Philosophy Commons^™

Conceptual Roles And Conceptual Explanation: How Internalism Can Provide Everything We Need From A Theory Of Concepts, And Why Externalism Can't, Cressida Gaukroger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation attacks externalism about concepts. It argues that attributions of mental state content that posit externally individuated concepts lack explanatory power. Only the intrinsic or local properties of mental states are relevant to causal explanations of behaviour - relational or non-local properties of mental states do not have causal power. This dissertation focuses on expanding upon this argument, and showing that it has significant consequences for those who assert the externalist position.

I begin by setting out the primary criticisms levelled at internalist theories of concepts. These include the claims that a theory that individuates concepts purely internally will …

Divine Omnipotence In Descartes' Philosophy, Alfredo Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present thesis explores various aspects of Rene Descartes' doctrine of divine omnipotence within the context of his overall philosophy and with reference to his medieval heritage. This thesis shows that, contrary to his multiple and explicit statements that God's power cannot be limited in any way, Descartes took a more nuanced position on divine omnipotence that incorporated aspects of the widely accepted medieval position that God's goodness is a constraint on his power. Furthermore, Descartes used the medieval concept of universals as he experimented with the use of modes to explain how a thing's actual existence is possible by …

Partir Marron: Un Parcours Sémantique À Travers Les Trous De La Mémoire Collective Haïtienne, Lucie Carmel Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word "marron " represents both a totality, and a specificity. Totalizing, the term refers to the slave who fled from the plantation, against the colonial order, that is, the fugitive slave. Specific, in the Haitian lexicography, it stands for a shifty and cunning individual, particularily a " Woule m debò "1. One has to recognize that there is a double meaning associated with the word, and at the same time, the syntagmatic locution "partir marron " reflects the individual's dependency on phenomenology. The moment of crisis is one of an explosion, through which one can only be …

Acting Wide Awake: Attention And The Ethics Of Emotion, Jacob Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In cases where two human cultures disagree over fundamental ethical values, metaethical questions about what could make one or the other position correct arise with great force. Philosophers committed to naturalistically plausible accounts of ethics have offered little hope of adjudicating such conflicts, leading some to embrace moral relativism. In my dissertation, I develop an empirically grounded response to moral relativism by turning away from debates over which action types are right and wrong and focusing instead on shared features of human emotional motivation. On my account, being motivated by ill-will is ethically bad (if it is), just because human …

Nature's Goodness: An Aristotelian Account, Nathan K. Metzger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neo-Aristotelians have made major headway in moral theory, and it is now commonplace to find philosophers defending the reality of goodness through a teleological analysis of human being. Whatever the merits of this approach, it has suffered from a lack of a sustained defense of its pre-modern metaphysical panorama: the Aristotelian conception of the human good gets traction only if its decidedly pre-modern and `robust' philosophy of nature is defensible in its own right. In this dissertation, I aim to give a partial breakdown of the particular sort of metaphysical project that the Aristotelian moral theorist assumes, but does not …

Why Should One Reproduce? The Rationality And Morality Of Human Reproduction, Lantz Fleming Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human reproduction has long been assumed to be an act of the blind force of nature, to which humans were subject, like the weather. However, with recent concerns about the environmental impact of human population, particularly resource depletion, human reproduction has come to be seen as a moral issue. That is, in general, it may be moral or immoral for people to continue propagating their species. The past decade's philosophical discussions of the question have yielded varying results. This dissertation takes on the issue in a broader moral perspective and asks not only whether it is moral to reproduce but …

Common Knowledge: The Epistemology Of American Realism, Mark Sussman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, Common Knowledge: The Epistemology of American Realism, focuses on realist fiction (primarily the novel) at the end of the nineteenth century. Its motivating claim is that the central descriptive and thematic imperative of realism--to depict life "as it is" rather than in some idealized form--emerged in response to crises in the status of knowledge that resulted from an attempt by writers and readers to come to a common understanding of the relationship between private experience and an increasingly fragmented social world. While William Dean Howells's definition of realism as a form of writing that displays "fidelity to experience …

