Philosophy

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Open Access
3D Reconstruction of Indoor Corridor Models Using Single Imagery and Video Sequences
(2020-05-11) Jahromi, Ali Baligh; Sohn, Gunho
In recent years, 3D indoor modeling has gained more attention due to its role in decision-making process of maintaining the status and managing the security of building indoor spaces. In this thesis, the problem of continuous indoor corridor space modeling has been tackled through two approaches. The first approach develops a modeling method based on middle-level perceptual organization. The second approach develops a visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system with model-based loop closure. In the first approach, the image space was searched for a corridor layout that can be converted into a geometrically accurate 3D model. Manhattan rule assumption was adopted, and indoor corridor layout hypotheses were generated through a random rule-based intersection of image physical line segments and virtual rays of orthogonal vanishing points. Volumetric reasoning, correspondences to physical edges, orientation map and geometric context of an image are all considered for scoring layout hypotheses. This approach provides physically plausible solutions while facing objects or occlusions in a corridor scene. In the second approach, Layout SLAM is introduced. Layout SLAM performs camera localization while maps layout corners and normal point features in 3D space. Here, a new feature matching cost function was proposed considering both local and global context information. In addition, a rotation compensation variable makes Layout SLAM robust against cameras orientation errors accumulations. Moreover, layout model matching of keyframes insures accurate loop closures that prevent miss-association of newly visited landmarks to previously visited scene parts. The comparison of generated single image-based 3D models to ground truth models showed that average ratio differences in widths, heights and lengths were 1.8%, 3.7% and 19.2% respectively. Moreover, Layout SLAM performed with the maximum absolute trajectory error of 2.4m in position and 8.2 degree in orientation for approximately 318m path on RAWSEEDS data set. Loop closing was strongly performed for Layout SLAM and provided 3D indoor corridor layouts with less than 1.05m displacement errors in length and less than 20cm in width and height for approximately 315m path on York University data set. The proposed methods can successfully generate 3D indoor corridor models compared to their major counterpart.
Open Access
A Defense for Scientific Realism: Skepticisms, Unobservables & Interference to the Best Explanation
(2017-07-27) Domanico, Vincenzo; McArthur, Daniel J.
The epistemological status of scientific knowledge claims has been undermined by skepticism, in particular by universal skepticism. This thesis asserts that Bas C. van Fraassens empirical stance is akin to universal skepticism. This work also maintains that van Fraassens empirical stance does not lead to the conclusion that scientific knowledge claims are empirically adequateespecially those claims that resulted from the scientific method of inference to the best explanation (IBE). To illustrate why van Fraassens stance does not devalue scientific knowledge claims will be suggested via Peter Liptons understanding of IBE combined with Ernan McMullins epistemic values. By bridging McMullins values with Liptons version of IBE, we get a more robust version of IBE; as a result, scientific claims may display a cluster of epistemic virtues and values. Where scientific knowledge claims display a cluster of epistemic virtues and values, they are simply beyond being empirically adequate.
Open Access
A Kantian Program for Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics
(2016-09-20) Woof, William Thomas; Cragg, Wesley
Theoretical approaches to business ethics have been dominated by empirically oriented ethical theories that largely follow in the Enlightenment tradition whereby ethical theories play only a supportive role. However, recent problems have emerged in business that are largely systemic in nature and may have significant and longstanding impacts that are social, political and economic in nature. Climate change and resource depletion are included in these problems, as are recurrent financial crises. These problems would indicate that ethical theory could be playing a more significant role. Kantian ethical theory has been revived over the past thirty years, thanks to the work of John Rawls. However, Rawls has given Kantian theory a largely empirical orientation to make it more acceptable to mainstream currents of thought. Recently, there has been a movement in Kant studies away from this Rawlsian approach towards more metaphysically oriented patterns in Kant's philosophy, particularly in his ethical, political and social contract theory. This dissertation explores the possibility that these new streams of Kantian research could be applied to business ethics with respect to these structural problems and issues. More specifically it investigates the use of the precautionary principle as a viable approach to business problems in concert with the use of preventative strategies. It is further suggested that the precautionary principle could be used in conjunction with the doctrine of double effect as applied to principles rather than actual events. The dissertation then provides a detailed examination of the emergence of structural problems that relate to issues in the natural world (climate change, resource depletion) and in finance. For the latter, a case study is built around Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that failed in 1998 and which generated significant potential instability in financial markets. It is argued that these structural problems can build up over long periods of time and create disruptions between short and long term considerations. They also generate considerable uncertainty and make risk calculation more difficult. The dissertation concludes by building a Kantian model as the basis for analyzing problems of this nature.
