Browsing Philosophy by Subject "Philosophy"
Now showing items 1-19 of 19
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A Defense for Scientific Realism: Skepticisms, Unobservables & Interference to the Best Explanation
(2017-07-27)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 ... -
A Pyrrhonist Examination of Scientific Knowledge
(2015-08-28)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 ... -
Autonomy, Automaticity, and Attention: Why Empirical Research on Consciousness Matters to Autonomous Agency
(2015-08-28)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 ... -
Becoming Godless: Heidegger's Nietzsche and the Eternal Return
(2018-08-27)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 ... -
Commensense Psychology: Fodor, Dennett, Baker
(2014-07-28)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 ... -
Concepts, Cases, and Compellingness: Exploring the Role of Intuitive Analysis in Philosophical Inquiry
(2015-12-16)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. ... -
'Disorder' and Its Evaluative Implications for Psychiatry
(2015-12-16)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 ... -
From Indifference to Difference: Theorizing Emancipation through Sylvia Wynter and Alain Badiou
(2018-03-01)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 ... -
How Many Minds Do We Need? Toward A One-System Account of Human Reasoning
(2015-12-16)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 ... -
Plato's Conception of Divination
(2015-01-26)I take one of the goals of Plato’s dialogues is to stake out a territory for philosophy. In order to do this, Plato evaluates and critiques other, more established, disciplines like rhetoric, the sophistic movement, poetry, ... -
Putting the Folk Back in Folk Psychology: The Social, Cultural, and Moral Character of Folk Psychology
(2016-09-20)This project provides a critical analysis of how philosophers have traditionally characterized and understood folk psychology, what I call the traditional construal of folk psychology. On the basis of a growing and diverse ... -
Semantic Scepticism and the Possibility of Meaning
(2019-11-22)Nearly four decades ago, Saul Kripke articulated a semantic version of scepticism, according to which no finite goings-on, either mental or behavioural, can establish what someone means by an expression. The semantic ... -
Situating Objectivity: A Feminist Conceptualization
(2015-12-16)This dissertation focuses on the ideal of objectivity in science. My aim is to understand and situate how objectivity has been conceptualized in the philosophy of science, and to question whether these conceptualizations ... -
Situationism and Moral Responsibility: An Externalist Account
(2015-01-26)Situationism is the position that there is no such thing as broad, situation-invariant character. This view emerged from situationist psychology experiments, such as the famous Milgram Obedience Experiments. It is supposed ... -
Social Construction and the Possibility of Emancipation
(2016-11-25)In this dissertation, I attempt to accomplish two main objectives. First, I attempt to clarify what social construction amounts to in contemporary analytic philosophy. Research on the social construction of social categories ... -
The Ethically Required Level of Mental Capacity Needed for Consent to Participate in Clinical Research on the Terminally Ill
(2015-12-16)While medical informed consent documents have received much attention in literature and throughout varying North American legal jurisdictions, the competence needed to be able to provide informed consent is often overlooked. ... -
The Moral Agency of Animals: Responsible in Practice
(2015-08-28)Mark Rowlands argues some non-human animals can be moral subjects that can act for moral reasons, but cannot be moral agents because they lack sufficient understanding for responsibility. I argue Rowlands’ mere moral ... -
The Semiotic Mind: A Fundamental Theory of Consciousness
(2018-03-01)One of the leading concerns animating current philosophy of mind is that, no matter how good a scientific account is, it will leave out what its like to be conscious. The challenge has thus been to study or at least explain ... -
The Social and the Real: The Idea of Objectivity in Peirce, Brandom, and Mcdowell
(2016-11-25)This dissertation focuses on Robert Brandoms and John McDowells philosophies of mind and language. Its particular emphasis is on the idea of objectivity as it is presented within the framework of Brandoms and McDowells ...