Albert Camus' Political Thought: From Passion To Compassion, Angel López-Santiago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present work analyzes the political thought of Albert Camus, specifically the challenges of the justice ideal, and Camus' prioritization of the concepts of limits and compassion. Although Camus is not usually considered part of the traditional canon of political philosophy, I organized his thought into three major areas: a sub-theory of the human being, a sub-theory of institutions, and a sub-theory of political change. This method, I demonstrate, is ideal for extracting and organizing the political ideas of non-traditional political writers. In the case of Camus, he advocates for an international and democratic `civilization of dialogue' as part of …

Existence: An Unholy Trinity. An Account Of Indeterminate Existence, Salas Sanchez-Bennasar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What is it for something to exist? This dissertation provides an answer to this question by giving a philosophical theory of existence in which the concept of existence in understood as a complex tri-partite notion. The account of existence defended here is arrived at by taking into consideration past philosophical theories of existence, the everyday and scientific uses of the notion, and also philosophical considerations about the nature of reality.

There are three conditions that are central to existence: spatiotemporality, mind-independence, and being a member of the quantificational domain of a true and complete scientific description about the world. To …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …

Metaphysical Dependence And Set Theory, John Wigglesworth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a counterfactual analysis of metaphysical dependence. It is natural to think that one thing x depends on another thing y if had y not existed, then x wouldn't have existed either. But counterfactual analyses of metaphysical dependence are often rejected in the current literature. They are rejected because straightforward counterfactual analyses fail to accurately capture dependence relations between objects that exist necessarily, like mathematical objects. For example, it is taken as given that sets metaphysically depend on their members, while members do not metaphysically depend on the sets they belong to. The set …

Deflationism About Truth And Meaning, Onyoung Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of my thesis is to defend a deflationary view of truth and meaning. I characterize the view as a doctrine holding that truth is a purely logical notion, and truth-theoretic notions don't play a serious explanatory role in an account of meaning and content. We use truth-terms (e.g. `true') everywhere, from the discourse of ordinary conversation to those of the hard science and morality. The ubiquity of truth-terms gives rise to the impression that truth is a profound notion playing substantive explanatory roles. This impression, say deflationists, is unduly inflated--the ubiquity of truth-terms is not a sign of …

The Metaphysics Of Improvisation, Tobyn C. Demarco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In "The Metaphysics of Improvisation," I criticize wrongheaded metaphysical views of, and theories about, improvisation, and put forward a cogent metaphysical theory of improvisation, which includes action theory, an analysis of the relevant genetic and aesthetic properties, and ontology (work-hood).

The dissertation has two Parts. Part I is a survey of the history of many improvisational practices, and of the concept of improvisation. Here I delineate, sketch, and sort out the often vague boundaries between improvising and non-improvising within many art forms and genres, including music, dance, theatre, motion pictures, painting, and literature. In addition, I discuss the concept of …

In Favor Of Teleosemantics: A Millikanian Treatment Of The Intentional Content Of Mental Representation, Pierre Faye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theoretical attempts to naturalize mental contents, that is, to explain how wholly physical organisms manage to represent the external world to themselves, are mostly conducted in accordance with causal-informational and/or functionalist approaches based on nomic physical correlations. In 1984, Ruth Millikan and David Papineau simultaneously, though independently, injected new life into the naturalist program by introducing a divergent approach known today as "teleosemantics."

In first approximation, teleosemantics purports to naturalize mental content by substituting for the former concept of nomic correlations found in causal and/or functionalist models, the biological concept of etiological functions resulting from natural selection. Since its introduction, …

Moral Mental States: Four Methods In Metaethics, Christopher Alen Sula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metaethics has traditionally focused on the meaning of moral statements, the referents of moral terms, and the justification of moral claims. This dissertation focuses on the thoughts in virtue of which our moral statements have their meaning and our moral claims have their content. These "moral mental states," as I call them, are best understood as having both intentional and volitional aspects and, corresponding to each aspect, as having satisfaction conditions involving both correctness and success in action. Put simply, our moral mental states are not only responsible for changing the world; they are responsible for changing the world in …

Anger Et Cetera: Understanding The Emotions In Ethics, Damien Dupont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues in part that because the ethical theory of sentimentalism is based on the mistaken belief that emotions are non-cognitive, sentimentalism cannot account for the fact of the influence of cognition in morality and moral action. Therefore sentimentalism is of little use in ethics.

