Philosophy Commons^™

Allyship And Affect: Qualitative Investigations Into Social Transformation, Michael Lucinda Jane Greer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Allies have faced several critiques in feminist philosophy. Some have argued that they lack the requisite political interests to be motivated to dismantle the social structures from which they stand to benefit. Others have argued that the epistemic limitations resulting from their social privilege are insurmountable. Yet others have argued that allyship is too individualistic a concept, preferring a more collectivist concept like solidarity. However, there remain privileged individuals who understand themselves as complicit in perpetuating oppressive forms of life, and who wish to transform themselves and work in coalition across difference to dismantle structural oppression. How ought these individuals …

Model-Theoretic Arguments In Philosophy, Peter Susanszky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on model-theoretic arguments in philosophy, especially those of Quine, Davidson, and Putnam. In the first part, to ground the debate, I give a rigorous introduction to the salient parts of first-order model theory. I start the second part by giving an introduction to Quine's philosophy, and how the model-theoretic arguments fit into it. After considering how Donald Davidson adopted the Quinean lesson, I move on to Putnam's model-theoretic arguments. Putnam's spin on these model-theoretic considerations significantly departs from Quine and Davidson, while retaining many of the core ideas. Most importantly, I argue that the target of Putnam's …

Experiences Of Resilience During Divorce For Black Women Who Attend Church, Tracey Ann Grant

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Across the globe, divorce is a challenging situation that affects family relationships and disrupts social networks. Divorced women often experience a decline in their health and well-being immediately postdivorce. The problem addressed in this study is that divorcing women tend to experience more negative or undesirable impacts on their mental health (e.g., depression) postdivorce than men and often find involvement in church to be a source of support or added stress. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to investigate how recently divorced Black women describe how their involvement in church may have supported their mental health and resilience …

The Person As Foundation Of Responsibility: The Insufficiency Of Rights-Based Human Development Approaches, Jaclyn Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building on the plethora of research that demonstrates the way rights language has been more useful for those with wealth and power to further expand capitalist markets, this text extends that criticism to human development programs and institutions. While they claim to be directed towards addressing global issues of poverty and hunger as well as climate crises, they continue to treat the symptoms without accurately diagnosing the disease. Approaches to development that rely on rights without questioning the way rights have been influenced by neoliberal capitalists or without questioning the capitalist global economic system will never be able to achieve …

Dialogic Communication Ethics As A Hopeful Response To Artificial Intelligence, Kristen Haldeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the past five years, a new technology has dominated modern culture: artificial intelligence. With a multiplicity of ways to respond to this new environment, this dissertation situates a response to artificial intelligence by combining the media ecology and communication ethics perspectives. Media ecology explores historical roots and biases of technology to learn about their influence of humanity. A dialogic communication ethics seeks to find an opening for hope to emerge. Hope, grounded in the works of Jacques Ellul and the Christian tradition, offers a new rhetorical perspective by shifting focus away from technology and to our neighbor.

A Philosophy Of Communication Response To Bullying In Corporate America, Chris A. Phillips Dr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This philosophy of communication response to bullying in corporate America follows the structure of posing research questions, synthesizing relevant literature, and offering advice to practitioners. It invites the reader to have hope in continuing the conversation through a constructive hermeneutic approach to the problem. By building on literature in oppression, silencing, bullying, incivility, and communication ethics, this dissertation reveals how (rhetoric) and why (philosophy) the problem occurs in corporate America today. This dissertation offers a new angle to an old problem, or, a rhetoric and philosophy of bullying. It responds to the following questions:

RQ 1: As a destructive communication …

Confronting Founding Injustices: Reconstructive Constitutional Adjudication And Constitutional Legitimacy In Postcolonial States, Mutasim Abuzeid

International Studies (MA) Theses

Why do some postcolonial constitutions achieve higher constitutional legitimacy than others? Across the Global South, constitutions have proliferated while legitimacy remains uneven and contested. Existing scholarship explains variation in constitutional legitimacy in postcolonial states through three dominant paradigms. Institutionalist theories equate legitimacy with procedural design and endurance, presuming that stable institutions generate compliance and, over time, diffuse support. Transformative constitutionalism locates legitimacy in social justice, emphasizing judicial doctrines such as proportionality and reasonableness to advance equality and material inclusion. Transitional justice approaches, by contrast, locate moral repair largely outside constitutional law—through truth commissions, reparations, and memory projects—often leaving the constitutional …

Ƒ(Enlightenment): A Complex Adaptive Systems Model Of Recursive Causality And Human Meaning-Making, Daniel Lambert

Dissertations and Theses

Conflict Resolution has developed as a richly interdisciplinary field; however, its theoretical architecture remains fragmented across distinct bodies of scholarship. Existing approaches offer valuable but often isolated explanations of conflict behavior, limiting their ability to account for its complexity. This thesis addresses this limitation by advancing systems science as an organizing framework for integrating these perspectives. It introduces the Human-Complex Adaptive Systems (H-CAS) framework, which conceptualizes human behavior as a recursive adaptive process operating across interconnected regulatory domains. Within this model, conflict is not treated as a discrete event or purely deliberative process, but as an emergent property arising from …

Impure Evidentialism: Essays On The Sources & Structure Of Doxastic Normativity, Felipe Oliveira

Dissertations - ALL

The four papers of my dissertation provide a new defense of Impure Evidentialism. The combination of evidentialism about normative reasons for belief with pragmatic encroachment (i.e. impurism) about epistemic justification is a familiar and intuitive view. However, many of the combo view’s finer points, unique advantages, and objections have not been addressed. My dissertation fills this gap by offering a new defense and in-depth look of what I take to be the most plausible version of the combo view. My version of Impure Evidentialism offers an improved and comprehensive account of the norms that govern our beliefs, explains why these …

Don't Force Me To Explain: Rethinking Access Outside Of Compulsory Transparency, Rhea Ienni

Dissertations

My dissertation is concerned with better understanding the barriers disabled people encounter while attempting to procure access both at the institutional level, and in their everyday lives. Within disability and accessibility literature, there are many discourses on what disability is and what access means. However, there are few people who explore the harmful consequences of disabled people being forced to “prove” they are disabled to an ableist world to get their basic needs met, and my dissertation intervenes in this gap. Within current US policy, if a disabled person requires access support at the institutional level, they must provide medical …

Merleau-Ponty On The Crisis Of Natural Philosophy: A Critique Of The Metaphysical Foundations Of Natural Science And Investigations Into The Ontology Of Nature, Kevin Mager

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature is also a radical critique of the metaphysical foundations of natural science. This critique leads us to a new ontology for science, grounded in the lifeworld. I focus on how his philosophy offers a detailed critique of both physicalism and mechanism. For Merleau-Ponty, mechanism is not just the strict adherence to classical causality, but any view that asserts that classical causality has any role to play in reality at all. To replace mechanistic causality, Merleau-Ponty argues that we must conceive of nature as grounded in meaningful possibility. Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on …

Philosophia From Dialectic To Dying Before Death: Traces Of Plato’S Spirit In The Encounters Between The Falāsifa, Mutakallimūn, And Sūfiyya, Fadhil Yunus Alsagoff

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers a fresh approach to the question “What is philosophy?” by reconsidering Plato’s vision of philosophiaand seeking its traces in the encounters between the Falāsifa, the Mutakallimūn, and the Sūfiyya of the classical Muslim world. I argue that Plato’s true legacy lies in a vision of philosophia as dialectical inquiry that ultimately leads – due to the inextricable limitations of propositional language – to aporia and what he called “practicing for dying and death.” I then argue that this vision of philosophia finds resonance in the classical Muslim world in the embodied encounters between …

Scruples Before Religion: Muslim Waraʿ Of The Formative Period, Omar Laaroussi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the conceptual history of waraʿ and its role as a normative paradigm existing in the formative centuries of the Islamic world. To do so, I consider the Hellenic concepts that ground Near Eastern understandings of virtue and piety before the rise of Islam. This, I then use to contextualise a focused discussion on the textual history of waraʿ before moving on to discuss its properties in a ascetic social-world through the analysis of those very texts. I attempt to place those properties in conversation with modern philosophers’ work on disciplinary regimes and their impacts upon the self. …

"But Oh, What Harm Those Basics Would Cause": How Journalists Can Better Interview Vulnerable Sources Utilizing An Ethic Of Care, Noah Carandanis

University Honors Theses

Traditional journalistic ethics have emphasized detachment from sources and objectivity guiding journalists' practices. In this thesis, I explore the contribution of care ethics to the field of journalistic ethics, emphasizing care in relation to interviewing vulnerable sources. I claim that the traditional objective, detached ethical status quo in journalism is insufficient in the context of reporting on mass shootings. This thesis argues that caring journalistic practices should be utilized when interviewing traumatized, vulnerable sources. In the first part, I present the issue of traditional journalistic practices through my personal experiences. I also discuss the philosophical underpinnings to journalist's objectivity criterion. …

