

Simulation Design Characteristics: Perspectives Held By Nurse Educators And Nursing Students, Jane Brekke Paige

Theses and Dissertations

Simulation based learning (SBL) is pedagogical method poised to innovate nursing educational approaches. Yet, despite a growing body of research into SBL, limited investigation exists regarding assumptions and beliefs that underpin SBL pedagogy. Even though key simulation design characteristics exist, the particular methods nurse educators use to operationalize simulation design characteristics and how these choices are viewed from the perspective of nursing students is unknown. Without understanding what motivates educators to design simulations as they do, it is difficult to interpret the evidence that exists to support chosen methods. Through the exploration of perspectives (points-of-view), underlying beliefs can be uncovered. …

Knowledge Studies, Jay Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, And Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution To Social Epistemology, David Ingram

David Ingram

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from structures beyond their control (but perhaps amenable to government remediation)? If both of these explanations are true (as I …

Vico’S New Science Of Interpretation: Beyond Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Hermeneutics Of Suspicion, David Ingram

David Ingram

The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur, Habermas, Freud) and a redemptive hermeneutics (Gadamer, Benjamin). It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others.

Critiquing Cultural Relativism, Jaret Kanarek

The Intellectual Standard

No abstract provided.

Structures In Real Theory Application: A Study In Feasible Epistemology, Robert H. C. Moir

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis considers the following problem: What methods should the epistemology of science use to gain insight into the structure and behaviour of scientific knowledge and method in actual scientific practice? After arguing that the elucidation of epistemological and methodological phenomena in science requires a method that is rooted in formal methods, I consider two alternative methods for epistemology of science. One approach is the classical approaches of the syntactic and semantic views of theories. I show that typical approaches of this sort are inadequate and inaccurate in their representation of scientific knowledge by showing how they fail to account …

Inscrutable Evils, Skeptical Theism, And The Epistemology Of Religious Trust, John David Mcclellan

Doctoral Dissertations

I argue that the philosophical discussion over William Rowe’s evidential argument from evil needs to take a closer look at the epistemology of religious trust—i.e., the rationality of the theist’s resilient confidence in God’s goodness in the face of inscrutable evils. This would constitute a significant change of emphasis in the current literature away from “skeptical theism,” the in vogue response to Rowe’s argument among theistic philosophers today. I argue that the skeptical theist approach is inadequate for two reasons. First, in trying to defeat even the atheist’s grounds for accepting Rowe’s argument, skeptical theists seem to seriously underestimate the …

The Intellectual And Curricular Spaces Of Knowledge Studies, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

The words “knowledge” and “information” are sometimes used interchangeably, but the connection between them is complex and problematic. Knowledge is a mental product gained from engaging with information. All educational subjects, scholarly disciplines, occupations, and activities produce knowledge as well as information. Because libraries encompass potentially all subjects, professional vision in librarianship would benefit from an examination of knowledge that transcends the methods and topical concerns of individual disciplines. An interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) framework in which to view knowledge was pioneered in the post-Sputnik age by Fritz Machlup and Michael Polanyi. Their insights have stimulated scholars to develop research, publications, …

David-Hillel Ruben’S 'Traditions And True Successors': A Critical Reply, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Learning From Experience: A Philosophical Perspective, Ethan Landes

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This work examines philosophical solutions to David Hume’s problem of induction—a skeptical attack on our ability to learn from experience. I explore the logical, ontological, and epistemic difficulties behind the everyday assumption that the future will resemble the past. While historical solutions by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper have been unsuccessful at tackling these complications, combining recent work on natural kinds and naturalistic epistemology has promise. Ultimately, I expand on work done by Howard Sankey, Hilary Kornblith, and Brian Ellis to create an account of nature and epistemology that explains why objects in nature have predictable behavior. …

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people …

A Presuppositional Rejection Of Enlightenment Evidentialism, Ethan P. Rogers

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge, truth, and the justification of belief. Epistemology of religion considers these issues in relation to religious truth claims (e.g., whether or not it is reasonable to believe that God exists). Often, the epistemology of religion leads to inquiry into fundamental attitudes towards the criteria for justification. For example, a major strain of contemporary epistemology of religion has been characterized “as a debate over whether evidentialism applies to the belief component of faith, or whether we should instead adopt a more permissive epistemology.” Thus, whether or not evidentialism is the appropriate approach to …

Ralph Waldo Emerson: From Buddhism To Transcendentalism, The Beginning Of An American Literary Tradition, Irene Jue

English

No abstract provided.