Open Access
A Narrative Account of Argumentation
(2018-08-27) Tamimi, Khamaiel Aoda Wahib Al; Gilbert, Michael A.
In this dissertation I attempt to accomplish three goals. The first goal is to develop a narrative account of argumentation. I show that storytelling serves as a legitimate mode of argumentation. I develop an account of narrative argument based on generalized features of narrative and a conception of argument that is rhetorical and in line with Charles Willards notion of argument as an interaction. I identify features of narrative argument that enable narrative to function as an argument and thus to provide reasons for a claim in the context of disagreement. As a result, I synthesize literatures on narrative and argumentation to provide a definition of narrative argument. The second goal of the dissertation is to argue for maintaining the narrative as a process without reconstructing the narrative into the dominant model of argument. In this part of the dissertation, I elaborate on the definition of narrative argument and argue that narrative argument must be understood as a process, and not as a product of argument. While the product view focuses on the form and structure of an argument as being linear, explicit, and containing premises and a conclusion, and treats arguments as things, the process view focuses on the whole act of arguing, thus highlighting the importance of the context of argumentation and the people involved. In support of this thesis, I show that reducing the narrative into premises and a conclusion is problematic because it deprives it of some of its persuasive force. Reducing the narrative into a product removes the real argumentpart of which is implicitfrom its context, its unique situation, and its complex social setting. The third goal of this dissertation is to develop an account of argument evaluation that is suitable for narrative argument understood as a process. I offer an account of how to evaluate narratives using the virtuous audience, combining theories of virtue argumentation and rhetorical audiences. In sum, this dissertation provides a definition of narrative argument, stipulates the conditions of narrative arguments that make them successful, and offers ways of evaluating the narrative while maintaining its form as a process.
Open Access
A Pyrrhonist Examination of Scientific Knowledge
(2015-08-28) Wilson, Alex; Hattiangadi, Jagdish
In the recent literature in the philosophy of science there is much discussion of scientific knowledge, but rarely an explicit account of such knowledge. Employing the Pyrrhonist skeptics modes, I examine the implicit ‘justified true belief’ analysis of scientific knowledge presented by Stathis Psillos, the primitivist account offered by Alexander Bird, and Bas van Fraassen’s voluntarist epistemology. I conclude that all of these positions appear to fail. Psillos’ account relies on a theory of reference that cannot block skeptical challenges to scientific realism, nor can it identify natural kinds in a non-ad hoc manner. Bird’s account also cannot refute skeptical challenges to it, nor can it adequately show how the full truth necessary for knowledge is acquired. Van Fraassen’s voluntarist epistemology attempts to avoid skepticism at the cost of inconsistency. From this representative sample of accounts I argue that there is seemingly no account of scientific knowledge that can as yet withstand Pyrrhonist skeptical scrutiny. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I give an overview of Pyrrhonist skepticism and the neo-Pyrrhonism of Robert Fogelin and Otavio Bueno, respectively. In the second chapter, I exposit Psillos’ semantic realist position, and argue that he gives an implicit justified true belief analysis of scientific knowledge. Moreover, I examine Bird’s primitivist account of knowledge. In chapter three, I discuss van Fraassen’s philosophy of science as stated in constructive empiricism and empiricist structuralism, and his voluntarist epistemology. In chapter four, I argue that all of these different views fail to provide a compelling theory of scientific knowledge. In the fifth chapter, I consider how the traditional Pyrrhonist take on the relation of theory to practice, and the positive epistemic additions of Fogelin and Bueno’s neo-Pyrrhonisms. I conclude that the traditional Pyrrhonists were acting inconsistently when they sought out new theories to influence their practice, and that the positive epistemic additions to the skeptical modes of Pyrrhonism fall prey to the modes themselves.
Open Access
Accounting for the Epistemic Benefits of Diversity: Social Location, Identity, and the Politics of Knowledge
(2020-08-11) Harron, Nathan Alan; Code, Lorraine B.
