Philosophy Commons^™

Is It Morally Permissible To Have Children, Awinyandji W. Djebou

Theses and Dissertations

Having children is something that has always been considered morally good. Generations and generations of human beings have been raised with the idea that procreating is part of the natural processes of life. To have a child is often considered an important milestone in a person’s life most societies. In fact, it is expected of any well-rounded adult. However, in recent years, some philosophers have argued against the moral permissibility of having children. In this thesis I aim to end the debate on the morality of procreation. I will argue that it is morally permissible to have children, but only …

Creator And Creation: Artistic Development In Herman Melville’S Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities And James Joyce’S A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Magdalena M. De La Cruz

Dissertations and Theses

This study focuses on the primary protagonists of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Pierre Glendinning and Stephen Dedalus, as well as Isabel Banford, a supporting character in Melville’s novel, to illustrate how the tensions of contemporary society have a direct influence on the artist-hero’s representations and perspectives on self-realization. This thesis will draw on the major concepts of the artist and artist fiction as put forth in Otto Rank’s Art and Artist (1916), Herbert Marcuse’s “Der Deutsche Künstlerroman” (“The German Artist Novel”, 1922), and Maurice …

On The Relationship Between Economics And Ethics, Mark D. White

Publications and Research

Economics and ethics have been linked since the days of Adam Smith, but this connection became tenuous after the formalization of economic theory in the twentieth century, the success of which in academia, government, and business serves to insulate it from ethical critique. Nonetheless, a field of “economics and ethics” has developed to restore this connection, albeit in two directions with disparate methodological approaches: one applying mainstream economic theory, primarily based in utilitarian ethics, to topics of ethical concern, and the other incorporating alternate forms of ethics, such as deontology and virtue ethics, to enrich economic analysis.

Determinism And The Problem Of Individual Freedom In Li Zehou’S Thought, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

Li Zehou’s work can be understood as an account of a Chinese modernity, a vision for Chinese society that seeks to integrate three distinct philosophical approaches. These are Chinese history and culture, which Li understands as largely Confucian; Marxism, which has exerted such influence on a modernizing China; and Western learning more generally, as expressed by figures such as Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. Li also frequently expresses the hope that a Chinese modernity will be one in which the importance of the individual is recognized, and rights and freedoms upheld (e.g., 2006, p. 182). But this stance raises an …

Helene Stöcker, Weimar Germany And Prophylactics: An Investigation Into The Context And Effects Of The Reichsgesestz Zur Bekämpfung Geschlechtskrankheiten, Joshua Stern

Dissertations and Theses

This paper investigates German gender studies in the Weimar Era. It looks at a specific law, passed regarding contraceptive devices. It seeks to show how women were presented with a guise of freedom, while living in a truly paternalistic society.

Symposium On Buddhist Perspectives On Free Will: Agentless Agency?, Rick Repetti

Publications and Research

This special issue of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 25, is a symposium on the anthology, Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will: Agentless Agency? (Repetti), and on the topic reflected by that title, more broadly, based on an Author Meets Critics session of the 2018 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting organized by Christian Coseru. To orient readers new to the topic, I first sketch what some of the issues are regarding Buddhist perspectives on free will. Second, I briefly describe the anthology, and third, I introduce the several contributions to this symposium. As I am sympathetic to most …

Forgiveness: An Ordered Pluralism, Miranda Fricker

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Español (Y Castellano), José Del Valle, Vitor Meirinho

Publications and Research

El significando y traducibilidad de «español» está indefectiblemente ligado al vocablo «castellano», cuyo significado y traducibilidad resultan también inaccesibles si se ignoran los de aquel. Cualquier relato que persiga trazar la historia de este idioma y, especialmente, determinar su origen se encuentra con la coexistencia de, al menos, estas dos palabras. Esta sinonimia, que como tal se manifiesta imperfecta e incómoda, revela también la condición política de la lengua que designa, es decir, su participación en la construcción y cuestionamiento de subjetividades políticas –ya sean regionales, nacionales o sociales–. Es precisamente la condición política de la palabra –de «español», de …

