Philosophy Commons^™

European Values For Ethics In Digital Technology, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

Digital Ethics deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. It covers a wide spectrum of societal and ethical impacts including issues such as data governance, privacy and personal data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithmic decision-making and pervasive technologies. Importantly, it is not only about hardware and software, but it also concerns systems, how people and organizations and society and technology interact. In addition, with Digital Ethics comes the added variable of assessing the ethical implications of artefacts which may not yet exist, or artefacts which may have impacts we …

Understanding Realism, Collin Rice

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

Catherine Elgin has recently argued that a nonfactive conception of understanding is required to accommodate the epistemic successes of science that make essential use of idealizations and models. In this paper, I argue that the fact that our best scientific models and theories are pervasively inaccurate representations can be made compatible with a more nuanced form of scientific realism that I call Understanding Realism. According to this view, science aims at (and often achieves) factive scientific understanding of natural phenomena. I contend that this factive scientific understanding is provided by grasping a set of true modal information about the …

You Can't Lose A Game If You Don't Play The Game: Exploring The Ethics Of Gamification In Education, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Brendan Tierney, Emma Murphy, Michael Collins, Anna Becevel

Articles

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the …

Ecological And Holistic Analysis Of The Epistemic Value Of Law Libraries, Paul D. Callister, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

We examine the libraries' roles within the "epistemic foundation of society.” Our analysis is in response to the omission of Yale Law Dean Gerken of the role of libraries in her recent article about legal education's new focus and to remarks by AALS President Vicki Jackson that suggest an uncertain role for libraries. We have adapted holistic ecological media theory, as developed by Ronald Deibert, to reject a technologically deterministic view of libraries as having no future. We have considered the role of law libraries in the social epistemology or cognitive authority of the legal community, the role of law …

Collective Autobiographical Reflexivity On Active And Compassionate Citizenship In The Covid-19 Crisis, Stella Mi-Cheong Cheong, Rowena A. Azada-Palacios, Yaobin Tong, Kamille Beye, Nar Bahadur Saud, Adam Peter Lang

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-economic inequalities have become exacerbated and COVID-19 related hate crimes have increased. This paper explores how citizenship education might be reimagined in response to this context, with the vision of rebuilding a more equitable and compassionate society. By using a collective autobiographical writing approach, this study documented six different autobiographical reflexivities of citizenship education scholars who were from different parts of the world: China, South Korea, the Philippines, the United States, Nepal and the United Kingdom. It also observed the way the pandemic played out in the location where they were situated during …

Hybridity And National Identity In Post-Colonial Schools, Rowena A. Azada-Palacios

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

The recent resurgence of extreme-right movements and the nationalist turn of many governments across the world have reignited the relevance of discussions within educational philosophy about the teaching of national identity in schools. However, the conceptualisation of national identity in previous iterations of these debates have been largely Western and Eurocentric, making the past theoretical literature about these questions less relevant for post-colonial settings. In this paper, I imagine a new approach for teaching national identity in post-colonial contexts, founded on postcolonial conceptions of identity and in particular, the concept of hybridity. I first develop a postcolonial account of national …

Releasement And Seduction: Heidegger And Baudrillard On The Preservation Of Illusion In The Epoch Of Obscenity, Marc Oliver D. Pasco

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

This work interfaces the philosophies of Jean Baudrillard and Martin Heidegger. It hopes to contribute to both Heideggerian and Baudrillardian scholarship by employing Baudrillardian ideas in more effectively describing the historical happening of the so-called withdrawal of Being from man, which preoccupied much of Heidegger’s body of work. The work argues that by re-visiting an earlier idea of Baudrillard, which he termed as seduction, one finds a possible way of navigating the obscenity of the current epoch of Being. Akin to Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit or releasement, Baudrillard’s concept of seduction invites one to allow the real to once again …

The Role Of Empathy In Moral Inquiry, William Gray Kidder

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this dissertation, I defend the view that, despite empathy’s susceptibility to problematic biases, we can and should cultivate empathy to aid our understanding of our own values and the values of others. I argue that empathy allows us to critically examine and potentially revise our values by considering concrete moral problems and our own moral views from the perspective of another person. Appropriately calibrated empathy helps us achieve a critical distance from our own moral perspective and is thus tied to impartiality in moral inquiry. In defending this role for empathy in moral inquiry, I draw on empirical work …