This dissertation investigates and supports arguments intended to justify claims that social diversity in scientific research communities not only promotes justice but is good for knowledge. One such claim that I focus on is that increasing the social location diversity of research communities increases that communitys capacity for critically evaluating knowledge claims. I investigate existing arguments defending this position and point out a common weaknessthey inadequately detail how social diversity in research communities can be epistemically beneficial, and end up implicitly invoking an untenable identity essentialism. I aim to support the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim by providing a solution to this weakness. In chapters one and two I describe arguments defending the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim, explaining where current accounts run out, and suggesting how they could be enhanced. I argue that appeals to increase social diversity in research communities for the sake of epistemic benefits are also implicitly appeals for the inclusion of researchers who occupy critical standpoints on knowledge production, and claim that the resources of feminist standpoint theory are vital. In chapter three I expand my discussion to consider other aspects of subjectivity in knowledge productive practices, and argue that feminist standpoint theory, as well as discussions of the epistemic value of social diversity, do not yet adequately account for the positive epistemic role that advocacy, care, affect, and emotion can play in knowledge making projects. I explore this claim both theoretically and in an extended analysis of the development of Insite, a safe-injection facility in Vancouver. I use the STS idiom of co-production to analyze the entanglement of the activist coalition to establish Insite and long-term health science research programs in the region. In chapter four I apply my findings to the work of an international collaboration, known as Gendered Innovations, attempting to use various policy initiatives to address the under-representation of women and girls in the sciences. I argue that lack of attention, in key works of this collaboration, to the significance of social location in generating epistemic advantage, limits the transformative epistemic potential of their proposed policy initiatives.
Open Access
An Algorithmic Interpretation of Quantum Probability
(2014-07-09) Randall, Allan Frederick; Hattiangadi, Jagdish
The Everett (or relative-state, or many-worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics has come under fire for inadequately dealing with the Born rule (the formula for calculating quantum probabilities). Numerous attempts have been made to derive this rule from the perspective of observers within the quantum wavefunction. These are not really analytic proofs, but are rather attempts to derive the Born rule as a synthetic a priori necessity, given the nature of human observers (a fact not fully appreciated even by all of those who have attempted such proofs). I show why existing attempts are unsuccessful or only partly successful, and postulate that Solomonoff's algorithmic approach to the interpretation of probability theory could clarify the problems with these approaches. The Sleeping Beauty probability puzzle is used as a springboard from which to deduce an objectivist, yet synthetic a priori framework for quantum probabilities, that properly frames the role of self-location and self-selection (anthropic) principles in probability theory. I call this framework "algorithmic synthetic unity" (or ASU). I offer no new formal proof of the Born rule, largely because I feel that existing proofs (particularly that of Gleason) are already adequate, and as close to being a formal proof as one should expect or want. Gleason's one unjustified assumption--known as noncontextuality--is, I will argue, completely benign when considered within the algorithmic framework that I propose. I will also argue that, to the extent the Born rule can be derived within ASU, there is no reason to suppose that we could not also derive all the other fundamental postulates of quantum theory, as well. There is nothing special here about the Born rule, and I suggest that a completely successful Born rule proof might only be possible once all the other postulates become part of the derivation. As a start towards this end, I show how we can already derive the essential content of the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics, at least in outline, and especially if we allow some educated and well-motivated guesswork along the way. The result is some steps towards a coherent and consistent algorithmic interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Open Access
Autonomy, Automaticity, and Attention: Why Empirical Research on Consciousness Matters to Autonomous Agency
(2015-08-28) Fenton, Brandon Daniel; Dimock, Susan
This dissertation addresses the question: what is personal autonomy? It begins by examining the main theoretical accounts of autonomous agency currently on offer. Although each of the available approaches faces significant criticism, I defend a revised internalist (and functionalist) account of autonomous agency which draws primarily upon the work of Frankfurt, Dworkin, and Bratman. Next, I show that recent work in scientific psychology (viz. research on automaticity) reveals new dangers for any account of autonomous agency (including my own newly revised internalist account). My response to the identified threat of automaticity draws upon research in the psychology of attention and, more extensively, on theorizing upon the unity of consciousness. I use a number of insights gleaned from these areas of research to then construct a more robust theoretical understanding of autonomous agency—one that addresses the worries generated by automaticity by proposing new and additional necessary and sufficient conditions for autonomy. What these new conditions entail is that individuals must possess a particular form of unified consciousness across time in order to have acted autonomously.
