Philosophy Commons^™

The Methodological Roles Of Tolerance And Conventionalism In The Philosophy Of Mathematics: Reconsidering Carnap's Logic Of Science, Emerson P. Doyle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation makes two primary contributions. The first three chapters develop an interpretation of Carnap's Meta-Philosophical Program which places stress upon his methodological analysis of the sciences over and above the Principle of Tolerance. Most importantly, I suggest, is that Carnap sees philosophy as contiguous with science—as a part of the scientific enterprise—so utilizing the very same methods and subject to the same limitations. I argue that the methodological reforms he suggests for philosophy amount to philosophy as the explication of the concepts of science (including mathematics) through the construction and use of suitably robust meta-logical languages. My primary …

Optimality And Teleology In Aristotle's Natural Science, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor of Aristotle’s own principle, expressed by the famous dictum “nature does nothing in vain but always what is best for …

A Defence Of Anti-Psychologism About Reasons, Alex Beldan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My concern is the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between the reasons for which an agent acted (motivating reasons) and the reasons which count in favour of that action (normative reasons). Normative reasons seem to be facts, whereas motivating reasons seem to be psychological states. Agents look to be capable for acting for the reasons that favour an action, which would require that motivating reasons are capable of being the same kind of thing as normative reasons, which in turn is in conflict with the different natures of normative and motivating reasons. My object in my dissertation is to resolve …

Some Disputed Aspects Of Inertia, With Particular Reference To The Equivalence Principle, Ryan S. Samaroo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a contribution to the foundations of space-time theories. It examines the proper understanding of the Newtonian and 1905 inertial frame concepts and the critical analysis of these concepts that was motivated by the equivalence principle. This is the hypothesis that it is impossible to distinguish locally between a homogeneous gravitational field and a uniformly accelerated frame.

The three essays that comprise this thesis address, in one way or another, the criteria through which the inertial frame concepts are articulated. They address the place of these concepts in the conceptual framework of physics and their significance for our …

Aristotle On The Good Of Friendship: Why The Beneficiary Is Not What Matters, Kristina L. Biniek

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Scholars seeking to understand Aristotle’s view of friendship often characterize the relationship in terms of the beneficiary of the virtuous agent’s activity. I argue that this is a distortive lens through which to interpret Aristotle. Aristotle’s primary and fundamental concern, in his ethics, is to understand what the good is and how to bring it about, not to determine how to distribute goods produced by virtuous activity. Remembering this helps clarify the role of the friendship books and dissolves apparent tensions between Aristotle’s eudaimonism and his account of friendship. My first chapter establishes how consistently Aristotle holds to his task, …

Justice, Rights, And Capabilities, Jeffrey E. Spring

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My investigation of the capabilities approach as a burgeoning theory of global justice underlies the integrated-article format of this thesis, where each chapter treats a discrete but related problem. In Chapter One I survey the rapidly growing philosophical literature on global justice, focusing on contemporary rights-based approaches. I defend capabilities as central to global justice because justice demands that individuals be well positioned to enjoy the prospects of a decent life, measured by how well individuals are actually able to convert resources and opportunities into valuable functionings. In Chapter Two I explore what I take to be the most promising …

Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …

Well-Being, Authority, And Worth, Michel Hebert

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theories of well-being give an account of what it is for persons to fare well or to live prudentially valuable lives. I divide the theoretical landscape based on the position that theories accord to schedules of concerns. A schedule of concerns is the loose program that specifies the objects that engage the subject’s active interest, attention, and care. Objective theories hold that the objects of one’s concerns alone determine one’s well-being. Subjective theories hold that one’s concerns alone determine one’s well-being. I assess each set of theories for descriptive adequacy and find that each runs into difficulty.

Subjective theories confront …

Hegel's Unconscious: Analyzing Matter In The Philosophy Of Nature, Andrew Kingston

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzes the structural position of matter within the philosophical system of nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Concentrating on the Philosophy of Nature, it reads Hegel’s treatment of matter psychoanalytically and semiotically as the unconscious to his anthropological (spiritual) and logical philosophy, which otherwise constitutes the majority of his writings. To do so, this thesis explores a proliferation of figurative language throughout Hegel’s text, specifically in his writing on mechanics, light, the elements, and organic life. In this investigation, Hegel’s work is considered alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Gaston Bachelard, and Rodolphe …

Method And Metaphor In Aristotle's Science Of Nature, Sean Michael Pead Coughlin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a collection of essays exploring the role of metaphor in Aristotle’s scientific method. Aristotle often appeals to metaphors in his scientific practice; but in the Posterior Analytics, he suggests that their use is inimical to science. Why, then, does he use them in natural science? And what does his use of metaphor in science reveal about the nature of his scientific investigations? I approach these questions by investigating the epistemic status of metaphor in Aristotelian science. In the first essay, I defend an interpretation of metaphor as a type of heuristic reasoning: I claim that Aristotle …

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 …

Basic Cable: Notes Toward Digital Ontology, Robbie Cormier

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis begins the work of constructing a fundamental ontology that employs the network automaton—a class of abstract computer program—as its model. Following a brief historical overview of the theory of network automata and its culmination in the work of Steven Wolfram, I examine how it bears on the ancient question concerning whether the continuous or the discrete has ontological primacy, consider the ontological status of materiality in consultation with Deleuzean ontology, and introduce the concept of prescience as a means of topologically mapping emergent patterns within the causal relations that compose the network. Finally, I will break the …

An Ethical Justification For Research With Children, Ariella Binik

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a contribution to the ethical justification for clinical research with children. A research subject’s participation in a trial is usually justified, in part, by informed consent. Informed consent helps to uphold the moral principle of respect for persons. But children’s limited ability to make informed choices gives rise to a problem. It is unclear what, if anything, justifies their participation in research.

