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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
An underexplored aspect of moral experience is the experience of apprehending ("seeing") other people as mattering, grasping the significance of whether their interests are set back or enhanced. I refer to these as value-apprehensional ...
It is commonly thought that external influences such as indoctrination, coercion, and subtle manipulation can affect our status as morally responsible agents. In extreme cases, external interventions may undermine our moral...
In this paper I set out to problematize what the distinguished evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson, has presented to a popular audience as his consilience worldview. Wilson's consilience worldview is a metaphysical framework that...
The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that while a discussion of the nature of human knowledge might be a worthy goal to pursue in public education, the science classroom is not the appropriate place for this discussion. The...
In the natural world there are things we call 'syndromes'. Depression is an example of a syndrome. There are many forms of depression, but generally, people with depression suffer from a subset of several unpleasant symptoms, such as...
This analysis provides a fact-based examination of the doctrine of nationalism and its idol, the national interest, couched within the context of twentieth century wartime presidential speeches and writings. What is significant about...
Can Value Properties Earn Their Keep? The Metaphysics of Value Supposing they exist, what work are value properties supposed to do? What difference do they make? What is the difference between a world in which they exist and a world in...
A traditionally difficult problem in the Philosophy of Religion is the one that divine omniscience, particularly divine foreknowledge, poses for free will. If God knows in advance how we will act, it looks as if we cannot act freely...
The question "What is the good life?" is perhaps the most basic question in all of ethics. The four major paradigms of the good life that have been proposed by various philosophers are: (1) hedonism, (2) various forms of desire...
This study examined the effects of combining two cognitive-motivational models of task engagement and achievement, the Control, Agency, and Means-Ends model (Skinner, 1998) and the implicit theories model (Dweck, 1999). Data were...
The power to exercise control is a crucial feature of agency. Necessarily, if S cannot exercise some degree of control over anything - any state of affairs, event, process, object, or whatever - S is not an agent. If S is not an agent, S...
This dissertation is about a priori justification and its relationship to experiential evidence. I begin the fundamental assumption that a priori justification is justification that is independent of experience. It has been argued that...
This paper engages in a critical analysis of pornography as it relates to the sociopolitical conditions of women in the United States. Within feminism, anti-pornography discourses have been led by theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon...
Compatibilism is the view that free will can exist even if determinism â the thesis that there is only one physically possible future at any given time â is true. In this thesis, I defend compatibilism by arguing against two of its...
Several organic and inorganic systems of importance for fundamental physics and applications have been studied by magnetotransport, dielectric constant, and Raman spectroscopy techniques. At the beginning of my thesis work, I...
Humean interpretations claim that laws of nature merely summarize events. Non-Humean interpretations claim that laws force events to occur in certain patterns. First, I show that the Lewis/Ramsey account of lawhood, which claims that...
A large portion of philosophy done in the Western analytic tradition attempts to provide conceptual analyses which are tested by examples that elicit intuitions. These intuitions are, in turn, used as evidence either for or against a...
Do we really have as much control over our behavior as we think we do? Might we be mistaken that our actions are ultimately up to us? Some philosophers argue that recent scientific research shows that we don't have the control required...
Two tenets associated with major strands of classical Christian orthodoxy assert both that God is meticulously provident and that humans have libertarian free will. On this view, God's meticulous providence is, in part, a function of His...
The problem of moral luck is rooted in the following pair of conflicting intuitions. On the one hand is the idea that the basis of moral assessments should be limited to factors under agents' control. This intuition can be formulated as...
Psychological happiness is a deeply important phenomenon, according to Dan Haybron. So important, he claims, that it’s a central component of the good life. But it isn’t alone at the center: psychological happiness shares that privileged...
This study sought to validate measures of caretaker readiness to facilitate meaningful participation in the Exceptional Student Education (ESE) educational decision-making process. School districts have encountered great difficulty in...
The participants in the human cloning debate are as varied as the interests they support: Catholic priests, agnostic biologists, atheistic philosophers, and political leaders have all spoken out since the announcement of Dolly the cloned...
Two prominent views of the role of intentional action ascriptions are the "theory of mind" view, which holds that the primary function of intentional action ascriptions is their use in behavior explanation and prediction, and the ...
Poems Unsealed is a collection of six chapters mixing conventionally fixed genres, such as nonfiction essay, short story, and poem. The chapters are infused with letters, poems, memoirs, interviews, dialogues, artwork, and teaching...