Neoliberalism & The Care Economy: Exploring The Gendered Impacts Of Social Protection Systems, Rachel Carruthers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how neoliberal transformation of social protection policy influences gender dynamics within the care economy. Care is necessary for well-being, but traditionally excluded from economic thinking. This thesis completes a historical overview of how care has been incorporated or excluded by different economic paradigms and is anchored in feminist political economy that emphasizes care as a central consideration. A comparative analysis across California, Texas, and Sweden demonstrates how social protection, specifically access to paid parental leave, varies across regimes and results in inconsistent care outcomes. The findings suggest that social protections can reduce some inequalities, but inadequately address …

Will Beauty Save The Brain? Exploring The Relationship Between Eudaimonic Reels Exposure And Egyptian Gen Z'S Mind And Motivations, Petra Zaky

Theses and Dissertations

Social media entertaining content includes a mixed bag of the meaningful and the trivial. For Generation Z, whose favorite daily entertainment is shallow yet funny short-form videos (reels), there is often an invisible price paid. The loss of ability to watch long meaningful videos, distractedness from self, “Brain Rot”, glamorizing of hedonism are among the maladies left behind the attractive rabbit hole of their daily media diet. This study explores the relationship between exposure to meaningful reels, in contrast to pleasurable reels, and Gen Z’s reflective thinking, “Brain Rot” symptoms, motivation to watch long meaningful videos and life motivations between …

The Case For The Exclusion Of Exclusion: Intellectual Property, Masculine Legal Reason, And The Ethics Of Care, Ragya Shoukry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that current legal ideals of objectivity and neutrality are historically gendered and inseparable from the development of capitalist property relations and imperial expansion. It traces origins that begin with early modern witch hunts and Francis Bacon’s empiricism, where a new “scientific rationality” emerges alongside intensified patriarchal violence. The thesis then examines John Locke’s labour-based justification of property and the figure of the rational individual, showing how this framework legitimizes enclosure, dispossession and colonial appropriation under the guise of improvement and development. Building on this foundation, the analysis turns to moral psychology and how its allegedly universal stage …

Foundations' Deep, Emily Williams, Morgan Williams

University Honors Theses

Most historic buildings do not survive as they were built, yet preservation frameworks still tend to evaluate them as if they did.

Foundations' Deep begins with a structure located in Helena, Montana 59602, a building that sits uneasily within the categories it has been asked to meet. Built in the early twentieth century, it has persisted through alteration, abandonment, and use. What remains is not a stable artifact but a record of accumulated decisions, some careful and many indifferent, now embedded in the fabric of the building itself.

The thesis grows from this condition and from the limits of the …

Gramsci’S ‘Democratic Philosopher’ And The Concept’S Foundations In Marxian Social Ontology, Eli Recht-Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the term ‘democratic philosopher’ from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In order to lay the groundwork for my distinct interpretation of the ‘democratic philosopher,’ I begin by providing an overview of Gramsci’s theory of the role of intellectuals in civil and political society. I then argue that the ‘democratic philosopher’ emerges from Gramsci’s typology of intellectuals but is a category which is both temporally and ontologically distinct from his more well-known concept of ‘organic intellectuals.’ ‘Organic intellectuals,’ intellectuals who co-develop alongside their fundamental social group or class, occupy a variety of cultural and political roles in …

Beyond The Veil Of Modernity: René Guénon, Prophet Of The Metapolitical Imaginary, Frederic Colier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heralded by some as one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, French metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) is also the controversial father of Primordial Tradition, a metaphysics designed to remedy the decline of Western civilization. Guénon viewed the West in the grip of a prolonged cycle of degeneration. He sought to implement a pseudo-authoritarian spiritual reset that required a total rejection of its Western intellectual heritage and an embrace of Eastern doctrines.

