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Articles 31 - 60 of 141
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
That Some Of Sol Lewitt’S Later Wall Drawings Aren’T Wall Drawings, P.D. Magnus
That Some Of Sol Lewitt’S Later Wall Drawings Aren’T Wall Drawings, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Matter, Memory, Multiverse : The Prism Of Reality, Sean William Johnson
Matter, Memory, Multiverse : The Prism Of Reality, Sean William Johnson
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
When Isaac Newton conducted his prism experiment, and discovered a “new theory of light and colours,” the experiment had far more social and scientific import than he could have anticipated. In his paper, Newton broke “whiteness” down into its true, conglomerate, multi-layered essence. “For the first time,” a phrase that was used quite a bit during the Enlightenment and Restoration of the 17th-18th centuries, whiteness was understood as a composite that contained every other colour. What happens to the paradox of the Enlightenment-- predicated upon “individuality” that was strangely restricted to white males-- when the very basis of “whiteness” has …
The Kantian Principle Of Treating Humanity As An End, Erjus Mezini
The Kantian Principle Of Treating Humanity As An End, Erjus Mezini
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This paper emphasizes the central role of the Formula of Humanity in Kantian ethics. It focuses mostly on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, with hypotheses being tested on Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals as well. It starts with an analysis of the argument Kant offers for the Formula of Humanity in Groundwork II, explicating the meaning of this formula and its distinction from the Formula of the Universal Law. It further develops on comparing all the formulations of the categorical imperative, and it argues that not all formulations are equivalent. It concludes that the categorical imperative is exhausted by …
Forall X: Introduction To Formal Logic, Version 1.40, P.D. Magnus
Forall X: Introduction To Formal Logic, Version 1.40, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Books
In formal logic, sentences and arguments in English are translated into mathematical languages with well-defined properties. If all goes well, properties of the argument that were hard to discern become clearer. This book covers translation, formal semantics, and proof theory for both sentential logic and quantified logic. Each chapter contains practice exercises; solutions to selected exercises appear in an appendix
What Kind Of Is-Ought Gap Is There And What Kind Ought There Be?, P.D. Magnus, Jon Mandle
What Kind Of Is-Ought Gap Is There And What Kind Ought There Be?, P.D. Magnus, Jon Mandle
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Some philosophers think that there is a gap between is and ought which necessarily makes normative enquiry a different kind of thing than empirical science. This position gains support from our ability to explicate our inferential practices in a way that makes it impermissible to move from descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. But we can also explicate them in a way that allows such moves. So there is no categorical answer as to whether there is or is not a gap. The question of an is-ought gap is a practical and strategic matter rather than a logical one, and …
Natural Philosophy, Geometry, And Deduction In The Hobbes-Boyle Debate, Marcus P. Adams
Natural Philosophy, Geometry, And Deduction In The Hobbes-Boyle Debate, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
This paper examines Hobbes’s criticisms of Robert Boyle’s air-pump experiments in light of Hobbes’s account in De Corpore and De Homine of the relationship of natural philosophy to geometry. I argue that Hobbes’s criticisms rely upon his understanding of what counts as “true physics.” Instead of seeing Hobbes as defending natural philosophy as “a causal enterprise ... [that] as such, secured total and irrevocable assent,”2 I argue that, in his disagreement with Boyle, Hobbes relied upon his understanding of natural philosophy as a mixed mathematical science. In a mixed mathematical science one can mix facts from experience (the ‘that’) with …
Efficiency, Growth And The Pursuit Of Social Utility, Mary-Elizabeth Theresa Breitmaier
Efficiency, Growth And The Pursuit Of Social Utility, Mary-Elizabeth Theresa Breitmaier
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This paper discusses and analyzes the claim that laissez-faire policies achieve greater efficiency and growth, which in turn provides overall social utility. This paper outlines and defines the terms used in the defense of laissez-faire policies and shows that this defense is suspect on all grounds. That is to say these policies do not provide greater efficiency, growth, or overall social utility. This paper argues against the questionable claim that a laissez-faire economy attains greater efficiency and growth. Further, even assuming that it did succeed in these two areas, it does not necessarily imply that greater social utility will follow …
The Promise Of Reconciliation Through Sympathy, Raphael Faith Moser
The Promise Of Reconciliation Through Sympathy, Raphael Faith Moser
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
A history of policies and practices of racial injustice against black Americans in the United
Novel Passions : Re-Reading English Fiction Through The History Of Emotion, 1689-1751, Joel P. Sodano
