Philosophy of Mind Commons^™

A Nietzschean Account Of Human Flourishing: Affirming The Will To Power Inside The Contours Of Friendship, Christian Joshua Roos

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the will to power, his account of friendship and his understanding of human flourishing. Through textual analysis, I offer a new way of interpreting the will to power, as the achieving of self-realization. The process of achieving self-realization is undergirded by the satisfaction of seven existential needs that are rooted in the paradoxical human conflict between instincts and consciousness. The existential needs are the need for a frame of orientation, the need for devotion, the need for unity, the need for rootedness, the need for stimulation, the need for effectiveness and …

The Content Of Consciousness: Do We Need Qualia?, Sara Copic

Kaleidoscope

No abstract provided.

Doing Without Desiring, Steven E. Swartzer

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation defends a cognitivist alternative to the Humean belief-desire theory of motivation against standard philosophical arguments.

Moral judgments influence our action. For instance, someone might donate to charity because she believes she has a duty to give back to her community. According to the Humean orthodoxy, some additional state—some passion or desire—is needed to explain her action. She may want to donate the money, to give back to her community, or to fulfill her duty. Yet there must be something she wants, the Humean insists, because only desires are capable of moving us. Even moral judgment is no more …

The Mind In Motion, Shayan A. Gates

Senior Honors Projects

The Mind in Motion

Shayan Gates

Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy

The origin of most scientific disciplines can be traced back to a few philosophical insights posed by a few curious thinkers throughout time, and cognitive science is no exception.While intrigue has nearly always surrounded the human mind and its relation to the brain, validation of this relationship has not been so easy to come by, and there are still areas of contention during this time of advancement in neurological sciences and related technologies.

This topic is very broad (to say the least) so I decided to confine this paper …

The Implications Of Merleau-Ponty For The Human Sciences, Ryan Marcotte

Senior Honors Projects

The Implications of Merleau-Ponty for the Human Sciences Ryan Marcotte Cobb Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy The American Anthropology Association (AAA) made headlines in November 2010 due to a controversial change in their 'Long-Range Plan.' The revised AAA mission statement omits all mention of the word 'science' and this omission has sparked a fierce debate within the anthropology community. The debate reveals that the study of social phenomena can be approached from two competing points of view – a scientific and a non-scientific perspective.  This project is concerned with the historical and intellectual developments that led to this competition between …

In Defense Of Existence Monism, Peter Finocchiaro

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The objective of this paper is a defense of a particular answer to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question: when is it the case that some objects together compose some additional object? The answer is the conjunction of two claims. The first claim, compositional nihilism says that, necessarily, there is never an instance of material composition, and therefore all material objects that do exist are simple, or without proper parts. The second claim, existence monism, says that there exists a material object, and that all other material objects are identical with this object. In other words, there is just one …

What Is A Human Person? An Exploration & Critique Of Contemporary Perspectives, Emmanuel Cumplido

Senior Honors Projects

What is a Human Person? An Exploration and Critique of Physicalist Perspectives

Emmanuel Cumplido

Faculty Sponsor: Donald Zeyl, Philosophy

Answers to the question “What is a human person?” that have garnered the allegiance of people throughout millennia fall under two broad categories: “physicalism” and “dualism”. One of the earliest renditions of physicalism was the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists. In their view, all of reality could be explained through two principles: atoms and empty space. As a consequence, people were thought to be nothing but assemblages of atoms in space. Plato’s Phaedo presents one of the earliest philosophical endorsements …

Articulating Animals: Animals And Implicit Inferences In Brandom’S Work, Joel D. Musser

Between the Species

Brandom denies animals implicit reasoning by emphasizing their inability to make inferences explicit, and in so doing, denigrates animals by likening their behavior to that of machines and artifacts. With disturbing regularity and ease, Brandom equates pigeons and parrots to machines and thermostats in their inability to express implicit/explicit inferences: neither the pigeon nor the machine can “provid[e] reasons for making other moves in the language game.”

I contest, however, that animals are paradigmatically more than any similarity or analogy to mechanical processing, just as humans are paradigmatically more than any reductive analogy to animals. The human/animal distinction need not …

Method In Catholic Studies, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Changing Our Minds: Bernard Lonergan And Climate Change, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Review- Startling Strangeness: Reading Lonergan's., Randall Rosenberg

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Catholicity And Faculty Seminars, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Ignatius, Lonergan, And The Catholic University, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Review- Startling Strangeness: Reading Lonergan's Insight. By Richard M. Liddy., Michael Mcguckian

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Singular And General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from the perspective of a mechanical theory of causation (Glennan 1996, 1997, 2010, forthcoming), and to explain what, from this perspective, causal generalizations mean, and what role they play within the mechanical theory.

Co-Creation Of Experiential Qualities, Vuk Uskoković

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Cognitive sciences have been interminably in search for a consistent philosophical framework for the description of perceptual phenomena. Most of the frameworks in usage today fall in-between the extremes of constructivism and objective realism. However, whereas constructivist cognitive theories face difficulties when attempting to explain the experiential commonality of different cognitive entities, objectivistic theories fail in explaining the active role of the subject in the formation of experiences. This paper undertakes to compare and eventually combine these two major approaches to describing cognitive phenomena. It is argued that constructivist explanations inevitably refer to a ‘hidden’ ontological source of experience, and …

A Theory Of Mental Credit, Jason Soll

CMC Senior Theses

Many philosophical subjects attempt to analyze the basis of human welfare. Theories of desert, distribution of property, and happiness tend to dominate philosophical discourse. Mental credit, which is the mental acquisition of credit for one’s accomplishments and the satisfaction one derives from this credit, is absent from this discourse despite its underlying role in the way people think about their lives. Mental credit is an eternal cognitive good that deserves thoughtful attention and pious decisions for implementation. The following theory of mental credit seeks to serve as a unifying theory for the mental calculations that guide life’s most imperative decisions, …

Does The Mind Extend Out Into The World, Andrew D. Kishino

CMC Senior Theses

The extended mind debate juggles the possibilities of whether or not the mind extends out into the world. Today, with the rise in technology, we have an additional claim that our tools are responsible for extending our minds. The internet, smart phones, and other tools give us a foothold in the extended mind debate by providing real world examples of how our mind is perceived as extending out into the world. In discovering where the divide between mind and environment exists we can come up with a conclusion whether or not the mind truly extends out into the world.

Will You Survive A Trip To Rekall, Inc.?, G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What would you do for ninety-two million dollars? In the movie Paycheck (based on the Philip K. Dick story of the same name), Michael Jennings agrees to give up three full years of his life-kind of. He loses three years of his mental life. To ensure confidentiality for his current client, the Rethrick Corporation, Jennings agrees to have all his memories of the three years he will work for the company removed. In return, Jennings will receive a large quantity of company stock options worth approximately $92 million. A good deal? Maybe, but I suspect most of us would be …

Responsible Believing, Miriam S. Mccormick

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In most of our decisions as parents or educators concerning how we should talk to children about difficult subjects, the question turns to what degree we should withhold the truth, how much information we should provide, or what details are appropriate. We, as adults, know the answer to the child's question, and the difficulty arises in figuring out what to convey and how. Questions about death and the afterlife are not like this. We - and by "we;' I mean especially educated adults of the Western world - are often as confused about what we should believe about these matters …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …