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Lighting The Way Of The Learner: Towards A Social Virtue Epistemology In Aḥmad Al-Ṣaghīr’S The Faqīh’S Lantern, Amani Khelifa

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This thesis offers an original translation and analysis of a West African didactic poem in Islamic ethics and law, by the Mālikī-Ashʿarī Mauritanian scholar Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr (d. 1272 AH/1856 CE) called The Faqīh’s Lantern (Miṣbāḥ al-Faqīh). In addition to the critical translation, I examine the poem thematically through the lens of social virtue epistemology. Chapter 1 sketches the background of the text and author, positioning the author historically as a product of a rich scholarly and pedagogical tradition while noting Mauritania’s contemporary place in the North American Muslim imagination. Chapter 2 is the translation of the text, making …

Using Formal Epistemology To Model Epistemic Injustice Against Neurodivergent People, Mackenzie Marcotte

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Neurodivergent people experience epistemic injustice, injustices that harm them in their capacity as knowers, but so far the epistemic injustice literature has mostly ignored this. This dissertation addresses this gap in knowledge in a novel way, using tools of formal epistemology. Bayesian network learning models that include modeled bias, communication style gaps, exclusion, and difference between people, are used to investigate testimonial injustice. Novel simultaneous Lewis-Skyrms signal games that include modeled bias, focus on success, gaps in way of thinking, exclusion, and difference in material interests are used to investigate hermeneutical injustice, the subset of epistemic injustice that involves concepts …

Back To The Beginning: An Empiricist Defense Of Scientific Stories About The Past, Craig William Fox

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The Earth has not always been accompanied by its celestial partner, the Moon. In fact, the Moon was acquired by the Earth about 100 million years after the start of the solar system. It was acquired in the aftermath of a massive collision between the Earth and another planet, dubbed “Theia,” the mythological mother of the Greek goddess of the Moon. Most of the iron-rich cores of Earth and Theia merged almost immediately, while the rest of the two planets vaporized. Some of the impact ejecta was lost, but enough remained in gravitationally bound orbit around what was then $ …

An Archaeology Of Contemporary Speculative Knowledge, Justas Patkauskas

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This dissertation investigates contemporary speculative knowledge grounded in the immanence episteme, which is struggling to emerge as a foundation for a new kind of absolute knowledge. Regarding method, I use Michel Foucault’s concept of archaeology, situating archaeology in the context of deconstruction. In general, by delineating the various differences and genealogies within immanence theory, I show that immanence is neither a monolithic homogeneity nor a schizophrenic multiplicity but a coherent, if troubled, ground for speculative thought.

In Chapter 1, I define deconstruction as a broad philosophical project concerned with the order of knowledge and the University and its disciplines. I …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

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Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

Philosophical Archeology In Theoretical And Artistic Practice, Ido Govrin

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The aim of this thesis is to examine philosophical archeology and the feasibility of knowledge that derives from researching it simultaneously through theoretical and artistic practice.

Philosophical archeology essentially embodies one’s relation to history and historiographic research—a research methodology at the core of which lies a “historical a priori”, that which a priori conditions the historical development of a phenomenon. However, this research conceives of philosophical archeology more broadly, as a multifaceted term that traverses the discourse of the humanities at large.

By pursuing this doctoral research, my original contribution to knowledge is twofold: (1) I historicize philosophical archeology—a …

Monuments Of The Present: The Document And Monument In Michel Foucault's Archaeology, Alexander Walker

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This thesis interrogates Michel Foucault’s distinction between the monument and the document in his key methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), originally released in French as L’Archéologie du Savior in 1969. Foucault attempts to formulate a new form of history based on the examination of the monument, where previous methodologies had examined the document.

The thesis first examines Foucault’s theorization of this distinction and then questions the stability of these two categories through the comments of art critic Erwin Panofsky. I propose that the monument and document distinction implicates the historian in the power-relations that Foucault articulates later in …

Agnotologies Of Modernism: Knowing The Unknown In Lewis, Woolf, Pound, And Joyce, Jeremy Colangelo

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Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive traits …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

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What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Mnidoo-Worlding: Merleau-Ponty And Anishinaabe Philosophical Translations, Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning

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This dissertation develops a concept of mnidoo-worlding, whereby consciousness emerges as a kind of possession by what is outside of ‘self’ and simultaneously by what is internal as self-possession. Weaving together phenomenology, post structural philosophy and Ojibwe Anishinaabe orally transmitted knowledges, I examine Ojibwe Anishinaabe mnidoo, or ‘other than human,’ ontologies. Mnidoo refers to energy, potency or processes that suffuse all of existence and includes humans, animals, plants, inanimate ‘objects’ and invisible and intangible forces (i.e. Thunder Beings). Such Anishinaabe philosophies engage with what I articulate as all-encompassing and interpenetrating mnidoo co-responsiveness. The result is a resistance to cooption that …

How Do Teachers Challenge Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy Within And Outside Of The Classroom?, Rezvan Shahsavari-Googhari