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Ethics And Bias In Machine Learning: A Technical Study Of What Makes Us “Good”, Ashley Nicole Shadowen

Student Theses

The topic of machine ethics is growing in recognition and energy, but bias in machine learning algorithms outpaces it to date. Bias is a complicated term with good and bad connotations in the field of algorithmic prediction making. Especially in circumstances with legal and ethical consequences, we must study the results of these machines to ensure fairness. This paper attempts to address ethics at the algorithmic level of autonomous machines. There is no one solution to solving machine bias, it depends on the context of the given system and the most reasonable way to avoid biased decisions while maintaining the …

The Problem Of Illusion In The Phenomenology Of Claude Romano, Joseph Cutolo

Student Theses and Dissertations

The phenomenology of Claude Romano constructs a strict distinction between perceptions and illusions. This distinction is so strict that the former excludes the latter completely. Putting this distinction into play is not a local decision about our experiences and the structures of our experiences. This decision brings with it metaphysical, ontological, and phenomenological frameworks to ground it. In what follows I attempt to draw out the consequences of Romano’s decisions about our experience, and to study the philosophical frameworks that underlie his decisions. In doing so, I reconnect his phenomenology with a wider terminology of phenomenology, in order to study …

Ethical Veganism, Virtue, And Greatness Of The Soul, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

Many moral philosophers have criticized intensive animal farming because it can be harmful to the environment, it causes pain and misery to a large number of animals, and furthermore eating meat and animal-based products can be unhealthful. The issue of industrially farmed animals has become one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. On the one hand, utilitarians have argued that we should become vegetarians or vegans because the practices of raising animals for food are immoral since they minimize the overall happiness. Deontologists, on the other hand, have argued that the practices of raising animals for food …

Veganism As A Virtue: How Compassion And Fairness Show Us What Is Virtuous About Veganism, Carlo Alvaro

Publications and Research

With millions of animals brought into existence and raised for food every year, their negative impact upon the environment and the staggering growth in the number of chronic diseases caused by meat and dairy diets make a global move toward ethical veganism imperative. Typically, utilitarians and deontologists have led this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to pro- pose a virtuous approach to ethical veganism. Virtue ethics can be used to construct a defense of ethical veganism by relying on the virtues of compassion and fairness. Exercising these values in our relations with animals involves acknowledging their moral value, …

For Philosophers, Art Is Also In The Mind, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Many college professors start with a broad range of interests, but often it’s the example of a gifted teacher that shows them the way. That was the case with Dr. Jonathan Gilmore. “I was a pre-med student taking hard science courses, but I had to take a philosophy course as well, and I had an extraordinarily dynamic art history professor. And then I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ So I shifted career plans, moved to New York right after college, enrolled at Columbia and did a PhD in Philosophy, but also studied for the PhD in art …

The Varieties Of Place-Based Education, Laureen Park

Publications and Research

Traditionally, the predominant focus of Place-based educational (PBE) theories and practices has been the natural environment. The focus of this chapter will be on urban and digital environments as incubators of the PBE goals of experiential learning, interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, ethical reflection, and other goals. The framework used to interpret and analyze the various senses of place is based on the notions of the lifeworld, personalistic attitude, noesis and noema, all concepts found in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I and II. Urban and virtual places share the characteristic of being built, which has resonances for the interactivity and engagement …

Syntax And Semantics Of Perceptual Representation, James K. Quilty-Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a defense of perceptual pluralism, the thesis that perceptual systems deliver multiple types of representations including those used in thought. In particular, it argues that perceptual systems output iconic (i.e., image-like, analog) representations as well as discursive (i.e., language-like, digital) states. A central thesis is that perceptual representations of objects are propositional and composed of concepts. It also develops a compositional syntax of iconic representation called the coordination model, according to which icons are sets of primitive parts, each of which determines values along multiple analog feature dimensions simultaneously. The dissertation supports the conclusion that perceptual …

Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in?

