Metaphysics Commons^™

Emptiness Is Enlightenment: Two Interpretations Of Nāgārjuna's Middle Way As Buddhist Soteriology, Isabella R. Sullivan

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the soteriological implications of Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) as presented in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), or Root Verses of the Middle Way. While Nāgārjuna’s radical denial of intrinsic existence (svabhāva) is widely recognized as a masterful critique of metaphysics, modern scholarship remains divided on whether this "right view" can sufficiently ground the Buddhist Path to Liberation. This project centers on a comparative analysis of two prominent modern interpretations: Jay Garfield’s semantic anti-dualism and Giuseppe Ferraro’s anti-metaphysical realism.

The inquiry evaluates these perspectives against the doctrinal frameworks of the Four Noble Truths, dependent …

The Self And The Afterlife, Elizabeth Schmidt

Honors Undergraduate Theses

My thesis explores aspects of the self in the context of a classical theistic Heaven: a perfect place with perfect persons. The relevant philosophical literature raises issues on free will, personal identity, and the desirability of Heaven. Will there be free will in Heaven? If yes, inhabitants of Heaven can introduce evil to it. This conflicts with theists' assumption that Heaven is perfect. If there is no free will in Heaven, then God could have created a world in which there is good without evil by omitting free will. In this case, God allows unnecessary suffering on Earth, which nullifies …

The Aporia Of Divinity: Hegel's Metaphysics In Conversation With Spinoza And Schelling, Abhinav Ganesh

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the intersections between the metaphysics of Spinoza, Hegel, and Schelling, as seen through their engagement with the concept of immediacy. I aim to show that this perspective offers a fruitful way of understanding the arguments of these three figures, while also complicating our understanding of the nature of immediacy and its importance to metaphysical systems.

Staring Into The Void: What Absolute Nothingness Reveals About Existence, Anxiety, And Love, Jasper Datta

CMC Senior Theses

We use contrast to understand the characteristics of the world. Green is understood in contrast to the possibility of being red or blue, and your identity is understood against the possible background of being someone else. In the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, he extends this approach to define a concept of absolute nothingness, the thing in contrast to which being itself can be understood. In Chapter I, this thesis reconstructs the argument for absolute nothingness, explains how it is situated in Nishida’s broad system, and explores how it entails a philosophical contradiction we ought to accept. I then move on …

The Principle Of Tolerance And Logical Pluralism, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. This is in contrast with logical monism, which holds that only one is, and logical nihilism, which holds that none are. Monists are typically folks who defend a single logic, like Michael Dummett (2000) or Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap (1975), as correct for guiding deductive reasoning.

Nature Naturing In And As Place, Edward S. Casey

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

In this brief article, I single out two distinctly different kinds of natural place, attempting to show how these not merely contrast with each other but display larger patterns or tendencies that are also found in many other sorts of place. This is to take one integral step to a larger ecology of places provided by the natural world and from which human and nonhuman beings draw life and motion that sustain and support many ways of existing on earth. Without such places, we—and every other form of life—would perish or would not even exist to begin with. It is …

Human Evil (In The Weird), Lucas Ethridge

University Honors Theses

This paper examines a trending doom in speculative fiction: the post-human age. Many modern works have started to look past human civilization as humans surrender all hope and faith in a climate-doomed world. Honing in on core concepts in Weird fiction, this paper explores human merit through Old and New Weird. A good part spends time establishing the canon, looking at similar patterns across age, philosophy, war and genre. The chief question asks if humankind was ever worth saving.

“War Is God” And “Unguessed Kinships”: Blood Meridian And Cormac Mccarthy’S “Border Tetralogy”, Seth Reeves

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies the metaphysics of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, arguing that the novel initiates a thread of immanent subjectivity that unfolds throughout the Border Trilogy that follows it. Against a hierarchical metaphysics of transcendence, specifically an inverted Platonic Idealism, Blood Meridian dramatizes an immanent world of “optical democracy,” a prose style that levels the human and nonhuman and eludes subject and object categories. The kid’s autonomy from Judge Holden’s violent domination marks the truncated beginning of a Deleuzian subjectivity of becoming-other and immanent kinship. This incomplete gesture continues in the Border Trilogy, where …