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This thesis uses the qualitative case study approach to investigate current strategies and skills four Ontario public secondary school teachers apply both within and outside of the classroom to enhance students’ critical consciousness. The focus is on teachers’ pedagogical work in the era of neoliberal restructuring in order to provide a rich account of how neoliberalism challenges and affects their teaching. Existing literature shows a crisis of identity and political agency among youth in many Western societies, characterized by individuals’ inability to think critically about social, political and economic issues, which is rooted in neoliberal education reforms. Adopting a critical …

The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary

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This thesis argues that the interior space of each individual mind has infinite potentiality to do or create x new reality in one’s life via possible worlds. I use Lawrence Durrell’s short story “Zero” (1939), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as literary representations of how readers outside of the literary text share an unbreakable bond with universal space. I discuss the infinite potentiality of the finite being, and the experiential data in the process of entelechy, or epistemological maturation of the mind. I bring Leibniz’s theory of the continuum of infinitesimals …

The Constellations Of Empiricism, New Science, And Mind In Hobbes, Locke, And Hume, Lisa Pelot

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In this thesis, positive and negative tensions among the “unit-ideas” of New Science and empiricism are explored as they relate to explanations of aspects of mind in the Modern period. Some constellations of ideas are mutually supporting, and provide fruitful discussion on how mind can fit into the natural world. This project aims to clarify the adequacy of this type of framework in accommodating and explaining mind, and aspects of mind. I proceed by analyzing key texts via the “unit-ideas” of New Science and empiricism. The three central chapters are case studies, looking at Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. Each chapter …

Tesitmony As Significance Negotiation, Jennifer F. Epp

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This dissertation addresses the following questions: How should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? What do people use testimony to do? And why does ‘what people do’ with testimony matter epistemically? In response to these questions I both define and characterize testimony.

While doing so I argue for the following answers, given here very briefly: What do people do when they testify? They tell each other things and avow that those things are true, offering their statements to others as reasons to believe. More importantly, they interact with each other in order to negotiate about significance. Why do these activities matter epistemically? Because …

Probabilistic Reasoning In Cosmology, Yann Benétreau-Dupin

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Cosmology raises novel philosophical questions regarding the use of probabilities in inference. This work aims at identifying and assessing lines of arguments and problematic principles in probabilistic reasoning in cosmology.

The first, second, and third papers deal with the intersection of two distinct problems: accounting for selection effects, and representing ignorance or indifference in probabilistic inferences. These two problems meet in the cosmology literature when anthropic considerations are used to predict cosmological parameters by conditionalizing the distribution of, e.g., the cosmological constant on the number of observers it allows for. However, uniform probability distributions usually appealed to in such arguments …

Philipp Frank: Philosophy Of Science, Pragmatism, And Social Engagement, Amy N. Wuest

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Philipp Frank––physicist, philosopher, and early member of the Vienna Circle––is often neglected in retrospective accounts of twentieth century philosophy of science, despite renewed interest in the work of the Vienna Circle. In this thesis, I argue that this neglect is unwarranted. Appealing to a variety of philosophical and historical sources, I trace the development of Frank’s philosophical thought and, in so doing highlight the roles played by history, sociology, values, and pragmatism in his philosophy of science. Turning to contemporary literature, I then argue that Frank’s work should be understood as an early instance of what is now called “socially …

Epistemology Of The Cartesian Image, Mikhail Pozdniakov

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This study is an examination of the epistemological history of the image. Its first strands are to be found in the Christian concept of profanity, in the difference of the world to the divine. The highest form of intelligibility profanity could have, second only to theology, was mathematics. Derived from the problems surrounding this concept are the techniques of inquiry that eventually resulted in the development of analytic geometry by Descartes. The latter marked a new sensibility regarding the physical universe and its constitution, one that is coterminous with the development of exact procedures in science. Being that exactitude regards …

A Feminist Defense Of Moderate Moral Intuitionism, Bill Jc Cameron

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The three integrated articles of this dissertation are concerned with the epistemic status of moral intuitions. The first article argues in favour of moderate moral intuitionism, the view that while any successful moral epistemology must be intuitionist to at least some extent, it must also take intuitions to be fallible. This is accomplished by synthesizing work by Robert Audi and George Bealer into a view of moral intuitions which is capable of overcoming some major contemporary objections against intuitionism, particularly from Sharon Street and Peter Singer.

The next article raises a more powerful objection to intuitionism, applying feminist ethics and …

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

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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 …

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley

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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 …

The Reasonable Effectiveness Of Mathematics In The Natural Sciences, Nicolas Fillion

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One of the most unsettling problems in the history of philosophy examines how mathematics can be used to adequately represent the world. An influential thesis, stated by Eugene Wigner in his paper entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," claims that "the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Contrary to this view, this thesis delineates and implements a strategy to show that the applicability of mathematics is very reasonable indeed.

I distinguish three forms of the …