Knowing Knowledge, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The position of the Art Academy in relation to third level education seems to be on the agenda in a number of ways at the moment. Recently at IMMA there was a panel discussion on the topic of “Art Academy+Knowing” in the context of the I Know You exhibition which is takign place there at the moment, but also within the wider sector there seems to be a sequence of alliances between the tradition Art College and third level education. The movement towards more integration of the stand alone Art Colleges and third level education is high on the agenda …

Removing The Classical Landmark: Assessing An Epistemology Governed By Methodological Naturalism, Kegan Shaw

Masters Theses

This paper proposes to assess the naturalist project in epistemology with an eye towards exposing the project as deficient for serving as a robust epistemological project. Epistemologists treasure a certain family of questions and burden themselves with a number of specific concerns the most important of which, I think, cannot be answered by the epistemological naturalist. Ignoring these questions, I will argue, essentially amounts to a dismissal of the principle tension that primarily motivates and properly guides epistemological theorizing. This tension is the familiar appearance vs. reality distinction and characterizes what I am calling the classical landmark or boundary-stone for …

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading …

The Untenability Of A Priori Prior Probabilities In Objective Bayesian Conditionalization, C.S. Arledge

Senior Honors Theses

The problem of theory confirmation has been an issue in the philosophy of science for decades. Many valiant attempts have been made to formulate a generally accepted criterion for determining the validity of a scientific theory. Bayesian probability theory has been utilized in numerous attempts to examine the epistemic nature of theory confirmation and Jonathan Weisberg offers a formulation of Bayesian Conditionalization that he believes to be both objective and successful.

In this paper I intend to show the defects in Weisberg’s theory of objective Bayesian confirmation by utilizing the arguments of both W.V. Quine and Bas van Fraassen to …

Liquid Assets: A Coasian Economic Analysis Of Oregon's Allocation Of Conserved Water Program, Richard A. Grisel

Richard A Grisel

Diversions for residential, agricultural, recreational, commercial, industrial, and other beneficial uses have had the effect of removing water from rivers and tributaries throughout the western U.S. Another, more recent, competing use is ecological, demonstrated by the legal recognition of instream beneficial uses in some jurisdictions. As awareness of the progressively acute need for reallocation has increased in the arid West, so has interest in water markets and other mechanisms to facilitate transfers across beneficial uses. However, governments and water users face a legacy prior appropriation system that prohibits instream beneficial uses, encourages maximal diversion, stifles water right fungibility, and generally …

Epistemology In "Stalker", Travis Wheeler

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

Georges Bataille, Philosopher Of Laughter, Troy M. Bordun

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

Why is it that when we laugh – not at jokes or to patronize – but when we laugh ecstatically and drift away from the self that seemed to constitute the majority of waking life, we feel free, at ease? And why is it, asked Georges Bataille, that after this ecstatic moment we come back to the mundane everyday with the feeling of a new and ineffable knowledge about human existence?

In this paper I present Bataille on laughter and its merits as a philosophical project. Laughter is an experience to be theorized and a praxis aiding in our pursuit …

Rahna Mckey Carusi Cv, Rahna M. Carusi

Rahna M Carusi

No abstract provided.

Fideism, Evidentialism, And The Epistemology Of Religious Belief, Matthew P. Butcher

Dissertations

Fideism is the theory that certain propositions can be held by faith without regard to evidence. Its epistemological underpinnings are often contrasted with evidentialism - the view that one is justified in holding a belief if and only if that belief is based on sufficient undefeated evidence. Recently, John Bishop and C. Stephen Evans have each forwarded new theories of fideism that oppose evidentialism. This dissertation examines these two theories, raising problems that threaten to undermine the epistemological claims of the fideist. A version of evidentialism is then advanced that addresses the problems identified by Evans and Bishop. Particularly important …

On The Possibility Of Inductive Knowledge, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

In this paper, we utilize a disjunction of familiar inductive beliefs—the disjunction being deductively valid—to show that we most likely have inductive knowledge, the likelihood depending on the usual inductive considerations like size and robustness of the sample, etc., i.e. on what it should depend on, not the usual 'philosophical' culprits like the old and new riddles of induction. While this is in itself philosophically significant, the implications of this for a justification of induction are also explored. Induction will be found to be supported but not justified by the proposed example. Lastly, to address this lacuna, and deriving support …

Review Of Mark Bekoff's Ignoring Nature No More: The Case For Compassionate Conservation, Ian Werkheiser

Ian Werkheiser

No abstract provided.

Carruthers And Constitutive Self-Knowledge, John C. Hill

Student Publications

In his recent book, The Opacity of Mind, Peter Carruthers advances a skeptical theory of self-knowledge, integrating results from experimental psychology and cognitive science. In this essay, I want to suggest that the situation is not quite as dire as Carruthers makes it out to be. I respond to Carruthers by advancing a constitutive theory of self-knowledge. I argue that self-knowledge, so understood, is not only compatible with the empirical research that Carruthers utilizes, but also helps to make sense of these results.

Virtue Epistemology, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Cognitive Demands Of Intellectual Virtue, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.