History of Philosophy Commons^™

Kant's Concept Of Freedom In The Metaphysics Lectures, Alin Paul Varciu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I argue that we can make use of Kant's metaphysics lectures to have a better understanding of the concepts of practical and transcendental freedom used within the Critique of Pure Reason. Based on Kant's metaphysics lectures I will argue that practical freedom and transcendental freedom are different predicates that apply to our power of choice and that each comprises different sorts of abilities. Practical freedom concerns the abilities we use in choosing the motives for our actions, while transcendental freedom concerns the ability to act otherwise than what nature necessitates through its causal laws. In terms of Kant's free …

Being And Historical Change In Hegel's Science Of Logic, Jarrad Felgenhauer

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation, Being and Historical Change in Hegel’s Science of Logic, examines the immanent relationship between metaphysics and history, specifically historical change, through an examination of Hegel’s Science of Logic. It seems to me that this relationship has been under-explored both in metaphysics broadly and Hegel scholarship specifically. For instance, many authors have discussed the role of history in Hegel’s philosophy and many others have focused on his metaphysics. But only a few have discussed how these two aspects immanently intersect with one another; specifically, what the examination of metaphysics can teach us about interpreting history and historical …

Circle Of Circles: Rethinking Idealism Through Hegel's Epistemology, Sila Ozkara

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation’s central thesis is that Hegel’s approach to knowledge and philosophy is “circular”. A “circle of circles”, Kreis von Kreisen, an image Hegel regularly uses throughout his corpus, has sustained a steady wonder in his commentators. Nevertheless, it has not been studied with rigor adequate to its extensive importance, which spans his philosophical career and frames his engagement with the history of philosophy and the philosophy of his time. Due attention to Hegel’s concept of circles provides a robust frame for grasping his philosophical project, idealism, and account of knowledge. The content of each of Hegel’s works is the …

A Re-Examination Of The Problem Of Universals, Jimmy Berger

Senior Projects Spring 2021

My aims in this project are to address what the problem of universals is, to provide a comprehensive account of its major solutions, to evaluate those solutions, and to provide my own conclusions about the problem. My primary thesis is that philosophers have been wrong to look for a universally applicable theory to account for the problem of universals, and instead should accept the profound complexity of reality and develop more modest theories that are applicable in limited domains.

Elucidation And The Solipsism Of The Tractatus, Jacob Phillips

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) of 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents his metaphysical account of the logical structure of the world and language. He aims to establish the possibility of the connection between “pictures” of the world—including linguistic constructions as sentences—and the constituent elements of the world. The account Wittgenstein promotes yields, by his own admission, a form of solipsism. Underlying the difficulties in interpreting the details of Wittgenstein’s solipsism (which he does little to explicate), there is a fundamental tension between solipsism of any sort and a metaphysical account that relies on language, something which seems essentially shared and …

George Berkeley's Idealism: An Examination Of The Idealist Metaphysics And Its Connection To Philosophy Of Mind, Joshua L. Powell

Honors Theses

The prominent 18th century empirical philosopher George Berkeley espoused a philosophy known as “idealism.” This thesis aims to show that George Berkeley’s idealism is a formidable player in philosophy of mind. The present research unfolds his arguments for idealism as they appear in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, turning at several points to The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous for clarification. This research further explores the fundamentals of idealism in light of philosophy of mind, highlighting idealism’s intrinsic connection to this discipline. While this work is far from exhaustive, it provides the reader with essential information …

Symposium On Justin Remhof's Nietzsche's Constructivism: A Metaphysics Of Material Objects (Routledge, 2018), Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects impact commitments in many areas of philosophy―not just metaphysics, but also language, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. In this book, Remhof presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s material object metaphysics. He argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial constructivist view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading …

St. Augustine And St. Thomas Aquinas On The Mind, Body, And Life After Death, Christopher Choma

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Historical and philosophical investigation of the thoughts of two of philosophy's most innovative Christian thinkers. The thesis primarily deals with the relationship between the mind and the body through the lenses of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. Thesis also includes theological discussions of life after death, and how one can be certain that the soul survives the corruption of the body.

