Other Philosophy Commons^™

An Ethics Of Amusement, Ashley Caroline Mobley

Doctoral Dissertations

Human beings often hold one another morally responsible for what we find funny or fail to find funny. Though this practice is common and so demands philosophical attention, it remains underexplored in the literature. The purpose of this project is to devote attention to this practice by developing an ethics of amusement.

In chapter 2, I argue for why amusement is an emotion according to incongruity theory—the dominant theory of humor and amusement. With this in mind, I argue in chapter 3 that we are responsible for our emotions insofar as we have emotional agency. In particular, while we cannot …

Temembe And Sven: The Ethics Of Racist Mirth, Stephen Wilke

Masters Theses

You walk past a crowd of people at a bar, grouped around one person. He’s in the middle of telling a joke, the kind you wouldn’t tell your parents but is often told in the amenable company of close friends. You realize that the butt of the joke, the punchline, assumes that people of color are lazy and entitled. This is not an assumption you agree wit, but you find yourself with a feeling of mirth while scoffing at the comedian. His timing is well executed, and the turn of phrase is witty. The joke was racist, and yet emotionally …

Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized …

The Beauty Of Understanding: Aesthetic Methods Of Theory Evaluation, Devon Craig Bryson

Doctoral Dissertations

Philosophers use a variety of methods to evaluate theories, theories that are sources of greater understanding. My dissertation argues that judgments of beauty are a justified part of how we evaluate theories. That is, I argue that beauty is part of what makes a philosophical theory better. I reach this conclusion by analyzing two powerful and popular methods of theory evaluation: reflective equilibrium and simplicity. The literatures on both reflective equilibrium and simplicity clarify how these methods work and why they are justified methods of theory evaluation. But I argue that the going accounts of reflective equilibrium and simplicity have …

Les Auteures Surréalistes : French And Francophone Women Surrealist Writers -- Joyce Mansour, Valentine Penrose And Gisèle Prassinos, Maitland Sierra Dunwoody

Masters Theses

The notion of the “author” and the purpose of its existence have been the subject of many contemporary debates, with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault as key. For Barthes, language defines a literary work and the author is relegated to a minor place. And he believes that certain movements, surrealism as an example, effectively aided in the “death” of the author. Though that may sometimes be the case, within the movement of surrealism the author and their language are of almost equal importance – which differs entirely from Barthes’ view considering his notions on the surrealist movement and authorship. In …

Religious Tones And Overtones In The Human Sufficiency Arguments Of Marx And Nietzsche, Norman Rudolph Saliba

Masters Theses

It is often assumed that since Marx and Nietzsche were both anti-religious thinkers, religion played no part in the formulation of their philosophical outlooks. With this assumption, the influence of historical religions on rhetoric has received a subordinate role, if at all, in the discourse on 19^th century German critiques of those very religions. Although differing fundamentally in the debate on inclusiveness versus individuality, this essay asserts that Marx and Nietzsche, both from families of religious scholars, broke with previous philosophical tradition and utilized a religious form of rhetoric in their writings to combat doctrines of human deficiency inherent …

Social Systems And Psychic Confluence: Flash Mobs, Communications, And Agency, Nicholas John Hauman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation involves two components: 1) an analysis of the history of flash mobs including detailed descriptions of specific flash mobs and 2) an exploration of what this analysis elucidates concerning the interaction between individuals and social structure. By focusing on the flash mob as a form of communication, the dissertation displays how the flash mob has communicated multiplicitously through various social systems (e.g. art, mass media, economy, politics) to achieve various and often divergent ends. Within this larger understanding of the interaction between flash mobs and social structure this dissertation also finds, through an application of Luhmannian systems theory, …

Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, And The Hyperreality Of The Mediated American Jury Trial: The French Perspective On O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bailey Miller Wamp

Masters Theses

This study investigates modern French criticism of jury trial mediation in the United States. By engaging the work of twentieth-century French theorists Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as French journalistic reporting on the jury trials of O.J. Simpson, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Casey Anthony, this study argues that mediated images of the American jury trial abandon the pursuit of justice in favor of a consumer capitalist endeavor to create spectacle. Ultimately, jury trial mediation generates a hyperreality in which the media simulates the pursuit of justice with no reference to the “real” pursuit of justice.

In order …

Indeterminism In Kane’S Event-Causal Libertarianism, Robert J. Nowell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In this paper, I examine the plausibility of event-causal libertarianism, a prominent view on free will which regards indeterminism in the causal history of a decision as necessary for an agent’s moral responsibility for a subsequent action. Specifically, I investigate how Robert Kane’s event-causal libertarian account fares in light of Derk Pereboom’s powerful “disappearing agent” objection, in addition to criticisms of my own. Kane concludes that Pereboom’s objection is ineffective against his account. I argue against Kane’s conclusion by highlighting a dilemma which results from Kane's response to the disappearing agent objection; either way Kane’s position is interpreted, his account …

Ought Implies Can: Why It Is Wrong And How That Impacts Deontic Logics, Kevin Michael Gayler

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Philosophy Of Officiating, Robert L. Davies Jr.

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Mysticism And Mystery Moves: An Examination Of Flow Theory, John Michael Trembley

Masters Theses

This study takes a phenomenological approach to squirt kayaking. It looks to examine mystical states of consciousness, as defined by William James, and flow theory, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and focuses on what these experiences mean for participants of the squirt kayaking community. The study poses three research questions. (1) Do squirt kayakers experience mystical states of consciousness through squirt kayaking, and what does this experience mean? (2) Do squirt kayakers experience flow states of consciousness through squirt kayaking, and how was this experienced? (3) What is the mystery zombie or the mystery trance state, and how is it …