Novel Passions : Re-Reading English Fiction Through The History Of Emotion, 1689-1751, Joel P. Sodano
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
“The passions” were of paramount importance in the 18th century. Classical contexts established excessive emotions as potentially dangerous forces that could override the will and dictate human action, but they also perceived them as inessential to and even extirpable from human nature. With the advent of empiricism, the theoretical framework of emotion shifted from an external condition to an internal proposition. Thus, in the 18th century a conceptual symbiosis is formed between “the Gales of Passion” and “the Reins of Reason” (Spectator, no. 408, 1712). This seemingly archaic idea is actually being confirmed by contemporary neuroscience. For recently discovered neural …
Kind Of Borrowed, Kind Of Blue, P.D. Magnus
Kind Of Borrowed, Kind Of Blue, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
In late 2014, the jazz combo Mostly Other People Do the Killing released "Blue", an album which is a note-for-note remake of Miles Davis' 1959 landmark album "Kind of Blue". MOPDtK (to abbreviate the band's cumbersome name) transcribed all of the solos and performed them with meticulous care so as to produce a recorded album that replicates, as much as they could, the sound of the original. This is a thought experiment made actual, the kind of doppelgänger which philosophers routinely just imagine. I explore some of the ontological and aesthetic puzzles which the album poses. I argue that what …
Hobbes On Natural Philosophy As “True Physics” And Mixed Mathematics, Marcus P. Adams
Hobbes On Natural Philosophy As “True Physics” And Mixed Mathematics, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
In this paper, I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for Hobbes is mixed because an explanation may combine observations from experience (the ‘that’) with causal principles from geometry (the ‘why’). My argument shows that Hobbesian natural philosophy relies upon suppositions that bodies plausibly behave according to these borrowed causal …
Visual Perception As Patterning: Cavendish Against Hobbes On Sensation, Marcus P. Adams
Visual Perception As Patterning: Cavendish Against Hobbes On Sensation, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
In Margaret Cavendish's view, her Philosophical Letters are the "building" (1664, preface; hereafter Letters) that rests upon the foundation already laid in her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (first edition 1655; second edition 1663; hereafter Opinions). In the Letters, she criticizes Descartes, Hobbes, More, van Helmont, and others by arguing for the superiority of her philosophical system in its ability to explain various phenomena and to avoid the objections she highlights.
The Creation Of The Self And The Birth Of Inequality : Locke And Rousseau On Natural Rights And Private Property, Michael Sokoler
The Creation Of The Self And The Birth Of Inequality : Locke And Rousseau On Natural Rights And Private Property, Michael Sokoler
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The formation of civil societies marked one of the most monumental shifts
Identifying The Limits Of Sexual Liberation As A Feminist Value, Nichole Hungerford
Identifying The Limits Of Sexual Liberation As A Feminist Value, Nichole Hungerford
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis explores feminist responses to the sexual revolution and the extent to which sexual liberation, from the perspective of heterosexual relations, has served women’s interests as an oppressed social group under patriarchy. In particular, this thesis examines the divide between libertarian and radical feminists’ interpretation of sexual liberation, considering both the radical feminist criticisms of the sexist nature of heterosexual sex and the libertarian feminist view of free sexuality as a revolutionary act that ameliorates the condition of women. This thesis offers a middle ground approach to sexual liberation as a feminist value by suggesting two conditions on heterosexual …
The Grammar Of Politicization And Depoliticization : Arendt's Republicanism And The Translation Of Revolutionary Politics And Judgment Into Political Institutions, Daniel Kuchler
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
For Arendt, political freedom is both a spontaneous rejection of rule and the foundation of institutions. In my dissertation, I argue that both aspects are linked together by her concept of political judgment. This reading of Arendt contrasts with a strand of political theory that seems to argue that public-participatory politics, as found in revolutions, cannot be translated into lasting institutions: Wolin and Rancière argue that any attempt at establishing institutions undermines the participatory character of politics. Habermas and Pettit on the other hand argue for establishing lasting institutions, but they do so at the expense of a rich concept …
What Monsters May They Be : The Moral Status Of Macabre Fascination And The Paradox Of Horror, Marius Abraham Pascale
What Monsters May They Be : The Moral Status Of Macabre Fascination And The Paradox Of Horror, Marius Abraham Pascale
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The paradox of horror poses the question, how is it possible for us to find fear pleasurable? Emotions of fear are traditionally seen as unpleasant, and viewed as that which ought to be avoided when possible. Yet individuals seek out and derive pleasure from works of horror, a genre with the explicit goal of producing fear. How is this possible, and ought we to find such works a source of pleasure? The goals of the project are twofold. First, to present a unique solution to the horror paradox. Second, to address the moral status of macabre fascination. The first section …