My aim here is to offer and defend an account of forgiving, which I’ll call ‘the charity account’: to forgive is to declare an enemy a friend (with respect to some wrong). That phrase employs a few semi-technical terms that need...
A viable theory of well-being has useful applications for individuals and groups alike. Psychologists frequently refer to notions of well-being for the sake of enhancing patients' well-being when it is lacking, and public policy makers...
It seems well accepted that agents can only be morally responsible for what they voluntarily control. Yet as a matter of practice, we seem to hold agents responsible for items outside of their voluntary control, blaming others for...
This is an investigation of philosophy as therapy, an examination of two philosophers who engage in philosophy as therapy, and an analysis of the success of that philosophy as therapy. In the first place, what is philosophy as therapy? A...
Two basic types of proposals for elucidating the concept of existential meaning have been made in the literature: 1) monist proposals; 2) family-resemblance proposals. Monist proposals attempt to give one overarching concept to which all...
According to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), a person is blameworthy for what he did only if he could have avoided doing it. This principle figures importantly in disputes about the relationship between determinism, ...
This dissertation consists of three independent papers about free will: two on the problem of present luck, and one on autonomy and indoctrination. Chapters 2 and 3 (on the luck problem) concern freedom of choice, and Chapter 4 (on...
Empirical research suggests that our moral behaviors, judgments, and intuitions have been evolutionarily selected for because they provide strategic solutions to the problems we face as social animals. Nonetheless, a great deal of moral...
Classically the problem of free will has consisted in whether free will is compatible with determinism. More recently, two other problems for free will have become prominent. One is whether free will is incompatible with indeterminism....
Suppose I don’t give this dissertation a title. In such a case am I responsible for not giving my dissertation a title? Does my responsibility for not giving my dissertation a title require that I could have given my dissertation a title...
The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be...
While most philosophers agree that the concept of intentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Unfortunately, there has traditionally...
Most of us are convinced that we act freely and are morally responsible for much of what we do. Nevertheless, this conviction faces a serious challenge, for either determinism or indeterminism must be true, and the truth of either one...
This dissertation contains emotion. In fact, it is about emotion, and particularly how emotions can disrupt and otherwise force us to reexamine our preconceived notions (or hypothetically predicted values) about important facets of our...
Moral worth is determined by moral agents. How is such a determination made? Western philosophical thought originally demarcated between human and all else. Some contemporary writers seek to extend moral worth to animals, and still...
Sometimes ignorance functions as a legitimate excuse, and sometimes it doesn't. It is widely maintained that, when the ignorance an agent acts or omits from is blameless, it excuses an agent. Call this claim the Blameless Ignorance...
The purpose of this study was threefold; (a) to determine how different components of effort are perceived during physical activity; (b) to examine whether attention focus varies as a function of intensity during physical activity; and ...
To what extent does an agent’s history affect her moral responsibility? Consider a U.S. one dollar bill. Something’s being a genuine U.S. one dollar bill depends on the history of that thing. It is essentially historical. The bill’s...
I intend to examine a particular human behavior, suicide, from an evolutionary perspective. It has been nearly 150 years since Darwinism has captivated the minds of mankind and I consider this thesis to be a continuation of Darwin's work...
In this dissertation, I draw from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and applied behavior analysis in order to present what I take to be a necessary condition for morally responsible agency, the Integrated Mental Status condition (IMS...
At Theaetetus 187b, Socrates' interlocutor Theaetetus offers a definition of knowledge as true belief. Since Socrates has already argued that Theaetetus' first definition of knowledge as perception is inadequate, the discussion has moved...
At the intersection of meta-ethics and philosophy of science, Nicholas Sturgeon's "Moral Explanation" ([1985] 1988), Richard Boyd's "How to be a Moral Realist" (1988), and David Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (1989)...
This dissertation challenges the conflict thesis between science and religion promoted by philosophers Alvin Plantinga and Philip Kitcher. I analyze their conflict thesis as an epistemological disagreement about the nature of inquiry....
Intuitively, it seems that we can easily distinguish which norms are moral and which are not. For example, regulations on killing clearly belong in the moral category while rules governing "casual Fridays" do not. Moral norms seem to...
Many argue that Jane Austen's novels exemplify a distinctly Aristotelian view of ethics. In An Aristotelian Approach to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, I argue that Austen presents the development of Mansfield Park's protagonist, Fanny...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