On The Question Of Thinking: A Study Of Heidegger's Later Philosophy, Shishir Budha

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the writings of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger to understand what “thinking” is and how thinking needs to be undertaken. I examine Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology in his early writings, his revaluation of the meaning of truth in traditional Western metaphysics, his criticism of calculative thinking and scientific rationality, his diagnosis of the human alienation and homelessness, and his evocation of the redemptive power of art and poetry through which we can find our place in the world. By questioning through all these themes, I attempt to trace Heidegger’s path towards a deeper and more original …

A Critical Analysis Of The Metaphysics Of Limit And Unlimited In Plato's Philebus, Ashley Lascano

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper examines several key passages within Plato’s Philebus and analyses the underlying metaphysics that exists at the heart of the dialogue. Plato implements the metaphysics in the dialogue by utilizing the terminology of “the limit” and “the unlimited”. This paper examines the Pythagorean origins of the limit and unlimited and depicts how Plato has adapted the terms from their original intent. The Philebus is examined to show the metaphysical importance of the limit and unlimited. The dialogue displays an example of the metaphysics of the limit and the unlimited through the debate between pleasure and intelligence, which is a …

Being And Structure In Plato’S Sophist, Colin C. Smith

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Being and Structure in Plato’s Sophist is a study of the metaphysical notion of being as it is at play in Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, and the senses in which Plato’s conception of being entails further accounts of ontological structure and goodness. While modern metaphysics primarily concerns existence, ancient metaphysics primarily concerns what grounds what, and in this dissertation I consider the nature and value of Plato’s understanding of being as a notion of ground rather than a principle of existence. I argue that Plato conceives of being in the fundamentally unified sense of participation, which entails a self-and-other …

Tian As Cosmos In Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

Schelling's Ages Of The World: The Beginning Of The Beginning, Andrew Jussaume

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the development of Schelling's philosophy of time as it appears in the Ages of the World, a work which Schelling himself never completed but which he clearly intended as his magnum opus. My project focuses on Schelling's claim that time is the absolute, a claim which grew out of his Naturphilosophie and which later served as the basis for his fruitful interactions with Kierkegaard in Berlin. In the dissertation, I defend the thesis that Schelling's concept of "beginnings" paves the way for an "organic" understanding of time which articulates the latter as a living, breathing entity. In …

Process And Mind: Exploring The Relationship Between Process Philosophy And The Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Science Of Cognition, Larry A. Moralez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This work examines the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and the nonlinear dynamical systems framework for studying cognition. I argue that the nonlinear dynamical systems approach to cognitive science presupposes many key elements of his process philosophy. The process philosophical interpretation of nature posits events and the dynamic relations between events as the fundamental substrate of reality, as opposed to static physical substances. I present a brief history of the development of substance thought before describing Whitehead’s characterization of nature as a process. In following, I will examine the both the computational and nonlinear dynamical systems frameworks for …

Heidegger's Attentiveness To Language: A Question Of Translation And "Original Contents", Alexander M. Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Language And The Structure Of Berkeley's World, Kenneth L. Pearce

Kenneth L Pearce

Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's …

Truth And Falsehood In Plato's Sophist, Michael Oliver Wiitala

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation is a study of the ontological foundations of true and false speech in Plato’s Sophist. Unlike most contemporary scholarship on the Sophist, my dissertation offers a wholistic account of the dialogue, demonstrating that the ontological theory of the “communing” of forms and the theory of true and false speech later in the dialogue entail one another.

As I interpret it, the account of true and false speech in the Sophist is primarily concerned with true and false speech about the forms. As Plato sees it, we can only make true statements about spatio-temporal beings if it …

Approaching Christianity: Exploring The Tragic Impact Of Greek Philosophical Thought On Christian Thought, Tammy Galvan-Barnett

M.A. in Political Theory Theses

This study explores the impact of Greek philosophical thought on Christian thought. I argue that Greek dualism is the fundamental contradiction in Christian thought creating problems for the doctrines of Christianity and ultimately thwarting a biblical approach to Christianity. From the early days of Christianity, Greek philosophy became absorbed into Christian thinking. Christian theology is often incorrectly interpreted through Platonic metaphysics. Platonic Christianity distinguishes between sacred and secular realms of the cosmos and devalues physical things. Furthermore, the tragedy is not only that Greek philosophy has had such a profound impact on Christianity, but also that its influence is still …