Change And Continuity In Biology, Gunnar O'Neill Babcock

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation considers various examples of change and continuity in biology. In particular, it focuses on the conceptual possibilities during the fission of microorganisms and genes when they multiply or replicate. Among the kinds of conceptual revision that are outlined in the first two chapters, the three chapter argues that certain concepts such as death, reproduction and organism have limited applicability in certain domains of biology. The fourth chapter investigates whether synthetic genomes should be considered parts of genetic lineages. It concludes that synthetic genomes are parts of the lineages upon which they were modeled. The final chapter aims to …

The Story Circle As A Practice Of Democratic, Critical Inquiry, Natalie M. Fletcher, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Peter Shea, Ariel Sykes

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

The authors of this essay have been committed practitioners and teachers of Philosophy for Children in a variety of educational settings, from pre-schools through university doctoral programs and in adult community and religious education programs. The promotion of critical thinking has always been a primary goal of this movement. But communal practices of critical thinking need to include other kinds of democratic conversation that prompt us to see others as full-fledged persons and to be curious about how our being in community with them makes growth and self-correction possible. As we continue to experiment and innovate in new contexts we …

Scientific Practice And Democratic Virtues, Gregory R. Peterson

School of American and Global Studies Faculty Publications with a Focus on History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion

Chapter 21: Scientific Practice and Democratic Values

Democracy and science, it might be thought, go hand in hand. As we commonly think of it, science has its roots in the heritage of Greek thought, and the same is true of democracy. And while Athenian democracy developed at best a complicated relationship with its intellectual luminaries, Athens was nevertheless home to both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Nearly two centuries later, the scientific revolution most quickly took root in those nations that had come to have some semblance of democratic rule. While the Republic of Florence had passed under Medici control …

The Aesthetics Of Repair: The Way Of Zen And Appreciation, Tyler Ellis Dobbs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nature objects and how beings interact with them has long been a debate in the philosophic tradition. One aspect of this I have taken a look at is the aesthetic qualities entailed in this with particular attention paid to repair. In particular I explore the blurring of the subject-object distinction and the role of narrative in human engagement. I based my research and arguments primarily from Buddhist and Japanese Zen theories and ideas. Special attention was paid to the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and the Kyoto School philosophy tradition and ideas from Mahayana Buddhism.

Diagnostic Justice: Testing For Covid-19, Ashley Graham Kennedy, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of …

แนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการกับปัญหาเรื่องช่องว่าง, พงศ์ศิริ ศรีวรรธนะ

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้มีวัตถุประสงเพื่อวิเคราะห์และประเมินข้อถกเถียงเกี่ยวกับปัญหาเรื่องช่องว่างในกลุ่มแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการ และต้องการปกป้องแนวทางการแก้ปัญหาเรื่องช่องว่างภายใต้กรอบแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการแบบสร้างตนเองโดยอิสระ กล่าวคือ กลุ่มแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการมีข้อเสนอร่วมกันต่อการแก้ปัญหาช่องว่างระหว่างความรู้เกี่ยวกับข้อเท็จจริงทางกายภาพกับความรู้เกี่ยวกับข้อเท็จจริงทางปรากฏการณ์ว่า ความรู้เกี่ยวกับข้อเท็จจริงทางกายภาพที่เชื่อมโยงกับความรู้เกี่ยวกับข้อเท็จจริงทางปรากฏการณ์ เป็นความรู้เกี่ยวกับรูปแบบการมีปฏิสัมพันธ์ระหว่างระบบการรู้คิดซึ่งประกอบด้วยสมองและร่างกาย กับสิ่งแวดล้อม อย่างไรก็ตาม มีข้อถกเถียงในกลุ่มแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการว่า ระบบการรู้คิดซึ่งเป็นส่วนหนึ่งของปฏิสัมพันธ์ดังกล่าว เป็นระบบที่มีความสามารถสร้างตัวตนหรือไม่ ในขณะที่แนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการแบบสร้างตนเองโดยอิสระให้ความสำคัญกับความสามารถเรื่องการสร้างตัวตน แต่แนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการแบบรับสัมผัสและเคลื่อนไหวและแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการแบบถึงรากถึงโคนแย้งความเห็นดังกล่าว โดยอ้างมโนทัศน์เรื่องความสามารถปรับตัว วิทยานิพนธ์ฉบับนี้ปกป้องแนวคิดปฏิสังสรรค์กระทำการแบบสร้างตนเองโดยอิสระว่าเป็นแนวทางที่แก้ปัญหาช่องว่างได้ เนื่องจากมโนทัศน์เรื่องความสามารถสร้างตัวตนเป็นมโนทัศน์ที่จำเป็นต่อการแก้ปัญหาช่องว่าง มโนทัศน์ดังกล่าวสามารถอธิบายกระบวนการการสร้างอัตลักษณ์ของระบบการรู้คิดที่แสดงถึงความเป็น ‘ผู้กระทำการ’ ของระบบ และแสดงถึงการเป็นประธานผู้มีมุมมองแบบอัตวิสัยที่มีปฏิสัมพันธ์กับสิ่งแวดล้อม การมีมุมมองอัตวิสัยของผู้กระทำการนี้เป็นพื้นฐานสำคัญของการมีประสบการณ์ความรู้สึก แต่มโนทัศน์เรื่องความสามารถปรับตัวเพียงอย่างเดียวนั้น ไม่เพียงพอที่จะอธิบายลักษณะดังกล่าวของระบบการรู้คิด จึงไม่สามารถแก้ปัญหาเรื่องช่องว่างได้

