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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...
This thesis examines the presence of legal institutions in the accounts of enslaved and apprenticed people who resided in the British colonies of Jamaica, Antigua and Mauritius. Focusing on the lives of three individuals, Mary Prince, ...
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...
Issues surrounding the use of cognitive enhancers by healthy adults have given rise to numerous ethical concerns. It may be considered unnatural, unfair to those who cannot or do not use them, or unsafe in certain ways, and therefore...
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...
The purpose of this study was to measure the impact of ARCS-based motivational email messages (MVEMs) on student participation in a free online English for Speakers of other Languages (ESOL) course. The course consisted of 10...
The purpose of this secondary data analysis study was to investigate the possible association between the use of behavior management strategies by interventionists in kindergarten small-group interventions and the self-regulation of the...
This dissertation presents three papers that can be generally categorized as political economy. Though they differ in topic and methodology, a unifying theme is accountability. The first two papers focus on political accountability and...
The Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930) was one of the most original Marxist thinkers in Latin America. His writings covered a wide variety of topics including political theory, revolutionary strategy, international relations, ... This dissertation focuses on the original contributions of Mariategui's intellectual work from 1923, the year he came back from Europe, to 1930. Its central thesis is that Mariategui revitalized the revolutionary character of Marxism in...
Actualizations of Utopia: Ideological Space & The Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival expands upon Henri Lefebvre’s concept of social space by developing the concept of ideological space in order to examine how sound engages with...
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...
The philosophical enterprise is a critical inquiry into the fundamental assumptions of what is real, what can be known, what is right and just, and how we can formulate precise patterns of sound reasoning about these fields of inquiry.... Because Marx himself pointed out that all the categories of political economy could be evolved from the concepts of private property and alienated labor, that the division of labor and private property are identical expressions, and that... Since Marx limits the development of communism to a period in which man's technological ability will provide all his necessities, and man will only have to be concerned with those products which have been added to his subsistence, it... If the economic 'infrastructure' is the source of man's social relations, his perceptions of reality, and his political ideology, then workers cannot gain self-control by doing away with the division of labor which is the form of all...
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...
Towards a new framework for artificial intelligence research
Description:
This dissertation constitutes an attempt to reconcile artificial intelligence research with the philosophical movement of phenomenology. It is not an easy task, as the initial work relating phenomenology and AI, done by Hubert Dreyfus, ... After an introductory chapter, I examine Dreyfus's arguments against AI. I conclude that these arguments, though they point to difficulties which AI researchers must face, do not provide compelling reasons for AI workers to abandon their... In the next chapter, I examine another set of criticisms of AI done by phenomenologists, that of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. I draw similar conclusions with these criticisms as I do with those of Dreyfus. In the fourth chapter, I examine the emerging AI paradigm of "embedded computation." Advocates of this paradigm hold that AI should rely on an "interactionist" theory of mind rather than the "mentalistic" theories traditional AI uses.... Because so many of the criticisms of AI discussed in Chapters Two through Four are inconclusive, in the fifth chapter I attempt to strengthen the arguments involved. I find some of the fundamental tenets of AI research, such as the...
This paper examines Greek Life and recreational drug use as two pillars of the collegiate society where college students are violating the 1st and 3rd formulations of Kant's categorical imperative. This is done by the analysis of the...
The controversy surrounding the dead donor rule and the adequacy of neurological criteria for death continues unabated. However, despite disagreement on fundamental theoretical questions, I argue that there is significant (but not...
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...
This is an historical and critical study of the discipline of musicology. The study is divided into two major sections: a retrospective of musicology, and a critique of musicology. The retrospective is an historical-chronological survey... The critical part of the study is in the Kantian mode using a methodology derived from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. This part is a critical study of the sources, scope and limits of musicology as delineated in the retrospective... Finally, the study may be read in two ways: as a critique of musicology as described above; or as an example of applied phenomenology.
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...
Wittgenstein and education: Teaching the infinite sign
Description:
The dissertation begins with an examination of four interpretations of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's so-called later writings; each of these interpretations is commonly thought to have significant bearing upon the philosophy... The descriptivists, those scholars who commit the fallacy of descriptivism, tend to see Wittgenstein as having stepped out of metaphysics and into a successor discipline which is an armchair version of a natural or social science.... What emerges from the critique of descriptivism is a new interpretation of Wittgenstein which does not suffer from the descriptivist fallacy. The new perspective holds a number of ideas in store for philosophy of education, among them... One of the goals of the new interpretation is to take inspiration not so much from differences between Wittgenstein's early and later work but from their many points of similarity. From this point of view, themes appear which run...