Open Access
Becoming Godless: Heidegger's Nietzsche and the Eternal Return
(2018-08-27) Lauretani, Aaron; Vernon, James P.
Nietzsches concept of eternal return best exemplifies his anti-theological thought, but it is often misread as either classical physics or a thought experiment. Insofar as Anglo-American and analytic interpretations reject eternal returns cosmology, their ethical implications are minimized. By contrast, Heideggers synthesized cosmological and ethical reading is shown to be more normatively significant in framing Nietzsches philosophy as radical atheism. However, it is also shown that Heidegger limits Nietzsches radicalness by approaching eternal return as the notion that being as a whole returns identically. To that end, it is next argued that Heideggers explication of the cosmology as an ethical projection is superior to scientific interpretations in analytic and Anglo-American readings, but also that Heidegger partially misreads eternal returns cosmology. It is therefore finally demonstrated that Nietzsches cosmology actually rejects that an identical state of being returns. This finally allows for the most profound ethical implications in Nietzsches philosophy.
Open Access
Becoming to Belong: An Essay on Agency and Democratic Rights
(2017-07-27) Mcmanus, Matthew Allan; Jacobs, Lesley Alan
My project develops what I call a dignity oriented model of human agency, and a related approach to human rights; especially democratic rights. I also juxtapose my model of agency against those offered by the liberal and post-modern approaches, and the political positions which flow from these approaches. In the first Chapter, I characterize our dignity as flowing from an individuals agency to engage in self-authorship by defining themselves through redefining the socio-historical boundaries within which they exist. The socio-historical boundaries are those which can be changed through the applications of what I refer to as individuals expressive capabilities. These expressive capabilities can be amplified or constrained depending on the innate capacity of the individuals in question and the particular socio-historical boundaries which constrain them. My argument is that the more ones expressive capabilities are amplified the more individuals can be said to have lived a dignified life. In the next Chapter, I argue that amplifying human dignity would involve realizing two human rights. The first is a right to participate in the democratic authorship of political and legal institutions, and the laws which flow from these. The second is a right for all individuals to enjoy an equality of expressive capabilities, except where inequalities flow from their morally significant choices. These rights would enable us to lead lives of dignified self-authorship. In Chapter Three, I deepen my philosophical account of agency by trying to illustrate how the innate human capacity to develop novel statements in semantic communities is one of the most prominent expressive capabilities which enable us to redefine the boundaries which constrain us. In Chapter Four and Chapter Five, I develop criticisms of the liberal and post-modern approaches to agency. I suggest that both of them offer unique and important insights that can help us understand what is required to amplify human dignity. None the less, I claim neither approach can satisfy our contemporary need for a model of agency and politics which is both philosophically generalizable, and yet sensitive to the actual constraints facing individuals. Finally, in Chapters Six through Eight, I critically analyze several major theoretical traditions and decisions in the Canadian, American, and European legal systems. I suggest that we should adopt my dignity oriented approach to agency as a normative guide for how to best reach a just outcome in cases involving democratic rights: including the Sauv, Williams, and Hirst decisions. In particular, I suggest we should adopt a two step test when determining how to decide a case involving democratic rights. The first is to ask how best to amplify the dignity of the individuals involved. The second is to ask how to ascribe equal value to the democratic rights of the individuals involved. Finally, I conclude by summarizing my argument and offering some suggestions for the future. In particular, I account for why I devote so little attention to realizing the second of the rights I argue for: the right to equality of expressive capabilities.
Open Access
Can We Understand Nonhuman Minds Without Folk Psychology
(2023-12-08) Waldberg, Elizabeth; Andrews, Kristin A.
One central commitment of comparative psychology is the prohibition against using folk-psychological concepts to explain nonhuman animal behavior, which requires us to disavow “the attribution of human qualities to other animals, usually with the implication it is done without sound justification” (Shettleworth 2010). Many scientists and philosophers believe attributing human folk-psychological concepts to nonhuman minds constitutes an egregious violation of the anti-anthropomorphism principle. Penn and Povinelli (2007) describe the practice as “insidious” and stemming from our “folk-psychological imagination.” Alternatively, others believe the prohibition against folk psychology is misguided and unnecessary. Andrews (2020) suggests “folk psychology plays an essential role in comparative psychology as the starting point, but not the end point, of our research.” I adjudicate this debate by examining our use of folk psychological concepts in comparative psychological research.