I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should …

Evil And The Ontological Disproof, Carl J. Brownson Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a revival of the ontological disproof, an ontological argument against the existence of God. The ontological disproof, in its original form, argues that God is impossible, because if God exists, he must exist necessarily, and necessary existence is impossible. The notion of necessary existence has been largely rehabilitated since this argument was first offered in 1948, and the argument has accordingly lost much of its force. I argue that the ontological disproof ought to be combined with the problem of evil, and that the resulting synthesis of the two arguments is far more powerful than either …

W.E.B. Du Bois: Freedom, Race, And American Modernity, Elvira Basevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation defends W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophy of modern freedom, which he grounds in the historical reconstruction of the American civic community on the moral basis of free and equal citizenship. Rather than ascribe to him an elitist politics of racial ‘uplift’ and assimilation to Anglo- American folkways, I instead argue that he defends black moral and political autonomy for securing state power and civic equality. Additionally, he challenges both historical and the contemporary political philosophers, including John Rawls, Axel Honneth, and Philip Pettit, to articulate the racial dimension of the development of a social order that actualizes the moral …

Meaning Through Things, Marilynn Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interpretation is the process by which we find meaning in the things in the world around us: clouds on the horizon, bones, street signs, hairbrushes, uniforms, paintings, letters, and utterances. But where does that meaning come from and on what basis are we justified in saying a particular meaning is the right meaning? Drawing from debates in the philosophy of language, I argue that a complete theory of meaning and interpretation must be grounded in intentions. My argument employs research in the philosophy of language, aesthetics, linguistics, and cognitive science to develop a general framework of interpretation. This framework is …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Involute Analysis: Virtual Discourse, Memory Systems And Archive In The Involutes Of Thomas De Quincey, Kimberley A. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thomas De Quincey’s involutes inform metaphysical thought on memory and language, particularly concerning multiplicity and the virtual, repetition and difference. When co-opting the mathematic and mechanic involute in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey generates an interdisciplinary matrix for the semiotics underpinning his philosophy of language and theory of memory and experience. Involutes entangle and reproduce. De Quincey’s involute exposes the concrete and actual through which all experience accesses the abstract or virtual. The materiality of their informatics and technics provides a literary model and theoretical precursor to a combination of archive and systems theory. The textuality of involute system(s)—both …

Grounding, Causation And The Unity Of Ontological Structure, Thomas Kivatinos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unity is enchanting. That is, it is an enchanting idea that although reality seems to be fragmented in various ways, this apparent fragmentation belies a fundamental unity. This dissertation is an attempt at theoretically capturing such unity via the theoretical unification of causation and grounding. And this unification supports another: the unification of reality’s causal structure and reality’s hierarchical structure.

To propose a unification of causation and grounding, I employ a common conception of grounding on which grounding is understood as a dependence relation. On this conception, if the Xs ground the Ys, then the existence of …

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

Toward A Social Ontology Of The Family, Laura W. Kane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation proposes a definition of the family that captures the qualitative aspects of familial relationships – a collection of features that set apart ideal families from deficient families – that best serve family members and the state. Most importantly, the qualitative features that define ideal families are the features that actually define the family qua family: groups that do not have these features do not count as families. Why draw such a categorical distinction between families and non-families? I argue that the benefits conferred upon families by the state demand that families be the kinds of groups that …

Is There A Secular Tradition? On Treason, Government, And Truth, Ali M. Uğurlu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Because the secular is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly,” writes Talal Asad, in the introduction to his Formations of the Secular. This thesis attempts to obliquely engage with secular power through a concept that has been at the center of much contention in our political present: treason. Taking the failed coup of July 16and the ensuing purge against the Gülen movement in Turkey as its points of departure, it seeks to broach some of the constitutive and operative logics of the modern nation-state. Inquiring into the State’s perennial presupposition …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

For Narrativity: How Creating Narratives Structures Experience And Self, Natallia Stelmak Schabner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation responds to the challenge to narrativity posed by Galen Strawson in “Against Narrativity,” where he claims that not everyone is Narrative by nature and that there is no reason to be. I make my claim “For Narrativity” as a mental process of form finding and coherence seeking over time that is an inherent mental activity and essential for experience of one’s Self. I make my case through examinations of our experience of time, our use of language, how we plan, and our sense of Self. In the first chapter, I show that considering Narrativity as viewing life as …