This work is done by going back to examine Western thinking on the emotions from its dawn in Homer's writing through to contemporary philosophy and neurophysiology on the emotions. Following the development of the way emotions were thought of and how they related to ethics allows the identification of an intellectual forked path brought …

The Phenomenon Of Amoralism: An Investigation Of The Cognitive And Emotive Roots, Andrei G. Zavaliy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An amoralist is defined as a person who rejects the claims of moral reasons to special authority, and systematically acts without regard to the generally accepted moral standards. A psychopath can be seen as a paradigm case of an extreme amoralist, although the less severe cases of selective amoralists are considered. The research into the typical behavioral pattern, motivational structure, and the value system of psychopaths can shed light on at least three aspects related to the analysis of the moral agency. First, it can help elucidating the emotive and cognitive conditions necessary for moral performance. Secondly, it can provide …

Eliminative Materialism And The Distinction Between Common Sense And Science, Nada Gligorov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is one of the premises of eliminative materialism that commonsense psychology constitutes a theory. There is agreement that mental states can be construed as posited entities for the explanation and prediction of behavior, and that the nature of those states is dependent on the theory that features them. Disputes arise when it comes to the range of the commonsense theory of mental states. In chapter one, I review major arguments concerning the span and nature of folk psychology. In chapter two, relying on arguments by Quine and Sellars, I argue that the precise scope of commonsense psychology cannot be …

The Qualitative Character Of Spatial Perception, Douglas Meehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ordinary perceiving relies heavily on our sensing the spatial properties of objects, e.g., their shapes, sizes, and locations. Such spatial perception is central in everyday life. We safely cross a street by seeing and hearing the locations of oncoming vehicles. And we often identify objects by seeing and feeling their distinctive shapes.

To understand how we perceive spatial properties, we must explain the nature of the mental states figuring in spatial perception. The experience one has when seeing a cube, e.g., differs from the experiences one has when seeing other shapes, e.g., spheres and pyramids. We must explain how such …

Identifying The First Person, Roblin Roy Meeks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wide agreement exists that self-ascriptions that one would express with the first-person pronoun differ in kind from those one would express with other self-designating expressions such as proper names and definite descriptions. At least some first-person self-ascriptions, many argue, are nonaccidental—that is, they involve no self-identification, and hence in making them one cannot accidentally misidentify the subject of the ascription. I examine the support for this claim throughout the literature, paying particular attention to Sydney Shoemaker's proposal that self-ascriptions are nonaccidental in virtue of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. According to Shoemaker, such immunity …

Wittgenstein And The Grammar Of Physics: A Study Of Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1929-1930 Manuscripts And The Roots Of His Later Philosophy, Anton Alterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object (the "color exclusion" problem). Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be logically independent of one another.

Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with …

Deflating Deflationism, Bradley Philip Armour-Garb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I take a close look at the deflationary theory of truth, and deflationary semantics, generally. My thesis is that, as a theory about the nature and function of the property of truth, deflationism is well supported. However, deflationary semantics, which combines deflationism about truth with deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for by pointing to the expressive function of the truth predicate.

Having shown that deflationism about meaning cannot be argued for in this way, I develop a challenge to deflationary semantics, the challenge of the contingency of sentential truth conditions. The challenge for the deflationist …

Some Consequences Of Semantic Externalism, Consuelo Preti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning and mental content are determined by relations to the world of objects and properties outside the physical boundaries of the subject of mental states. What you mean by your words–what you're thinking when you're thinking about something–is essentially constituted by the world at large. It has become customary to formulate externalism in terms of so-called twin earth cases–cases where (some kinds of) content do not supervene on inner states, but this formulation can be shown to be too limited to be of any great use in characterizing a theory of mind. A more …

Christopher Caudwell And His Critics: A Study Of Caudwell's Philosophy Of Art And The Critical Response, Thomas Riggins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the philosophy of art of the British Marxist, Christopher Caudwell. It begins with a general discussion of the intellectual environment of Caudwell's day–i.e., the 1920s and 30s in Europe and especially in England. It then procedes to a presentation of Caudwell's basic philosophical position with major emphasis on his work Illusion and Reality. This is followed by a review of the critical assessment Caudwell's ideas evoked and a number of detractors and supporters are discussed. Special attention is then placed on a review of the aesthetic theory of Socialist Realism and Caudwell's relation to it. …

Aristotle's Conception Of Megalopsychia, Kevin Patrick Osborne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.