Resembling Nothing: Image And Being In Plato, Yancy Hughes Dominick

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

A crucial application of Plato’s views on the use of images in philosophy occurs through the use of the image relationship as an image for the relation of forms and particulars. The relation of a picture to the object it depicts, or that between a reflection and what it reflects, can be seen as analogous to the relation of a particular to the form in which it participates. Although the attack on the image model as analogous to the relation of forms and particulars in the Parmenides threatens to undermine any reliance on that model, this essay will present a …

Posibilidad Y Principio De Plenitud En Tomás De Aquino, Santiago Argüello

Santiago Argüello

No abstract provided.

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …

The Parts Of Definitions, Unity, And Sameness In Aristotle's Metaphysics, Mark R. Wheeler

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

First principles (ἀρχάι) are crucial to Aristotle's conception of scientific knowledge (επιστήμη). In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle teaches us that all scientific knowledge is either knowledge arrived at through demonstration from first principles or knowledge of the first principles themselves. The first principles of a given science are the primary premises (τὰ πρώτα) of that science (Pst. An., 72a7); they express the essential characteristics of the substance about which the given science is concerned; and all other scientific knowledge is derived from the first principles through syllogistic inference.

The first principles of the various sciences are expressed through definition (ὁρισμός). …

On 'Essentially' (Hoper) In Aristotle, Alban Urbanas

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In this paper I shall examine the notion of ταὐτόν - commonly translated as 'same' or 'identical' - and its relevance to so-called essential predications, as effected through the use of ὅπερ in Aristotle. It will be shown that propositions of the type 'A is ὅπερ B' involve an essential predication where either a genus is affirmed of a species, or a species of an individual. The possibility of such predications will be founded upon the doctrine of the categories and the ontological distinction between essence and accident. Besides predications involving generic or specific identity, others effected through propositions of …

Substances, Accidents, And Kinds: Some Remarks On Aristotle's Theory Of Predication, Frank A. Lewis

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

A major feature of Aristotle's strategy against Plato in the Categories is to collapse the dichotomy that Plato's theory of (metaphysical) predication attempts to make between forms and sensibles. In Aristotle's theory, Socrates IS some of his predicables, but HAS others. He IS what is essential to him, and HAS the rest. These different relations between Socrates and his various predicables form a large part of the motivation for the further ontological distinctions that Aristotle draws in the Categories.

Aristotle On Kinesis, Arthur L. Peck

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

This paper is zetetic rather than expository: Can we define the field in which Aristotle believed kinesis to operate? My interest in this question stems from my work with his biological writings. The distinction between potentiality and actuality was for him an indispensable instrument for philosophy. The application of this principle reaches its apex when he speaks of active and passive nous.

Xxii. Philosophical Meaning, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXII: Philosophical Meaning

As we have seen, philosophy was one of the major contributions of Greek Civilization. It was the Greeks who gave it its first major impetus as well as its name, "the love of learning." This very phrase embodies the most important aspects of their contribution to the West: the love of the best or most excellent; the search for something beyond a description of immediate experience; and the attempt to grasp, in some comprehensive fashion, both the actual and the ideal, both the given and the possible. In order to accomplish this task philosophy has, as we have seen, traditionally …

The Functionalism And Dynamism Of Aristotle, John Herman Randall Jr.

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

It is the contention of this paper that Aristotle's thought is relevant and suggestive for two of the most important present-day philosophical movements, the concern with language, and the concern with natural processes and their analysis. Aristotle can be viewed today as the outstanding functionalist of the Western tradition. Aristotle's philosophy is more than important, it is true.

Numbers And Magnitudes: An Iamblichean Derivation Theory And Its Relation To Speusippean And Aristotelian Doctrine, W. Gerson Rabinowitz

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Aristotle's Doctrine Of Future Contingencies, Richard Taylor

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.