Public education in the United States has seen many changes over the years. Some of those changes came in response to what are now recognized as clear problems with religious liberty in the common education system adopted in the mid 1800...
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...
An examination of William James' epistemology was presented, with particular emphasis placed on his theory of truth. The thesis was that James never fully developed a pragmatic theory of the nature of truth, although he did develop...
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...
Schopenhauer on willing and the unconscious: Origins and legacy
Description:
In his notebook from 1813, Schopenhauer hoped of his philosophy that one day someone would come along to "restore the antique." I "restore" Schopenhauer's position in the history of philosophy by relating it to his predecessors and his... In chapter one, I show the connections between Schopenhauer's views regarding free-will and determinism and the relationship between intellect and will (reason and passion) as they parallel the empiricist tradition from Bacon to Hume. In... The third chapter marks a transition to Schopenhauer's successors, in which I discuss Nietzsche's rejection of Schopenhauer's (and Kant's) position on transcendental freedom, as well as providing a transition to my next chapter by...
This is an argument against overprotective parenting. Those who do so are creating an environment that limits their children's psychological and moral growth and development. Overprotective parents control two very important aspects of...
AN EXAMINATION OF DERRIDA'S INTRODUCTION TO HUSSERL'S ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY
Description:
Jacques Derrida's first book, Edmund Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry' : An Introduction, offers a critique of Husserl's phenomenology. An assessment of this critique has been attempted. The primary aim of this assessment has been to defend... After a general discussion of the work of both philosophers, the above-mentioned text by Derrida and Husserl's essay "The Origin of Geometry" are each closely exposited and condensed to a number of main points. These points are then... Derrida's observations are found to contribute to an understanding of the methodological interrelationships that make up the framework of Husserl's phenomenology, and to point to the need for further clarification of some of the aspects...
In this paper, I discuss why conscientious objection should not be used in cases of abortion. According to a modern day interpretation of the Hippocratic oath, doctors have the responsibility to do whatever it takes to better the lives...
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...
HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF NATURAL SCIENCE
Description:
Husserl's Phenomenology and the Foundations of Natural Science develops a reading of Husserl's phenomenology as a response to the philosophical problems motivated by the metaphysics of early natural science; in particular, the problems... Husserl's unfulfilled claim in the Ideas ((SECTION) 33) that the epoche and reductions will be developed in a graded series is taken to heart, and this graded series is developed in terms of its still inchoate appearance in the Crisis.... The role of constitutional analyses in Husserl's phenomenology is then developed as the third requisite step in Husserl's attempt to provide phenomenological foundations for the natural sciences. It is shown that epoche without reduction... The dissertation concludes by summarizing phenomenology's role as a "meaning-restorative" to meaning-depleted sciences, and by defending Husserl's notion of "reduction."
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...
The digital age has expanded the problem of bullying onto online platforms, which serve as adult-free havens for children to congregate and inflict pain on one another. This paper examines the role of the school system in cases of...
THEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF SOCIAL INACTION IN THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION (CULTURE, ETHICS, RELIGION)
Description:
Southern Baptists have grown from a membership of 365, 346 to 14 million since their organization in 1845. Yet they are a silent people on many issues. Patriots who supported the colonists during the American Revolutionary War, hawks in... The answer to this question comes partly from the historical development of the Baptists in early seventeenth-century England where, as a result of religious persecution, they began to contend for the separation of church and state. Part...
KARL MARX: FROM POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY TO REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS
Description:
The study begins with a review of Marx's writings in which Marx acknowledges a debt to Hegel. Hegel's influence on Marx was a profound and enduring one, though it is more evident in Marx's early writings than in his later ones. A look at... On the basis of an analysis of Marx's early journalistic writings from 1841 to 1843, it is argued in this study that the efforts of the young Marx were directed toward applying some of the fundamental theses of the Hegelian philosophy of... The study closes with an assessment of the communist politics and strategy for revolution as these had been worked out by Marx prior to the outbreak in 1848 of the February Revolution in France. There are two aspects of this assessment....
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...
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.