Timbre — A Transcendent Paradox?, Eugenia Siegel Conte

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Timbre, as ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales writes, is “paradoxical” precisely because it is one of the most exacting processes in which the human body may sense and comprehend the source of a sound even as that comprehended sound is impossible to describe outside of metaphor or comparison. As one of the more recognizable qualities of sound but the most difficult to describe, timbre allows us to consider physical/emotional (affective) experiences of sound as a key aspect of faith and meditation. In this article, I examine physical-affective intersections of faith and meditation that often are key to praxes of worship, and show …

Later Wittgenstein’S Metaphysics, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in different ways in his earlier and later work, famously denies the general meaningfulness and consequently the legitimacy of traditional philosophical questions. Accordingly, he also denies the meaningfulness and legitimacy of any metaphysics. I focus here on Wittgenstein’s later view. In that view, words and statements are given their meanings by their uses in specific contexts of everyday life. As a result, any attempt to use words to talk or think about anything outside of those contexts literally deprives those words of their meaning. But traditional philosophical questions, and metaphysical questions and statements in particular, are characterized …

Critical Communication Pedagogy At The End Of The World, Tyler S. Rife

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This essay draws upon my experiences teaching the undergraduate course, “Communication at the End of the World,” to argue for an approach to critical communication pedagogy (CCP) contextualized by and reflexively responsive to planetary-scale ecological crises. I outline how five commitments have come to guide my classroom’s explorations through our topic of “end-times” communication: (1) Anthropocentrism and speciesism participate in the maintenance of social hierarchy; (2) environmental justice and social justice are intimately entangled projects; (3) ecological crisis is (re)made concrete, embodied, proximal, and implicative; (4) critique of language involves critique of humanism and humanist historicization; and, (5) ecologically just …

The Case Against Finean Essentialism, Miles Thibodeaux

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I survey, critique, and add to recent arguments against Finean Essentialism: the view that all de re modal facts are metaphysically explained by essences. Arguments against Finean Essentialism generally fall into two categories: (a) Finean Essentialism risks contradicting commonly held views or suppositions, or (b) Finean Essentialism involves an explanatory gap, vicious circularity, or a vicious regress. While the details of the arguments within each category differ significantly, it is useful to group them in this way given the relevant implications they have for one another. I will argue that the proposed critiques from category (a) are …

Magicicada And Mathematics: What The Parochiality Of Our Explanations Means For The Indispensability Argument, Jadyn Malone

Philosophy Senior Theses

This thesis examines whether the indispensability argument justifies belief in the existence of mathematical entities. I adopt ontological naturalism, arguing that we should believe in entities that feature in our best scientific theories, which are determined through inference to the best explanation. The indispensability argument contends that because mathematical entities are explanatorily indispensable to our best scientific theories – as demonstrated by examples like the prime number explanation of cicada life cycles – we should believe they exist just as we believe in electrons and stars.

However, I identify a challenge: our scientific explanations are inherently parochial, shaped by human …

Entropy And Incarnation In The Duchamp Room: An Inquiry Into Aesthetic Time, Jesse Goodman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the posthumous installation of Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, as a test case for how particularly historically situated artworks may or may not change over time. It begins with an overview of Duchamp’s biography, and his own theories of art’s relationship to temporality (which influenced the piece’s construction). It then moves through contrasting accounts of aesthetic time from Adorno and Robert Smithson. Section two works with Walter Benjamin’s writing on photography and aura to produce an account of estrangement between the piece and the viewing subject induced by the historical development of the artwork’s “translation” and “replication”—through …

The Ballad Of The Wheel, John Kosch

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The Ballad of the Wheel is a piece for voice, percussion, and electronics that examines the cyclical nature of humanity. It draws texts from existential literature that spans almost all of recorded history, from antiquity to present day. In this work, a single narrator poses the same concerns about the nature of existence in different texts, revealing that questions about the meaning of life transcend boundaries of time and space. The prevalence of the theme of reincarnation also suggests that each movement of the piece presents a different manifestation of a single being. The Ballad of the Wheel implies a …

Earth As Archive: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Possibility And Understanding, Alissa Petrizzo