Adjudicating The Simulation Theory/Theory Theory Debate (With Especial Attention To The Case Of Autism Spectrum Disorders), Susan M. Parrillo
Adjudicating The Simulation Theory/Theory Theory Debate (With Especial Attention To The Case Of Autism Spectrum Disorders), Susan M. Parrillo
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Susan M. Parrillo
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
The Enlightenment has been thought of as the Age of Reason: the birth of the individual, the rise of print culture, the beginning of the middle class, and an exponential growth in the sciences. The Enlightenment shaped the world into the form that it is today, but it also marks the start of colonization and the slave trade. The following thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Enlightenment to both colonization and the slave trade; that without it neither of these practices would have had the reach that they achieved over time. Using the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques …
Dynamic Politics : Necessity, Founding, And (Re)Founding In Machiavelli's Discourses On Livy, Vincent John Commisso
Dynamic Politics : Necessity, Founding, And (Re)Founding In Machiavelli's Discourses On Livy, Vincent John Commisso
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation is an attempt to recast the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy in a far more radical light than it has been previously understood. Rather than trying to overcome fortune, I argue that Machiavelli was encouraging political actors to embrace it by embracing the force which fortune generates: necessity. Along with this orientation towards fortune and necessity, Machiavelli also was engaging in an additional subversive project: the systematic undermining of the conventional republican wisdom of his predecessors and his contemporaries. On a practical level, the necessity central to Machiavelli’s thought is that of “founding,” …
The Dialectics Of Reading : Fredric Jameson And Politics Of Interpretation, Robert Henri Faivre
The Dialectics Of Reading : Fredric Jameson And Politics Of Interpretation, Robert Henri Faivre
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Fredric Jameson’s theory and practice of reading, in the name of critical interventions into the dominant hermeneutics in literary and cultural texts, have limited transformative readings and provided interpretive alibis, though an ever-receding utopian writerly space, for cultural reform within capitalism. Deploying a materialist analytics, The Dialectics of Reading draws out Jameson’s interpretive ambivalence, unlayers its class interests and demonstrates how in Jameson’s interpretations—from his Sartre: Origins of Style to An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army—the dominant material relationships are grasped as dialectical reading. In a detailed interpretation of his interpretation of “Walmart,” The Dialectics of Reading …
Preserving The Autographic/Allographic Distinction, P.D. Magnus, Jason R. D'Cruz
Preserving The Autographic/Allographic Distinction, P.D. Magnus, Jason R. D'Cruz
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
In his study of forms of representation, Nel- son Goodman sought to explain why some representations, like words or musical scores, are considered replicable while others, such as paintings, are not. He named the replicable rep- resentations allographic and the ones we consider nonreplicable autographic (Goodman 1976, 113). His explanation of what grounds this distinction is in his theory of notations (chaps. IV–V). That theory essentially seeks to secure the possibility of identity for representations, as well as the possibility of knowing such identity, by setting out a number of requirements. Unless a repre- sentational practice satisfies the requirements (is …
John Stuart Mill On Taxonomy And Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus
John Stuart Mill On Taxonomy And Natural Kinds, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The accepted narrative treats John Stuart Mill's Kinds as the historical prototype for our natural kinds, but Mill actually employs two separate notions: Kinds and natural groups. Considering these, along with the accounts of Mill's 19th-century interlocutors, forces us to recognize two distinct questions. First, what marks a natural kind as worthy of inclusion in taxonomy? Second, what exists in the world that makes a category meet that criterion? Mill's two notions offer separate answers to the two questions: natural groups for taxonomy, and Kinds for ontology. This distinction is ignored in many contemporary debates about natural kinds and is …
Promising To Try, Jason R. D'Cruz, Justin Kalef
Promising To Try, Jason R. D'Cruz, Justin Kalef
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
We maintain that in many contexts promising to try is expressive of responsibility as a promiser. This morally significant application of promising to try speaks in favor of the view that responsible promisers favor evidentialism about promises. Contra Berislav Marusˇic´, we contend that responsible promisers typically withdraw from promising to act and instead promise to try, in circumstances in which they recognize that there is a significant chance that they will not succeed.