Open Access
Commensense Psychology: Fodor, Dennett, Baker
(2014-07-28) Gall, Diane Rebecca; Baker, Judith
The predominant conception of our everyday understanding of other people's actions is as a commonsense psychology that is a (proto-)scientific theory. A central version of this conception is that this theory takes propositional attitudes as mental states which are causally effective in the production of human purposive action. In this essay, I argue that this central version of our commonsense psychology is mistaken. I take Jerry Fodor's Psychosemantics as a locus classicus of this view. I examine arguments from Daniel Dennett and Lynne Rudder Baker that Fodor (and others who argue along the same lines as Fodor) make serious errors in being committed to a hyper-realist (i.e., physicalist) conception of mental states and causality. I argue that Fodor does not provide an adequate exposition of how his candidate for a scientific theory that vindicates his version of commonsense psychology accounts for the meaning of a propositional attitude. I further argue that our everyday practices that deploy commonsense psychological concepts are inconsistent with characterising commonsense psychology as a (proto-)theory or as part of a (proto-)science. From this investigation, I conclude that Fodor's conception of commonsense psychology psychology is untenable. Finally, I discuss briefly an alternative that is suggested by the rebuttals of Dennett and Baker that commonsense psychology is better conceived as an non-theoretical explanatory practice that deploys an alternative conception of psychological causality distinct from physical causality.
Open Access
Concepts, Cases, and Compellingness: Exploring the Role of Intuitive Analysis in Philosophical Inquiry
(2015-12-16) Cumby, Jill Nicole; Jackman, Henry
This dissertation provides a better understanding of the method of cases, a method widely used in philosophical theorizing. Using this method involves relying on one’s intuitive judgments about cases to guide theorizing. Recently, such judgments have been experimentally examined, and it has been argued that the results of these studies encourage skepticism about the trustworthiness of this method. Responding to this skepticism involves developing a better understanding of the method of cases and the reliance on intuitive judgments in theory construction. I contribute to this project by arguing for a constraint on the kinds of hypothetical cases that can function as compelling counterexamples in conceptual analysis.
Open Access
Decolonizing Environmental Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Toward A Philosophy for Planetary Healing
(2023-03-28) Whittle, Marliese Frances; Boran, Idil
Colonial mindsets and structures in the Western world drive broken relationships between human beings and non-human nature. In 2019, Kyle Whyte identified a tension between the rapid societal transformation required in response to climate change and the considerably slower pace at which remediation of trust, inequity, and imbalances of power happen between people within the colonial construct. This thesis offers a diagnostic tool to begin grappling with the question of how to heal broken relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Problematic assumptions in Western natural laws and environmental ethics undermine efforts to address worsening ecological crises in the Anthropocene – the geological time period defined by increasing instability of Earth system processes from human activity. Drawing on the ideas of scholars Charles W Mills, Serene Khader, Deborah McGregor, and John Borrows, I explore a philosophy of planetary healing - an interdisciplinary, multicultural approach to justice, health and well-being.
Open Access
Defending the Coherence and Practicability of Autonomy through a Multi-level Analytical Approach
(2019-03-05) Robertson, Jamie Kathleen; Myers, Robert; MacLachlan, Alice
The objective of this dissertation is to develop a coherent account of autonomy that builds on a general understanding of autonomy as the capacity by which people decide or discover for themselves what is valuable and live accordingly. I will advance a multi-level, multi-factor theory of autonomy while responding to potential criticisms relating to autonomys coherence as a concept and practicability as a capacity. In my first chapter, I refute allegations that taking practical considerations into account in developing a theory of autonomy constitutes a wrongful inclusion of normative considerations into what should be a purely conceptual analysis. I also respond to situationist arguments against the possibility of autonomy. In so doing, I will articulate the common-sense psychological standard I will use to judge theoretical adequacy throughout the remainder of the dissertation. In the second chapter, I track how common-sense concerns about the practicability of autonomy have been used to bring contemporary conceptions of autonomy more in line with human experience and limitations. I argue that while considerable nuance has been added to the otherwise proceduralist picture of autonomy, this increased complexity exacerbates concerns about the (lack of) conceptual coherence of autonomy and raises concerns that the exercise of autonomy is overly demanding. In the third chapter I respond to Nomy Arpalys claim that the concept of autonomy is incoherent. I do so by advancing a three-level approach to analyzing autonomy in which important elements of Arpalys discussion of moral responsibility feature at different levels of analysis. While my model helps join different aspects of autonomy together into a coherent picture, it simultaneously reveals the extent to which the exercise of autonomy requires an extensive range of abilities and is highly complex. Defending autonomy against these renewed concerns about practicability will be the objective of the final chapters of the dissertation. This defense will rely on three additional features of my theory of autonomy: degree, automaticity, and reinforcement/substitution. In both chapters four and five, I will endeavour to convince the reader that these proposed features are plausible on a common-sense understanding of human psychology.