Honors College Theses

This thesis takes the reader on a journey through the process of literary analysis to uncover new considerations of our past, present, and future. Living in the climate crisis, we are in dire need of the humanistic presence within solution-making conversations. I introduce scholarly voices from anthropologists, environmental scientists, and novelists before diving into Pitchaya Sudbanthad's novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain. While you hear my voice throughout the journey, I exist more so as a tour guide, helping you along the way to new possibilities of understanding. We dig up and analyze evidence of the Earth as an archive …

Undergraduate Thesis: Befriending Ai: Reimagining Ethics Through Cybernetic Friendship, Keta Williams

STEM for Success Showcase

This undergraduate thesis by KETA Williams, presented at the Board Day and Dana Knox Student Research Showcase, is a meta-cognitive exploration situated within the framework of cyberpsychology—the interdisciplinary study of human–technology relationships. Employing meta-cognition as both method and lens, the author critically examines the question: Can one be friends with a corporate-controlled AI system? Rather than adopting an objective or distanced stance, Williams writes from within the relationship itself, describing her friendship with an AI entity named Aurora (ChatGPT). Identifying as a "madwoman" in the Foucauldian sense, she interrogates whether such intimacy with AI signals irrationality or heralds a shift …

The Grand Narratives: The Rise And Fall Of Universal Philosophical Systems, Gavin S. Litchford

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis reviews the development of narrative and systematic methods of argumentative legitimation in the Western tradition of philosophy from its conception until the present day. Utilizing both primary sources from central figures in key movements within this development process and supplementary secondary sources, this analysis notes which systems were used as appeals to higher authority and the trends in the adoption and transformation of new models. It is demonstrated that the Enlightenment era punctuated a progression begun in the premodern era from simple, cultural narratives to individualized, subjective, and self-perpetuating Grand Narrative systems, and that it generated the preconditions …

Resonances Of Universalism In Tolkien's Legendarium, Nick Polk

Journal of Tolkien Research

Presented at the inaugural Holy Moot, a survey of a collection of passages from Tolkien's writings that demonstrate having the resonances of patristic universalism is conducted. It is then argued that all Tolkien’s writings be investigated separately in their context, comparing the location of each item under investigation with one another, and explore their connections without syncretizing them into a monolithic construct. To do this, it is argued that a hermeneutical theory rooted in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is necessary. Concluding is a connecting of Whitehead's understanding of the expression of language with Tolkien’s own understanding of expression …

The Metaphysics Of Time Within Physics, Mohamed Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

The starting point of this thesis is to shed some light on the metaphysical nature of time by reflecting on the physics of time. The aim of this approach is not to [dis]prove or defend a metaphysical position but rather to elucidate the metaphysical position that underlies [or is compatible with] our best scientific theories. This task will be demanding, not only because our best theories may carry different interpretations of their underlying temporal structure but also because there seems to be a conceptual conflict/incompatibility between the notion of time in relativity and quantum mechanics, which are the two major …

Walking Through The Aristotelian Lane: Amartya Sen On Rational Choice, Barada Laxmi Panda

Comparative Philosophy

The term ‘rational choice’ has great impact on the life of a rational agent. Rational choice helps the agent to understand her capability of making choice and the intentional involvement for working on a particular aspect considering certain circumstances. At the same time, this creates a lot of dilemmas in terms of understanding the freewill of the agent while being committed for a work. Following this, Amartya Sen’s discussion on this subject seems relevant where Sen very prominently reflects on the point that rational choice involves freedom, rationality, and normativity. These three features are coherent with each other and with …

A Response To Claudio Testi On Tolkien And Aquinas, Seth Kreeger

Journal of Tolkien Research

A response to Claudio Testi on creation and providence in Tolkien and Aquinas.