Focusing on his landmark book The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), the dissertation examines how Guénon implemented his controversial reset. After outlining the religious, cultural, and …

An Absolute Manner Of Seeing: Flaubert, 1848, And The Development Of Modernist Style, Nicholas Olson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as a key work in the emergence of literary Modernism from the tradition of Realism. I begin by exploring the intellectual background of Realism in the works of Honoré de Balzac and the ties between this aesthetic theory and the theory of representative government: here I discuss the work of François Guizot, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, J.W. Goethe, and Walter Scott as well as later thinkers like György Lukács, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. From this, I demonstrate a commonly held theory of the social as a discreet totality, which makes …

Theatrical Agency In The Constitution Of Logical Space, Esther Marveta Neff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes advantage of our current moment of collapse and shifting episteme to move from resistance and critique into modes of position, prefiguration, and praxiocentricism, giving not only a critique of the colonial-modern logical space of Theatrum Mundi, but also aiming to configure the thetic consciousness that grounds “theatrical agency” in the logic of cognitive and social epistemological modelling.  In what ways do we “build our own worlds”? What does “theatricality” tell us about human agency, especially in the domain of “theoretical attitudes,” and “consciousness”? In what ways, and to what extent, are we responsible for constituting …

Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems And The Principles Of Distinction And Proportionality, Nicholas Cromie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) challenge the core principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), distinction and proportionality, by delegating life-and-death decisions to algorithms rather than human judgment.  This dissertation examines whether LAWS can conform to these principles and, if so, under what conditions.  Through process tracing, the study traces the historical integration of disruptive weapons technologies, including chemical, biological, nuclear, and armed drones, into IHL-compliant frameworks or their exclusion via prohibition.  Each case reveals distinct pathways: outright bans for indiscriminate or inherently inhumane systems (chemical and biological weapons), normative restraint and limited acceptance despite destructive power (nuclear weapons) and phased …

Imagination And The Self: A Cross-Cultural And Cross-Disciplinary Study, Qianyi Qin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation of the imagination and the self that engages with cognitive science, philosophy of mind, Buddhism, ethical theories, and a variety of perspectives from Asian and Western philosophy. I address the following questions in three interrelated chapters. First, what does it mean for the self to appear in imagination? In Chapter 1, against certain narrow understandings of the self in philosophy of language, I build a multidimensional model of the self in imaginative experiences to capture the rich phenomenology, drawing on empirical findings on memory and imagination. Second, can the self be removed from imagination? …

Fundamentalist Disorientations For Queer Subjects: Narrative And Theory, Betty Canoso

University Honors Theses

This thesis examines disorientation experienced by queer people who were raised in high-cost fundamentalist Christianity–people like me. Disorientation is a philosophical concept useful for examining specific intersections of human experience, like queerness and fundamentalism. Philosophers such as Sara Ahmed (2006) and Ami Harbin (2016) have been exploring the intersection of queerness and disorientation. Psychologists, sociologists and researchers from other disciplines are analyzing the interrelatedness of queerness and religion, and disaffiliation and deconversion from high-cost or high-control religions is another ongoing area of interest. Yet, despite widespread interest in these concepts, few have looked at instances of disorientation as they pertain …

The Disconnect Of Moral Accountability: Freedom, Equality, And The Limits Of Punishment, Celine Shiah Choi

Philosophy Senior Theses

This thesis examines the justificatory foundations of moral accountability as a social practice and the profound disconnect between our ordinary intuitions about justice, the moral attitudes we hold toward one another, and the governing institutional practices of punishment. Drawing on Stephen Darwall's second-person standpoint and P.F. Strawson's account of reactive attitudes, the paper argues that legitimate accountability presupposes two necessary conditions, freedom and equality, understood as the shared capacity of rational agents to recognize moral demands and stand in reciprocal normative relation with one another. Both conditions, however, prove deeply fragile in practice: legal institutions invoke the language of rational …

A Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Assembly Line: Jewelry, Facture, And Alienation, Jonathon A. Zalakos

Masters Theses

A Pot of Gold at the End of the Assembly Line integrates icons of mass-manufacturing with signifiers of joyful work, stimulating a dialogue between industrial and craft labour. Visible traces of the making process left on these works conjure a spectral ‘maker’, implied by the fingerprints, toolmarks, assembly, and conspicuous decision making of an ‘other’. As we relate to these signifiers as opportunities for our own bodily action, this spectre speaks in our own voice. Possessed by this ghost, viewers are vicariously thrust into an imaginary context and made sensitive to the nature of this work — whether it validates …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Recombobulation- Taking The Bad With The Good, Gregory T. Kmieciak

Masters Theses

Recombobulation, a play on the word discombobulated (completely disoriented and utterly confused), is intended as a joke.  In the lore of the Milwaukee airport, the Recombobulation Area is located between the TSA check point and the boarding area, or likewise right after you land and before you are heading out of the airport. It's an area to regroup, get your bearings, or if you're anything like me, have a beer.

I've chosen this made-up word as a thesis title, both for its informal tone and to pay homage to my home town. It offers an air of lightness to otherwise …