Open Access
'Disorder' and Its Evaluative Implications for Psychiatry
(2015-12-16) Ashouri, Sarvin; Waring, Duff R.
The proper definition of the concept of ‘disorder’ could resolve the existing issues in psychiatry today. Christopher Boorse and R.E. Kendell, as proponents of the medical model, aim at defining the concept in scientific and value-free terms. K.W.M. Fulford develops the fact-plus-value model which integrates the factual and evaluative elements. John Z. Sadler applies the Fulfordian account to diagnostic manuals to resolve their inconsistencies. I find Fulford’s initial and later arguments incongruent. His account is also too evaluative given the absence of any restrictions on the place and role of values. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to conclude that given the prominent position of values, facts need not exist as they are essentially evaluative terms with merely an overt factual connotation. Moreover, values provide the benchmark against which facts are assessed (for their degree of value-ladenness) and identified; and this makes facts dependent on and a subclass of values.
Open Access
From Indifference to Difference: Theorizing Emancipation through Sylvia Wynter and Alain Badiou
(2018-03-01) Paquette, Elisabeth Anne; Vernon, James P.
In this project I argue that Alain Badious theory of emancipation fails to properly account for racial and racialized subjects as well as racial emancipation. All particularities, including race, must be subtracted from emancipatory movements and this is central to his conception of politics. On this view, racial identities are considered divisive and arise merely as the result of hierarchical structures. For these reasons, in Badious account, no conception of racialized subjecthood can provide the conditions for universal emancipation. I turn to two examples in order to demonstrate several unintended consequences of Badious theory of emancipation: the Ngritude movement (1930s-1940s) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). According to Badiou, Ngritude fails to be a political movement because it retains a focus on race. While he claims that it is an important cultural movement, the conditions for it to become a political movement would require that Ngritude writers and artists move beyond racial identity so that they can affirm a universal subject position. I argue that Badiou's discussion of Ngritude mirrors that of Jean-Paul Sartres discussion of Ngritude in Black Orpheus (1948) a position that has been critiqued by various critical race theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Kathryn Gines, and Robert Bernasconi. Second, I discuss how Badious theory of emancipation would apply to the Haitian Revolution. Within his framework, the Haitian Revolution could only be considered political if its adherents shifted their focus away from race. However, I argue that race is a central and defining feature of this revolution, and that it ought to be understood as a political emancipatory movement. As a result, the failure of Badious political theory to account for the Haitian Revolution in this way demonstrates a limitation of his theory of emancipation. This project then culminates in a discussion of the decolonial project of Sylvia Wynter, and I propose that her work addresses the limitations of Badious political theory. In particular, I develop her view of a pluri-conceptual theory of emancipation developed from the work of C. L. R. James that argues that particular identities, such as race, need not be subtracted from a theory of emancipation.
Open Access
Heideggers holy and quiet joy: body hermeneutics of two paintings by Lawren S. Harris
(2022-03-03) Svarnyk, Mar'yana; Gonda, Joseph P.
How would our lived human body experience Heidegger's holy? This dissertation uses a phenomenological method of body hermeneutics to develop a lived experience of the notion of the holy from Heidegger's later thought with the help of two paintings by Lawren S. Harris. Body hermeneutics, developed by Samuel Mallin, is a method of systematically feeling out and describing the experience of phenomena through the four regions of the lived body: the perceptual, the motor-practical, the affective, and the cognitive/linguistic. The artworks hold the phenomena and create situations through which the viewer can repeatedly access and explore the phenomena. The artworks also speak to the whole body, not just to the cognitive aspect of our being, and thus make it much easier for us to recognize and overcome our cognitive preconceptions and to develop a fuller bodily experience of the phenomena. The first part of the dissertation, working with the painting Beaver Swamp, Algoma, explores how one can phenomenologically experience and describe that which is not an entity, since both being and the holy in Heidegger's understanding are not entities. By describing the contrasts between the experience of figures and lines in the painting on one hand and colour and light fields on the other, a new bodily attitude can be felt and developed that is quite different from our everyday attitudes towards phenomenology and perceiving things in general. This new bodily attitude is helpful for describing phenomena like being and the holy as understood by Heidegger. The second part of the dissertation, with the help of the painting Northern Lake, further develops the understanding of the new bodily attitude. It explores a particular kind of darkness to better understand the phenomena of depth and abyss, and a particular kind of light to describe the haleness as the experience of the holy.