Some research ethicists propose to resolve this problem by appealing to social utility, proxy consent, arguments explaining why it is permissible to expose children to some harm, and an argument concerning the appropriate balance between …

Moving Forward With A Clear Conscience: A Model Conscientious Objection Policy For Canadian Colleges Of Physicians And Surgeons, Jocelyn Downie, Carolyn Mcleod, Jacquelyn Shaw

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

"A Painter's Brush That Also Makes Poems": Contemporary Painting After Northern Song Calligraphy, Andy J. Patton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There is no Western equivalent to the practice of calligraphy in pre-modern China, an aesthetic form which does not resolve itself into a literary object or a visual one. Calligraphy was sustained by a rich and complex body of thought that can fully rival art criticism and theory in the West. To undertake this project, I immersed myself in the study of both key works of calligraphy and the aesthetic that sustained it during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) in China—not in order to practice calligraphy but to transform my own understanding of art and make contemporary Western paintings out …

Rotman Institute Speaker: Feminist Neo-Materialism And The Future Of Phenomenology, Dorothea Olkowski

Future Directions in Feminist Phenomenology

No abstract provided.

Fertility Preservation Technologies For Women: A Feminist Ethical Analysis, Angel Petropanagos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation I examine ethical issues that concern fertility preservation (FP) technologies for women from a feminist perspective. FP technologies involve the removal, cryopreservation and subsequent storage of reproductive materials for future use. The aim of these technologies is to preserve the option of future genetic reproduction. FP technologies have been developed in the cancer context because infertility is one of the long-term side-effects of many cancers or cancer therapies. Many FP technologies are still experimental, but some technologies are becoming available to healthy women who wish to guard against age-related infertility. Although FP technologies are expanding women’s reproductive …

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 …

Husserl's Transcendental Idealism And The Problem Of Solipsism, Rodney Parker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A pervasive interpretation among Husserl scholars is that his transcendental idealism inevitably leads to some form of solipsism. The aim of this dissertation is to defend Husserl against this charge. First, I argue that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is not a metaphysical theory. Transcendental phenomenology brackets all metaphysical presuppositions and argues from experience to the conditions of the possibility of experience. Husserl’s transcendental idealism should therefore be interpreted as a transcendental theory of knowledge. Second, it follows from the above characterization of Husserl’s transcendental idealism that the responses Husserl gives to the problem of solipsism are in no way meant to …

On The Physical Explanation For Quantum Computational Speedup, Michael Cuffaro

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The aim of this dissertation is to clarify the debate over the explanation of quantum speedup and to submit, for the reader’s consideration, a tentative resolution to it. In particular, I argue that the physical explanation for quantum speedup is precisely the fact that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement enables a quantum computer to fully exploit the representational capacity of Hilbert space. This is impossible for classical systems, joint states of which must always be representable as product states. I begin the dissertation by considering, in Chapter 2, the most popular of the candidate physical explanations for quantum speedup: the …

Infanticide And The Anxious Silence Of “Language As Such”, Kevin Godbout

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

No abstract provided.

Pasolini's Laugh: Joyful Ignorance In The Decameron, Andrea Privitera

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In this paper, I discuss Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and its 1971 film adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini. To be more precise, I focus on the fifth novella of the sixth day, the one about Giotto and Forese, and its audiovisual re-elaboration, which can be seen as a very brief and at the same time very vivid example of Pasolini’s ideas on society, language and communication.

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 …

Maurice Merleau-Ponty And Hannah Arendt: The Intersection Of Institution, Natality, And Birth, Nathaniel Coward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Establishing respectively the relevant concepts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt, this thesis links flesh and the inter esse as both bespeaking of a fruitful dialectical relationship wherein the new is born by making its visible appearance. This advent of the visible is made possible in differentiation from an implied invisibility, which for both authors determines a connection between nature and temporality; nature as related to the appearance of the visible as grounded upon temporal implications within the invisible. Commensurate temporal structures of the invisible between these authors demonstrate birth as institutional (the continuation of a historically contingent sensibility) and …

The Resilience Of A Refined Higher-Order Thought Theory Of Consciousness, Lee-Anna T. Sangster

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation consists of three independent papers, each defending the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) Theory of Consciousness against a different objection. First the HOT theory is defended against the Theory of Mind (TOM) Objection. Since the HOT theory requires that a subject be able to represent mental states in thought in order to have mental states that are conscious, objectors argue from empirical evidence that few creatures pass TOM tests to the conclusion that few creatures must be capable of having conscious mental states according to the HOT theory. The counter-intuitiveness of this claim is then taken as reason for rejecting …

Aristotle On Code, John Thorp

Philosophy Presentations

No abstract provided.