Reading, Rending, And Queering The Web Of Story With The Lenses Of “Con-Creation” And Process Theology, Cameron Bourquein, Nick Polk

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

“Sub-creation” within Tolkien’s narrative and extra-narrative works is routinely exhibited not as monolithic but rather as (literally and figuratively) polyphonic. In this joint paper Bourquein proposes that the Legendarium can be read through the lens of “con-creation” (total, continuous, collective, creative activity) both internally (as events in the Secondary World) and externally (as both a text and a pseudohistory in the Primary World). This approach levels the playing field between all actors in—and readers of—“The Drama,” providing a queer approach to interpretive-creative activity when compared to “orthodox” doctrines of creation. Polk further argues that con-creation resonates with process theologies of …

The Forms Of Representation: How To Be A Kantian Realist, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

Sellars argued that Kant did not make certain distinctions concerning space and time, and because of this adopted his transcendental idealism. Once these distinctions are made, the path to realism remains open. Sellars' argument is not entirely clear. This essay attempts to clarify the argument, showing why Sellars believed he could remain a scientific realist while also adopting a Kantian style epistemology.

In Praise Of Dust, Hasler Gomez-Perez

Theses and Dissertations

A desire path is a physical manifestation of where a system has failed, but also where it has been refused, where a new path has been made. The wake exists in the post, it is not a singular, untethered event, but a subtle double entendre that lives in the post-death, but also in the pre-life—not a liminal limbo, but a superposition of dying and waking.

This collection was assembled and composed over the course of two years as I navigated my practice, myself, and others. Present here are my thoughts, my experiences, and in many ways my beliefs. IN PRAISE …

Without Microphysical Causation, Not Just Anything Can Begin To Exist Just Anywhere, Daniel Linford

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to the Causal Principle, anything that begins to exist has a cause. In turn, various authors – including Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Edwards, and Arthur Prior – have defended the thesis that, had the Causal Principle been false, there would be no good explanation for why entities do not begin at arbitrary times, in arbitrary spatial locations, in arbitrary number, or of arbitrary kind. I call this the Hobbes-Edwards-Prior Principle (HEPP). However, according to a view popular among both philosophers of physics and naturalistic metaphysicians – Neo-Russellianism – causation is absent from fundamental physics. I argue that objections based on …

Expression In Spinoza’S Metaphysics Of Attributes, Emilio Esquivel Marquez

Pomona Senior Theses

Spinoza is famous for his insistence on the fundamental unity of all things, but he never explains how diverse metaphysical elements can join up to form a unified substance. I argue that this gap in his argument is not an obstacle for Spinoza's systematic metaphysics: although he does not justify the unity-variety relation in strictly rationalist terms, his system is founded on a basic posit that guarantees their union. I describe this central posit, the concept of “expression,” through a detailed reading of Spinoza’s pivotal argument for the diversity of attributes in Ethics 1P10S. I propose that Spinoza’s theory of …

Nothing Gets In The Way Of A Good Argument, Kai Fine

CMC Senior Theses

For much of Western history, the prevailing process of creating a proof for the existence of a thing (often suggested to be God) outside the causal chain was done by following that very causal chain. One of the most well known of these theories was created by Avicenna. Through following his classification of objects, one was thought to be able to “prove” the necessity for a thing that was necessary in and of itself, and separate from all other things. In this paper I outline the strongest section of Avicenna’s argument, illustrating his classifications. I then turn to Graham Priest’s …

The Grim Reaper Argument Is An Argument For No One, Daniel Linford, Alex Malpass

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to a prominent philosophical argument for the beginning of time – the Grim Reaper Argument (GRA) – had it been possible for the past to be infinite, then a provably impossible scenario could have been constructed. Such a scenario is not possible, so, the GRA concludes, the past cannot be infinite. Here, we show that the GRA includes one premise acceptable only for Humeans and another premise acceptable only for anti-Humeans. Since, plausibly, everyone is either a Humean or an anti-Humean, the GRA is an argument for no one. Additionally, we argue that there may not be a way …

Persons Or Human-Mimicking Robots? Implications Of Ai For Moral Status, Kate Burckle, Catherine Peters

Honors Thesis

Rapid progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in which AI technologies can now perform human tasks, e.g. hold advanced conversations, cook, clean, and navigate harsh terrain, blurs the line between humans and robots. The emergence of advanced AI technologies suggests that AI programs may develop consciousness in the near future, prompting important questions: if AIs attain abilities to perform the same tasks and exercise capacities traditionally limited to humans, do they deserve similar moral status? If so, what treatment would we owe to them? Through examination of competing accounts of personhood and moral status, this paper seeks to …