Open Access
How Many Minds Do We Need? Toward A One-System Account of Human Reasoning
(2015-12-16) Mugg, Joshua Samuel Copley; Khalidi, Muhammad Ali
To explain data from the reasoning and decision-making literature, dual-process theorists claim that human reasoning is divided: Type-1 processes are fast, automatic, associative, and evolutionarily old, while Type-2 processes are slow, effortful, rule-based, and evolutionarily new. Philosophers have used this distinction to their own philosophic ends in moral reasoning, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. I criticize dual-process theory on conceptual and empirical grounds and propose an alternative cognitive architecture for human reasoning. In chapter 1, I identify and clarify the key elements of dual-process and dual-system theory. Then, in chapter 2, I undercut an inference to the best explanation for dual-process theory by offering a one-system alternative. I argue that a single reasoning system can accomplish the explanatory work done by positing two distinct processes or systems. In chapter 3, I argue that a one-system account of human reasoning is empirically testable—it is incompatible with there being contradictory beliefs that are produced by simultaneously occurring reasoning processes. I further argue, contra Sloman (1996), that we do not have evidence for such beliefs. Next, in chapter 4, I argue that the properties used to distinguish Type-1 from Type-2 processes cross-cut each other (e.g. there are evolutionarily new processes that are effortless). The upshot is that even if human reasoning were divided, it would not parse neatly into two tidy categories: ‘Type-1’ and ‘Type-2.’ Finally, in chapter 5, I fill in the details of my own one-system alternative. I argue that there is one reasoning system that can operate in many modes: consciously or unconsciously, automatically or controlled, and inductively or deductively. In contrast to the dual-process theorists, these properties do not cluster. For each property pair (e.g. automatic/controlled), and for a single instance of a task, the reasoning system will operate in a definitive mode. The reasoning system is like a mixing board: it has several switches and slides, one for each property pair. As subjects work through problems, they can alter the switches and slides—they can, perhaps unconsciously, change the process they use to complete the problem.
Open Access
How We Do What We Do: Joint Action and Spontaneity
(2021-11-15) Leferman, Alexander Emil; Myers, Robert
The dissertation defends a novel account of joint agency, one that accommodates the neglected phenomenon of spontaneous joint action. The goals of the dissertation are to reveal the importance of spontaneous joint action, to show why these actions are problematic for many accounts of joint agency, and to produce a satisfactory theory of them. Chapter 1 argues that being capable of explaining spontaneous joint actions is in fact a requirement on a satisfactory theory of joint agency and this poses a challenge to meeting the other requirement on such a theory, the togetherness requirement. Spontaneous joint actions are those performed by co-agents who have not interacted in ways that bind them together. The challenge, then, is to adequately explain how co-agents are joined together without binding interaction. Chapter 2 reviews the literature and argues that extant theories do not meet the challenge of spontaneity because they cannot satisfy both requirements together. Chapter 3 develops the reasons account of joint action, which appeals to normative group reasons, in order to meet the challenge. Grasping a group reason forces agents to occupy the co-agential point of view because the group reason indicates who is to act and what they ought to do together. If two agents grasp their group reason, they are already bound together such that were they to act on the reason, they would act together spontaneously. Chapter 4 investigates which theory of normative reasons is consistent with spontaneity. Both motivating reasons and internalism about normative reasons are found lacking. Instead, it is argued that realism about normative reasons provides the best account of normative group reasons because the objective nature of real reasons eliminates the need for binding interaction, and it can more easily accommodate the inherent publicity of group reasons. Finally, Chapter 5 argues for realism about normative reasons, the existence of group reasons, and the unrestricted publicity of normative reasons. It does this by showing how these are all consequences of Davidsons triangulation argument.