The Effect Of Competency Modeling On Restaurant Employee Engagement And Turnover Intent, Erin Mclaughlin Vu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

High turnover and low engagement among restaurant employees cost restaurant owners thousands of dollars per employee each year due to costs associated with training and lost productivity. Competency models are used in many industries to improve employee engagement and reduce turnover, but there is a gap in knowledge surrounding the use of competency models in restaurant organizations. The purpose of this pretest-posttest quasi-experimental quantitative study is to examine if the implementation of a competency model affects turnover intent and employee engagement for restaurant employees. Employee engagement and turnover intent were measured before and after a competency model was implemented. Four …

Making Sense Of The Divinely Beautiful: Essays On Friendship, Love, And Attraction, Michelle Catlin

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Essay 1: As interpersonal communication has changed with the proliferation of technology-based forms of meeting and interacting with others, philosophers have begun considering ways in which these new types of communication have altered the landscape of our relationships. Although philosophers are split on whether online friendships can measure up to the Aristotelean standard of virtue friendship, none have questioned the importance of truth telling or accurate representation of oneself in the context of online sharing. The underlying assumption is that in a virtuous friendship, there is no role whatsoever for anything other than strict honestly. I disagree with this …

Spinoza's Methodology: A Genetic Account Of Fundamental Concepts In His Early Writings, Clay Graham

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, is written in a very peculiar, “geometrical” style, one that builds metaphysical and ethical doctrines out of mathematical, deductive proofs. These proofs rely on a series of definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations. Nowhere in the Ethics does Spinoza explain his fundamental definitions and axioms, nor does he proffer a defense of his manner of presentation. I claim that by a thorough and systematic investigation of his earliest writings we can peel back the mystery of this geometrical garb and grasp why Spinoza presents his philosophy with formal, mathematical structure. I argue for the view …

Care Ethics, Disability, And Public Policy, Piper Gibson

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Can Mind Perception Explain Virtuous Character Judgments Of Artificial Intelligence?, Daniel Burton Shank, Mallory North, Carson Arnold, Patrick Gamez

Psychological Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

People tend to attribute less of a virtuous or unvirtuous characteristic to artificial intelligence (AI) agents compared to humans after observing a behavior exemplifying that particular virtue or vice. We argue that this difference can be explained by perceptions of experiential and agentic mind. Experiential mind focuses on one's emotions, sensations, and past experiences, whereas agentic mind focuses on one's intentions, capacity for action, and behaviors. Building on person-centered morality, virtue ethics, and mind perception research, we argue that both agentic and experiential mind are possible mediators of behavior-to-character attributions. We conducted two experiments (n = 613, n = 584) …

On Inadvertently Created Tables: A Brockean Theory Of Concrete Artifacts, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