Toward A More Intuitive Virtue Ethics: A Perspectival View, James Fanciullo
Toward A More Intuitive Virtue Ethics: A Perspectival View, James Fanciullo
Philosophy
No abstract provided.
Trust, Trustworthiness, And The Moral Consequence Of Consistency, Jason R. D'Cruz
Trust, Trustworthiness, And The Moral Consequence Of Consistency, Jason R. D'Cruz
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include …
Demarcating Aristotelian Rhetoric: Rhetoric, The Subalternate Sciences, And Boundary Crossing, Marcus P. Adams
Demarcating Aristotelian Rhetoric: Rhetoric, The Subalternate Sciences, And Boundary Crossing, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The ways in which the Aristotelian sciences are related to each other has been discussed in the literature, with some focus on the subalternate sciences. While it is acknowledged that Aristotle, and Plato as well, was concerned as well with how the arts were related to one another, less attention has been paid to Aristotle’s views on relationships among the arts. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle’s account of the subalternate sciences helps shed light on how Aristotle saw the art of rhetoric relating to dialectic and politics. Initial motivation for comparing rhetoric with the subalternate sciences is Aristotle’s …
The Queen's Three Bodies : Representations Of Female Sovereignty In Early Modern Women's Writing, 1588-1688, Erin V. Casey-Williams
The Queen's Three Bodies : Representations Of Female Sovereignty In Early Modern Women's Writing, 1588-1688, Erin V. Casey-Williams
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role …
The Self In Hume's "Treatise", David M. Krueger
The Self In Hume's "Treatise", David M. Krueger
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Much has been written about Hume's treatment of the self and personal identity in his Treatise. However the scholarship generally focuses on individual aspects of Hume's discussion of self and personal identity. This account is an attempt to elucidate Hume's view of the self and personal identity throughout the Treatise, including the Appendix. I argue for a consistent and cohesive interpretation of Hume's account, one that rejects a more traditional view of identity for an unreflective view of identity.
Beyond Permissibility : Traversing The Many Moral Pitfalls Of Abortion (A Virtue Ethics Approach), John Westley Mcmichael
Beyond Permissibility : Traversing The Many Moral Pitfalls Of Abortion (A Virtue Ethics Approach), John Westley Mcmichael
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Ethical discussions about abortion, typically, focus on whether or not it is morally permissible to destroy a fetus. If it is morally impermissible to do so, that seems to answer the question of abortion outright: all things being equal, it is wrong. If it is permissible to kill a fetus, however, it doesn't follow that one cannot err morally by doing so. Using virtue ethics as my guiding normative theory, I argue that there are many potential moral errors one can make in having an abortion (or, in other cases, by not having an abortion) that do not hang on …
Identical Particles In Quantum Mechanics : Operational And Topological Considerations, Klil H. Neori
Identical Particles In Quantum Mechanics : Operational And Topological Considerations, Klil H. Neori
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This dissertation reports our investigation into the existence of anyons, which interpolate between bosons and fermions, in light of the Symmetrization Postulate, which states that only the two extremes exist. The Symmetrization Postulate can be understood as asserting that there are only two consistent ways of combining the behavior of distinguishable particles to obtain the behavior of identical ones. We showed that anyonic behavior then arises because of the way in which the probability amplitudes of distinguishable particles in two dimensions are affected by the topology of the space. These can then be combined in one of the ways arising …