There has been a lot of discussion recently regarding abstract artifacts and how such entities (e.g., fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, and mythological planets like Vulcan), if they indeed exist, could possibly be our creations.  Much of this debate has been carried out by Stuart Brock and David Friedell in this journal.  One interesting aspect of their discussion concerned the extent to which creative intentions play a role in the creation of artifacts, both abstract and concrete.  I here address the creation of concrete artifacts in particular.  I ultimately defend a Brock-inspired, heterodox view on which creative intentions are not …

Religious Naturalisms, Carol W. White

Other Faculty Research and Publications

This article focuses on recent developments in religious naturalism in the twenty-first century, building on Jerome Stone’s 2008 study of its resurgence in the mid-twentieth century. I introduce religious naturalism as a synthesis of naturalistic ideas that often depart from traditional forms of religious thinking, defining it as a capacious, ecological religious worldview grounded in the observational conviction that nature is ultimate. I also describe different models of religious naturalism, focusing on the key ideas found in the influential publications of contemporary religious naturalists (e.g., Ursula Goodenough, Donald Crosby, Loyal Rue, among others). While acknowledging specific points of emphasis, I …

Narrative Value And Well-Being, Franchesca Fu

Scripps Senior Theses

Some philosophers think that one’s well-being increases when one obtains more objective goods, and one of those objective goods under debate is one’s narrative. In this thesis, I examine how one’s narrative can increase one’s well-being by itself by drawing from David Velleman’s argument for narrative value. After finding Velleman’s argument compelling, I clarify what a narrative is, including how it has an objective and subjective component. I then explore what criteria are necessary for one’s narrative to make a positive contribution to one’s well-being by presenting Connie Rosati’s argument that one’s narrative needs to be chosen or internalized, affirming, …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Thinking Reasonably About Indeterministic Choice Beliefs, Andrew Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recent research suggests that, regardless of the truth of libertarianism about free will, there appears to be a widespread belief among nonphilosopher laypersons that the choices of free agents are not causally necessitated by prior states of affairs. In this paper, I propose a new class of debunking explanation for this belief which I call ‘reasons-based accounts’ (RBAs). I start the paper by briefly recounting the failures of extant approaches to debunking explanations, and then use this as a jumping off point to articulate several alternatives, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Diagrams In Intra-Configurational Analysis, Marco Panza, Gianluca Longa

MPP Published Research

In this paper we would like to attempt to shed some light on the way in which diagrams enter into the practice of ancient Greek geometrical analysis. To this end, we will first distinguish two main forms of this practice, i.e., trans-configurational and intra-configurational. We will then argue that, while in the former diagrams enter in the proof essentially in the same way (mutatis mutandis) they enter in canonical synthetic demonstrations, in the latter, they take part in the analytic argument in a specific way, which has no correlation in other aspects of classical geometry. In intra-configurational analysis, diagrams represent …

Analysis, Constructions And Diagrams In Classical Geometry, Marco Panza

MPP Published Research

Greek ancient and early modern geometry necessarily uses diagrams. Among other things, these enter geometrical analysis. The paper distinguishes two sorts of geometrical analysis and shows that in one of them, dubbed “intra-confgurational” analysis, some diagrams necessarily enter as outcomes of a purely material gesture, namely not as result of a codifed constructive procedure, but as result of a free-hand drawing.

Ten Moons: Consciousness And Intentionality In The Alambanapariksa And Its Commentaries, Jay L. Garfield

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Emotion, Executive Dysfunction, And Agency: Can Emotional Disability Impair An Agent’S Likelihood Of Virtue?” In Faith & Virtue Formation: Christian Philosophy In Aid Of Becoming Good, Edited By Adam C. Pelser And W. Scott Cleveland, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Retributive Justice: A Review Of The Ethical Considerations Surrounding Capital Punishment And Solitary Confinement As Used In United States Correctional Facilities, Adelaide Marie Laros

Honors Papers

The purpose of this paper is to argue the use of capital punishment and segregated housing throughout United States correctional facilities constitute human rights violations through torture. Regardless of the reason for their application, these penalties are physically and psychologically damaging, inconsistently assigned, costly, and, in their most potent form, fatal. As such, I advocate for the national abolishment of these practices. In their place, I support enacting policies that promote education and reformation over punishment. My aim in making this argument is to encourage a transition away from the popular American judicial ideology grounded in retribution toward a framework …

Theatre X, Curtis L. Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.